Colonial North American Project

When completed, the Harvard Colonial North American Project (cnap) will make digitally available some 450,000 images from over 1,600 collections across twelve repositories. So far the Harvard University library has posted about one-third of the eventual total, and it is clear that this project is a great gift to early American historians. Given the enormity of the collection, it defies easy description. Most notably, “colonial North American project” is a misnomer, but in a good way. The cnap collection is not confined to the colonial period and includes material from the revolutionary and early national periods, dating as late as the 1840s. Early records of Harvard and people associated with the school also figure prominently. The Harvard graduate student Alicia DeMaio contributed a few short essays to the Web site focusing on a few of these people and addressing diverse topics such as political culture, women's labor, and religious life. Some collections will have broad appeal across subjects, such as the ten boxes of materials related to Hannah Winthrop and John Winthrop—a Harvard professor and, at times, acting president—and including annotated almanacs. A trove of New England legal records and the papers of many lawyers ended up in the collections of Harvard Law School, which are also included in the cnap collection

Appeal · Archaeology · Colonialism · Library science · Misnomer · National archives · New england · Political science · Politics · Special collections · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classics · History · Law