Final Project

Maryland Loyalism Project

Skills:
Historical methodology: transcription, biography, textual analysis, digital mapping, network analysis
Digital platform, source, or tool: Google Suite, TimeMapper
Historical narrative: Loyalism, revolutionary settlement

We’re making a digital resource!

In the final project for the semester, students will contribute to a public resource for the study of Loyalism in the British Atlantic World. Here students will have the opportunity to apply the skills learned throughout the semester to create a database of information pertaining to Loyalist refugees who fled Revolutionary Maryland in the early 1780s. Each student will be assigned a memorial (testimony) presented by a refugee to the Parliamentary Loyalist Claims Commission in either London or Halifax. Students will “unlock” the data contained within the document and will present and contextualize this information using a variety of tools. In so doing, students will be asked to consider the following questions:

  • Who were the “losers” of the Revolution? What were their backgrounds and why (and how) did they oppose the revolution?
  • What were the “costs” (emotional, personal, familial, financial) of Loyalty to the Crown?
  • How did the British government deal with the Loyalists during and after the War?
  • How did the “Loyalist Diaspora” come to exist?
  • What are the legacies of Loyalism?

The Project will be divided into four stages:

Stage 1: Transcribe Your Document

Due: Sunday, Mar 31, 12 midnight
Individual

Each household will be assigned either a single or small number of loyalists documented within the papers of the Loyalist Claims Commission (LCC). The LCC came into being following the adoption of the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The issue of financial restitution for those who had remained loyal to the Crown was a major issue underpinning the peace negotiations. Parliamentary commissioners were appointed under the American Loyalists’ Act (1783) to inquire into the losses of refugees. The LCC interviewed loyalists and condensed their stories into “memorials” or testimonials alongside claims of financial loss. Working with your household, your will transcribe one or more such memorials.

As was the case with the Digital Paxton transcriptions, you will transcribe the document exactly as it appears into a Google Doc. Use your assigned loyalist’s name as the title of the document (beginning with the surname/last name followed by the first name, i.e. “Smith, Johnathan”) Again, please provide an exact transcription for your assigned memorial. This means that you will keep original spellings and period-specific style. Begin your transcription with source information [i.e. AO/12/6/4-5]. This information can be found in the title of the images provided by your instructors. Most memorials are multiple pages in length, so be sure to put the page number in brackets within the text of the transcription when you begin a new page. The page number listed should correspond to the page number in the top right-hand corner of the page of the page of the new page. So if your memorial encompasses pages 4 and 5 of your memorial, list [5] in your transcription at the point in which the text on page 4 ends and the text on page 5 begins [“Memorialist was instrumental in the evacuation of the Cittie of [5] Philadelphia later in the year.”]

Note: if your household has been assigned one loyalist with many pages of testimony, you should divide the document evenly among all the household members. Clearly indicate who did what transcription within the document.

In addition to the textual transcription, students should also record date/time specific information in a separate Google Spreadsheet. This information will be important in final phase of the project. As was the case with your transcription document, the title of the spreadsheet should be your assigned loyalist’s name. List the surname/last name first followed by the loyalist’s first name [“Smith, Jonathan”]). The first sheet in the Google spreadsheet, entitled “narrative,” should contain three columns labeled “date”, “event”, and “specificity”. Each memorial contains much time-specific information leading to the date that the memorialist was interviewed by the LCC. Record any mention of a particular date, month, or year in the “date” column alongside a brief reference to what happened at that time in the “event” column. Finally, you will discover this information can fall on a spectrum from “vague” (“the memorialist arrived in Maryland in 1764…”) to “date specific” (“The memorialist left New York on the 30 May 1782”). In the “specificity column” record the specificity of the date on a scale from 1 to 3 (1=month/day/year; 2=month/year; 3= just year).

Please take the following into consideration when recording dates:
Quite often the memorials will mention specific events without mentioning dates (memorialist emigrated to America with family in 1772; memorialist participated in the Battle of Brandywine). By consulting other resources, therefore, you may be able to assign specific dates to events (when, for example, was the Battle of Brandywine; when were the majority of American refugees evacuated from Charleston, Philadelphia, or New York?).

Outcomes:
A diplomatic transcription of the original document;
A spreadsheet of the important dates in the life of the loyalist.

Stage 2: Evaluating Another Digital Resource

Due: Sunday, April 14, 12 midnight
Group

In the Digital Humanities world, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. As we are creating a new digital resource on Loyalists that we intend to make publicly-available, we can gain inspiration by looking at digital projects that have already been created by others. Writing a review of a digital site is a good way to force yourself to explore more closely, considering all the aspects of design, content, and argument.

Writing a review of a digital resource is different than writing a book review. You are not only going to be assessing the argument of the site, but also the way the site is constructed. The Journal of American History has a very helpful set of guidelines on how to evaluate a digital resource here: https://jah.oah.org/submit/digital-history-reviews/

Your review will be 4-5 double-spaced pages long. Start with an introductory paragraph that lays out an overview of the digital resource you looked at and some of the most important themes that struck you from exploring it. Then there are six areas that you need to cover in your review:

  • What genre is it? Options include archive; essay, exhibit, or digital narrative; teaching resource; tool; gateway/clearinghouse; journal/blog/publication; professional/institutional site; digital community; podcast; audio/application-based tour; game; or data set. Refer to the Journal of American History webpage (URL above) for helpful definitions of each!
  • Content: Is the scholarship sound and current? What is the interpretative point of view? How well is the content communicated to users?
  • Design: Does the information architecture clearly communicate what a user can find in the site? Does the structure make it easy for a user to navigate through the site? Do all of the sections of the project function as expected? Does it have a clear, effective, and original design? How accessible is the site for individuals of all abilities? If it is a website, is it responsive (i.e., tablet/mobile-friendly)?
  • Audience: Is the project directed at a clear audience? How well does the project address the needs of that audience?
  • Digital Media: Does it make effective use of digital media and new technology? Does it do something that could not be done in other media—print, exhibition, film?
  • Creators: Many digital projects include multiple contributors. Who worked on this project and in what capacity?

Finally, your conclusion should explore what ideas the website you reviewed gave you for what we might do with the Loyalist Claims Commission manuscripts that will be the basis for our class website. What might work? What wouldn’t? Things that we should not do are just as important as things that we should do!

You will sign up in class in advance for one of the following digital resources related to the time period we are studying:

Georgian Papers Programme – https://georgianpapersprogramme.com/
Interactive Constitution – https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution
United Empire Loyalists Association of Canada – http://www.uelac.org/
Slave Voyages – https://www.slavevoyages.org/
Yale Indian Papers Project – https://yipp.yale.edu/
Robert Townshend Account Books – http://easthamptonlibrary.org/long-island-history/robert-townsend-account-books/
The Occom Circle – https://www.dartmouth.edu/~occom/
Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761 – http://revolt.axismaps.com/
New Map of the Empire – http://mapscholar.org/empire/
Boston 1775 – http://boston1775.blogspot.com/
Age of Revolutions – https://ageofrevolutions.com/
Borealia – https://earlycanadianhistory.ca/
Adverts 250 – https://adverts250project.org/
Nehri, Chef Des Haytiens – https://kingdomofobjects.wordpress.com/
Georgetown Slavery Archive – https://slaveryarchive.georgetown.edu/
Jesuit Plantation Project – https://jesuitplantationproject.org/s/jpp/page/welcome
Annotated Newspapers of Harbottle Dorr, Jr – http://www.masshist.org/dorr/
Digital Paxton – http://digitalpaxton.org/works/digital-paxton/index
Founders Online – https://founders.archives.gov/
American Archives – https://digital.lib.niu.edu/amarch
Moravian Soundscapes – https://moraviansoundscapes.music.fsu.edu/
Quill – https://www.quillproject.net/quill
Isaiah Thomas Broadside Ballads – http://americanantiquarian.org/thomasballads/
CityReaders – http://cityreaders.nysoclib.org/
North Carolina Runaway Slave Advertisements – http://libcdm1.uncg.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/RAS
Colonial North America at Harvard Library – http://colonialnorthamerica.library.harvard.edu/spotlight/cna
Old Bailey Online – https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/
Louisiana Colonial Documents http://www.lacolonialdocs.org/?fbclid=IwAR28LFy84bjPKNMyNTQJGNkI_tTSfpIJKNALhL5TWNmeGJy9MoslDIjIrLY
Tulane French Colonial, Spanish Colonial documents https://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/islandora/object/tulane:p16313coll29?fbclid=IwAR0BgRJwevNqWYImOsvzyWtExDHcYd7p5fy7fGETJAb951gEzv9iLmM2z3Y

Outcome:
A polished review of a digital history resource

Stage 3: Making Your Case

Due: Tuesday, April 23, and Thursday, April 25, at 4:15 pm
Group

On April 23 and 25, the Loyalist Claims Commission will convene at Loyola and Shepherd Universities to hear the testimonials of Maryland Loyalists. Each household will pick one Loyalist the household has worked on whose case they will present to the commission.

In making your case, think about presenting in the most persuasive way possible:
Who you are?
What contribution you made to the war effort?
What you lost as a result of your loyalty to the Crown?

Each presentation should be 5-7 minutes long, followed by questions from the Commission. In making your presentation, pull from the deliverables that you are creating for the fourth and final stage of the project (below).

April 23: Allen, Dragging Canoe, Glen, and Warren Households
April 25: Brant, Chesney, Drinker, Hemings, and Williams Households

Outcomes:
A bang-up presentation on the experience of a loyalist refugee

Stage 4: Final Deliverables for Building the Digital Resource

Due: Thursday, May 2nd, by 4 pm
Group

There are four final deliverables that will provide the building blocks for the digital resource that we will be building this summer. They are:

A revised copy of your household’s transcription
Encyclopedic biographies of your Loyalists
Datasets for the basic biographical, financial, and network information about your Loyalists
TimeMap(s) to illustrate the life experience of your Loyalist(s)

The final phase of the project is to create an updated biography of your loyalist. There will be two components to this biography. First, each group will create a standard, encylopaedic, biography that is primarily textual in nature. Second, each group will geographically visualize the wartime experiences of their refugee using a program called TimeMap.

1) Revised Transcription.
Have someone else in your household read over your part of the transcription to make sure it is perfectly accurate.

2) Encyclopedic Biography:
Apart from the LCC memorial itself, students will build upon two other resources to craft their biography. The first resource is The American Loyalists, or Biographical Sketches of Adherents to the British Crown in The War of the Revolution; Alphabetically Arranged; with a Preliminary Historical Essay a collection of loyalist biographies collected and published in 1847 by U.S. politician and antiquarian, Lorenzo Sabine. The second resource, the relevant sections of which will be provided to you by Professor Bankhurst, is Gregory Palmer’s Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution. Imagine that your essay will be an updated and expanded version of those written by Sabine and Palmer. You have a wealth of secondary (and primary!) material available to you that were unavailable to these authors.

The biography should be fairly detailed narrative of each Loyalist’s life. For obvious reasons pertaining to available source material, the refugee’s wartime experience will be the most substantive portion of the essay. That said, each group should include information, where available, about their subject’s life before and after the Revolution. Consult genealogical resources such as Ancestry.com (Shepherd students have free access to this resource at the GTM Center for the Study of the Civil War; Loyola Students can access this through the University Libraries’ databases) to fill in the gaps in the narrative (birth dates, ships upon which the memorialist may have traveled, date of death).

Each biography should between 300 and 1000 words. Submit this as a Google Doc.

3) Dataset
These loyalist memorials are rich in different types of data. They contain biographical information as each memorialist attempted to prove that they had been active in the defense of the Crown during the war and that they had suffered in consequence of their loyalty. They therefore provided detailed accounts of their service while in America. On a fundamental level, these are memorials are also financial documents (similar to insurance claims). The purpose of these testimonies was to seek monetary compensation for lost property and income. The Loyalist claims, like wills, deeds, or other probate records, provide an interesting glimpse into the household economy of early America. Finally, most of the memorials presented to the LCC tell us something about Loyalist networks. Those networks often included family members. Sometimes, in order to make a convincing case to the LCC, refugees relied on other Loyalists and British officials to craft a unified narrative of their mutual experiences and to substantiate their claims about active loyalty and hardship.

In this phase of the project you will collect and tabulate this data according to type. You have already made a transcription of the memorial in a word document so your task here is nearly done!

In this project you are going to add three new sheets to your Google spreadsheet.

The first sheet should be entitled “Biographical Information.” Students should entitle their columns as follows:
Last name:
First name:
Gender:
Occupation:
Place of birth: Some memorials are more specific than others so you may find that your document lists basic information (“born in America”) or quite specific data (“born in Newry, in the County of Down, in the Kingdom of Ireland”).
Date of Birth: These dates tend to be vague if included at all. Hopefully you will be able to supplement this information with genealogical research (see phase four)
Spouse: where available, record the name of spouses here.
Children:
Relatives: list relatives here.
Other household members

The second sheet is for information pertaining to your loyalist’s financial losses. Title this sheet “Memorial Claims.” Create two columns entitled “Item” and “Amount” respectively. Each row in the sheet will be dedicated to an individual object claimed by the memorialist to have been lost, or in their understanding “sacrificed,” as a consequence of their loyalty. Items lost could include property, revenue from employment, items, or – on occasion – enslaved labor. List a description of each object lost in the “item” column and the amount claimed by the loyalist for the lost object in the “Amount” column. Remember that all financial information should also be included in your original transcription.

For more information on eighteenth-century British Currency see: http://umich.edu/~ece/student_projects/money/denom.html

To ascertain the value of loyalist claims in today’s money (because we know you are curious!) see: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/

For colonial currency see: https://coins.nd.edu

The third sheet is for the names of family members and references who came forward to attest to the veracity of your loyalist’s story. Entitle this sheet “References.” Create columns for last name, first name, title, and nature of the relationship to the Loyalist (i.e. “commander of the 2nd Loyal Maryland Regiment, a unit in which the memorialist served”).

4) TimeMap
Finally, students will create a TimeMap of their refugee’s life to visualize their experience throughout this tumultuous period. Our inspiration are the story maps created by the University of New Brunswick through their New Brunswick Loyalist Journeys Project https://loyalist.lib.unb.ca/story-maps. Instead of using ArcGIS as our platform, we are going to use a free platform known as TimeMapper (https://timemapper.okfnlabs.org/) which was created by the Open Knowledge Foundation Labs. Between the examples on the TimeMapper website and the stories already created by the folks in New Brunswick, you should find lots of inspiration!

Revisit the Google spreadsheet that you created in stage one of the events of your loyalist’s life. See if new events have come to light since you created this. If they have enter them. We will provide you with a tutorial for TimeMapper and a template for the information to upload, which will include the following fields:
date
Title for event
Description
Source
Visual (if there is an appropriate one. Be creative!)

Outcomes:
A revised copy of your household’s transcription
Encyclopedic biographies of your Loyalists
Datasets for the basic biographical, financial, and network information about your Loyalists
TimeMap(s) to illustrate the life experience of your Loyalist(s)

All deliverables are due on Thursday, May 2nd, by 4 pm CST. Each household should submit their materials together by email to Profs. Bankhurst and Roberts.

Deadlines at a Glance

Stage 1: Transcribe Your Document
Due: Sunday, Mar 31, 12 midnight
25% of final project grade

Stage 2: Evaluating Another Digital Resource
Sunday, April 14, 12 midnight
25% of final project grade

Stage 3: Recreating the Loyalist Claims Commission
Tuesday and Thursday, April 23 and 25, 4:15 pm
10% of final project grade

Stage 4: Final Deliverables: Biography, TimeMap, Data Set, Revised Transcription
Thursday, May 2, 4 pm
40% of final project grade