Historiographing the Era of the American Revolution

The notions on the historical meaning of democracy, liberty and freedom and its development through time is important to our understanding of the past. Correspondingly, the goal of the HGEAR (acronym for Historiographing the Era of the American Revolution) project is to chart shifts in the character and structure of political discourse during the era of the American Revolution. By comparing shifts in language usage via ShiCo (Shifting Concepts Through Time) with changing formations in correspondence networks, we are able to measure how networks of communication within the Founders Online letter corpus and resources such as the Letters of Delegates to Congress shaped the character, distribution, and spread of political ideas during the Revolutionary era.

The analyses as part of this project offer insights into longstanding debates in the field of early American history. Also, by means of additional collected data, we show how the here included scripts can be easily accomodated to include other letter correspondence sources as well. Ultimately, this allows researchers to get a more complete picture of the fluxes in the political discourse during the American Revolution.