The Maryland Loyalism Project

  • March 25, 2020
  • 12:30 PM - 1:30 CST
  • CTSDH
  • Elizabeth Hopwood, ehopwood@luc.edu
  • free
  • students, faculty, and staff
     Open to the public.
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    Following the American Revolution, loyalist refugees lined up in London, England, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, to share their experience of wartime upheaval in hopes the state would recognize their allegiance and compensate them for their losses.

    The records of the Loyalist Claims Commission document the media landscape of late-eighteenth-century Anglo-America. In making their case, these men and women provided oral testimony, written affidavits, notarized deeds, newspaper accounts, and more to establish their political allegiance and right to confiscated property - including a substantial number of enslaved people - in the face of betrayal, persecution, and loss of family and friends. The state recorded the narratives of this refugee population, one of the 18th-century Atlantic¿s largest, on its own media platforms.

    Nearly 250 years later, the Maryland Loyalism Project engages undergraduate and graduate students to use contemporary digital platforms to make these poignant stories available to scholarly and descendant communities. This talk will focus on how the project team has wrestled with questions of platform, design, and representation in creating a project that seeks to restore the humanity of all impacted by the British loss in the American Revolution.