Delaware’s John Dickinson does not get the same recognition as other founding fathers, but a University of Kentucky researcher and her team are working to change that, and plan to bring the effort to the First State.
This fall, the John Dickinson Writings Project received a federal grant to establish a presence at the University of Delaware.
The project launched in 2010, seeking to pull together the writings and correspondence of the “Penman of the Revolution.”
It will include Dickinson's most important writings of the late-colonial and Founding
period - a 55 year window from 1753 to 1808 - along with what the project calls "a robust selection of correspondence."
The project’s director and chief editor Jane Calvert says the writings illustrate Dickinson’s duty to inflexible virtue.
"If he believed something was right, he stuck to it," said Calvert. "And he was basically willing to destroy his own popularity for the cause of what he believed was true and right. He put everything on the line for that and his patriotism was entirely selfless."
That duty to virtue led Dickinson to refuse to sign the Declaration of Independence.
He also took some other stances that were deemed “unpopular” at the time, but have since become commonplace in our society.
The Dickinson Writings Project expects to publish a total of six volumes. The first two were published in 2020 and 2021, and work is now underway on volume three.
They are being published by the University of Delaware Press and University of Virginia Press.
The project also expects to produce a college-level course reader and make a digital version available online.
The project is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the State of Delaware, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and private donors.
More information about the project is available at its website.
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