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Virginia Tech

The Digital John D. Wagg Papers

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

John D. Wagg was a native of Ashe County, North Carolina and a Southern Methodist circuit minister active immediately before and during the Civil War. His surviving journal, sermons, and received letters allow us to employ him as a window into a particular time, place, and set of conditions. To facilitate this, selections from the Wagg documents have been transcribed, edited, and presented as a Web-based digital edition, the Digital John D. Wagg Papers. This edition is designed to work with many other editions of similarly narrow historical and geographical scope as one historical witness in a network of witnesses. We must draw from several varieties of documents in the John Wagg collection and from contextualizing historical scholarship to construct a history of Wagg as a product of and participant in his times. Born 8 July 1835, Wagg began keeping a journal in 1854 as he worked toward a degree in medicine at Jefferson, North Carolina, the Wagg family hometown. As a diarist he often explored the place of humanity in a God-made world, a theme that foreshadows his turn from medicine and entry into the itinerant ministry of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South in October 1858. Wagg spent the Civil War years preaching throughout western North Carolina and southwest Virginia, generally striving to keep his heavily Confederate-leaning politics from the pulpit. This lifestyle allows the Wagg Papers to bring an alternate point of view to any archive of Civil War documents consisting primarily of the letters of combatants.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master of Arts
Level thesis:degree_level
masters
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
English
Department dc:contributor.department
English
Grantor dc:publisher
Virginia Tech
Year dc:date.issued
2011

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Woods, Zachary John-Robert
Chair dc:contributor.committeechair
  • Radcliffe, David H.
Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember
  • Mosser, Daniel
  • Oehlschlaeger, Fritz H.

Subjects

dc:subject × 5

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Dc Identifier Other
etd-04152011-163649
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/31725

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Virginia Tech
Base URL
vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Woods, Zachary John-Robert. The Digital John D. Wagg Papers. masters thesis, Virginia Tech, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/31725