A Colonial goldmine
Historians and archivists know a secret that most of us do not: that vast stores of primary documents about North America’s Colonial era lie untouched and unseen in repositories throughout the United States and Canada. The papers of the Founding Fathers and other prominent figures are well known, said University Librarian Robert Darnton, who is Harvard’s Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and a historian of early modern France. But much archived material — a lot of it related to the economic and social life of the Colonies — has not been fully examined. With Darnton in the lead, Harvard is doing something about that by digitizing documents for its Colonial North America (CNA) project. “There are fabulous holdings in unexpected places,” he said. Having 73 libraries gives Harvard the advantage of volume. Taken as a whole, the University’s archival and manuscript repositories house more than 45,000 collections, according to a 2010 survey, which...