>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. ^M00:00:04 ^M00:00:21 >> Mark Sweeney: Good afternoon and welcome to the Library of Congress. I'm Mark Sweeney, the acting Deputy Librarian of Congress. And it's my pleasure to welcome you to the library's historic Thomas Jefferson Building for which to this afternoon's symposium, the first public event in the United States related to the Georgian Papers Programme. Launched in April of 2015, the Georgian Papers Programme is a collaborative effort led by King's College London and the Royal Collection Trust to make an accessible and extraordinary rich collection of primary source material from the Georgian monarchs, including King George III, the British monarch in power when the American colonies declared independence. Comprising nearly 350,000 pages of correspondents, maps, and royal household ledgers, the Georgian Papers, 85% of which have been unknown to scholars until now, stand to revolutionize our understanding of 18th century British, American, and Atlantic history, an era of profound cultural, political, economic, and social change in many ways continues to influence us today. Last year, in one of the first acts as Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden signed an agreement with King's College London and the Royal Collection Trust to collaborate on digitization, dissemination, and interpretation of the papers of King George III and the other Georgian Papers' materials. Over the next four years, the Georgian Papers Programme promises to reveal many more dimensions to Britain's longest reigning king, allowing scholars and the general public a unique window into the life and times of King George III. The Library of Congress holds the papers of numerous United States founders, including those of George Washington, offering historical context when paired with the documents of the Georgian Papers. As such, it is quite fitting for us to actively embrace this project, and my colleagues and I are delighted to partner with our peers both here in the United States and across the pond. The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture is the primary US partner for the Georgian Papers Programme. The Library of Congress joins the Sons of the American Revolution and the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association as a critical part of the American Collaboration. This afternoon's symposium is hosted by the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in partnership with the Omohundro Institute and King's College London. The Kluge Center brings together scholars and researchers from around the world to stimulate and energize one another to distill wisdom from the library's rich resources and to interact with policymakers and the general public. In a few moments, we will hear from four scholars who were recently among the first to examine the Georgian Papers held at Windsor Castle. Each scholar's presentation will reveal their early findings, describing for us some of the remarkable historical discoveries that are being made. But before introducing them, a few important announcements related to the library's participation in Georgian Papers Programme. First, a major exhibition, the Two Georges is planned for 2020, 2021 to explore the overlapping worlds of King George III and George Washington, two globally significant figures of the late 18th century. The exhibition, exploring the commonalities and contrast between the two men and the global, political, and cultural context of their lives will open first here at the Library of Congress and subsequently at a venue in London. More details to come on this exciting project as it continues to develop. And second, for those of you who may be inspired by today's event, the library is proud to announce a new Georgian Papers fellowship. Interested scholars may apply for a two-month fellowship to pursue independent research in the Georgian Papers of the Royal Archives at Windsor and in the Early American Collection at the Library of Congress with one month in residence in London and one month in residence here at the library. The application deadline for the Georgian Papers fellowship is January 31, 2018, and the fellowship recipient will be selected based on the relevance of their project for research at both institutions. For more details, please visit the Kluge Center website at loc.gov/kluge. Finally, the Library of Congress would like to thank our generous donors, Beverly and Lyman Hamilton, members of the library's private-sector support group, the John-- the James Madison Council, for making this program possible. We are delighted that Beverly Hamilton is in the audience. Mrs. Hamilton, would you please stand and be recognized. Thank you. ^M00:05:43 [ Applause ] ^M00:05:48 I will now turn the podium over to my colleague, Dr. Colleen Shogan, deputy director for National and International Outreach here at the library. Colleen is our Georgian Papers Programme project manager, and she's going to handle the remainder of today's program. Colleen. Thank you. ^M00:06:07 ^M00:06:13 >> Dr. Colleen J. Shogan: Thank you, Mark, for those terrific introductory remarks. What a terrific moment in history for this Anglo-American collaboration. Of course, through the Georgian Papers Programme, the United Kingdom is providing greater access to important documents and papers that have gone largely unexamined for many years. And the United States, as we all know, well, we're great exporters. Apparently these days, this also includes princesses so-- That's a joke for old folks, but we do want to wish congratulations to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, and we wish them the best. There's a few people I'd like to acknowledge in the room before we begin. First, the director of National and International Outreach, Jane McAuliffe. Next, the director of the Kluge Center, John Haskell. And then I'd also like to introduce you to two of our exhibit-- lead exhibit members of our team for the Two Georges, Julie Miller our historian and our curator for the Early American collections and Cheryl Regan the senior exhibit specialist in charge of the Two Georges. Lastly, I'd like to thank Travis Hensley who worked very hard to put this program together, also in conjunction with our special events team here at the Library of Congress. There will be plenty of time at the end of the program for questions, but we ask that you hold all your questions and your thoughts until the end of the program, after all the speakers have spoken, and then they will join us on stage to take all of your questions. So now, I'd like to introduce our first speaker, Arthur Burns. We're very happy that Arthur was able to make the trip today from London to join us here at the Library of Congress. Arthur is a professor of Modern British History at King's College London, historian of the Church of England from the 18th to 20th centuries. He was one of the editors of the prize-winning "St. Paul's: The Cathedral Church of London" published by Yale University Press in 2004, and is a director of one of the first large-scale public-facing online history projects in the UK, The Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540 to 1835, which he co-founded in 1999. And most important for our purposes, he's the academic director of the Georgian Papers Programme. Arthur, the stage is yours. >> Arthur Burns: Thank you very much, Colleen. And can I just say what a pleasure it is to be here. It's a really exciting program for all of us involved. But to come here and speak at the Library of Congress, as you can imagine, is something of a treat. So thank you, everybody, who's made that possible. So, my task this afternoon is to introduce the Georgian Papers and to say a little bit about the project as a preface to the reflections you will hear from my colleagues about their actual researches into the program. So they will be giving you the hardcore research findings. I'm going to try and give you a sense about just how interesting and exciting a program this is. Now, I have to confess because I'm a bit of an archives junkie. I've spent the last 30 years on and off investigating the contents of archives across the UK, some of which are state-of-the-art archives with the computer catalogs and advanced access arrangements, and others which conform about the more popular stereotype archives with stone clad vaults and cobweb documents. The contents of which is rather hard to predict since we've actually blown the dust physically off the boxes and ledgers. On the other hand, in my capacity as director of the clergy database you just heard about, I've also had 20 years experience working getting archival documents online in the form where the wider public can access them and scholars across the world make use of them. ^M00:10:03 So if you think of the two unique selling points of Georgian Papers as archival and online, you might think this just feel like another day at the office for me. That's far from it. The Georgian Papers are different and I find myself absolutely caught up in the excitement that all my colleagues here feel for the project. I just hope I can get some of that excitement across this. I've been told to be lively. I'll do my best with my cold, but we'll see how we get on. So a good place to start. Well, maybe the actual archive in which the Georgian Papers are held. Now in all kinds of ways, this Windsor Castle conforms to the archive as impenetrable treasure chest of popular imagination and something of that I think is captured in the documentary that BBC made a year ago to introduce the Georgian Papers, "The Genius of the Mad King". ^M00:10:51 [ Music ] ^M00:10:56 >> [Background Music] Windsor Castle is the treasure chest of royal secrets. Here in the round tower are the personal papers of all British monarchs and their families from George III right down to Elizabeth the second. They've always been out of bounds, except to a few select historians. >> Documents that really you're wanting to keep forever, you think about a strong place to put them. And in the case of Windsor Castle, the very strongest place to put them is inside the round tower. And the round tower is built on the site where William the Conqueror founded the castle in 1070. And that settles the round tower oval to the mid 12th century, so for very sensible and very secure place to keep papers. >> Nowhere safer? >> Nowhere safer? >> What's happening here at the top of these 104 stone steps is history of sorts too. Nearly two centuries after George III's death, all his private papers, hundreds of thousands of them are being released to the world. Now some may ask, why has it taken so long? But here in this fortified royal vault, it's groundbreaking. >> Never before has a group of academics been allowed inside the inner sanctum to rifle through these invaluable documents. So the first visit of scholars from King's College London, partners in this project, was a kind of royal revolution. >> If you could break yourself into groups of three or four [inaudible]. ^M00:12:28 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:12:42 >> Arthur Burns: So that's-- So from now I'm reporting on that fondling that was just described there. And I think that does capture just how difficult an archive this has been to access in the past, which is why we estimate, as you already heard, that despite the obvious importance, only some 15% of the papers which it contains have ever been published. In terms merely of its size, with some 350,000 pages of documents to appear by the time the program on digitization concludes, this is clearly one of the most significant caches of 18th and early 19th century papers that will be made widely available to new audience for decades. And it's not only a matter of making available digital images of the documents online. The documents fit formally. You could only get to it by going to sit in this glamorous reading room. It sometimes feels a bit like the historical versions of prince and sleeping beauties of hacking your way into the round tower together. Or indeed, so we're going to digitize them, yes. But of course, it's not just the question of digitization because some of the documents are damaged and they have to be conserved first before they could be made available. We also don't have a proper catalog of these documents. So a key aspect of the project is going to be making a catalog so we actually can describe these documents the way it should be confined with appropriate metadata. And we're probably going to transcribe a fair number of them as well into machine readable text, which for the first time enables scholars really to engage with these documents in a serious way. So, so far I think that document should capture something important but it also obscures one or two key features of the archives to make it all the more intriguing to us scholars. And obviously one thing that is obvious for this, we thought all about George III. We said George-- that there's a lot about George III in here and George III is obviously of particular interest with transatlantic audience because of his rather painful role in the creation of your nation. And the sense also that he has a very long reign. I mean he does stay around-- the longest reigning monarch we have. But it's really important, don't forget this archive also contains papers relating to other monarchs, in fact four of the monarchs. George I came to the throne in 1714. His successor George II, who reigned until George III succeeded him in 1760. And a much more significant number of documents relating to George's success of his son George IV both as king and when he was Prince of Wales and regent. And finally, there's a smaller bunch of documents that relate to the reign of William IV under his death in 1837, Victoria took the throne. So the archive that gets this inside is right across the Hanoverian period which even without the American Revolution would surely count as one of the most significant periods of British history. Moreover, the archive also contains papers relating to many other members of the royal family, such as the monarchs' consorts and children who's often owned rather turbulent lives-- and there were some really quite extraordinary life stories in the immediate family of the king. Of equal interest to those are the monarchs themselves. Secondly, I think the emphasis in the documentary, the vault-like security of Windsor Castle needs to be balanced by the fact that these archives weren't there for a long time and they didn't arrive there in the present form until the early 20th century. The bulk of the collection has been left by George IV to the care of his executor, who just happened to be the Duke of Wellington with the instruction to be destroyed unread. Well, luckily for us, the instruction was largely ignored and as was the collection itself until it was rediscovered in 1912 in the basements of Wellington's Apsley House then transferred to its present home in 1914. So some records have ever been consigned to the fire before it went to Wellington are bits of the royal records which clearly were not [inaudible] of Queen Charlotte's papers and disappeared. Some of George III's early papers have disappeared. And that's the most distressing one. The years when George is dealing with the other [inaudible] in which a lot of key policies relating to North America were being discussed, some of those papers we think are just missing. Others suffer from the neglect in the interim. We do have damaged documents from damp and all of those other things reflect things have not properly been kept from the years in Apsley House. And this means we don't therefore have a complete set of all these monarchs' papers. But against that, we can set the fact that these collections had been augmented by gifts and purchases which extended coverage to many key men and women of the court or the employee of the monarchs. And we were already finding that some of the key discoveries that some of you will hear about later are being made among these tapes of the papers that were those closely associated with the king [inaudible] the king himself. And those have not been investigated anyway near as much as the papers of George III's own handwriting on them. And then there were odd additional items and of such things of now that are usually lurking under that catchall title, miscellaneous in the catalog. And one such curiosity which I think illustrates the kind of things you can find there is a pair of letters from Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson to Emma Hamilton. And you can see a little bit of one here. Now, it's not hard to assess why these documents which have no immediate or thorough connection with the royal family end up in the royal archives in the 20th century for in them Nelson warns Emma that he's heard that the Prince of Wales wants her for her mistress and he's trying to persuade her to stay out of any contact with him in any place lest this happens [inaudible] of events today this document. The next [inaudible] is when you would [inaudible] the evidence that we might then hear because they also illustrate incidentally the force of Nelson's passion. I don't know how good your paleography is, but if you look closely at the screen, you'll see that in this excerpt he declares his own feelings be so strong that, "I might be trusted with 50 virgins naked in a dark room." So, that's Lord Nelson. He was writing this after he'd had his hand amputated as well, so we [inaudible] as he's dictating this to someone, which is hard to imagine, but probably he taught himself to write with his other hand. So, it was a private communication. It's important to emphasize, I think therefore that the sheer variety of papers, the Georgian Papers, is a key part of the importance. And as we might expect, both Andrew and Jim will show you shortly, discoveries in the papers already shed new light on politics, both domestic and international in the period, including the [inaudible] relations of Britain and the North American colonies and then the United States. But it goes also interactions with Europe during the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and with other parts of the British Empire and beyond, the Macartney mission to China for example being one of those. And these are the kind of revelations that we might all expect from the monarchs' papers. But there's a lot more to it than that. And this pie chart, which is a work in progress, it changes every time I see it. It tries to analyze what we've got in these papers in breaking it down. And anyone who is good at taxonomy will instantly see these are not a coherent set of categories because we have some personal names of the [inaudible] themes and therefore all kinds of overlaps are taking place here within those broad sways that's labeled with a particular monarch's name. But even allowing for all its weaknesses, this does give you a sense of the sheer variety of papers which are in the documents even before you take account of the variety hidden behind those monarchs' names. ^M00:20:04 There's lot here, for example, the historian of science and medicine manifest-- we know after that George III was famously ill for a long time and awful lots of records relating to the treatment and diagnosis of that illness and that often painful reading, stuff relating to his interest in scientific inquiry, relating to a magnificent collection of scientific instruments that my university is not fortunate to own but you can see through our kindness in the science museum where they were on display, a magnificent collection of telescopes and [inaudible] and so on. But you'll also get the emphasis with the other family members and they suffer from distress in large variety of illnesses between-- across the range of them. And you'll find also lots of stuff in their emotional lives, of all these princes and princesses often very complex relationships often ending tragically. And again, anyone with an interest in the history of interpersonal relations or gender history from the people find awful lot of [inaudible] material here. Then there were papers relating to the workings of the royal households, the knots and bolts of keeping the show on the road in terms of food, provisioning, equipping the buildings with objects, and so on. And that's another very rich dimension of the collection which we only just began to think about historians of art, the book, or maps, we'll find documents that are absolutely vital to interpreting magnificent collections of those objects held by the British Library and at Windsor and anyone who's had a chance to look at the map collection of George III. It's an absolute fantastic resource. If you didn't travel, this was how he knew the world. He looked at the maps and pictures. And that's how he understood the world around him. And of course the [inaudible] because they bought lots and lots of stuff, lots of really important for art historians you could do an awful lot of these lined up against the libraries collections or against those in the British Library. Commissioning buildings, commissioning paintings, commissioning music, handle festivals, right, a part of George III's life. So, something for everybody is the basic message and exploring the papers we'll find a lot about English monarchy but also about societies in which the monarchs lived and also the societies in which they didn't live, those overseas in which [inaudible] to rule. And most-- many of the papers I think which relate to the less person [inaudible] the monarch of those we know the least about. And as we move into those, I think it's very hard to predict what we find but there is going to be some major new agendas I think set for researchers very rapidly as we explore those. That said even where we've had papers that's already been published, the program is shedding new light. And we can see for example, where editions mistook or omitted or misinterpreted. And it's very striking for example that the very first volume of published letters of George III came out in the 1920s by the librarian, since then he produced a very thick volume of correspondents. One of his colleagues was so outraged by the quality of this edition that he then published the hardback edition of corrections to that volume, to volume one that was 100 pages long. And yet that's the collection we still have to work with. So, we're going to put these digitized images, we're going to be looking at those documents and new. But also of course when you look at the document in manuscript or in the very high quality digital and if you see something quite different from when you look at the printed page. If you look at George III's abdication letters when he's drafting this potential abdication speech, he thinks he might need to give shortly after the loss of the American colonies. It's one thing to read the finished version. But you look at the original and you see the agonized crossings out. You see the rethinking that's going on, something about the psychological state of mind that comes across [inaudible] in that form that simply could not be reproduced even if you try to annotate a printed edition to indicate all those corrections. And I think we look at them fresh again, if we're looking at them as a document rather than as part of a narrative history where maybe this is reproduced as a part of a story. And we know that he thought of that abdication and we know that it's part of the story of George is agonizing after the end of the American war. But nobody has ever reported to say, well, where did you get the idea of abdicating from? Because after all, this is was a king who is very, very conscious of being a divinely authorized and responsible person for his people, and yet here he is starting to walk away, walk away at the moment when he knows that this is a [inaudible] no respect whatsoever as potential monarch. So how does he think this is an exercise of his responsibilities to his maker if he's doing that? So we can rethink the questions we ask about these documents, I think, as we see them as documents. Another way we see [inaudible] part of bigger collection, because the proximity of all these different themes in one collection reflects the very real proximity of a monarchy where you have a small court operating in a very intimate setting with politicians and princesses and coaches and servants all in a very limited particular space and of course all at the heart of London, the leading world city of the late 18th century. We could therefore have to think quite harder what the interconnections are among with those papers. And that takes me into the final we're going to talk about which is how we then add value to these images into the collection of objects we're making public. And there is a fantastic program of research that's going on in association with this program. Thanks to King's and the Omohundro Institute and the generosity of our associates at Mount Vernon and the Sons of the American Revolution which we're enormously grateful, now joined by the Library of Congress if you heard more than 35 scholars have already been actively researching the Georgian Papers as Georgian Papers fellows exploring the range of themes which match the diversity of the archive itself. A particular relevance this afternoon for example, we should note that the Omohundro alone has now funded more than a dozen scholars working on an American or Atlantic world topics in this program. And that's fantastic feature. And for me, it's been terrific because I'm a really bad example to kind of put a historian who doesn't ever look up to other places doing my work and having to work alongside so many people working in American themes such as illuminated so many things I just wouldn't have got to without this program. And I think that's true of a lot of British historians. There's something special I think as well about having so many people who can feedback into the cataloging process because that's going to help us improve the means back to others because we're thinking about what these documents are all the time the scholars as well. And also the fact we were working on one archive. And that for me says a really special about this program. Quite often I go to campuses and the biggest difference between me and the other people there is we don't use the same stuff and so we can't find an easy common ground on which to debate things. Here we have a load of scholars doing extraordinary different things who've all been physically working on the same papers. And we had a marvelous meeting this September organized by Omohundro where we brought together 14 or 15 of the people who already done work to get papers and a lot of the others came as well. And the connections the people were making of animal history through to the highest politics you can imagine through the history of food and the dining traditions of the monarchy, the points of sparking going off suggesting people that you think about new dimensions [inaudible] research on that context was really wonderful. And I really do think that's going to be a big feature to the program as we go forward is that we accumulate more and more of these fellows. And indeed, we're now-- as we've gone digital, as we have more and more documents online, that community doesn't have to be just [inaudible], we can have a digital community. Two weeks ago, we launched, The King's Friend, which is online network research to see opportunities to advance the work through the papers program. And already more than 220 scholars joined that network. About a third of those were in the United States but they're worldwide and they come from department of history, of literature, of art, of music, and lots of curators and archivists as well. And then we're going to be keeping them involved with the project as it goes forward, having to give them advance opportunities to look at materials before it goes public so they can contribute the interpretations for us. It's a new approach to try to bind people to approach you like this, one which we are really excited about, which we hope will feed into things like the exhibitions we've been hearing about as we go forward. And of course the digital lets you do is potentially make relations with other archives and put documents together which you wouldn't always be able to do physically. And we hope to try and do some of that with making connections to other archives online, particularly those that are endangered, say those in Jamaica or other places where we might be able to make connections with them and try and do something together. Another [inaudible] see transcription going forward with students, scholars, and wide [inaudible] public taking part in the act to practice transcription and in the interpretation of documents. And already both William and Mary and King's both postgraduate and undergraduate students have the opportunity to get involved in this project at first hand. My own students at King's selected each of the document at random. They would give them a free choice to go to the archive and find some things that's both to them and then they were given 10 weeks to produce an online digital edition of that document. And they came from all kinds of disciplines. So one of favorites was a math student who never had done any history before and they went into George's exercise books as a young man and say, what math is he doing? Where is he getting that math from? And they identified the textbooks he used. Why he was doing this math, is all about ballistics so he could picture, you know, the cannonballs landed in the right place. But no, it's a fantastic thing for her to do to take ownership of this, her own project and we'll feed that back into the archive project because we didn't know this. That student founded that and that would be her contribution to the project. So that's a great thing I think, putting research into the heart of student's education. ^M00:30:02 We're next taking it schools. I'm talking to the British Historical Association building a collection of documents will be used in school when teaching for [inaudible] school children due the [inaudible] using Georgian Papers to illuminate the curriculum. Not just about George III but about literacy and things as part of the school curriculum. So, all of those things speak to what I found is that digital was doing the last 20 years. It's an extraordinary moment for us that we can take our serious scholarly work without compromising it in terms of rigor or scholarship find point connection with the wider historical public and work together to try and improve and enhance our interpretation. It's a wonderful thing to be able to do and the Georgian Papers project offers a possibility of doing this with a new set of documents on a different scale and internationally. And that's just fantastic I think for me. That said, the work professional scholars will be at the core what we're going to do as you would like to hear, folks. And period we're dealing with obviously is a complex and extraordinary one exhibiting both parallels with their own time and you can think of the globalization shifting political tectonics that leave people wrong-footed at every moment to what to do next or how to act, the impact in new media like a very striking parallel between the politics there and now and rapidly evolving social economic challenges. There's also striking contrast, we see the origins of many of our contemporary institutions and practices and with very different circumstances in which they now operate. And to make sense, that's going to require a lot of skill and patience and research as well as a lot of foreknowledge so we will need professional historians. So it's pleasure to be able to hand over to three such scholars who all got patience and foreknowledge and they will continue our discussion by explaining some of the themes that's researched in the papers is already highlighting. Thank you very much. ^M00:31:47 Applause ^M00:31:56 >> Dr. Colleen J. Shogan: Thank you, Arthur. That was terrific. Now I'd like to introduce our second speaker. Jim Ambuske is the former post-doctoral fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia, School of Law Library. A historian of the American Revolution and the Early Republic, Jim recently completed his PhD at UVA. In addition to his work on the Georgian era, he co-directs the Scottish Court of Session Digital Archive project in the 1828 catalog project at the UVA Law Library. The later being an initiative to reconstruct the law-- the legal library that Thomas Jefferson created for the University of Virginia. Please join me in welcoming Jim to the Library of Congress. ^M00:32:39 [ Applause ] ^M00:32:44 >> Jim Ambuske: Good afternoon, everyone. I just want to begin by thanking Karin and Shaun and Colleen and Travis for inviting me here today. It's nice to see some of my fellow fellows from the Georgian Papers project. Two years ago I had the good fortune of being the first Omohundro fellow to be in the Georgian archive. I beat my fellow over there by about a month. So now I'm giving a talk in the Library of Congress. I'm not sure it's going to get any better so I'd like to announce my retirement at the conclusion of today's program [laughter]. I wanted-- I'd like to tell you about my time in Windsor and a bit about my research there by telling you a story about two men. Admiral Sir Samuel Hood and General Jacob De Bude. These are common household names in the history of the American Revolution although it's entirely possible and you probably have heard of Lord Hood. But they shared a correspondence during a critical period of the American warfare independence. Letters that I found locked away in the royal archives of Windsor Castle. By necessity, then this story begins not of the 18th century but on the 21st on a cool September morning, two years ago in the round tower. I applied for my Georgian Papers fellowship hoping to find material for my dissertation project which was a study of Scottish immigration to North America in the era of the American Revolution. And I found that other evidence in some archives that George III was aware what some amongst the Scottish elite described as a depopulation crisis in Scotland. In other words they believed that a combination of factors that push Scots out of Scotland and pull them to the colonies here would deprive Britain of laborers and soldiers at a critical moment in the imperial crisis. And so as I waited through boxes of material on the royal archives, seeking answer to my questions, I ask to see the papers of General Jacob de Bude, the man so honored here by this inscription within Saint George's chapel located just down the hill from the round tower. Born in Geneva in the early 18th century, as a younger man, de Bude acted as a military page for George III's great uncle William, Prince of Orange. He later served in a Swiss regimen. In 1772, de Bude joined the British royal household to oversee the education of the princes William Henry and Edward. George III made him a general in the Hanoverian army and apparently became the king's aide-de-camp. He later served as Prince Frederick's secretary and it was Frederick who placed memorial to de Bude in St. George's Chapel, a testimony to that man's long service to the royal family. And so on that September morning, in 2015, I received a red archival box similar to what Arthur showed in the video there containing de Bude's papers hoping upon hope that they pour something directly on my dissertation topic hoping that I find a letter from the king where he's talking to de Bude in confidence about this potential crisis. And I didn't find anything, but that's OK. And part of the process of this program is to figure out what is there and what is not there. And as I'd like to say, what I found is better in more instances that one, and so in that box sandwiched between account books and a collection of recipes. So if you need anything for the holidays, let me know. I found a catch of letters wrapped in brown paper and bound together by a piece of string. Opening that package I discovered about 140 letters plus enclosures written to de Bude from Admiral Hood. Here was a collection unknown to scholars, dating between 1781 and 1783, written by one of Britain's senior naval officers to one of George III's trusted men in the last years of the revolutionary war. I wonder what it could mean that these letters existed in this collection within this particular archive and what they might tell us about the relationship between these two men, about the American Revolution and about George III. To begin to answer those questions, we need to know something about de Bude's correspondent, Admiral Hood. A season naval veteran, Hood first went to see with the royal navy in the 1740s. Served in a seven years war, what we commonly called the French-Indian war in North America, stationed in Halifax, Nova Scotia in the years before the American Revolution, served as a commissioner of the naval yards at Portsmouth, England. Before becoming a flag officer in the British fleet in the early 1780s, confident in his own abilities, often to the point of arrogance, Hood all too easily found fault in the conduct of his fellow officers, even his superiors. He was not afraid to express his opinions to his friends and to his civilian superiors and the luminous correspondents. But it was never without a point and that's important, Hood wanted his correspondents to understand where the officers had gone wrong, wanted to expose flaws in British military strategy and wanted to offer a sense of the potential consequences of certain military choices. Now of course, you know, Hood, he's not writing this without an eye towards his own conduct, his own reputation. He wants his correspondents to hold him in high regard. But he generally believed in the righteousness of the British cause in suppressing the American rebellion. He was content on doing his duty to king, country, and empire. And he was also a politically astute man. He was well versed in 18th century ideas of duty, honor, and propriety. While he was on friendly terms with the king, Hood dared not flout the chain of command and send his grievances directly to George III. And so with that in mind, I want to emphasize the importance of to whom Hood is writing. True, some of what Hood wrote to de Bude mirrored what he communicated to others. But the fact that he provided de Bude one of the king's men with detailed accounts of the war effort and the people involved raises [inaudible] prospect that Hood saw these letters as way to back-channel to George III himself. Hood's correspondence with de Bude written in the wake of a catastrophic British defeat in the late summer of 1781, offers an excellent example of the kind of information he might have conveyed to this exchange. They help illuminate a fatal moment and the people involved in Britain's efforts to subdue the rebellion. And so most of us are aware I think with the Battle of Yorktown of October 1781, the victory by the combined Franco-American army that traps Cornwallis southern Army on New York peninsula and leads to peace negotiation with the Americans. Certainly if you're familiar with the Hamilton's soundtrack, you know this by heart by now [laughter]. Far fewer know much about the Battle of the Chesapeake, just one month before on September the 5th, 1781. This was the decisive naval engagement of the American Revolution, especially with respect securing American independence. It is difficult to imagine Cornwallis' surrender without it. ^M00:40:07 The clash of the Virginia coast was a reflection of Britain's-- the British military and southern strategy in this period of a war. After John Burgoyne's surrender at Saratoga in 1777 and France's formal entry into the war the following year, the British military concentrated its efforts in the southern colonies, partly in the belief and not without good reason that they would find greater numbers of loyal Americans in the south. In for a time, the British found success. They actually re-conquered Georgia in the fall of 1779. That colony is declared at the king's peace, all right? So that's one check mark. In May 1780, they captured Charles Town, South Carolina, all right, captured one of the southern coast's most important ports. And after Charles Town falls into British hands, Lord Cornwallis takes command of the southern army, spends the better part of the next year and a half working to pacify South Carolina where a very violent civil war breaks out between patriot and loyalist, moving north into North Carolina and finally into Virginia. And in Virginia, he has orders from General Sir Henry Clinton to establish a fortified position near a port to which the British could send supplies. And all the while, American continental and militia forces are harassing him and his men. By the summer of 1781, George Washington and de Rochambeau sense an opportunity. Stationed up the Hudson River near White Plains, New York, the two generals debated whether to launch a strike against the British headquarters in New York City, a city that the British [inaudible] of the war or to begin an offensive in Virginia to capture or destroy Cornwallis' southern army. And ultimately they choose Virginia largely because Rochambeau convinces Washington who really wants to just go in there and get the crap out of the British in New York that Virginia is the better option. But with the British Navy patrolling American waters, Washington and Rochambeau needed the assistance of the French fleet to accomplish their objectives. One small French naval force lay off Rhode Island while another under the command of Admiral de Grasse was soon expected on the West Indies. If you'd like to know more about the American Revolution in the Caribbean, I encourage you to read Andrew O'Shaughnessy's book "An Empire Divided". It's terrific. Go pick up your copy today. And once that fleet arrives, Rochambeau sends a message to de Grasse asking him to bring his fleet north to assist the allied armies marching toward Virginia. The British had a fleet in the West Indies as well, one that included Hood abort his flagship. And the British rightly suspected that their enemies were preparing a joint operation either against General Clinton's forces in New York or against Lord Cornwallis in Virginia. The senior British admiral ordered Hood to take a detachment of 14 ships of the lines to the battleships to track de Grasse after the French commander began the voyage north. Because Hood took a more direct route to the American mainland, he actually passes de Grasse and arrives in Chesapeake Bay on August 25, 1781. Finding no French ships in the bay, Hood sailed north to New York City to consult with Admiral Graves who had the overall command with the British fleet in North America at this time. And when Hood, Graves, and other officers observed the sailing of the French fleet at Rhode Island, they correctly suspected that Virginia was the target. Mobilizing a combined fleet of 19 ships of the line, the British sailed south to prevent the French from isolating Cornwallis' army. And here you have a map from the Library of Congress, depicting this battle. And the British fleet is-- are the darker of the two colors there. On September the 5th, 1781, Hood, Graves, and the rest of the British fleet encountered de Grasse and his force of 24 ships of the line near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. Outnumbered, outgunned, outmanned, the British nevertheless put up a decent fight for a few hours before being forced to withdraw. De Grasse's victory left the French in command of Virginia waters. Tracking Cornwallis on land has the Franco-American army drew near. Despite the magnitude of this defeat, Admiral Hood was not lost for words. He sent letters to correspondents including Jacob de Bude, describing the battle in what he thought it meant for the faith of Britain's American empire. He composed a long letter to de Bude 11 days after the battle, in which he noted, "On the 5th instant, at 11 am, we plainly discovered 24 sail of French ships of the line and two frigates at anchor about Lynnhaven Bay, which afforded the British fleet a most glorious opening for making a close attack to advantage but it was not embraced. But with this letter, Hood also included a copy of his thoughts composed on the morning after the battle. Although uncharacteristically short nevertheless, Hood was characteristically blunt in his assessment of the battle. And this is the message he wants to convey to his correspondents including de Bude. "Yesterday the British fleet had a rich and most delightful harvest of glory, presented to it, but admitted to gather it in more instances than one." And here we see a fine example of Hood noting the failure of a superior officer's judgment in superiority of his own. Hood argued that Admiral Graves who commanded the center of the British line failed to press the attack. He believed that if Graves had exploited weak points in the French line, it might have been able Hood to cut the French center to pieces. But as Hood sought, Graves failed to act decisively. In this another letters, Hood made claim to de Bude that defeat on the 5th of September along with the later decision not to mount another rescue effort, portended doom for Lord Cornwallis, his army, and the British war effort. I found in this particular collection, he writes letters on the 24th of September where he describes the council of war and Hood is desperately arguing that the British should send fire ships in to French lines. Basically they would set their own vessels on fire and ram them into the French fleet as a means to punch a hole to rescue Cornwallis, and he can't convince them to do it and he is just beside himself. He's really quite passionate about what he thinks is the right thing to do. In the intimate nature of this correspondence between these two important figures in the British military and in the royal household and the implication that it may represent a means to convey information to George III, compels us to ask new questions about various aspects of the American Revolution. You know, in this town we like to ask what did the president know and when did he know it. And we can modify that question to ask with, well, what did the king know and when did he know it? And so I want to leave you with the idea that the significance of the Hood-de Bude letters is that they are suggestive of a broader and formal intelligence network that George III used to gather information about the progress of the American war, developments in Europe, and matters at home. George III took his duties as sovereign seriously as Arthur suggested, making it a point to know as much, if not more about policy, politics, and military strategy as the ministers who ran his government and his empire. And for a king who gave his last full measure of devotion to the preservation of that empire and whose ministers had to drag him to the conclusion that Britain could not win this imperial civil war, letters such as these along with other evidence can give us a new window not only into naval history, military history, but also into the king's mind. The letters between the admiral and the aide-de-camp tell us much about the relationship between Hood and de Bude and Hood's service on the oceanic front lines of the American rebellion, yet they raised exciting new questions about George III's American Revolution. And now through the Georgian Papers project and generosity of many, many people here and not, we are getting access to the-- that archive that will help us to answer those questions. Thank you very much. ^M00:48:08 [ Applause ] ^M00:48:17 >> Dr. Colleen J. Shogan: Thank you, Jim. Our next speaker is Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy, who is the vice president of Monticello, the Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies and Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He is a dual citizen of Britain and the United States. His most recent book, "The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire" received eight national books awards including the New York Historical Society American History Book Prize, the George Washington Book Prize, and the Society for Military History Book Prize. A fellow of the World Historical Society, he is an editor of-- for the Journal of American History. Andrew, we welcome you to the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. ^M00:49:11 [ Applause ] ^M00:49:16 >> Andrew O'Shaughnessy: I'd like to begin by thanking the Library of Congress especially Colleen and her colleague Travis Hensley who've been primarily involved in coordinating this. I also want to thank the Sons of the American Revolution. And I put a slide there of my giving lecture sponsored by them for two months at King's College London University. They paid for me essentially for two months to be a visiting professor at King's in association with King's College Joe Dooley, a former director general who's sitting in the third row. ^M00:50:03 And he's really led that organization in a remarkable direction to do many more academic programs to have regular academic conferences and make it more than simply a social organization. And also, I would like to thank King's College and especially Arthur Burns who hosted me very warmly, that the faculty do make visitors really feel part of the college while they're there even though one's spending most of your time at Windsor. Now my objective now is going to be to show you the importance of this archive for American history and specifically the American Revolution. And this is why I applaud the Library of Congress and the Kluge Center for its involvement and because this is important albeit for the British side of the American Revolution. But the British side is very essential part of understanding the American Revolution more generally. George III was in some ways the last king of England to rule in any real sense. It might be said by pedants that there are important moments where monarchs did intervene like William IV with the reformat-- and even most recently the Queen in 1963, she appointed a prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home who was virtually unknown at the time in a situation of the gridlock in parliament. But George III letters has always been debated as to whether it was a constitutional or unconstitutional monarch. George III did have real power. And he was able to choose members of the cabinet and he was able to choose the prime minister as long as he chose a prime minister who generally had support in parliament. But that gave him a lot of leeway. George III was not responsible for the policies that led to the American Revolution even though he's blamed as such by the declaration of independence. And John Adams in retirement complained to Thomas Jefferson that he shouldn't have called George III a tyrant. But George III does become the leading war hawk. And this is one of the reasons that these are the key papers, the papers of George III for high politics and the military during the American Revolution from the British side. Unfortunately, the papers of Lord North are very disappointing and very limited. The only papers that really compete would be those of the colonial office in the national archives. George III essentially became obsessed with this-- with the issue of America after the Boston Tea Party. That was the moment that he decided that war was inevitable and he became, in the words even of his own admirers, almost his own prime minister. He dominated Lord North who was constantly trying to resign, who lost faith in the conflict very early on. He refused to negotiate with opposition leaders who were committed to withdraw from America as early as 1778. And he was almost Churchillian in the words of Herbert Butterfield who was a historian at Cambridge during the Second World War and wrote this shortly afterwards that he reminded of Churchill when he read phrases like "If any 10 men will stand beside me, I intend to go on." George III was so obsessed that he actually threatened his abdication during the war before-- long before he wrote the actual abdication letter. And when he heard about the news of Yorktown, he sent-- well, up today, we would think of almost like an email because George III, whenever he was writing, would put the exact time of the day almost to the last second on the note. But in this particular message, which was sent to the secretary of state for America in his house in Pall Mall in London, he failed even to put the date which shows that there was a certain anxiety because he just heard about Yorktown. And he wrote to Germain who was dining with nine guests. And the nine guests were unaware in fact to the news of Yorktown but they knew something major is happening when the message came from the king late at night during a dinner party. And one of the guests happened to say that they'd heard that the French foreign minister died and how sad because the minister would never know what the outcome of the American Revolution was. And Germain-- Lord Germain said he did know the outcome of the American Revolution. And most of the party at that point felt that they were referring to the Battle of the Chesapeake Capes, because most people still expected Cornwallis to be victorious. They're even calling him an English Hannibal in the British newspapers. And then Germain passed around the message which said he'd heard that Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown but we intend to go on. This is a minor setback like Saratoga but most of the army is still in place in New York. We still have cities throughout the eastern seaboard including Savannah or in Charleston. We still got Canada and we will fight on. And indeed, one of the reasons that North eventually resigned was because he couldn't really persuade the king for him to be able to give an unequivocal commitment that Britain would withdraw from America. And opposition leaders came in to replace him. George III during the American Revolution made his main palace outside of London Windsor Castle, where the archives are. And that is the round tower where they're contained. I've always started symbolically quite significant that he would base himself in a castle during the war because both-- his father died of course before becoming king but his grandfather George II and his great grandfather George I, both of them [inaudible] Windsor Castle. In fact, a lot of work had to be done to make it inhabitable. George III would have military music played constantly there. He even designed the kind of uniform coat wear called the Windsor uniform that was introduced towards the end of the war. And he obsessed about every detail of the war. And that is very apparent when you start to go through the correspondence. Now, Arthur alluded earlier to the fact that correspondence was published in the '20s by a man called Sir John Fortescue, who's a remarkable librarian of the royal archives and a remarkable historian who wrote multi-volume histories of the British army. And although in terms of their interpretation of attitudes, they're very dated. Nevertheless, John Shy, one of the America's leading military historians of the American Revolution, he recently reprinted the section dealing with the American Revolution because he particularly admired the way Fortescue is very easily and briefly able to summarize battles and events. But the problem with that correspondence is firstly it's incomplete as we again see in a moment. Secondly, his author alluded it's not really reliable. And it was Sir Lewis Namier who's regarded as one of Britain's leading 20th century historians, who went through just the first year and produce the volume of corrections and amendments to Fortescue's series. Incidentally, that had a credible effect to all documentary editors afterwards. It sent shivers people spying that because a lot of these changes were hardly significant, nevertheless it was a warning never to entirely rely on this-- on the printed edition. Thirdly, actually seeing the original documents is in itself, does influence your reading of them. ^M01:00:08 This on the screen is a list of George III's own hand of ships of the French Navy. And one of the most remarkable things to me-- and I was actually curious about George III's influence on strategy because like the president of United States, he was commander-in-chief of the army. But he actually knew by name most of his officers. He was also the most proficient monarch in naval affairs since at least William III, if not the equal of someone like James II. Supposedly, he knew off by heart the soundings and depths of various harbors around Europe. And I found lots of letters and lists where he'd copied in his own hand. The most remarkable is in fact the Siege of Boston in 1775 where he's got information about ordnance. And what he do is he'd receive the official papers from one of the secretaries of state usually germane and then he copy it out. So, what was the discovery for me was that of course he had no secretary. This material was thought of as so private. And he remained without a secretary until really quite later on when ill-health forced him to have a secretary. And so, all of this material is in his own hand. Thanks to his keeping letters and papers that we have so much of Lord North's correspondence because North didn't keep as much for his own part. I mentioned that a lot of papers that are admitted by Sir John Fortescue, the most entertaining are the series of the letters from a spy, and it might have actually been more than one person, who signs himself Aristarchus. I was asked by the BBC, was he a kind of James Bond figure? And I said, I didn't think so because he describes himself as being in his late 60s. Although he said he felt like a younger man, sort of 40 years, his junior, but he was very much stationary in London but receiving intelligence reports especially from France. One of them describes a plot that they thought was an assassination plot. They said the French know that you often are seen walking alone in your garden without anyone around you, and so that this was a warning. Another more entertaining one was that a British agent had been put up a chimney in which Benjamin Franklin-- a room in which Benjamin Franklin was meeting with the emperor of Austria to overhear the conversation. But some of it goes beyond. And I always imagine that Fortescue as a military historian is mystic because he didn't think the intelligence is very good. That was always been my guess. So, I really don't understand why would particular letters-- there are even letters of Lord North that are not printed in the correspondence. I'm not sure if it was just negligence or if he had a specific reason. But there are other intelligence reports that really are very important. I thought one of the most important came in a booklet and it's from 1777, 1781 and it's a book of naval intelligence by British spies based near the coast near the port of Brest watching the movements of the French fleet. And that is pretty critical because one of the reasons that British got it wrong in Yorktown is that one of the only times in the war they had bad naval intelligence. The British planned to have a-- what was known as a [inaudible] navy. And that would be navy that was strong enough to defeat France and Spain simultaneously. Nearly for all of the 18th century, the British had naval superiority. It was the basis of their empire, their control of the seas. But the battle of the Chesapeake Capes is one of the only battles they really lost. And it was a loss even though much of it was simply drifting apart. But the fact that the British were not able to defeat the French Navy and open up the Chesapeake represented a major defeat. And one of the reasons was bad intelligence. And he's very curious because the two commanders, army commanders would blame each other after the war. Sir Henry Clinton, the commander-in-chief in New York, Lord Cornwallis in Yorktown, they would blame each other and yet both have been misled and both had preceded on the assumption that Britain would've had the superior navy. Had they done so, it would've been possible to simply ferry Cornwallis out Yorktown and to get him back to New York or to Charleston. Other papers that are important and they're more than just papers of George III, Jim spoke about Sir Samuel Hood's papers and those papers are very interesting too for the royal family because Sir Samuel Hood for a long while looked after Prince William. It was part of George III's obsession with this war that he sent two of his own sons into the military, one into the army and the 14-year-old Prince William into the navy where he essentially was eye witness to some horrendous moments almost from the moment that he left England. The father was incredibly disappointed with him later on because he acquired such foul language, manners and alcohol habits from his time in the navy. But Hood oversaw him and gives us a lot of information. Hood was also in the Caribbean. So, it's a very important source for naval warfare in the Caribbean. These materials were never used by any of Sir Samuel Hood's biographies. So they really were unknown and they do represent a very major new discovery. A third set of papers that are important are those of Prince William himself who corresponded with his father throughout. He was the only member of the British royal family to visit America before it became independent. And what was most dramatic to me was his descriptions of British occupied New York. And what was amusing was his description of arriving and he was greeted by Henry Clinton who's commander-in-chief who you think might had other preoccupations at the time because this was literally about a month before Yorktown where people are going mad in New York with the fleet of Sir Samuel Hood having returned, knocked about by de Grasse. And supposedly they were trying to refit it and repair it to go and have another attempt to release Cornwallis. But when Prince William arrived, he met Sir Henry Clinton and he walked through what he called the Parade Ground but what we call Bowling Green. And at this moment, his relationship with his father was incredibly tense because the father really was upset by now at the sort of relationships the son was developing, the fact that he wasn't studying. And he said as he walked through Bowling Green, and I saw the pedestal where once he imagined the statue stood [laughter]. And it's difficult not to think that this was a [inaudible] dad [laughter]. Also, part of the papers, although they are being digitally copied separately, but an important part of the papers are the maps and military plans and engravings in the royal collection. These are very remarkable. I looked at several, the Bunker Hill, and I initially thought I recognize these. These are the famous plans of Bunker Hill that you'll see them in almost every textbook. And then I realized they showed different parts of the day of Bunker Hill that these had not been reproduced. Now, I can tell you that the Library of Congress actually did microfilm of these many years ago, but I don't think many people would be aware of that. ^M01:10:02 But the Library of Congress is the most important secondary repository for a lot of British materials. They copied all of the colonial office materials many decades ago. So it's an excellent place to come and study the American Revolution. Nevertheless, when you're dealing with maps and engravings, you really do want to see the original not look at it on microfilm. And finally people mentioned that there are lots of miscellaneous papers at least to do with trying to get his-- buy out his son from letters that the son had foolishly written-- this was the future George IV-- to his mistress and the father had to pay a lot of money to get these letters back. The woman involved was a very smart actress and she managed to secure a very large sum of money. She then went on to be the partner [inaudible] probably the most hated British officer in America but it's often said although people regard [inaudible] memoirs as a lot of lies, but they're some of the best written memoirs by any British soldier. But that's because she was a novelist and a writer and it almost certainly a ghost written his memoir. All I can say by ending and any of you might consider applying for this fellowship, is that it's just the most wonderful location. These are a few photos that I just took with my iPhone. The Nell Gwynn coffee house supposedly there are tunnels from that coffee house which Nell Gwynn used to see Charles II. There's a changing of the guard just like Buckingham Palace everyday. And of course it's terribly tempting because I meant to be inside the castle. But there's always so much going on outside and, you know, just observing sunset-- there's an even song there everyday, a beautiful song, even sung in St. George's Chapel where Elizabeth I is also buried. And it's worth going to just purely as a good concert and you can also get free admission to the castle if you go to that. So I'll just leave you with those visitors. But I'll end by saying I think that is wonderful the Library of Congress is involved. I've met with Carla Hayden at Monticello and again at the British embassy. I know how personally enthusiastic she is about this program. But what I really liked and especially when I came for planning session of the exhibits on the Two Georges that they're planning is that this clearly is not a top-down enthusiasm, there's real enthusiasm among the staff of this relationship. And in the museum and library world, these kinds of collaborations are becoming more and more important. So, thank you very much. ^M01:13:20 [ Applause ] ^M01:13:27 >> Dr. Colleen J. Shogan: Last but certainly not the least. It's my distinct honor to introduce Karin Wulf. Karin is a historian of early America and the early modern Atlantic world focused on gender, family, and the state. She is director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and a professor of History at the College of William and Mary where she directs graduate student research in early American and gender history. She is a founder and co-chair of the William and Mary's Neurodiversity Initiative and a co-founder of Women Also Know History, a media and curriculum tool for supporting and advancing the work of women historians. And most importantly, she is the academic lead for the Georgian Papers Programme in the United States and is proven to be a terrific colleague and collaborator for the Library of Congress and our GPP partnership. Karin, we look forward to your presentation. ^M01:14:24 [ Applause ] ^M01:14:30 >> Karin Wulf: Well first, I want to thank our colleagues and host here, of course first of all Colleen but also John and Travis and others for joining us in the work of the Georgian Papers Programme and in helping us to bring attention to its work and its potential. I also want to thank some absent friends, colleagues especially at the royal archives whom you saw in some of the images that Arthur shared and who are scanning, cataloging, and posting the materials on the Royal Collection Trust website and aiding of course all of the scholars now working in the materials both the physical archive at Windsor and the digital archive that we're producing collaboratively. So the documentary from which Arthur shared some clips, Robert Hardman's "Genius of the Mad King", was on BBC last January as a way of introducing to the British public, the Georgian Papers Programme. And actually all four of us appeared in the documentary. Jim used to actually saw Arthur among that collaboration of scholars there in the first clutch, you know, getting to touch the materials and so on. And he and Jim and Andrew are each interviewed in the documentary about their research and about the wonderful findings. From my rather ignominious part in the documentary, I was filmed at an event almost two and a half years ago now, on April 1st of 2015 about two dozen of us gathered in the royal library at Windsor where Her Majesty the Queen formally inaugurated the project and we were all introduced. And it was quite wonderful of course. She's kind of extraordinary. And I was babbling a bit with her about the excitement of the archives. So, that's the piece that made it into the documentary [laughter]. Now I've been reliably informed that many people start to babble a bit when in the presence. But honestly, my enthusiastic fulminating wasn't entirely about speaking with the queen. Anyone who's enthusiastic, whatever you're enthused about, whether you're into cars or knitting or fine wine or barbecue or founding father saltshakers is actually a thing will know that a fantastic example of the object of your enthusiasm will make you completely gaiety. So yes, the archives themselves are absolutely fabulous. King George III wasn't employing a secretary at an arguably enormously important period in the history of our two countries. So to handle those materials, to see the shade and feel the weight of the paper, to look at where he lifted the quill or maybe press too hard to make a point, a point that were directly on the war that created our country, well, the physical object itself is beyond compelling. But even that isn't what made me quite so kind of nutty in that film clip that I'm purposely not sharing with you [laughter]. What compels us still as we explore and shape this project going forward is really the potential of the project. Refresh historical understanding that is really what makes this project so exciting. I don't think there's anyone here that I have to persuade about the importance of history. I'm going to just go with assuming that. But history is the context in which we make decision, everyday consequential and minute, domestic and national. And these archives give us an opportunity to think with fresh evidence about the history that shapes the world that we live in right now. In part it's the fresh material like the Aristarchus material that Andrew just discussed, the de Bude correspondence that Jim's analyzed, but it's also a chance to think about how we can see things in a fresh light, make new connections or create an entirely new frame of reference or subjective analysis. We can use it to see people and subjects that may have been or may have seemed to be marginal to its interest that is the interest of the court but in fact incredibly important, especially in an American and Atlantic context. And the Omohundro Institute's chief investment in this project is entirely along these lines. To take the opportunity of this incredible archive that bear so importantly on our country's early history, to illuminate fresh histories of early America and the Atlantic world. Just one of these potential topics is the nature of 18th century women's intellectual exchange. In the 18th century, a robust intellectual exchange across the Atlantic, sometimes called the Republic of Letters included philosophers, scientists, and statesmen from England and the continent, and Americans such as most famously probably Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Now this developing web of intellectual connection was fueled by an exchange of writing, mostly letters and other manuscript material but also printed books, treatises, pamphlets. Jefferson and Franklin produced and received roughly 10,000 and 15,000 letters respectively in their lifetimes giving you some idea of the volume of this Republic of Letters and anybody who's tried to get their email inbox down to zero can appreciate the size of this endeavor. Scholars have mapped the Republic of Letters in putting data on authors and recipients to produce data visualization. There's actually terrific project out at Stanford University called Mapping the Republic of Letters. For America, the primary observation of mapping that republic is that the Republic of Letters looks very focused on England and particularly on London networks that is for the Americans who are participating. And of course the most elaborate work has been done on the primarily male participants in these networks. ^M01:20:03 But women's literally and intellectual networks were also flourishing in the 18th century. And they may not yield to the kinds of data points and mapping approach but the voluminous correspondents of men like Jefferson and Franklin might, but rather take some teasing out of themes and influences. Now scholars have studied closely what's known as the bluestocking circle of women writers in England. And other scholars have also studied early American groups of women, particularly in the urban hubs of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York who are writing and reading one another's work. How might these groups have intersected and what can the Georgian Papers illuminate in fresh possibilities about these women writers? So, I want to invite to take three quick steps with me through women's transatlantic connection centering on intellectual and literally concerns. The first concerns, two of the most prominent women of England and America, respectively, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren, whose connection offers us just a quick place to begin. Macaulay was one of the most prominent public women in an era in which very few women were either and certainly not as intellectual as we've heard already a lot about princesses and mistresses. She was known colloquially as the female historian. Macaulay wrote a history of 17th century England, the history of England from the ascension of James I to the revolution in eighth volumes with the first volume published in 1763 and the last 20 years later in 1783. This was a political history that is a history of politics and governance but also a quite politically charged history. It [inaudible] for mostly Whigs and was seen as a kind small "r" republican work and anti-royalist, though not necessary straightforwardly so. She was incredibly critical of Oliver Cromwell. For example, she called him a glorious usurper. She's a great writer. I hear applause out there for being glorious usurper, OK [laughs]. Macaulay's history was praised by major figures of the day in England even by William Pitt for examples in the House of Commons. Mercy Otis Warren's life was marked by the revolutionary era in which she lived. Born of a mayflower family mother and a lawyer father, mercy and her siblings were raised and educated to an extraordinary high standard. One of her brothers, James Otis, for example, authored key text to the American Revolution such as the famous pamphlet "Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved". He famously articulated the principle of no taxation without representation in regards to the scheme to collect taxes on American consumption of British goods. Mercy wrote in a variety of genres including one of the more significant publications of the late 1780s, advocating for the inclusion of a bill of rights in the new US constitution. And in 1805, she published the product of decades of writing about the unfolding events of the revolution and its aftermath. Thomas Jefferson wrote that her rise, progress, and termination of the American Revolution, was "a truthful and insightful account of the last 30 years that will furnish a more instructive lesson to mankind than any earlier period in history." Because of Warren's increasingly anti-federalist and Jeffersonian leanings however, John Adams who had been a long time dear friend denounced the work. These two extraordinary women, these two historians, Macaulay and Warren, maintained a long and intense correspondence across two crucial decades. They began to correspond in 1773 and Warren's last letter to Macaulay was in May of 1791, the year that Macaulay died. In an early exchange about whether women could and should express political opinions, obviously they were preaching to one another there, Mercy Warren wrote to her famous friend, "I disregard the opinion that women make but in different politicians. When the observations are just and do honor to the heart and character, I think it very immaterial whether they flow from a female lip or are thundered in the Senate in the bolder language of the other sex." Macaulay and Warren's friendship was tested as they like many other figures in this period who are deeply involved and invested disagreed, sometimes mildly and sometimes sharply, sometimes privately and sometimes actually quite publicly. But their mutual admiration never waned. Macaulay visited America for over a year, beginning in the summer of 1784. And she spent time in Boston with Warren and she actually spent time at Mount Vernon too, visiting George and Martha Washington. Now that we've established something of the extent of women's transatlantic connections, courtesy of Warren and Macaulay, let us turn to one that brings us into the courts and the Georgian Papers. This example concerns one of the 18th century's most celebrated novelists, Frances Burney known as Fanny. Burney was a prodigious diarist. In fact just this year, the Guardian described her edited diaries as one of the 100 most important nonfiction works of all time. She's a great diarist and great writer. She published her first novel in 1778 and her second, "Cecilia", to great acclaim in 1782. The enthusiastic reception for "Cecilia" included attention from the royal family. The queen urged her daughters to read it for amusement and for education. And in 1785, Queen Charlotte asked Burney to accept the position at court, which the novelist accepted. She was one of the queen's ladies for five years, difficult ones that included King George III's first intense period of mental illness. We've heard quite a bit about the king's qualities as a sort of intellectual magpie you might have gathered he was interested in all kinds of different things from agriculture to astronomy to statecraft. And Charlotte too had a lively curiosity for botany, for music, and language but especially for history and literature. She was keen to have bluestockings around her. Burney wasn't the only one. And they remained close. Burney remained close to the princesses too after she left royal service. Burney's reputation flourished internationally and in America. The London edition of "Cecilia" was advertised as early as 1784 in America and was printed in an American edition in 1793. Now these novels are sometimes described as precursor to Jane Austin. They're witty, they're country house settings. In these books, the women are always readers. And in fact Austin's-- the title of probably Austin's most significant novel comes from a line in "Cecilia" where a character notes that the whole of this unfortunate business has been the result of pride and prejudice. Burney' reputation among American educators in particular only grew. As the 19th century dawned, there was a rush of new academies founded for the education of privileged girls in America and an embrace of the value of education for free girls of elite families as a benefit to the new republic. Among the great writers and advocates was another Bostonian, Judith Sargent Murray. She was an early advocate for equality of the sexes, publishing an essay by that name in 1790, well in advance of Mary Wollstonecraft in fact. And she gathered her many essays together in 1798. Just as Americans were beginning to think about creating a new national literature and she published in three volumes "The Gleaner", which incorporated her political views and especially her interest in women's education. And she'd go on to found a women's-- a girl school herself with two friends in 1802. And in "The Gleaner" which Murray is publishing in 1798, she advocated for the value of Burney's novels, especially "Cecilia". In a period when novels were often dismissed as frivolous or not reflective of the virtues of the new nation, there's actually a very snarky John Quincy Adams quote about "Cecilia" specifically. But Murray and others made clear that in their reflections on character and circumstances, novels could be essential reading and learning. And here of course she's echoing Queen Charlotte who if you remember advocated Burney's books for her daughters for the same reasons. And now let's bring this quickly together. The transatlantic connections among women intellectuals, they were reading one another's work, writing about one another and even directly communicating, in fact across political-- what we might think of as political device. My third example here concerns the place of history in geography in women's education in the late 18th and early 19th century. In those early female academies, like the one Judith Sargent Murray helped found, the curriculum included novels in place of course in poetry but it also emphasize the importance of history and geography essential to the education of women as Denisons [phonetic] of this new nation. And here you'll see on the right there an example from a Quaker school right outside of Philadelphia where teachers created their own textbooks of poetry and also had their students create their own globes. This stitched globe is actually it's got hardcore interior and batting around it and there are number of examples from this particular school, the Westtown School, as well as others. And then the longitude is stitched. It's really faded there but it's a really beautiful object. It's [inaudible] center right now at the Boston Public Library. This stitched globe helped these young women as they had male students for centuries, not only with basic geographical orientation but with geometry and astronomy. And back inside Windsor Castle, Queen Charlotte, her six daughters, the princesses and their governesses and ladies in waiting like Frances Burney were creating curricula of their own. The Queen established at Frogmore House a private retreat on the grounds at Windsor, a printing press of her own. And there, among many others projects, they created boxed sets of historical and geographical information. Here you see, on the top left there, an example of a manuscript version, which on that kind of upper left there in the center what you see is a whole bunch of those manuscript cards stacked together with their own really beautiful box next to it. ^M01:30:12 So, even the manuscript rough draft copy gets a beautiful leather box. Anyway, and then you also see the printed cards there. So you can see how they were printed at Frogmore, on the press at Frogmore. Printed cards and boxes about Spain, Germany, France, Portugal, and Rome, or United States of America you'd say. So how might these have reflected the work of some of the important historian of the day like Macaulay? The queen herself was also writing historical accounts that reflected her veracious reading. She may have been like her husband and many others of their era copying work she read or combining her own thoughts and words with those of others. And I've been reading in her historical accounts. She began to keep careful track for example of the history and lineage of Sophia, Electress of Hanover. There are two copies in the queen's handwriting of the lineage of Sophia. Why would she be writing multiple times about Sophia the Electress of Hanover? Well, those of you who know your 17th and 18th century English history will know exactly why. Because this was-- She was the granddaughter of James I and this was the lineage that would shift the British monarchy from the Stewarts to the Hanovers with George I and would bring Charlotte to England as the consort of George III. She wrote out this history of Sophia, Electress of Hanover multiple times. How meaningful that was and yet how contested in the many histories of the 17th century and earlier that she had read. How consequential in the 18th centuries through to what she was living. These are just a few of the extraordinary stories and connections that we can pull out of the Georgian Papers. And I want to suggest that if you want to explore the Georgian Papers yourself, the items are being digitized and then released online in trenches. There are about 50,000 items already on the website and they're being released and rolling about 25 to 30,000 items at a time. And you can begin by looking at our three project websites. To read more about the blog post and information about the GPPU can consult the Omohundro Institute and William and Mary site which is georgianpapers-us.wm.edu. We'll post all these staff for you. And the King's site which is georgianpapersprogramme, with an extra M-E dot com. These are mirror sites and they express our mutual and ongoing scholarly work. The papers themselves along with some of the academic commentarial including pieces by all of us are at gpp.royalcollection.org.uk. And if you toggle to the upper right there, you'll see the GPP micro site. And that has at least 50,000 items that are already posted some of the materials we've shared with you. But more all the time is this project continues through 2020. Thank you so much for your time today. ^M01:32:57 [Applause] ^M01:33:04 >> Dr. Colleen J. Shogan: OK. So now we're going to ask all of our presenters to come back up on stage and it's time for you, you've been very patient audience, if you have questions for them. We have about 20 or 25 minutes. And we also have microphones coming around the room. So when I call on you, please wait until the microphone arrives. Is there anybody that has questions? Yes, over here. Yeah, just wait for the microphone, please. ^M01:33:35 ^M01:33:45 >> So, best estimate, overall, what percentage of papers have been at least indexed? >> Karin Wulf: It depends on what you mean by indexing. I mean, there's a kind of-- there's a rough look at the whole-- the pie chart that Arthur showed you, you know, is from a kind of rough cut look, but when you say index, nothing. >> Arthur Burns: Possibly even less than 15%, in fact. >> Karin Wulf: Yes. >> Arthur Burns: Is a real indexing. >> Karin Wulf: Yeah. >> Arthur Burns: So you can-- What's on the outside of the box, we can tell you. >> Karin Wulf: Yeah. >> Arthur Burns: Beyond that, no. >> Andrew O'Shaughnessy: I thought I'd been deficient because I kept expecting it would be somewhere kind of printed manuscript guide that you have for almost every archive and it doesn't exist. And one of the problems reminds me a little once I mentioned this to Karin, Gary Hart [assumed spelling] when he was asked to investigate the CIA and FBI with Barry Goldwater and he said we didn't know what we were looking for [laughs]. And that is the difficulty, always nervous as to whether you're awfully aware of exactly what is there or if there are boxes that you just haven't been told about. You rely a lot of course on the on-site librarians to tell you what they have. But I would stop by going to the published Fortescue correspondence. So at least you can get a sense of what you might find in there. >> Jim Ambuske: A few weeks before my arrival I was sent a spreadsheet, an Excel spreadsheet that essentially had, as Arthur said, an indication on what was on the label on the box. Some sense of what had been published before in Fortescue [inaudible] and that was it. So, there was very little [inaudible] sub-collections. So one of the cool things about this submission is that I got to work with Oliver Walton and the archivist to figure out what was actually in these things and then we all did. >> Arthur Burns: That's the other you can do. You can become a King's friend. And if you sign up to King's friends, we're very happy for anyone to say I'm looking for this, what have you got? And we will follow that up. And actually [inaudible] we don't know what's in there, what we might want to find, the more people would tell us what they'd like to find, the more we can try to find it. >> Karin Wulf: The other thing I would just say-- I know there are other questions, so sorry-- but is that some of the fellows have gone to the archives looking for particular topics and the not finding has been a significant as the finding. There's a wonderful blog post on our mutual sites by Professor Cynthia Kierner from George Mason University who's been working on a wonderful book about early American disasters. And she was actually going in search of information about the royal philanthropy because-- which really takes off in a big way starting with the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. And she wanted to know what did they say about their incredible philanthropic efforts and the answer was almost nothing. And just the fact that they were so little there tells you something. Anyway she's got-- I won't give it all away but it's a wonderful blog post about why finding nothing can be as important and revealing and tells us actually as much as finding a lot. >> Dr. Colleen J. Shogan: Other question? Right here. >> All of you have spoken about collections of objects, things that can be listed in spreadsheets. But when you make a digital collection, it seems to me if you look to the future information technology, which happens to be my specialty not history, allows you to build graphs of links into my new elements in different objects, different documents. And if someone looking ahead to how such a metadata can be created to address themes and documenting whatever historical findings they have by linking many different places not just in the Georgian Papers collection but even collections that are related. >> Arthur Burns: So, it's a real challenge and it's something that was quite a few on the team have worked [inaudible] basic ways are fully aware of and also just what an opportunity it is. The peculiar challenges with this collection is partly is because of the range of the materials in it. So the expertise you need to produce a metadata is extraordinarily wide ranging in this case. So again, what we're trying to bring people in, it could be part of the conversation that we're trying to get it right and there are lots of examples in UK, I'm sure that are here too, places where they got it wrong and it's left with metadata unusable, at least because there have changes in their name so [inaudible] all English politicians always have about four different titles and the most famous examples with the British parliamentary archive that failed to realize the same people in the metadata creation, link them together. So we have a very good team of digital humanist at King's and at William and Mary who are working together on these issues. We hope we'll be able to make a start on it, probably to make a success of it we'll need to get a funding going that would build that. But it's very much something that's in my mind and also trying to think how we provide web architecture and we'll have other people join with us to do that throughout and to do it entirely on our own. >> Karin Wulf: And there's been a wonderful initiative here at the Library of Congress actually to fund questions about interoperability and making collections. >> Dr. Colleen J. Shogan: That was our first four away into the project is-- Is Charlotte here? Charlotte? Charlotte Caslick [assumed spelling] was a digital stewardship resident that we actually sent to Windsor for several months. She was in residence here then residence in Windsor and she was working on the issue of metadata inoperability particularly between the Library of Congress collections and the GPP collections. OK. Yes, in the back. ^M01:39:57 >> We're pretty certain about the nature of George III's madness but I was wondering of this sheds in any new light on how it-- or its incipient stages may have affected policy in Britain. >> Andrew O'Shaughnessy: He had about sickness at the time of [inaudible] in the 1765, which went on for months. So that was actually the first intimation of it. But there's no evidence that he was sick during the American Revolution itself. It was really on the eve of the French Revolution that he had the first sustained belt that was in fact the subject to the movie "The Madness of King George". The thinking seems to be changing. For decades, they thought that this was porphyria. It's a mother-son team of psychiatrists. And I thought that they've made quite a conclusive case because there's a giveaway characteristic of porphyria which is a blood disease caused often by intermarriage, very like hemophilia but it's kind of purple-colored urine. And so-- And one of the doctors constantly alluded to urine color and we've got incredible archives of the doctor's reports. But it seems that it's changing again. I've actually seen this in the BBC, an academic article that they're going back to thinking that he was bipolar and that would make a difference. But-- And there's nothing of the characteristics of the later madness of then in 1765 and then again 1789. >> Arthur Burns: What you do find is that an awareness on politicians, the key moments that something going before it becomes clear. That's just how extensive the problems are and the effort to manage the news around the [inaudible]. >> What happened in this second decade of the 21st century that after all these years the crown decided or somebody in England decided to open these archives? >> Arthur Burns: So I think that a number of different things come together, one is just the technical possibilities doing this that other people done it to the [inaudible] for it. The [inaudible] has begun with smaller projects they took Queen Victoria's journal for example and made those online. And I think we've taken it back that we have interest that were shown in, in that project and that was behind the [inaudible], so this was the first way to be to do it would genuinely open resource with academic collaborators. I think the second feature is that the royal archives having under pressure to become more public. There's been a lot of interesting things in 20th century, royal family in their papers. Obviously there's been quite tricky issues about personal [inaudible] people still alive and I think what they wanted to show is their overarching mission to treat these as public documents even though they're in fact private documents which is part of a national heritage and therefore there's been-- it's extraordinary effort I think for those [inaudible] party was very, very hard unless you were fully tenured professor with a very particular project even to get to see what was then because there were no catalogs. You could find out until you got there what they was. And now it was full of people, not just with us, there are an awful lot but actually they've read on the reading room. There's now more opportunities to go in and use the papers. They've increased their opening. So it's a genuine attempt. I think it's very rewarding for the archivist there too that they found they been able to do their job of interpretation and understanding far more actually now that there are more changes towards people [inaudible]. It's a very well [inaudible]. >> Karin Wulf: Given the restriction there and it is where a monarch lives. So the security restrictions are pretty intense and, you know, the restriction on what can be done within that space are pretty intense. Given all that I think they've been really extraordinary about opening access to these archival materials. And, you know, if you go to the website, you know, anybody all over the world can freely see. And by 2020, you know, anybody all over the world can see all of the Georgian Papers collection digitally. Well, anybody with a, you know, connection in the computer anyway. >> Arthur Burns: And it is all-- I think that's quite important to emphasize. It's not the sense of selection-- >> Karin Wulf: Yeah, it's everything. >> Arthur Burns: It's the archive. >> Dr. Colleen J. Shogan: Another question. Yes, down in front. >> Those were four fabulous presentations. I can't tell you how they fit together and also stood on their own. ^M01:45:08 [ Applause ] ^M01:45:11 And I care about 18th century British history. But I want to ask a little bit about Fanny Burney and how this might help in teaching working with graduate students in women's and gender history. Have you thought about that? >> Karin Wulf: Well, so, you know, I'm not a Fanny Burney expert and there are those, many of them actually, so I don't want to suggest that somehow I know something that other scholars don't. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is why I said, well, we'll post a bibliography on our websites for people who are interested. But I think that the teaching possibilities for the GPP generally are going to be terrific and the Fanny Burney material will be great. I'm not sure if is that's me squeaking or someone else. >> No. >> Karin Wulf: OK. All right. Good. You could see I've got a little PTSD from that BBC documentary [laughter]. But the teaching possibilities are great. I mean, Arthur really did this amazing project with his undergraduates in King's and we've been talking about a kind of collaborative effort at William and Mary and King's to teach with the GPP materials to give the students a kind of, you know, a one-shot one year kind of informal seminar research experience. But I think all over, the access to this materials and to link them up-- I mean, this is, you know, linking sometimes in the old-fashioned way of I thought this and now I've thought of that, but also digitally linking things is going to make curricular possibilities, really extraordinary. And, you know, the obvious, I think, topics here are the political and military ones. And I just went for the easiest women's history one here which is the intellectual women who are writing and publishing and who are among the most famous, you know, of 18th century Anglo-American women. But the women's history opportunities in these archives and the opportunities to link materials in those archives with other archives here in the United States is really incredible. There are all kinds of things we can learn about, you know, women's consumption patterns, about food, about ideas about the body. And there are just-- Anyway, they are just endless opportunities and those will translate to teaching. >> Arthur Burns: I think one thing you have to example is Princess Amelia and her experience of consumption. Now there's another extraordinary medical case history. Lived from the inside by royal princess has also infatuated one of your queries, so does the extraordinary romantic story of that new kind of romantic love being embodied in that situation in [inaudible], days we're looking at that, an extraordinary material that she's found there. And that was a great story about how digital works as well, because we broadcast the documentary on the BBC and there's a brief section where Flora Fraser, one of our fellows who is one of our Mount Vernon professors, talks about this. And the next day, I got a friendly call from somewhere in the north saying, "I think I've got the other half of the correspondence." And it was ascendant to one of the queries that she's involved with. So we've been up there. We haven't yet found what we can do that an idea would be to digitize those documents and bring those in as well. And that's what you can do with digital. You can create virtual archives without having to mess about with physical archives themselves. And it's fantastic we can do that. >> Karin Wulf: Those medical-- The medical history as a kind of theme throughout is really compelling with George III of course and Amelia and Fanny Burney has one of the most famous women's medical histories of the period where she, you know, narrated her own mastectomy. She writes about having done it under-- you know, with no anesthesia. It's a really extraordinary document in women's history. >> Yes? ^M01:48:45 ^M01:48:51 >> I'd read recently in recent years about the-- that one of the key reasons for the loss in 1780 in Cornwallis was that half of the British troops in America had been diverted to the West Indies to protect the sugar. And given what you've referred to as-- and we've seen other places about the king's involvement of this, it's hard to quite imagine him either suggesting or allowing that diversion. Is there anything that's come to light about that? >> Andrew O'Shaughnessy: He actually supported that policy and said, "We can't even fight the American war without our sugar items." And so in 1778, when the British had occupied Philadelphia, the new commander-in-chief Henry Clinton was given orders to give up Philadelphia to send 5000 troops down to the Caribbean to take Saint Lucia. And then in the summer of 1779, the British received warning that Jamaica was about to be invaded. ^M01:49:59 They put their entire army in New York onboard ship with Cornwallis and they were at sea for almost a week. So this really shows you the priorities. They did lose a large number of their islands during the revolution. But it seems to have been kind of one compromise they're willing to make was to lose Jamaica, So they're actually sending more troops to the West Indies in the second of the American Revolution then to America. >> Dr. Colleen J. Shogan: Over here? >> Thanks again to all of you for wonderful presentations. I'm wondering if any of you has any sense that this project might stimulate contextualization with parallel archives for example among the royal houses elsewhere in Europe or perhaps even more pertinently, papers of British aristocratic families and households and so on or perhaps such already exist? >> Arthur Burns: So, we know already there are one or two other projects that are beginning to talk to us, some of the kind that you've mentioned is we've got an addition of one of the courtier's papers that's proceeding in Manchester. They're not talking to us, we're hoping to align transcription, launch that. And there are various tensions raised and [inaudible] we hope we'll be able to build links possibly even fellowships of the kind that we've had elsewhere to bring people in to work with the papers. I think the competitive monarchs things is a point very well taken. We're in touch with a scholar in Leiden, Jeroen Duindam, who wrote a-- I think it's a book called Dynasty. You may know it, which is global history of monarchy in any modern period. He's just got some money to do a project on Northern European monarchies. And I'm talking to him about what we might be able to do at some point for the workshops to bring those together. And I think that that's precisely the kind of thing that we want to see happen. And one of the nice thing about the project, in some ways, it's a very unusual project. And we don't have a research question. And usually now, when you set out in Britain, like if you got a particular question, you say, this is where I'm going to find the answer and you hope you do and that's why you give them the money to do it. Here, probably because we aren't funded in a big research project without a single question, we can follow what the archives suggest to us. And the key to that is making sure enough people know about what we're doing and that's what links with them the Library of Congress and others. It's so important that we can then make those connections for as wide an audience as you possibly can. And it's the fun of it too. >> Jim Ambuske: I think there's evidence that it's beginning to inspire the project. So we were just in Scotland three weeks ago at our Scottish Records Conference and met with the archivist at the Duke-- of Duke of Argyll at the Inveraray Castle. And they are beginning to make public and more accessible not necessarily to digital means but more accessible, the papers of the Dukes of Argyll who are the most powerful family in 18th century Scotland. And so you're getting to see, you know, I think some momentum built up to open up these once very closed bases to new research. >> Karin Wulf: I'll just add one quick thing there which is that through these back and forth fellowships of having fellows in one archive and then in the other at Windsor and at the Library of Congress and hopefully in other back and forth spaces, you commit the fellows really to helping talk to all of us about what's mutually in those things. We can read an academic monograph and see, oh, you've used archival materials in this place and this place. They must connect in some logical way. But because the fellows are, you know, fellows of the project, they actually provide support back to the project on exactly these questions of linkages. >> Arthur Burns: One of the interesting things about our period, I think, is attentive of what situation the US is but in the UK, the 18th century is the most digital of all centuries. More pioneering work is being done in digital amenities. We have the Old Bailey online where every criminal case at that Old Bailey is readable online. We have records of all the London workhouses. We have records of every murder that happened in London plotted onto maps. And so all these things might include your database for every [inaudible] you bring those together and we're beginning to create a kind of unique digital environment as well, which we can just-- there's a thing called connected histories now where you can type in John-- well, don't type in John Smith. But if you found a slightly more unusual name, type it in, and it will tell you which of those databases have references to that name. And the possibility of linking them all up in that way is a very exciting and slightly daunting prospect as well. >> Dr. Colleen J. Shogan: We have time for one more question. OK. Well, that brings us to the end of the formal part of our proceedings. Once again, I would like to thank Mrs. Beverly Hamilton for her generous sponsorship. Great public programming like today's event is made possible only through the support of people like you. If you'd like to help the library offer more of these types of programs, please consider making a gift at loc.gov/donate. Please join us now for our reception and a viewing of a selection of British Political cartoons from the Library of Congress Collection which were purchased from Windsor Castle in the 1920s. In great British tradition, we have tea and scones available. However, our conscientious library staff tell me that you cannot take your tea and scones into the room where we have the materials. So please enjoy your refreshments and also enjoy the terrific treasures on display. We hope you have a great afternoon here at the Library of Congress. Thank you. ^M01:55:39 [ Applause ] ^M01:55:42 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.