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Digital Paxton: Digital Collection, Critical Edition, and Teaching Platform

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Digital Collection 102 image_header 319021 2020-09-24T17:40:30-07:00
Welcome to the Digital Collection. Click any item to access images, metadata, and full-text transcriptions as we add them.

All images are free for non-commercial use under Creative Commons, Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). By default, all images are available as 300 dpi (or higher) jpeg files.

Special thanks are due to two dozen contributing archives, research libraries, and cultural institutions that have made this collection possible:
Below "Contents" you may use paths to filter materials by type. At present, the Digital Collection features 39 artworks, four books, 17 broadsides, 180 manuscripts, 27 newspaper and periodical issues, 71 pamphlets, and nine political cartoons. About half of the corpus is fully-transcribed, with new transcriptions being added on a regular basis. The manuscripts path includes sub-paths with which readers may filter for correspondence and diaries related to Conestoga Manor, Moravian missionaries, the Friendly Association, Timothy Horsfield, and Edward Shippen. Likewise, pamphlets includes a sub-path highlighting items for which we have digitized more than one edition (Multiple Editions).

Finally, there are several tools you may use to search across the Digital Collection. You may perform a local search on the Index page. This page contains too many items for easy browsing; however, a local search will allow you to quickly filter items using keywords related to titles and descriptions. To search across metadata and transcriptions, use Scalar's global Search. By default, Scalar searches item names and descriptions; if you select all fields & metadata, Scalar will across the Digital Paxton corpus, which may require more time.

At any point you may return to this or any other path using the Table of Contents, accessible from the menu in the top left corner of the screen.
Introduction
Now Available: The digital companion to the exhibition A New Looking-Glass for the 1764 Pamphlet War.
The conclusion of French-Indian War was supposed to eliminate the threat of frontier violence from the Pennsylvania backcountry. However, despite English calims to vast, uninterrupted swathes of North America, Ottawa tribesman Chief Pontiac resisted imperial authority. He led the Delaware and Shawnee tribes in a series of attacks on English forts across the Midwest in what came to be called Pontiac’s War.

Fearing new attacks on their Paxtang settlement (a suburb of what is today Pennsylvania’s capitol, Harrisburg), a group of Scotch-Irish militiamen fixed their sights on the Conestoga (Susquehannock), a tribe who had peaceably inhabited a tract of land outside Lancaster for three generations.

These “Paxtang Men” or “Paxton Boys” sought to expunge the Conestoga—and any other Indians they could find—from the Pennsylvania colony. They marched on Conestoga Indiantown, murdered all the residents they could find, and torched their cabins. After the colonial government determined that the killings ought to be classified as murder, governor John Penn announced a reward for the Paxtons’ capture and placed the remaining Conestoga in the custody of the Lancaster jailhouse. The Paxton Boys broke into the facility and murdered the remaining Conestoga. They publicly desecrated the victim's bodies and vowed to march on Philadelphia, where other peaceable Moravian Indians were being sheltered. The Paxton Boys were met in Germantown, six miles outside Philadelphia, by a delegation led by none other than Benjamin Franklin, who persuaded their leaders to enumerate their grievances in Declaration and Remonstrance, which sparked a vigorous debate about the authority of the colonial government.

Critics contended that in murdering the Conestoga, the Paxtons had flouted the government’s agreement with the natives, and in pursuing them in the Lancaster jailhouse they had defied the rule of law. One critic argued that “malice and party-spirit” motivated the Paxtons and their sympathizers. He advised: “Let the Friends of Pennsylvania lay aside the animosities which have been raised and maintained by the wicked and weak.”

For their part, Paxton apologists held that the pacifist principles of the Quaker-dominated Assembly had long kept the government from protecting the lives of backcountry settlers. “It is an inexpressible Absurdity,” wrote one apologist, “that a warlike People should be governed by Persons of Quaker Principles, and especially in Time of War.”

Critics and apologists rushed to shape popular opinion using pamphlets, which were produced from one or more sheets of paper printed on both sides and folded in halves, thirds, or fourths. Thanks to simplicity and economy of these materials, pamphlets could be produced quickly and in great volume. The Paxton debate comprised more than one-fifth of the Pennsylvania colony’s total printed material in 1764, making it one of the most important pamphlet wars of the colonial period.

Waged in pamphlets, political cartoons, broadsides, and correspondence, the pamphlet war featured some of Pennsylvania’s preeminent figures, including governor William Penn and founding father Benjamin Franklin. At stake was much more than the conduct of the Paxton men. Pamphleteers used the debate over the behavior of the Paxtons to stake claims about settlement practices, race and ethnicity, masculinity and civility, and religious association in pre-Revolutionary Pennsylvania.

Digital Paxton serves as both an archive and a critical edition of that pamphlet war.

Digital Paxton as Archive
As an archive, Digital Paxton collects more than 170 political cartoons, manuscripts, broadsides, pamphlets, and German-language translations of pamphlets related to the Paxton incident. The original papers reside at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society, the Moravian Archives, and Haverford College Quaker and Special Collections. Currently, Digital Paxton features more than 1,600 free, open-source, print-quality (300 dpi) images. In the future, I hope to expand the archive to include materials residing at Lancaster History and the Historical Society of Dauphin County.

Every digitized item features all the metadata available in the Library Company catalog related to printer, pagination, and authorial attribution. You can access that metadata by clicking the “Details” tab below any image. In addition to some three-dozen full-text transcriptions currently available, I will add new transcriptions on a weekly basis and communicate updates using Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. As they become available, transcriptions will appear in “Annotations” tabs below images. This is a large project, and I welcome your contributions.

To jump directly to the Paxton archive, click here.

Digital Paxton as Critical Edition
In 1957, historian John Raine Dunbar created the first critical edition to the 1764 pamphlet war, The Paxton Papers. While Dunbar’s Papers has served scholars well, it suffers from three limitations: it’s dated, limited in scope, and not easily accessible.

The past sixty years have seen significant Paxton research and scholarship, enabled, in no small part, by Dunbar’s edition. Dunbar’s introduction offers a useful entry point to the study of the Paxton incident, it obviously does not reflect the vast and varied work scholars are doing today. In the past several years alone, MCEAS organized a 250th anniversary Paxton conference from which Early American Studies culled an impressive special issue.

Dunbar’s corpus is also quite selective. While he curated twenty-eight pamphlets in Papers, Alison Gilbert Olson later identified sixty-three pamphlets and ten cartoons. Even that tally does not account for the complete range of Paxton material, given that many cartoons are nested inside of pamphlets, many of which circulated in multiple editions throughout 1764.

Finally, the Dunbar Papers is out of print, and when it can be found, it’s expensive. Though many of the Paxton pamphlets are available online, access remains either ad hoc or expensive. Several pamphlets are available in the Internet Archive. Many more are searchable via Readex Early American Imprints. However, in both instances, readers must identify specific pamphlets to retrieve results, and, in the case of Readex, they will need to affiliate with an institution that has purchased access to them. Perhaps most important, search-based discovery flattens what was a heated exchange in which writers address, answer, examine, counter, and unmask one another. Current digital access makes it difficult to discern derivation (who’s responding to whom) and authorship (writers employ a variety of pseudonyms).

Digital Paxton seeks to address each of these limitations.

As a web-based critical edition, Digital Paxton will accommodate three forms of critical context: historical overviews (nested inside this introductory path), conceptual keyword essays, and teaching materials designed by and for secondary and post-secondary educators. This introduction models my iterative approach: since the site launched, I have revised and expanded this introduction to include a more expansive critical apparatus.

Readers may follow this Introduction to explore five contextual essays, beginning with an overview of the Paxton riots authored by Kevin Kenny, an historian at Boston College who quite literally wrote the book on them. With the permission of the Encyclopedia for Greater Philadelphia, we have excerpted an essay on the relationship between Pontiac's War and the Paxton rebellion, written by Michael Goode an historian at Utah Valley University. Jack Brubaker, a Lancaster journalist and author, has authored an essay on the immediate and long-term aftermath of the Conestoga massacre. Darvin Martin, an advisor to the Circle Legacy Center, provides a history of Conestoga Indiantown, its people, and their displacement after the Paxton march. Finally, I have created a digital companion that both reproduces and extends an exhibition that is currently on display at the Library Company of Philadelphia. My hope is that this exhibition will serve as the basis of a new way of framing the 1764 pamphlet war.

Readers may also choose to dip into the Paxton archive using four conceptual Keyword essays, modeled on the work of Raymond Williams (Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society) and more recently, Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (Keywords for American Cultural Studies). Authored by Paxton scholars, these essays theorize and historicize a keyword from the Paxton debate using primary source material available in the Paxton archive and secondary sources as further reading. I'm delighted to share essays from Nicole Eustace (New York University), Scott Paul Gordon (Lehigh University), James P. Myers, Jr. (Gettysburg College), and Judith Ridner (Mississippi State University). Alongside full-length essays dedicated to material culture, condolence rituals, charges of elitism, and the use of anonymity, Digital Paxton also welcomes shorter, Wiki-style contextual tags. To that end, Scott Paul Gordon has provided tags for the Moravians, Christian Indians, and Edward Shippen.

In the interest of facilitating access to the Paxton massacre, the site also includes a Pedagogy section where secondary and post-secondary educators may contribute lesson plans. Educators at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania have created a multi-part high school lesson plan. Montgomery Wolf (University of Georgia) has submitted an innovative assignment in which students create podcasts using the Digital Paxton archive. And Benjamin Bankhurst (Shepherd University) and Kyle Roberts (Loyola University Chicago), who are co-teaching an undergraduate history course about the American Revolution, have shared a Digital Paxton transcription assignment. I hope to add many more assignments, lesson plans, and teaching materials in the coming months.

Digital Paxton’s online format ameliorates issues of access, scope, and design. Thanks to the generosity of partnering institutions, Digital Paxton provides free, print-quality images with rich metadata and, in many instances, full-text transcriptions. Because Digital Paxton does not need to be printed or reprinted, it can accommodate new materials and scholarly contributions as they become available. For example, I recently added high-resolution imagery of an Edward Hicks’s painting, courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Thanks to its foundation in Scalar, an open-source, online publishing platform developed by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture (USC), Digital Paxton supports multiple narratives (Paths) using archival contents. I’m currently use paths to create sequences of content, as with this introduction. In the coming months, I will supply new ways to explore the Paxton corpus, including paths that foreground chronology, ideology, and intertextuality.

Using Digital Paxton
You may navigate the Paxton archive by several avenues. First, I recommend you follow this path (the sequence of items listed below Contents), which will direct you to the aforementioned historical overviews. After that, this path will direct you to the Archive of pamphlets, which itself includes numerous ways to explore the Paxton corpus. If you continue on this path, you will also discover conceptual keyword essays (Keywords), supplementary teaching materials (Pedagogy), crowdsourced transcriptions (Transcriptions), and additional information about the project (Creators).

Alternatively, you can navigate Digital Paxton using the Table of Contents, accessible when you hover over the menu icon in the upper left corner of any screen. You may preview the contents of any section by clicking the associated arrow .

Below the Table of Contents, you can access the Index, which allows you to filter items by type. Filtering for Paths will allow you to browse sequences of content, such as pamphlets or collections of pamphlets. Filtering for Media will enable you to browse all individual pages of archival items. Alternatively, you may perform a keyword search by clicking the magnifying glass in the menu bar.

I hope that you enjoy Digital Paxton, and I invite you to share your thoughts, suggestions, and discoveries using the aforementioned social media platforms. By design, Digital Paxton is a work in progress, and I hope that it will become a richer, more useful tool. Thank you for using the site and for contributing to this endeavor.
Using Digital Paxton Digital Paxton is a digital collection, critical edition, teaching platform devoted to the 1764 pamphlet war.

Digital Paxton as Digital Collection
As a digital collection, Digital Paxton hosts more than 300 political cartoons, books, broadsides, manuscripts, and newspaper issues related to the Paxton incident. The original papers reside at two dozen different archives, research libraries, and cultural institutions, including the American Philosophical Society, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. At present, Digital Paxton features nearly 3,000 free, print-quality (300 dpi) images.

Every digitized item features metadata available in the Library Company of Philadelphia's catalog related to printer, pagination, and authorial attribution. You may access that metadata by clicking the "Details" tab below any image of by clicking "Additional metadata" in its parent.

About half of the corpus is fully-transcribed. Transcriptions are configured to appear as Annotations that automatically overlay when you cursor over the top left quarter of an image. New transcriptions will be added on a regular basis and announced via Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. All transcriptions are fully searchable and will be collected in Transcribed Records. We welcome reader contributions using the project’s crowd-sourced Transcriptions platform.

Digital Paxton as Critical Edition
In 1957, historian John Raine Dunbar created the first critical edition to the 1764 pamphlet war, The Paxton Papers. While Dunbar’s Papers has served scholars well, it suffers from three limitations: it’s dated, limited in scope, and not easily accessible.

The past sixty years have seen significant Paxton research and scholarship, enabled, in no small part, by Dunbar’s edition. Dunbar’s introduction offers a useful entry point to the study of the Paxton incident, it obviously does not reflect the vast and varied work scholars are doing today. In the past several years alone, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies organized a 250th anniversary Paxton conference from which Early American Studies culled an impressive special issue.

Dunbar's corpus is also quite selective. While he curated twenty-eight pamphlets in Papers, Alison Olson later identified sixty-three pamphlets and ten cartoons. Even that tally does not account for the complete range of Paxton material, given that many cartoons are nested inside of pamphlets, many of which circulated in multiple editions throughout 1764.

Finally, the Dunbar Papers is out of print, and when it can be found, it’s expensive. Though many of the Paxton pamphlets are available online, access remains either ad hoc or expensive. Several pamphlets are available in the Internet Archive. Many more are searchable via Readex Early American Imprints. However, in both instances, readers must identify specific pamphlets to retrieve results, and, in the case of Readex, they will need to affiliate with an institution that has purchased access to them. Perhaps most important, search-based discovery flattens what was a heated exchange in which writers address, answer, examine, counter, and unmask one another. Current digital access makes it difficult to discern derivation (who’s responding to whom) and authorship (writers employ a variety of pseudonyms).

Digital Paxton seeks to address each of these limitations.

As a web-based critical edition, Digital Paxton will accommodate three forms of critical context: historical overviews (nested inside Historical Overview), conceptual keyword essays (Keywords), and teaching materials designed by and for secondary and post-secondary educators (Education).

Digital Paxton's online format ameliorates issues of access, scope, and design. Thanks to the generosity of partnering institutions, Digital Paxton provides free, print-quality images with rich metadata and, in many instances, full-text transcriptions. Because Digital Paxton does not need to be printed or reprinted, it can accommodate new materials and scholarly contributions as they become available.

Thanks to its foundation in Scalar, an open-source, online publishing platform developed by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, Digital Paxton supports multiple narratives (Paths) using a common library. Digital Paxton uses paths to create sequences of content, as with this introduction. You may access the contents of a pathway by scrolling to the bottom of the page (listed below Contents) or by using the arrows in the wings (in the left and right hand margins) to access the next or previous page in a pathway.

Using Digital Paxton
You may navigate the Paxton corpus by several avenues. We recommend that you click the blue button at the bottom of this page to progress to Historical Overview. That pathway features six brief essays, beginning with a piece by Kevin Kenny, who quite literally wrote the book on the Paxton riots. With the permission of the Encyclopedia for Greater Philadelphia, we have excerpted an essay on the relationship between Pontiac's War and the Paxton rebellion, written by historian Michael Goode. In the next essay, historian Jay Donis looks ahead to the next year in order to compare the violence of Black Boys to that of the Paxton Boys. Historian Judith Ridner and literary scholar Scott Paul Gordon attend to the visual culture and manuscript records that haven't, traditionally, been associated with the public debate.

Jack Brubaker, a Lancaster journalist and author, has authored an essay on the immediate and long-term aftermath of the Conestoga massacre. Darvin Martin, an adviser to the Circle Legacy Center, provides a history of Conestoga Indiantown, its people, and their displacement after the Paxton march. Finally, editor Will Fenton has created framework that situates the Paxton massacre in a longer lineage of settler colonialism that extends from the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) through the Northwest Ordinance (1787). This “new looking-glass” seeks to serve as a new, more capacious framework for thinking about the pamphlet war, as well as those who could not participate in it.

Upon completing this Historical Overview, you will find yourself in the Digital Collection, where you may filter by type of content: artwork, broadside, manuscript, pamphlets, or political cartoon.

You may also navigate Digital Paxton using the Table of Contents, accessible when you hover over the menu in the upper left corner of any screen. You may click any associated arrow to preview the contents of a section. Below the Table of Contents, you can access the Index, which allows you to filter items by type. Filtering for Paths will allow you to browse sequences of content, such as pamphlets or collections of pamphlets. Filtering for Media will enable you to browse all individual pages of records. Alternatively, you may perform a keyword search by clicking the magnifying glass in the menu bar.

Readers may choose to dip into the digital collection using conceptual Keywords, modeled on the work of Raymond Williams (Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society) and, more recently, Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (Keywords for American Cultural Studies). Authored by Paxton scholars, these six essays theorize and historicize a keyword in the Paxton debate using primary source material available in the digital collection and secondary sources as further readings. We’re delighted to share essays from Benjamin Bankhurst (Shepherd University), Nicole Eustace (New York University), Scott Paul Gordon (Lehigh University), Angel Luke O'Donnell (King's College London), James P. Myers, Jr. (Gettysburg College), and Judith Ridner (Mississippi State University). Alongside full-length essays dedicated to eighteenth-century material culture, condolence rituals, the idea of elitism, and the use of anonymity, Digital Paxton also supports Wiki-style contextual tags. To that end, Scott Paul Gordon has authored tags for the Moravians, Christian Indians, and Edward Shippen.

To facilitate greater knowledge of and access to the Paxton massacre, the site also includes a Education section where secondary and post-secondary educators may contribute lesson plans. Digital Paxton features six middle school lessons, 12 high school lessons, and three university-level lessons. In conducting one of those university lessons, Loyola graduate students Kate Johnson, Marie Pellissier, and Kelly Schmidt created documentation to support crowdsourcing transcriptions using an open-source platform called FromThePage. We have created a Transcriptions section to surface transcribed materials, to showcase their documentation, and to solicit your contributions. To that point, we have also added a Public Outreach section that foregrounds various project milestones, including collaborations, talks, and publications.

As evidenced by our collaborative approach to transcriptions, Digital Paxton wouldn't be possible without the contributions of countless individuals and institutions, and we encourage visitors to use the Credits section to acknowledge the individuals behind the technology. Invisible labor is labor nevertheless.

We hope that you enjoy Digital Paxton, and we invite you to share your thoughts, suggestions, and discoveries using any of the aforementioned social media platforms. By design, Digital Paxton is a work in progress, and we hope that it will become a richer, more useful tool with time. Use the Contact page to get involved or to submit queries, questions, or suggestions. Thank you for contributing to the project.