168. Mining King George III's Papers with Zara Anishanslin and Arthur Burns

While work continues on the podcast's upcoming Season 5, we’re pleased to offer you another summer interlude.

For today’s show, we bring you the audio version of Jim Ambuske's recent live stream chat with Professors Zara Anishanslin and Arthur Burns about the Georgian Papers Programme.

Now, most of you probably know that some Americans had a little -  shall we say – disagreement with King George III two centuries ago. Something about taxation, tea, and tyranny.

But did you know that researchers, librarians, and digital humanists on both sides of the pond are busy digitizing and interpreting the papers of the Georgian Monarchs, their families, and the members of the royal household from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?

What can we learn about early America, and especially the American revolution, from these documents?

Stay tuned to find out.

As always, if you’d like to see the images associated with this live stream, consider watching the video version by going to www.mountvernon.org/gwdigitaltalks.

About Our Guests:

Zara Anishanslin is Associate Professor of History and Art History at the University of Delaware.  She is the author of Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World. She was the 2018 Mount Vernon Georgian Papers Programme Fellow, working at the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, the Washington Library, and King’s College London on her new project on the American Revolution, London Patriots.

Arthur Burns is Professor of Modern British History at King’s College London. He is currently academic director of the Georgian Papers Programme. Primarily a historian of later Hanoverian and Victorian Britain, Burns engages with the history of the Church of England over a much longer period, notably through his pioneering involvement in digital humanities. He co-founded the Boydell and Brewer monograph series Studies in Modern British Religious History, which has now published more than 35 volumes on this theme.

About Our Host:

Jim Ambuske leads the Center for Digital History at the Washington Library. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia in 2016 with a focus on Scotland and America in an Age of War and Revolution. He is a former Farmer Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia Law Library. At UVA, Ambuske co-directed the 1828 Catalogue Project and the Scottish Court of Session Project.  He is the co-author with Randall Flaherty of "Reading Law in the Early Republic: Legal Education in the Age of Jefferson," in The Founding of Thomas Jefferson's University ed. by John A. Rogasta, Peter S. Onuf, and Andrew O'Shaughnessy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019). Ambuske is currently at work on a book entitled Emigration and Empire: America and Scotland in the Revolutionary Era, as well as a chapter on Scottish loyalism during the American Revolution for a volume to be published by the University of Edinburgh Press.