UNL digital history project reviewed in top academic journal

earlywashingtondc.org

The Journal of American History, one of the top academic journals in the field, published a favorable review in the December 2017 issue on the digital history project, O Say Can You See: Early Washington, D.C., Law & Family.

The project is jointly produced by University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and Professor of History and John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities, William G. Thomas.

O Say Can You See is an invaluable resource for historians, genealogists, and scholars. It explores multigenerational black, white, and mixed family networks in early Washington, D.C., by collecting, digitizing, making accessible, and analyzing thousands of case files from the Circuit Court for the District of Columbia, Maryland state courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court.

The review states, “At each level of the work, the project team has enhanced the materials to enable more fruitful historical analysis, and the result is a model of good digital history work.”

The CDRH project team includes Kaci Nash, Laura Weakly, Jessica Dussault, and Karin Dalziel.

Nash says of the project, “In the past five years, O Say Can You See has grown in size and scope into something that is historically relevant, adding a new dimension to our understanding of the social and legal world of early Washington, D.C. In particular, the petition for freedom cases offer a rich source material for uncovering the individual experiences of enslaved people and families."

Explore the project here:

http://earlywashingtondc.org