Wikipedia:WikiProject Virginia/Library

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Welcome to the WikiProject Virginia Resource Library! This page provides organized information guides and curated links to resources that might be useful in providing information, citations, and images to help build the various articles about Virginia subjects.

Most of the links are to the Internet Archive, a free-content repository which contains many high-resolution digital scans of original works, freely available for download. Links are for the benefit of the Virginia wikiproject, and should not be seen as an endorsement of any authors or organizations. Any assessment of an item's ultimate value to the Wikipedia project will rest with the editor who chooses to use it (and the broader community consensus).

For more help with finding resources, see

library reference desk
.

Guidelines

In order to make the library as useful as possible for editors, all content on this page must:

  • be freely accessible to any reader (not behind a password or paywall); AND
  • be suitable for use as a
    reliable source
    for factual information OR a source of freely-licensed images; AND
  • be either public domain, freely licensed, or otherwise legally hosted at the destination site; AND
  • be non-commercial or historical (i.e. not promoting a current interest). Like the rest of Wikipedia, this is not a place for promotional links (see
    WP:NOT
    ).

General reference and geography

  • Henning, Julia Ryon (1894). Geography of Virginia. Richmond, Va.: B. F. Johnson Publishing Co.
  • Virginia county names : two hundred and seventy years of Virginia history (1908) by Charles M. Long
  • A Comprehensive Description of Virginia and the District of Columbia(1830s)

Newspapers

Chronicling America is a project of the Library of Congress that scans and hosts historical collections different newspapers that have fallen into the public domain (pre-1923). A list of the over 40 different newspapers' collections from Virginia may be found here. The optical-character search function is weak, but all collections may be browsed by date.

Historic sites

See also:
WP:WikiProject NRHP

The Virginia Department of Historic Resources (VDHR) is the official state agency charged with keeping the Virginia Landmarks Register and the designated State Historic Preservation Office for Virginia. It's website contains a complete and official list of National Register of Historic Places in Virginia, as well as digitized scans available online of most of the nomination documents. While these documents and associated photos and maps are generally prepared by private individuals and are NOT in the public domain, the information in them may be a useful source for citations. Virginia's general National Register page may be found here, with the nomination forms sorted by county or city available here

Photographs and drawings of numerous buildings have been made as part of the

Historic American Engineering Record; such works are generally considered to be works of the Federal Government and thus likely in the public domain
, though some archival content used as part of the survey may not be (see the individual item in question for details).

Books

Virginia history

Colonial Era & Federal Era

Federal and Antebellum era

American Civil War

Frank Leslie's Illustrated

wood engravings
of Virginia sites, scenes, and battlefields during and after the American Civil War. Note that due to the news cycle for images at the time, the corresponding illustrations may be weeks or months after the event in question occurs or is written about.

Selections of the various wood engravings were later collected and presented in the following volumes:

Harper's Weekly

Harper's Weekly was a rival illustrated newspaper to Frank Leslie's, published in New York City and operating in much the same format.

Jamestown Exposition of 1907

The

Norfolk Naval Station
(which was in part a result of the exposition). The following are various guidebooks and pamphlets produced in conjunction with it; some may not be suitable to serve generally as reliable sources, and are maintained here for their image value for completeness. As always, editor discretion and judgement is needed.

Pavilion-specific and exhibit-specific works:

Biography

Biographical dictionaries of Virginians (i.e. general reference works not devoted to any singular individual)

Works edited by Lyon Gardiner Tyler

College of William and Mary
) edited two series of biographies of contemporary and historical Virginians. While somewhat promotional (they read like a "who's who" list, should not be weighted heavily when trying to establish notability, esp. the later volumes), and as with many works of the period not inclusive of women or people of color, they are nevertheless a source of biographical information for some of the more obscure notable figures of the period, as well as photographs and signatures for a good many figures that don't yet have those posted on Wikipedia. Both sets are rather similar in format, but one is ten years later. The notability seems to roughly somewhat taper downward from the first volume (which has many a governor and ex-Confederate officer) to the fifth (which is mostly local businessmen).

Works edited by E. Griffith Dodson

Serving as Clerk of the Virginia House of Delegates (1934 to 1962) facilitated Dodson's compilations of Virginia history, and the legislative bios he prepared from questionnaires distributed to General Assembly members before 1961 are invaluable: The Capitol of the Commonwealth of Virginia at Richmond (1937),[1] The General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 1885-1918 (1960),[2]The General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 1919-1939 (1939),[3] Speakers and Clerks of the Virginia House of Delegates, 1776-1955 (1956) and The General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia 1940-1960 (1961).[4]

Successor volumes should be open source, since they were government-produced, but I have only seen the 1619-1978 Bicentennial edition on a Russian website with an abbreviated title, so I haven't dared open that link. Sounds silly, but going to a library and thumbing through them to find out who succeeded who might actually be somewhat efficient.

Men of Mark in Virginia (1906)

The 1906 series edited by is a who's who list for Virginia men of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Volume include an index of the full-page portraits.

Encyclopedia of Virginia Biography (1915)

Other publishers

Local history, geography, guidebooks

Note: Many of the books listed are locally-produced guidebooks, which while very useful for specific information on local history and geography, as well as plentiful images, suffer from "

establish notability
. The following sources should be used with this in mind.

These are listed by region (east to west), then alphabetically by jurisdiction, then chronologically

General

Hampton Roads

Norfolk and Portsmouth

Hampton

Tidewater (non-Hampton Roads)

Richmond and Petersburg

Northern Virginia

Piedmont

Southside

Ridge and Valley

Railroad tourist guidebooks

Maps

Other

  1. ^ https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001263715
  2. ^ https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006260268
  3. ^ https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b4537684;view=1up;seq=9
  4. ^ https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006260270
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