New in this release, and added to all previous volumes of the Adams Papers Digital Edition, are mouseover expansions of all of the Adams family code abbreviations used in the edition (such as AA2 for Abigail Adams [1765–1813], daughter of John and Abigail).

Adams Family Correspondence, volume 8, drawing from nearly 250 letters, follows the Adams family from March 1787 to the close of 1789. The correspondence covered in this volume evokes a period of transition both for both the nation and the Adams family. John Adams made the transition from the first Minister to the Court of St. James to first Vice President of the United States under the new Constitution, after only a brief respite at their newly acquired farm in Quincy, which John Adams named Peacefield. Meanwhile, their daughter Nabby, married in 1786, gave birth to John and Abigail’s first grandchildren, and their sons, John Quincy, Charles, and Thomas Boylston, furthered their studies at Harvard and embarked on their own legal careers.

Volume 9 of the Adams Family Correspondence chronicles the early years of the American republic under the new Constitution with Vice President John Adams faithfully presiding over the Senate. Internationally, the United States faced diplomatic challenges as the outbreak of the French Revolution raised questions about the position and response the nation should take in regard to both France and Europe in general. On the domestic front, all of the Adams children completed their transition to adulthood, with the youngest son, Thomas Boylston, graduating from Harvard. The correspondence of the children, both among themselves and to their parents, takes center stage in this volume of nearly 300 letters spanning from January 1790 to December 1793 and reveals not only their sentiments on national and world events, but also the intimate details of family and farm.

The 350 letters of The Papers of John Adams, volume 14, explore the slow and difficult diplomatic conclusion to the American Revolutionary War from October 1782 to May 1783. Wary of France’s motives and desirous of establishing a fully independent way, John Adams and the American Peace Commissioners determined to strike a peace with Great Britain separate from France, but issues ranging from loyalists to fishing rights slowed progress. Meanwhile, Adams continued his role as minister to the Netherlands overseeing the distribution of funds of the Dutch-American loan, followed fifteen-year-old John Quincy’s long journey from St. Petersburg to The Hague, and took a keen interest in how best to write an accurate history of the American Revolution. As always, Adams’s letters reveal a wealth of insight into not only the history of the period but his own thought processes.

(UVA Press wishes to thank Sara Sikes of the Adams Papers, and her staff, for assistance with proofreading of the digital volumes.)

This latest installment of the DMDE takes the reader through 1844 and the sale of Montpelier, the Madisons’ estate in Orange County, Virginia. In 1844 Dolley finally realized that her debts (and those of her son, John Payne Todd) had become too great for her to continue running the property; her only choice was to sell. This she did to a Richmond merchant with local family connections, Henry Wood Moncure. After 1844 Dolley would never again return to Virginia. As of this installment the reader has now twenty editorial essays on topics ranging from the enslaved community at Montpelier to the nineteenth-century “autographomania” that led collectors to seek out James and Dolley Madison’s signatures. Among the new biographical identifications are entries on nearly twenty members of the Montpelier slave community. Also new are three high-resolution images of Montpelier survey plats from the Orange County Courthouse that accompany an editorial essay by Ann L. Miller.

The images in the gallery below are scans of plats based on surveys in preparation for the sale of the Montpelier estate. The largest plat, covering two pages, includes the entire plantation and immediate surroundings.

Forthcoming installments of the DMDE will focus on Dolley’s life after her return to Washington, DC, locally honored and publicly feted, while privately still struggling to keep herself financially afloat.

This volume contains over 500 documents from 1 May through 30 September 1794. During this period, Washington and his cabinet faced foreign policy challenges connected with the ongoing war in Europe, including embargo evasions, activity by British and French privateers. Fears persisted of a potential war with Great Britain, even as envoy John Jay began negotiations with the British.

On the domestic front, conflict with Indians and the activities of Spain and Great Britain remained concerns. But the major event was the transformation of opposition to the whiskey excise tax into the violent outbreaks in western Pennsylvania that have become known as the Whiskey Rebellion. As this volume closes, President Washington himself is departing Philadelphia to join federal troops marshaled against the rebels.

As always, UVA Press thanks Jennifer Stertzer, associate editor with The Papers of George Washington.

But with the new year, we have moved all of our general descriptive content about Rotunda to a hierarchy under the ROTUNDA tab on the Press website (above on the menu bar). We’re doing this for several reasons: to avoid maintaining parallel designs, to allow more Press staff to edit Rotunda content via our WordPress interface, and above all to integrate Rotunda projects more closely with the rest of the Press’s publications.

Rotunda publications themselves will remain at their existing URLs (usually underneath rotunda.upress.virginia.edu, sometimes under separate hostnames), and our entrance page to all the publications—the URL you’ll want to bookmark for access—continues to be http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/entrance.xqy. A few other pages performing services that cannot be provided via WordPress will stay where they are as well.

We are still working out some display bugs in cross-browser testing. If you notice anything that looks odd or that doesn’t seem to be working properly, please let us know at upress-web@virginia.edu.

Anyone who has done a major site redesign knows that it is a demanding and time-consuming effort. Over the past year, UVA Press staff members Shannon Shiflett, Jason Coleman, Mark Saunders, and Mary MacNeil collaborated on the design, data porting, and architecture, with Mary handling the ONIX database conversion and Shannon doing the lion’s share of the WordPress installation and MarkLogic search-and-display programming. Bill Covert of Covert Designs did most of our theming and graphic design. David Sewell worked on infrastructure setup and porting of the development environment.