Pinckney Papers Announces Project Completion
ADE Website Committee
After fifteen years of editorial work supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the Pinckney Papers Projects are now completed, bringing to scholars and the general public a selective edition of the papers of an important early national South Carolina family. Publication this month by Rotunda, the digital imprint of the University of Virginia Press (https://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/), of two supplemental volumes adds 42 fully edited documents to The Papers of Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Harriott Pinckney Horry (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2012) and 130 to The Papers of the Revolutionary Era Pinckney Statesmen (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2016-2023). The comprehensive Table of Contents index for the Pinckney Statesmen volume includes citation location for an additional 280 documents. An important contribution in the re-release of the four chronological initial Pinckney Statesmen volumes in conjunction with publication of the supplemental volume is the addition of brief summaries provided by the editors for the 4,367 of the 6,110 calendared documents, manuscripts for which reliable transcriptions are not available online.
These supplemental volumes bring the total of Pinckney family documents accessible either as a transcription in a modern scholarly edition or a complete location citation to 790 documents in the Pinckney-Horry edition, and 9,563 in the Pinckney Statesmen edition, of which 4,243 documents have been fully edited and annotated. These documents, covering nearly a century from 1739 to 1830, illuminate international, national, state and local social, political, diplomatic, and military events that shaped the new nation.
In addition to the two completed born digital editions, edited by Constance B. Schulz, Neale Millikan, Mary Sherrer, Robert Karachuk, Marty D. Matthews, and others, a final component of the Pinckney Papers Projects is the creation by our graduate assistant Elisabeth [Zoie] Horecny of a web page, “People Enslaved by the Pinckneys,” https://exhibits.library.sc.edu/peopleenslavedbythepinckneys/ which organizes data from various Pinckney inventories, wills, and other document list formats into twenty-one downloadable spread sheets that allow researchers to investigate family relationships, gender, occupation, and other characteristics of those enslaved by the extended Pinckney family over a century. Used in conjunction with the two editions, these spread sheets should be an invaluable research and teaching tool for a wide variety of users.