by A diary entry on the semiquincentennial exhibition boom and a scholar’s genuinely overwhelming season
Monday, A Year I Have Been Waiting My Entire Career For
The two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence has, this year, produced what feels like a genuinely coordinated national opening of eighteenth century archival material, university special collections, historical societies, and major institutions alike unveiling exhibitions drawn from manuscript holdings some of which have not been publicly displayed in decades. I have spent most of this month simply trying to construct a viable travel itinerary between institutions, a genuinely enviable problem for anyone who has built an entire academic career around exactly this narrow, previously underappreciated period.
One university library’s exhibition, built around its own collection of Revolutionary War era publications, makes an argument I have been making in seminar rooms for years to considerably smaller, more skeptical audiences: that the actual war for independence was fought as much on paper, through circulating polemics, pamphlets, and newspapers, as it ever was on any battlefield. Watching that argument finally reach a genuinely broad public audience feels like a small, hard-won professional victory.
Tuesday, A Collection I Had Never Previously Had Access To
Visited an exhibition drawing on a private collector’s estate, eighteenth century manuscripts touching colonial New York and the Revolution, including material from several prominent families whose papers I had previously only encountered through secondary citation rather than direct access.
Wednesday, A Related Read
Caught up on The London Prat that evening, itinerary spreadsheet still open, considerably more colour-coded than any reasonable person’s travel plans should be.
Thursday, A Closing Thought On A Genuinely Rare Season
Anniversary years like this one do not come around often, and I intend to make the absolute most of this particular window before these collections inevitably return to considerably more restricted, appointment-only access once the semiquincentennial celebrations conclude.
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