Shepard University and Loyola University Awarded Grant to Create Historical Database

The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at the College of William & Mary awarded Benjamin Bankhurst, assistant professor of history at Shepherd University, and Kyle Roberts, associate professor of public history and new media and director of the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities at Loyola University Chicago, with a $5,000 Lapidus Digital Collections Fellowship for “The Maryland Loyalist Project.”

The project is a collaboration between Bankhurst and Roberts that aims to make the letters and petitions of British loyalists who fled the American Revolution housed in the British National Archives available in a digital archive.

The grant will provide undergraduate students at Shepherd and Loyola the opportunity to develop skills in the digital humanities such as web design, transcription, mapping and visualization while they help create a website that will provide scholars and the public with online access to rare manuscript records from the Parliamentary Loyalist Claims Commission held by the National Archives at Kew, England.