Arguing with Digital History / Current Research in Digital History

     This week, I focused on two digital history projects and brought up the main question posed by the 2017 White Paper and by Stephen Roberson and Lincoln A. Mullen, what were these two projects trying to argue?

    The first project that I analyzed was Scot A. French's Notes on the Future of Virginia: The Jefferson-Short Letters, 1787-1826. I chose to reach this article and learn about this project because my current professor is Dr. French and I thought it would be interesting to learn about some of the previous work he has done. And interesting it was. Dr. French's project frames over 4 decades of letters between Thomas Jefferson and William Short by their ideological positions as well as key events going on while the letters were written to provide important context. 

    One of the projects interfaces works like a New York subway map. The user is able to select a key term and the interface will morph to show the letters that pertain to the key term selected. Some of the key terms include slave labor, sharecropping, and Indian Camp. Another part of the interface is a map that shows the geographical location of where Short and Jefferson sent and received letters. This is important as Short spent much of his time in France and was writing to Jefferson who was still in Virginia.

    Dr. French notes in his paper that his project is in conversation with an expands upon the more traditional research done by Annette Gordon-Reed. Gordon-Reed closely examined Short's 1798 letter in which he argued that keeping 700,000 people in perpetual slavery was much worse for humanity than race-mixing. Dr. French expands on this with his project by allowing users to examine all the letters between Short and Jefferson to find other key issues the two differed one. One of the lasting impressions that I got from the article and what I believe is one of the key "arguments" from the project is showcasing the close-mindedness of Thomas Jefferson. In the letters, Short shows a clear flexibility in his views. For example, his views on post-Revolution slavery went from allowing race-mixing and transforming slaves to free laborers to contemplating a serf style labor system. Jefferson was set on the exportation of freed blacks to countries that were ruled by blacks, and his ideas on that were firm throughout his life. 

    The other project that I examined was the from the CRDH Article "Networks of Piety and Slavery among Late Eighteenth-Century Rural Maryland Catholics" by Rachel Bohhmann and Suzanna Krivulskaya. In their work, they used Mathew Carey's Catholic Bible which had the names of his supports (which he called subscribers) as the topic of their research. Catholics in America were oddities at this time, and so the authors used whatever data they could find to track these people. 

    What they found was that many of the subscribers were wealthy and were slave owning. While the authors use maps to show the locations and clusters of Catholics who subscribe, the project's focus turned towards the enslaved. On top of the map they created, the authors also created a chart that divided the total amount of enslaved people in household groups by size. 

    This project initially got my interest because I enjoy research religious topics, and I was not disappointed. While I believe that there are a few arguments that could be made with the data the authors collected, one stood out. It was that Marylander Jesuit Catholics were dependent on the free labor slaves provided. There were even a sizeable amount of priest and clergy who owned slaves. This shows a clear connection between religion and enslavement by Catholics in Maryland.