History
Digitized program from the Society’s 1925 Centennial Celebration
For over 190 years, the Jefferson Literary and Debating Society has played an integral role in the development of student life and intellectual culture at the University of Virginia. Funded by the Jefferson Trust––an initiative of the University of Virginia Alumni Association––the Jefferson Society Archives Project has organized and digitized the approximately 32,000-item archival collection of UVA’s oldest student group. In making the Jefferson Society’s history accessible and preserving it for the future, the JSA Project has given a key piece of UVA history back into the hands of students, community members, and researchers.
Since 1825, the Jefferson Society has defended the free exchange of ideas and worked to improve the quality of student life at the University of Virginia. The Society’s regular Friday meetings offer its members opportunities for literary discussions, political debates, and productive intellectual conversations. Famous regular members of the Society include President Woodrow Wilson, Edgar Allan Poe, and former Virginia Governor James Gilmore. Famous honorary members include Presidents James Madison and James Monroe, the Marquis de Lafayette, and William Faulkner. The Society has held anti-war rallies, published the University’s first daily paper, and helped to start many of UVA’s modern student organizations, from Student Council to the International Relations Organization.
Photograph of Society members included in James Goode’s 1965 history of the organization
The Society’s unique contributions to the University render its history uniquely valuable. The Jefferson Society’s archives document much of this history in the form of handwritten meeting minutes, correspondence with distinguished speakers, Society publications, speeches given before the organization, and roll books signed by members past and present. Treasures like minutes taken by Woodrow Wilson can be found beside constitutions from the 1800s and satirical commentaries on early University life. For the past few decades, however, the Society’s archives have been in a dangerous state of disrepair. Anything from leather-bound volumes to loose-leaf paper had been crammed, without a catalog or sorting system, into filing cabinets in the basement of Alderman Library. Nothing had been preserved online or easily accessible for researchers.
On April 15, 2016, The Jefferson Trust awarded the Society $33,615 to begin the Jefferson Society Archives Project. Since then, the Society has partnered with the University of Virginia Library and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) to save its archives. Each semester, the JSA Project has employed a team of students to reorganize the physical archives, create a comprehensive catalog, collect metadata on each item in the collection, and re-house the items in archival-quality acid-proof boxes and folders. At the same time, the Digital Production Group in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library has been digitizing the Society’s most valuable archived items. The final stage of the project deposited the archives with Special Collections and transferred them out of Alderman to a more secure and well-regulated environment.