After reading “The Revolution at 250: A Conversation,” published in JER, I thought about the many different angles to approach writing this blog piece. This conversation contains many important insights into the scholarship on the American Revolution, more than can fit into one blog post. I could reflect on the ways the topics in this conversation informed and engaged my research on elite American female diplomats in the period during and after the American Revolution, or I could write about the digitization of materials and my work at the Adams Papers, or even fields of inquiry not mentioned in the conversation, like diplomatic history or environmental history. Upon further thought, I realized that these topics are all tied together.[1]

The conversation acknowledges historiographical shifts in consequences (more so than causes) of the Revolution, yet it is worth acknowledging how the messiness of the 1780s deserves even more scholarly attention.[2] While the discussion produced a consensus about the progress made in studying women during the Revolutionary era, for instance, the 1780s have the potential to further our understanding of women’s roles.[3] In some cases, like the elite women under analysis in my research, the post-Revolutionary moment proved unique for women’s political and diplomatic roles. Studying women’s history in connection with diplomatic history has highlighted a novel area of women’s agency in the new nation. Women, including Abigail Adams, Sarah Livingston Jay, and Mary Stead Pinckney, socialized with and hosted aristocratic men and women in European courts while sharing political news and newspapers with family in the United States and transcribing correspondence for their husbands. As the diplomatic corps formalized, many of these diplomatic activities closed off to women.

The Adams Papers Digital Edition, https://www.masshist.org/publications/adams-papers/

While researching women’s diplomatic roles in Europe, I relied on digitized documentary editions for my project. For example, in my chapter on Nabby Adams, the Adams Papers identified many of John Adams’s letters that were in her hand, bolstering my argument about her role as diplomatic secretary (with the ciphers too!). Access to these sources enabled me to analyze patterns in their writings—what they included, the information they purposely left out, and even the ways they hid information within the letters.

In “The Revolution at 250” conversation, Michael Hattem makes an important insight comparing digitization today to microfilm in the 1950s. Hattem discusses the effects of this “digitization revolution” in the classroom, but it is not limited to that.[4] Historians such as myself use these sources in their research. For example, the Adams Papers Digital Edition, which I work on (and which Serena Zabin cites in the conversation), provides free access to thousands of annotated Adams family documents.[5] The annotation includes insights into people, wars, legislation, family affairs, and much more. In addition to annotation, you can find volume introductions, verified transcriptions, and volume indexes. More recently, the Adams Papers published the complete John Quincy Adams Digital Diary, which includes over 15,000 transcriptions alongside manuscript pages from John Quincy Adams’s 51-volume diary, making it an unparalleled resource for the longer Revolutionary era. At the Adams Papers, we add documents we find in other libraries and archives to our database of known Adams documents. The Online Adams Catalog, called OAC, can be used online to locate Adams documents and correspondence. These databases provide researchers with digital access to the Adams universe.

The Online Adams Catalog, courtesy of Massachusetts Historical Society, https://www.masshist.org/adams-resources/slipfile/catalog.php

Moreover, as someone who finished my dissertation during the COVID-19 pandemic, the digitization of these sources allowed me, and many others, to continue our work while travel and access to archives was limited. Open access sources provide high school students, researchers, the public, and teachers with richer material to provide for their students or in their writings.

Researching and writing about women’s diplomatic history, among many other subjects, is contingent on greater access to digital sources. Projects, like the Adams Papers, have made available thousands of public and private papers of an extraordinarily well-documented family. As research into the American Revolution continues to elicit new questions, digitized primary sources allows greater access for historians, students, and the public to the voices of those who experienced, led, fled, and observed the Revolutionary era.

Endnotes

[1] Miriam Liebman, “‘Thus Much for Politicks’: American Women, Diplomacy, and Politics” (PhD diss., The Graduate Center, CUNY, 2022); “The Revolution at 250: A Conversation,” 525.

[2] “The Revolution at 250: A Conversation,” 529–542.

[3] “The Revolution at 250: A Conversation,” 514, 519, 527, 535.

[4] “The Revolution at 250: A Conversation,” 525.

[5] “The Revolution at 250: A Conversation,” 553.