This February, I will be teaching a course for the Lifelong Learning Institute of James Madison University. The class will meet here in the Library & Research Center, so that will give us the chance to examine some of the historical sources from the archives in person. The topic is Woodrow Wilson’s early life during the years of Reconstruction.

This massive photograph album from the avid collector of all things Woodrow Wilson, Wallace McClure, includes postcards and a few cut-outs from magazines. When putting together a collection of images along a single theme, it was common to include some printed items that fit in, so that they would not be lost.

President Wilson put great effort into maintaining his correspondence, and that included many personal Christmas greetings.

In December 1920, Arthur Sweetser reported back on the first assembly of the League of Nations. He went through all of the major points of the meeting, including the discussion of humanitarian issues.

In a recent blog post, the topic ended on the owners of the Montgomery Hall plantation in Staunton, one of the larger tracts near Staunton where enslaved people were forced to work the land. The Virginia Chronicle at the Library of Virginia offers some more information from the state’s newspapers on the fate of the house. For instance, we can see the sale of the land by John Peyton’s heirs shortly before Woodrow Wilson was born. Highlights included a vineyard of catawba grapes, acres already planted in wheat, and housing for enslaved farm workers.

The Valley of the Shadow at the University of Virginia was an early example of a successful digital humanities project. Comparing northern and southern communities, the digital archive is especially valuable for us here at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library because Staunton and surrounding Augusta County are one of the two Civil War regions covered. The Wilson Library was even involved in the initial development of the project in the early 1990s.

We read a bit of Wilson’s diary in the last blog post when discussing his trip to the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. We mostly have his sparse notes on life at Princeton and then at home for summer vacations over the next two years. Wilson repeatedly lags in his writing and then berates himself for his failings as a diarist when he starts up again, often months later. As the editors of the Woodrow Wilson Papers describe his journal: “It covers the period June 3 to November 23, 1876 and consists of fifty-five pages of closely written shorthand.”

The volunteers discovered a delightful newspaper article in the collections that is worth sharing. This is from the October 27th edition of the New York American in 1912, just before the election when Woodrow Wilson faced off against two former presidents, Taft and Theodore Roosevelt.

We often have to tell researchers that President Wilson did not keep a diary. That is one of the reasons why the diaries of his doctor are so valuable. There is one intriguing period, though, when young Tommy Wilson did attempt to keep a journal when he was working to teach himself shorthand while a student at Princeton. Many of these were collected and transcribed for the Woodrow Wilson Papers by Arthur S. Link

Recent scholarship has stressed how much “Anglo-Saxon” is really more of a modern term than a reflection of medieval identity. Contemporary documents from the Early Middle Ages rarely mention that name, but as scholars of English became focused on the idea of an old, original language in the sixteenth century, they called it Anglo-Saxon after two Germanic tribes. Late in the 19th century, just as historians began to link the laws of these groups to the liberties of both England and America, scholars again discussed the idea of the ancient Anglo-Saxons. Numerous dictionaries and documents were produced for a wide market of educated people to study the origins of the English language.