Creators
Digital PaxtonThe Digital Paxton would not be possible without the inestimable support of collaborators at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. At the Library Company of Philadelphia, special thanks are due to James N. Green (Librarian), Concetta Barbera (Digital Outreach Librarian & Curatorial Assistant), Nicole Joniec (Digital Collections Librarian and Print Department Assistant), Nicole H. Scalessa (Information Technology Manager and Digital Humanities Coordinator), and summer intern Hunter A. Johnson. Page Talbott (President and CEO), Bethany C. Yost (Manager of Annual Giving and Special Events), Heather Willever-Farr (Digital Services Manager), Samantha Miller (Digital Services Imaging Technician), and summer intern GVGK Tang each played an integral role in identifying resources, digitizing materials, and collecting metadata at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. When I first conceived this project, I lacked any formal funding, and Digital Paxton simply would not be a reality without the generosity and hospitality of these individuals and institutions.
I also want to personally acknowledge Craig Dietrich (Information Design Director), Curtis Fletcher (Project Manager), Erik Loyer (Co-PI, Creative Director), and Tara McPherson (Lead PI) at the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. In addition to creating the free, open-source platform upon which Digital Paxton is built (Scalar), the ANVC team has offered hands-on technical support throughout the planning and development process.
Contributing Archives
Digital Paxton is by design an unfinished and open-ended project. As students, educators, and researchers discover and use the project, I invite suggestions to improve the site as a digital archive, critical edition, and meeting space. To that end, I am honored to welcome our first contributing archive, the American Philosophical Society. I am grateful for the generosity of technical and library staff, particularly Patrick Spero (Librarian and Director), Scott Ziegler (Head of Technology), Abigail E. Shelton (Assistant to the Librarian), and Chelsea Reed (Digital Library Intern), who have digitized dozens of manuscript pages now publically available through Digital Paxton.
The Moravian Archives has also digitized several German-language manuscripts. Special thanks are due to Thomas J. McCullough (Assisant Archivist), for digitizing the letters, and to Scott Paul Gordon (Lehigh University), who supported the digitization effort.
Scholarly Contributors
Scott Paul Gordon is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair at Lehigh University, where he has been teaching since 1995. He has served as Director of Lehigh University Press (2006-2011) and as chair of the Department of English (2011-2016). Gordon’s first projects focused on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British literature: The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640-1770 (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and The Practice of Quixotism: Postmodern Theory and Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing (Palgrave, 2006). His current research focuses on early America, in particular the Moravian experiment in Pennsylvania. One project brings into print for the first time the extensive correspondence of Mary Penry (1735-1804), who immigrated from Wales in 1744 and lived as a single sister in Moravian communities at Bethlehem and Lititz for nearly fifty years. Another focuses on religion, social ambition, and patriotism in colonial and revolutionary Pennsylvania by exploring the lives of “worldly Moravians.” Pieces of these projects have appeared in The William and Mary Quarterly, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Early American Studies, and The Journal of Moravian History. In 2010 the Jacobsburg Historical Society published Gordon’s study of the Delaware chief Gelelemend (1737-1811), titled Two William Henrys: Indian and White Brothers in Arms and Faith in Colonial and Revolutionary America.
Kevin Kenny is Professor of History at Boston College. His principal area of research and teaching is the history of migration and popular protest in the Atlantic world. His latest book, Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn's Holy Experiment (2009), explains how Pennsylvania's early religious tolerance and social harmony disintegrated during the eighteenth century, with disastrous consequences for the province's Indians. Covering the period from Pennsylvania's foundation in the 1680s to its dissolution during the American Revolution, the book traces the emergence of intensifying forms of colonialist expropriation, from the flawed utopian vision of the founder, through the rapacious avarice of his sons, the French and Indian War, and Pontiac's War, to the consummation of a harsh new order during the Revolution. At the heart of the story is the extermination of the last twenty Conestoga Indians by a group of frontier settlers known as the Paxton Boys.
Professor Kenny's earlier work concentrated on the history of Irish migrants in the Atlantic and British imperial worlds. His first book, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (1998), examined how traditions of agrarian protest in nineteenth-century Ireland were translated into an American industrial setting. His second book, The American Irish: A History (2000), offered an interpretive survey of Irish migration to North America from 1700 to the present, including the Irish preconditions to mass emigration and questions of labor, social mobility, religion, race, gender, politics, and nationalism among the Irish in the United States. He is also the author of a short pictorial history, The Irish: Towards the U.S.A., published in Italy as Gli irlandesi che hanno fatto l'America (2006) and contributing editor of Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2004), a collection of historical essays that launched the Companion Series to the five-volume Oxford History of the British Empire.
He is currently researching various aspects of migration and popular protest in the Atlantic world and laying the groundwork for a long-term project investigating the meaning of immigration in American history.
James P. Myers, Jr., is emeritus professor of English at Gettysburg College, where he taught, among other subjects, courses in Shakespeare and Irish literature. For the past decades or so, he has researched and published on aspects of frontier life in Pennsylvania during the pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary periods. In 2010, he published his fifth book, a biography, The Ordeal of Thomas Barton: Anglican Missionary in the Pennsylvania Backcountry, 1755-1780. Most recently, he has written several articles on the eighteenth-century Franco-American farmer, cartographer, writer and, possibly, spy, Michel-Guillaume St. Jean de Crèvecoeur (a.k.a John Hector St. John).
About the Creator
Will Fenton is the Albert M. Greenfield Foundation Dissertation Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia, an MLA Proseminar Fellow, and a doctoral candidate at Fordham University where he specializes in early-American literature and the Digital Humanities. His dissertation, “Unpeaceable Kingdom: Fighting Quakers, Revolutionary Violence, and the Antebellum Novel,” examines the discrepancy between fictional representations of fighting Quakers and their historical practices of pacifism and political participation.
Will has served as the Director of the Writing Center at Fordham University Lincoln Center, Editor of Eloquentia Perfecta, and a Teaching Fellow. He is the recipient of a Haverford Gest Fellowship, HASTAC Scholarship, as well as Fordham's Innovative Pedagogy Scholarship and Digital Start-Up Grant. His work has appeared in Slate, Inside Higher Ed, and PC Magazine, for which he writes a biweekly column, “The Autodidact,” on educational technology.
This page has paths:
- Digital Paxton Will Fenton
