Crossroads of Revolution to Cradle of Reform: Litchfield Connecticut: 1751-1833 is an exciting new digital history project of unique national significance led by the Litchfield Historical Society. The Society is seeking funding to digitize archives and material culture for a Web site that will make available a comprehensive collection of the diverse primary sources that record all aspects of life in Litchfield. The Society will collaborate with the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia and Fordham University on Crossroads.

The project will chronicle life in Litchfield, one of the most important political and cultural centers of the nation from the time it was designated the county seat in 1751 to the closing of Tapping Reeve's famed Litchfield Law School in 1833. Over five decades at this, the nation's first school of law, Reeve and his partner James Gould educated two vice presidents, fourteen governors, fourteen members of the federal cabinet, twenty-eight U.S. Senators, 100 members of the House of Representatives, three members of the U.S. Supreme Court, and many other state and local public officials.

The final Web site will offer a digital collection of Litchfield's primary sources, providing Internet access to the object and archival legacy of the town. The site will showcase the community and its influence on the national story in areas as diverse as the development of the American political system from the colonial through early national periods, the beginning and spread of American legal education, women's education, reform movements, western expansion and the abolition movement.

Crossroads will meet and build the public's burgeoning interest in the formative years of our country and in the development of our national institutions. Educators will find primary sources that will enhance their classroom teaching and will enrich and enliven their students' investigations of the past. Scholars will discover a vast repository of little known, detailed sources that illuminate major facets of life during the late colonial and early national years. Family historians, museum professionals, visitors to Litchfield, and the general public will find new and exciting ways of looking at the American past. Crossroads will provide researchers the tools for doing sophisticated primary source research with documents and objects that have not been widely accessible. New technologies enable the project to advance
scholarship across geographic and disciplinary boundaries, connecting archival texts and material culture in ground-breaking ways.

The Virginia Center for Digital History created a basic prototype of the site. The end product will be created by a professional designer, but this prototype demonstrates the usefulness of the project. Moving forward depends upon procuring funding. If you have interest in supporting the Society in this endeavor, or if you feel this project would be useful to your research, please contact us and let us know how.

Project Staff:

Catherine K. Fields, Project Co-Director
Director, Litchfield Historical Society
P.O. Box 385
Litchfield, CT 06759
Phone: 860-567-4501
Fax: 860-567-3565
e-mail: director@litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org

Catherine Fields holds an M.A. in museum administration/American history from the University of Vermont and a B.A. in American history from the College of William and Mary. She has been director of the Litchfield Historical Society for eighteen years In Litchfield she has been responsible for several ground breaking projects, including the 1994-98 renovation and reinterpretation of the Tapping Reeve House & Litchfield Law School and acted as project director for the NEH funded exhibition project "To Ornament Their Minds: Sarah Pierce's Litchfield Female Academy, 1792-1833."

Doron Ben-Atar, Project Co-Director
Professor, Department of History
Fordham College at Lincoln Center
113 West 60th Street
New York, NY 10023-7475
Phone: (212) 636-7014
e-mail benatar@fordham.edu

Project co-director and scholar Doron Ben-Atar received his B.A. and M.A. in comparative history from Brandeis University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in American history from Columbia University in 1990. He is the author of Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power (Yale University Press, 2004); What Time and Sadness Spared: Mother and Son Confront the Holocaust together with Roma Nutkiewicz Ben-Atar (University of Virginia Press, 2006); The Origins of Jeffersonian Commercial Policy and Diplomacy (St. Martin Press, 1993); and Federalists Reconsidered (with Barbara Oberg, University Press of Virginia, 1998). During the 2003-2004 academic year, Ben-Atar was a Fellow at the New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers where he worked on a social and cultural portrait of Litchfield during the early national period.

Linda Hocking, Project Archivist
Curator of Library and Archives, Litchfield Historical Society
P.O. Box 385
Litchfield, CT 06759
Phone: 860-567-4501
Fax: 860-567-3565
e-mail: archivist@litchfieldhistoricalsociety.org

Linda Hocking holds a B.A. in political science from Marist College and an M.S. in library and information science from the University of Illinois. She has been curator of library and archival collections at the Litchfield Historical Society since November 2002. In 2005, the Society of American Archivists awarded the Colonial Dames Scholarship to the January session of the Modern Archives Institute to Hocking. In September of 2005, Hocking was admitted to the Academy of Certified Archivists.