Since America last celebrated a major anniversary, debate about the nature of these foundations has undergone a series of tectonic shifts. A brand-new field of digital humanities, offering archivists and historians novel ways to organize, interpret, and compute primary sources, has emerged. Historians have developed new research priorities drawing on sources that previously lay hidden in the nation’s archives. As curators and archivists have reevaluated their “objective”/neutral role in relation to the archive, many collecting institutions have undertaken re-description projects to reveal the contributions of women and minorities that generations-old description had elided. As historians turn their attention to the Revolution’s Atlantic and global dimensions, previously untapped archival resources, many of them located in the Global South, assume increased significance. Future opportunities for collaboration between repositories, and for post-custodial approaches to enriching the revolutionary archive, await.

There are also continuities. Projects to edit and publish the papers of the nation’s first leaders are ongoing, producing rich resources for researching the authors of our founding documents. Digital editions of these textual editing projects increase the accessibility of such papers. But, they also run up against traditional modes of scholarly communication (relatively few are available via open access) as well as the seemingly inescapable fact that the perspectives they provide tend to be that of the empowered white men whose personal papers were preserved in the years after the revolution.

Documentary interpretation is a collective endeavor but it is not one that has always succeeded in proceeding across disciplinary and professional boundaries. The first goal of this panel is therefore to foster discussion between people who work on revolutionary-era archives (in all forms) from different professional perspectives. It is convened in the belief that such a conversation can identify new insights and strategies to the revolutionary archive: strategies that have the potential to increase the accessibility of archival materials, to prompt the creation of new types of revolutionary archive and, ultimately, to foster evolving interpretations of the United States’ founding moment and its memory.

Discussion will be guided by the following questions: What is the state of the archive from and about the revolutionary era? What is the potential for adding to this archive? What can archivists, librarians, and historians learn from each other? Do the digital humanities have a peculiar potential for interpreting the revolutionary era? What is the future of textual editing around revolutionary archives? What are the intellectual benefits of interrogating the revolutionary archive? What are the public benefits of such an interrogation in a moment when history and how it is taught is so contested?