Fellowships Overview

2021

• James Ambuske (George Washington’s Mount Vernon), Randell Flaherty (University of Virginia Law Library), and Loren S. Moulds (University of Virginia Law Library) with The Centre for Research Collections at the University of Edinburgh for “The Scottish Court of Session Digital Archive Project,” an ongoing effort to construct a digital archive and research platform centered on Session Papers, the printed documents produced during litigation before Scotland’s supreme civil court in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
• Molly Kerr (History Revealed, Inc.) and the New York Public Library for “Digitizing the Alexandria, Virginia account books,” the second phase of the Shopping Stories project. The project uses store ledgers to uncover consumer interests, lives, and the larger community of people who resided in eighteenth century. The first phase of the project involved a crowd-sourced effort to transcribe eleven ledgers from the two John Glassford & Company stores from 1758-1769. Phase two will focus on Colchester and Alexandria, Virginia.
• Kaitlin Tonti (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) was awarded an
  OI-Mount Vernon Digital Collections Fellowship to work with the New York Public Library to digitize the poetry of Hannah Lawrence Schieffelin, including the poem “George Washington.” You can learn more about the project here.

2020

• Lydia Curliss (Brown University) for “Reclaiming Cultural Heritage: Digitizing early Nipmuc Histories from Colonial Documents.” This project seeks to preserve Nipmuc culture by interpreting archival documents from an indigenous perspective. Ms. Curliss will work with the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) to digitize manuscript collections containing early Algonquian-language monographs, manuscript collections from prominent colonial citizens, and early town records with vital and unique information about Nipmuc people and their language. These digitized records will be added to the tribe’s developing Mukurtu database as well as a new public joint AAS/Nipmuc Nation webpage.
• Joshua Eckhardt (Virginia Commonwealth University) will work with the British Library to publish the Wyatt Papers online. Professor Eckhardt also will work with British Virginia, VCU’s peer-reviewed digital publisher of colonial documents, to produce digital scholarship based on the documents.
• Elizabeth Heath (Baruch College – City University of New York) and Julia Landweber (Montclair State University) will work with the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University to digitize eleven maps from the JCB’s collection for use in their open-access digital project “Visualizing the Data of the Eighteenth-Century French Caribbean,” a collection of eighteenth-century censuses that can be used alone or with georeferenced historical maps and GIS software.

2019

• Benjamin Bankhurst (Shepherd University) and Kyle Roberts (Loyola University, Chicago) for “The Maryland Loyalist Project.” This project seeks to make the rich primary resources left by loyalists who fled the United States in 1783, emigrating to London and Halifax, Nova Scotia, available for study online. The records are now housed in the British National Archives. The project grows out of synchronous online undergraduate courses developed between Shepherd University and Loyola University Chicago.
• Jennifer Palmer (University of Georgia), Julia Gaffield (Georgia State University), and Patrick Tardieu (Bibliothèque Hatïenne des Pères du Saint-Esprit) for “Endangered Colonial Imprints in the Bibliothèque Hatïenne des Pères du Saint-Esprit: The Archives Décoloniales of the Age of Revolutions.” The project seeks to digitize materials printed before 1820 during the colonial, revolutionary, and early independence periods in Saint-Domingue (later Haiti), some 160 documents. Up to an additional 100 documents will be conserved then scanned, cataloged, and uploaded as part of the project. The materials are housed at the Bibliothèque Hatïenne des Pères du Saint-Esprit, the oldest library in Haiti, and are at risk of deterioration or loss due to the significant damage sustained by the library and its collections during the 2010 earthquake.
• Daniel Webb (University of New Mexico) for digitization of documents relating to Apache (Ndé) history. The project seeks to preserve records related to bands, clans, and family lineages during different stages of migration and territorial expansion. The project is a collaboration between Daniel Webb (University of New Mexico) and the University of New Mexico’s Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections. Additional consultation for the project is planned with representatives of the Jicarilla Apache Nation in Dulce and the Mescalero Apache Tribe in Mescalero, New Mexico, along with representatives of the Lipan Apache in Texas and the San Carlos, Tonto, and White Mountain Apache in Arizona.

2018

• Rosalind J. Beiler, University of Central Florida, partnered with the Historical Society of Pennsylvania to digitize volumes 1 and 2 of the Pemberton Papers (1641–1702). These materials from Phineas Pemberton and his descendants document Pennsylvania’s early Quaker history. Since completing the digitization of the Pemberton Papers in July 2018, the group has made steady progress on developing People, Religion, Information Networks and Travel: The Dynamics of Migration in the Early Modern World (PRINT). The Historical Society of Pennsylvania is currently in the process of shifting its Digital Asset Management System so the Pemberton Papers are now marked as digitized in the catalog and are available to the public upon request. The UCF team will be making the letters available to the public through the UCF Library’s STARS (Showcase of Text, Archives, Research and Scholarship) by early May 2019. An additional project to transcribe the Pemberton Papers via crowdsourcing is in the planning stages. The long-term goal is to create an internationally accessible digital archive of more than 2,000 letters based on collections of correspondence in Philadelphia, Amsterdam, Germany, and London, that will demonstrate how dissenting religious communities, especially those of Mennonites, Quakers, and Pietists, shaped the dynamic patterns of migration in the Atlantic world.
• William Fenton, Fordham University, partnered with the American Antiquarian Society to further his project Digital Paxton. The project expands upon John Raine Dunbar’s The Paxton Papers (1957) by making available a more expansive and diverse corpus of primary source, contextual, and teaching materials. Digital Paxton offers a window into the colonization and conquest of the trans-Appalachian West, eighteenth-century print and visual culture, and Pennsylvania on the eve of the American Revolution. As a digital collection, the project benefits from the contributions of 18 cultural heritage institutions, including an entirely new section devoted to newsprint, made possible by the Lapidus Initiative. Digital Paxton continues to evolve as an educational resource. Alongside several lesson plans for higher education, including a crowdsourced transcription platform, the project recently gained lessons for high school history teachers. The project will continue to grow as an educational resource via a summer institute co-sponsored by the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage (July-August 2019).

2017

• Andrew Sluyter and Lauren Coats, Louisiana State University, digitized approximately 1400 surveys housed by LSU Libraries that mapped land claims in Spanish Louisiana at the close of the eighteenth and opening of the nineteenth centuries. These surveys provide a comprehensive overview of the patterns of land and life in Spanish Louisiana on the eve of its integration into the territory of the United States. They are now available online as part of Louisiana Digital Library as the Pintado Papers.
• Nicholas Gliserman digitized, transcribed, and encoded the diaries and correspondence created by members of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends in the course of establishing and supporting a Quaker mission to the Seneca Country between the years 1795 and 1820. This manuscript collection aids in documenting Native-Quaker relations in the eighteenth century. The records are housed at the Quaker & Special Collections of Haverford College and were added to Haverford’s existing Beyond Penn’s Treaty website.
• Stephen Mullen digitized the Stirling of Keir collection held at Glasgow City Archives at the Mitchell Library with the assistance of archivist Dr. Irene O’Brien. The resulting online collection, titled Scotland’s Slavery Past, includes mid-eighteenth-century records, such as invoices, letter and account books, associated with two sugar plantations in Jamaica-Hampden in St. James and Frontier in St. Mary. The digitization of these sources allow historians to compare economic and social conditions of sugar estates across the Atlantic world as well as consider the lived experiences of master and enslaved in the British Caribbean.