I'm Jane Calvert from the College of Arts and Sciences, at the University of Kentucky.
I'm an associate professor of history and founding director and chief editor of the
John Dickinson Writings Project.
Well, I had no intention of working on the Founding Fathers or the Revolutionary Period.
But as I was writing my dissertation on Quakers, his name kept coming up, over and over.
I thought, who is this guy? And then when I looked at what historians had to say, they
didn't know what to make of him. He made perfect sense to me. And the reason was, it was very
clear, is that I went to a Quaker college. There was a lot that I really liked, really
appreciated about Quakerism. But I never wanted to become a Quaker. And that was exactly Dickinson's
position. So Quakers call people like us Fellow Travelers. We promote a lot of the same causes,
have a lot of the same beliefs, but we don't want to ever really join. For one reason or
another. And Dickinson's reason was that he was not a thoroughgoing pacifist. He said
he believed in the lawfulness of defensive war.
He advocates resistance to the British, but refuses to sign the Declaration of Independence.
Because he wants the conflict to be resolved peacefully; without war. Makes perfect sense.
John Dickinson was America's first political celebrity. And he wrote more than any other
single person for the American cause. And so his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania,
that was the first resounding call for American unity in the face of British oppression. And
because of these, Dickinson became known, up and down the colonies, throughout the Atlantic
world; in Canada, France, England, Ireland; he became the spokesman for the American cause.
Even when the sentiment of the country started to turn away from peaceful resistance towards
violent war and independence, Dickinson was still powerful enough that the month before
American's declared independence, they turned to him to write America's first constitution;
the Articles of Confederation.
My first book is called looks at the origins of the theory and practice of civil disobedience in
Quaker thought and action in the 1660s
To talk about civil disobedience, that presumes a concept of rights. So, the book I'm working
on now is the Quaker conception of rights, and then Dickinson's actions in trying to
bring that conception of rights to the American people at the founding. Of the major founders,
he was the only one to free all of his slaves during his lifetime, and work for abolition.
He was the only one to advocate women's rights. He was the only one to advocate Native American rights
Narrator: With new funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission,
Calvert has raised more than a half million dollars, for the John Dickinson Writings Project.
This project will collect, transcribe, edit and publish the complete writings of Dickinson
in print and digital editions.
Jane Calvert: Without documentary editors, we wouldn't have any of the founding father
biographies that people love so much. We wouldn't know anything about the people who shaped
our country. One of the hardest things about it, is trying
to read John Dickinson's handwriting. He used idiosyncratic shorthand. He used legal shorthand.
He used Latin abbreviations He often didn't abbreviate the same word the same way in the
same document.
Editing itself is related to doing history. I thought I transcribed my primary sources
accurately as a historian, until I became a documentary editor. And then I saw all the
mistakes that I'd made. You have to learn how to see in a much more detailed way than
you normally do.
The way I train students is very much influenced by my scholarship and my work as a historian
and as a documentary editor. In the first place, I bring my primary source documents
into the classroom. I take stuff directly from the archives and bring these things in.
This is stuff that is obscure sometimes, and unique, and really fascinating. So, that really,
I think, gets students more excited. They feel like they're really doing history more. Also,
I try to encourage students to take on the skills of documentary editing. Whether at
the undergraduate level and just editing their own work, or as graduate students in learning
how to be better historians.