Организация: The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

Probing the Past provides a searchable version of information contained in the transcriptions of all 325 probate inventories. Users may browse by time period or city/county, or search the database to find records that meet specific criteria, and then view the original written text and a transcript of the inventories.

All collected inventories were transcribed in their entirety. Where words in the original are illegible or questionable, they have been identified by [ ] or noted as [illegible]. Spelling errors are evident, but the use of [sic] has been restrained, only appearing in truly questionable places, as in a double entry by a court clerk. Attempts have been made to preserve the original structure of sentences. Therefore, when a sentence or entry extends beyond modern margins, it continues on the following line, indented by three spaces.

Each inventory has been identified by county, colony-state, and source, and when available the date ordered by court, and/or the date taken by appraisers, and/or the date recorded in probate records. Only the microfilm copies have been examined; the originial documents have not been consulted. All Maryland inventories are in the microfilm collection of county records held by the MARYLAND STATE ARCHIVES in Annapolis, Maryland. All Virginia inventories come from the microfilmed county court records of the LIBRARY OF VIRGINIA in Richmond, Virginia.

Although every effort has been made to provide a true transciption, it is advised that if questions arise or before publication of any of this material, the original be consulted. Facsimiles of the original documents are available alongside our transcriptions whenever possible.

LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY: EXPLORING THE FRENCH REVOUTION provides an accessible and lively introduction to the French Revolution as well as an extraordinary archive of some of the most important documentary evidence from the Revolution, including 338 texts, 245 images, and a number of maps and songs. Lynn Hunt of UCLA and Jack Censer of George Mason University—both internationally renowned scholars of the Revolution—served as principal authors and editors. The site itself is a collaboration of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (George Mason University) and the American Social History Project (City University of New York), supported by grants from the Florence Gould Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

NAVIGATING YOUR WAY AROUND THE SITE

The site offers three main navigational paths:

EXPLORE

If you want an introduction to the main themes of the Revolution, you can read through our ten essays that cover all the major topics in the history of the revolution, including, the social causes of the revolution, the fall of the monarchy, women and the revolution, the story of Napoleon, and the legacies of the Revolution. Two additional chapters consider "How to Read an Image" and the "Songs of the Revolution." As you read these essays, you will notice that there are icons in the margin. When you click on these icons, you are presented with primary source documents (images, texts, maps, songs) related to specific points in the essay. You can see the images, for example, by clicking on the paint palette that appears at appropriate places in the left-hand margin of the text.

BROWSE

If you are more interested in examining the rich archive of primary sources on the site, you should start by browsing through one of six main categories of materials.

  You can browse through a list of 245 images included in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. The largest number are political cartoons. But we also include paintings and images of artifacts such as decorated fans and porcelain. The images are drawn from many repositories, but particularly from the Museum of the French Revolution in Vizille in southwest France and the Rare Books and Manuscript Division housed in Olin Library at Cornell University. An essay on how to read images provides useful background.

  338 text documents (personal memoirs, official reports, newspaper articles, treatises, eyewitness accounts)—most of them translated from French to English and edited for the student and general reader.

  Thirteen maps, which were created especially for this project, illustrate changing European borders in this era, military campaigns, and sites of Parisian revolutionary activity.

  Thirteen songs document the changing musical landscape of France in the revolutionary era. An ensemble at Texas Tech University performed about half of the recordings in 1989. Musicians associated with Boston University performed the rest especially for this project. Included here are the audio recordings as well as the lyrics in French and English.

 382 timeline entries chronicle the key events of the Revolution as well as those leading up to and emerging out of it.

 The 65 terms included here assist readers in understanding the text, images, and essays in Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity

See also a list of all French Revolution documents.

SEARCH

If you are looking for something specific, you should start here. The search engine allows you to locate all the materials on the site by keyword, topic, and type of resource (e.g., audio, text, image).

OTHER FEATURES AND NOTES

Companion book and CD-ROM: A book and CD-ROM of the same name is available from Penn State University Press for $19.95. The book offers a brief but comprehensive narrative of the Revolution. The CD-ROM contains all the resources available on the Web and is particularly useful if you have a slower Web connection. It also includes multimedia overviews that are not available on the Web.

Problems? Please read this list of Frequently Asked Questions or, if you have further questions, contact us if you have technical or other problems in using the site.

"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" © 2001 American Social History Productions, Inc. All rights reserved. The images included on this website cannot be reproduced or copied without the permission of their owners or the archives in which they are held.

The project to reconstitute the War Department Papers was begun by Ted Crackel more than a dozen years ago, and it has involved years of painstaking work, including visits to more than 200 repositories and the consulting of more than 3,000 collections in the United States, Canada, England, France, and Scotland. In 2004, however, work on the project was essentially suspended when Crackel became the editor of the George Washington Papers. But in early 2006, the project was transferred to the Center for History & New Media at George Mason University, which is working to realize Crackel’s original vision. Indeed, perhaps uniquely among U.S. institutions, Mason combines the scholarly, technical, and institutional qualities (including substantial staff with credentials in military history, the history of the early republic, historical editing, and especially digital history) necessary to complete the project in a professional and timely manner.

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University presents Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives, which immerses viewers in the history of the Soviet Union’s vast system of forced labor camps.

Millions of prisoners suffered the brutal assault on human dignity that was the Gulag. Many Days, Many Lives presents the history of this system through a browseable archive of video, art, artifacts, photographs, and the life stories of former Gulag prisoners. Online exhibitions take visitors on a thematic exploration of Gulag life, including a virtual tour of the reconstructed camp and museum made possible by the Gulag Museum at Perm-36. Teaching resources for introducing the Gulag's history into middle and high school classrooms are available.

The project is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities; Title VIII, The U.S. Department of State; Kennan Institute; and Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.

The site is produced in association with the Gulag Museum at Perm 36, Perm, Russia and the International Memorial Society, Moscow, Russia.

The Bracero History Archive collects and makes available the oral histories and artifacts pertaining to the Bracero program, a guest worker initiative that spanned the years 1942-1964. Millions of Mexican agricultural workers crossed the border under the program to work in more than half of the states in America.

The Bracero Program, which brought millions of Mexican guest workers to the United States, ended more than four decades ago. Current debates about immigration policy-including discussions about a new guest worker program-have put the program back in the news and made it all the more important to understand this chapter of American history. Yet while top U.S. and Mexican officials re- examine the Bracero Program as a possible model, most Americans know very little about the program, the nation's largest experiment with guest workers. Indeed, until very recently, this important story has been inadequately documented and studied, even by scholars.

The Bracero Program grew out of a series of bi-lateral agreements between Mexico and the United States that allowed millions of Mexican men to come to the United States to work on, short-term, primarily agricultural labor contracts. From 1942 to 1964, 4.6 million contracts were signed, with many individuals returning several times on different contracts, making it the largest U.S. contract labor program. An examination of the images, stories, documents and artifacts of the Bracero Program contributes to our understanding of the lives of migrant workers in Mexico and the United States, as well as our knowledge of, immigration, citizenship, nationalism, agriculture, labor practices, race relations, gender, sexuality, the family, visual culture, and the Cold War era.

The Bracero Program was created by executive order in 1942 because many growers argued that World War II would bring labor shortages to low-paying agricultural jobs. On August 4, 1942 the United States concluded a temporary intergovernmental agreement for the use of Mexican agricultural labor on United States farms (officially referred to as the Mexican Farm Labor Program), and the influx of legal temporary Mexican workers began. But the program lasted much longer than anticipated. In 1951, after nearly a decade in existence, concerns about production and the U.S. entry into the Korean conflict led Congress to formalize the Bracero Program with Public Law 78.

The Bracero Program was controversial in its time. Mexican nationals, desperate for work, were willing to take arduous jobs at wages scorned by most Americans. Farm workers already living in the United States worried that braceros would compete for jobs and lower wages. In theory, the Bracero Program had safeguards to protect both Mexican and domestic workers for example, guaranteed payment of at least the prevailing area wage received by native workers; employment for three-fourths of the contract period; adequate, sanitary, and free housing; decent meals at reasonable prices; occupational insurance at employer's expense; and free transportation back to Mexico at the end of the contract. Employers were supposed to hire braceros only in areas of certified domestic labor shortage, and were not to use them as strikebreakers. In practice, they ignored many of these rules and Mexican and native workers suffered while growers benefited from plentiful, cheap, labor. Between the 1940s and mid 1950s, farm wages dropped sharply as a percentage of manufacturing wages, a result in part of the use of braceros and undocumented laborers who lacked full rights in American society.