We’ve been busy the past two weeks, despite the break we all took for the July 4 holiday. As the national news reported, Northern New England has been rainy, and now flooded. The hardest hit spots are across the river in Vermont from us.
We have begun with the most obvious materials for this project to feature, the cache of letters written by Black Georgians themselves. These represented the first 120 documents to be uploaded to our From the Page site. The five of us based in Hanover have been working to make the metadata consistent as we familiarize ourselves with the platform. Before long, we plan to dig into the indexing feature, which will greatly enhance our ability to track specific people, places, and themes. It’s great to have active members from the broader world already at digging in to the scrawled handwriting in these letters. A shout out to the time logged and the great work done by “Mary V”!
For the rest of July, we will be moving at a more deliberate pace. Two tasks are before us. First and most importantly, we are methodically moving through the Stephens’ corpus identifying material that is most worth featuring. A goal is to have a total of about 300 documents by the beginning of August.
Uploaded over the past few days are spare, legalistic, documents (heart-breaking in their own way) related to purchase and inventory of enslaved people. We are also featuring the letters that document the suppressed Sparta conspiracy of 1863. Moving into the earliest period, we have those concerned with the Bob Stephens as a young adult (under Linton’s care, he shuttled around the state, including a stint at the University of Georgia) and his sister Mima. A rich collection of Pierce-related material, which I’ve worked on already with the writer Channing Joseph, is next in the queue.
We’ve decided not to turn out the comments section for these posts. But if you want to chime in, send an email to robertebonner@gmail.com and I will cut and paste it into this site!