Projects and Project Summaries from 2016

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Projects and Project Summaries from the 2016 Editing Institute

Adams Papers
Massachusetts Historical Society
Adams Papers
This project edits the public and private papers of three generations of the Adams family.

Jane Addams Papers Project
Ramapo College of New Jersey
Jane Addams Papers
The Jane Addams Papers Project (JAPP) is working directly with Ramapo College of New Jersey and its students to make the letters and other primary documents related to Jane Addams more accessible to the public. As her handwriting is quite difficult to read and her work spans multiple decades, we hope that by organizing the archived microfilm we can inspire scholars to learn more about Addams and Hull‑House as well as conduct research into her life and legacy.

Franz Boas Papers Documentary Edition
University of Western Ontario
Franz Boas Papers
The Franz Boas Papers Documentary Edition explores the personal and other correspondence of anthropologist Franz Boas. Working with an interdisciplinary team of academics and partners including the American Philosophical Society, the Musqamagw Dzawada’enuxw Tribal Council, the Union of BC Indian Chiefs, and the University of Victoria, the letters will be transcribed, digitally formatted, and used by editors to create bound volumes of annotated correspondence published by University of Nebraska Press.

Memoirs of Josiah Cotton & Allied Documents
University of Richmond
Douglas L. Winiarski
The Memoirs of Josiah Cotton & Allied Documents will present a scholarly edition of the selected manuscripts of an obscure eighteenth-century Plymouth, Massachusetts, civil magistrate, Indian missionary, and cultural critic named Josiah Cotton. The project centers around Cotton’s 444‑page “Account of the Cotton Family,” a remarkable record of notable political, economic, social, and religious events in New England, as well as his correspondence and miscellaneous writings, which include a fragmentary treatise entitled “Some Observations Concerning Witches, Ghosts, and Apparitions.”

Einstein Papers Project
California Institute of Technology
Einstein Papers
The Einstein Papers Project is a major ongoing editorial documentary project focused on the publication of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. Fourteen documentary volumes in the original language, accompanied by scholarly annotation and apparatus, and an equal number of corresponding translation volumes have been published to date, half of which were completed at the EPP’s current institution, the California Institute of Technology.

Foreign Relations of the United States
Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State
Foreign Relations of the United States
Initially published in 1861, the Foreign Relations of the United States series serves as the official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity. The annotated volumes contain declassified correspondence and meeting records from Presidential libraries, U.S. Government departments and agencies, and private collections.

Civilian Accounts of the Battle of Gettysburg
Adams County Historical Society, Gettysburg, Pa.
Adams County Historical Society
Our historical society holds dozens of previously unpublished diaries, letters, and memoirs written by Adams County residents during or soon after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. We would like to transcribe and process these original records in such a way that would allow us to publish them as a single annotated book about Gettysburg civilians during the Civil War and make it accessible beyond our local research room.

Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library, Mississippi State University
Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library
The Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library, located at Mississippi State University, is in the process of creating an annotated print edition of Ulysses S. Grant’s personal memoirs. The project aims to reinvigorate interest in the memoirs by contextualizing it for the modern reader.

“Scarce the High Pursuit Begun”: Lucinda Humphrey Hays, Teacher of Freedpeople of Memphis
Rust College
Alisea W. McLeod
Civil War missionary Lucinda Humphrey Hays labored among the contraband of the Mississippi Valley between 1862 and 1864. A short book project, intended to be made available electronically, will narrate Humphrey Hays’s experience, using letters she wrote to the head of the American Missionary Association, letters she wrote to family back in her hometown of Tipton, Iowa, and secondary materials that include camp records and records of soldiers whose families lived in camp with Humphrey Hays and her spouse Col. John Hays.

Hemingway Letters Project
Pennsylvania State University
Hemingway Letters
The Hemingway Letters Project is producing a comprehensive scholarly edition of the author’s some 6,000 letters, approximately 85 percent of them never before published. The edition is being published by Cambridge University Press in a projected seventeen volumes. The project is authorized by the Ernest Hemingway Foundation/Society and the Hemingway Foreign Rights Trust, holders, respectively, of the U.S. and international rights to the letters.

Papers of Thomas Jefferson
Princeton University
Thomas Jefferson Papers
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, which began at Princeton University in 1943, is preparing the definitive scholarly edition of correspondence and papers written to and by Thomas Jefferson.

Henrietta Aiken Kelly: The Correspondence of a Special Field Agent for Sericulture
Walker Local and Family History Center, Richland Library, Columbia, S.C.
Walker Local and Family History Center
Henrietta Aiken Kelly (1844–1916) was an educator and scientist who, in 1901, was hired as a Special Field Agent for sericulture by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Kelly’s correspondence with the director of the department’s Entomology Bureau, L. O. Howard, consists of approximately 60 sixty letters written from 1901 to 1904. The letters describe Kelly’s experiment station in Charleston, S.C., as well as her efforts to improve the plight of South Carolina’s farmers with silk farming. The project goal will be to transcribe, annotate, and digitize the complete collection.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project
Stanford University
Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers
The principal mission of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project is to publish the definitive fourteen-volume edition of King’s most historically significant speeches, sermons, correspondence, and unpublished manuscripts.

Naval Documents of the American Revolution
Naval History and Heritage Command, U.S. Navy
Naval Documents of the American Revolution
Naval Documents of the American Revolution facilitates a comprehensive understanding of the War of Independence at sea through the publication of documents that give a full coverage of naval activities. It publishes transcriptions of documents, in English and other languages, that bear “on the regular naval forces on both sides, state navies, privateers, merchant shipping, logistics of the conflict, and operations on sea, lake, bay and river.”

New Hampshire Citizen Archivists Initiative
Keene State College
John Lund
The Citizen Archivist project teaches the skills necessary to read, interpret, and transcribe 18th and 19th century handwritten primary source documents to a wide range of audiences. Participants in Citizen Archivist institutes learn best practices in transcribing primary sources while preserving (in digital form) important document collections.

Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project
George Washington University
Eleanor Roosevelt Papers
Eleanor Roosevelt, whose political life spanned from the Progressive Era through the early Cold War, was one of the most significant American women of the twentieth century, and she remains one of the most admired. The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project publishes in both print and electronic formats, prepares documentary editions that address the needs of scholarly and lay audiences alike, and works closely with teachers, students, history professionals, and policymakers to integrate ERP resources into their respective fields of practice.

Seward Family Archive Project
University of Rochester
Seward Family Digital Archive
The Seward Family Archive Project will provide one of the most comprehensive records of the life and times of an extended family in nineteenth-century America. Through the project’s public website, digital images and searchable annotated transcriptions of family letters, journals, account books, photographs, and other materials will be available.

Joseph Smith Papers Project
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Joseph Smith Papers
The Joseph Smith Papers Project is a comprehensive papers project focusing on the papers of Joseph Smith (1805–1844), the founding prophet and first president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‑day Saints. Between the project’s website and print volumes the project will publish complete transcripts with both textual and contextual annotation of all extant documents created by or on behalf of Joseph Smith as well as papers received by him or filed in his office.

Personal Papers of Walter Bedell Smith
Drew University
Jeff Ewen
This project will produce for publication the personal letters that Walter Bedell Smith wrote to his wife during World War II. Since Smith never wrote an autobiography about the war, these letters give valuable insight into high command.

U.S. Navy in World War I Documentary History Project
Naval History and Heritage Command, U.S. Navy
Naval History and Heritage Command
The WWI project will focus on the United States Navy’s involvement in WWI in Europe. The project will publish documents online detailing the wide breadth of the Navy’s involvement in that war.

Washington Family Papers
University of Virginia
Washington Papers
To collect, transcribe, annotate, and publish the comprehensive papers of Martha Washington and a select edition of documents related to George Washington’s family. In addition, to publish a newly transcribed and annotated edition of George Washington’s Barbados Diary, 1751.