This edition is still being proofed. Please do not cite this
preview until this notice is removed.
The editors welcome suggestions and corrections (see link above).
We would like to thank The Ohio State University Libraries for permission to publish this edition of the William B. Anderson Letters and to incorporate images of the manuscripts held in the Rare Books and Manuscript Library. Dr. Geoffrey D. Smith, Head of Rare Books and Manuscripts, met with the editors to introduce them to the manuscript collection and its place in the special collections of the University Libraries. Laura Denning, a student employee of Rare Books and Manuscripts, scanned the manuscript pages to exacting standards.
While all of the transcriptions were done from high-resolution scans of the original manuscripts after an on-site inspection of the manuscripts, the editors benefitted greatly from the work of Steve Agricola, an undergraduate intern at the University Libraries, whose transcriptions of the Anderson letters provided a starting place for our own work with the manuscripts.
Contextualizing and annotating "familiar" letters requires editors to seek out local histories and hard-to-find contemporary sources (i.e. sources stemming from more or less the same time and place as the documents) in order to identify and understand references to people, places, and events. Given the time contraints under which the initial release of this edition was produced (a ten-week academic term), the editors depended a great deal on the local archival materials made available online by academic libraries, historical societies, and private genealogists. We cite those sources whenever we rely on them in editorial introductions and footnotes, but we extend special thank to Ms. Jamie Danker, great-great-grandaughter of William and Mary Louisa Anderson, for permission to reproduce the photographs of William and Mary Louisa used in this edition. Ms. Danker's family history Web site, http://www.jamiedanker.com, also provided a great deal of documentary information about the Anderson family.
Professor Elizabeth Hewitt of the Department of English at The Ohio State University and author of Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865 (Cambridge UP, 2004) also met with the editors and provided valuable insights into the historical background of the letters.
This electronic textual edition also depends on technical support from a number of organizations and individuals at The Ohio State University. The College of Humanities (COH) hosts this Web site and the XML publishing system used by the edition on the Humanities Network, managed by the Humanities Information Systems (HIS) staff. James Cheng, HIS Senior Systems Developer, installed and configured Apache's Cocoon XML publishing application, and Jody Croley Jones, HIS Web Services Manager, created the code behind the comments and corrections page, allowing the editors to respond to readers' feedback.
High-resolution images of the manuscipts are housed on the Colleges of the Arts and Sciences Media Manager application, which allows the edition to provide users with zoomable views and numerous detail views of the manuscript pages on the fly, all from archived master images. We owe particular thanks to Media Manager staff members Allen Coleman and George Abraham, who helped us adapt our project to a new version of the Media Manager that came online just as we were preparing this edition.
Finally, we would like to thank the Digital Media Project (DMP) in the Department of English at The Ohio State University, which provided classroom support for the editorial team. The director of the DMP, Professor Scott Lloyd Dewitt, generously allocated funds from the DMP to purchase a classroom license for the specialized XML-editing software used by the editorial team.