Putting the American Revolution in Context Through Transcription
Today’s guest post is from Lauren Algee, a Senior Digital Collections Specialist & By the People community manager at the Library of Congress.
What do patriotic songs, society women’s diaries, and nautical maps have in common? All give context to life in America before, during, and after the Revolutionary War – and you’re invited to transcribe them all with the By the People volunteer transcription program in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of American independence!
Since 2018, By the People has invited anyone to become part of the Library of Congress as a transcription volunteer. Volunteering is done online through the By the People website, where you can explore, transcribe, and review transcriptions of digitized pages. Completed transcriptions go back into Library of Congress digital collections on loc.gov to create page-level, keyword searches and improve the accessibility of these texts.
By the People has launched The American Revolution in Context to bring together pages that provide context for the colonial period, revolution, and early republic from across Library collections.
In addition to celebrating the United States semiquincentennial, The American Revolution in Context is a community engagement project for the PBS documentary series, “The American Revolution” by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt. The twelve-hour series about America’s founding struggle, which premiered November 16, 2025, presents the story of the men and women of the revolutionary generation, their humanity in victory and defeat, and the crisis through which they lived.
The first three transcription campaigns of The American Revolution in Context include letters and diaries from women of the early republic, early American books, and early copyright ledgers. Additional campaigns for early American sheet music, the Atlantic Neptune revolution-era nautical atlases, and 18th-century cookbooks will be published over the next 6 months.
By the People offers volunteers the opportunity to connect deeply to the people, places, and events through the close reading inherently required by transcription. We are excited to bring Library of Congress primary sources to the fingertips of viewers drawn into this period in history by the documentary. A toolkit with guidance for hosting transcribe-a-thons and other related programming is available on “The American Revolution” film website.
What materials are available to transcribe?
The Women of the Early Republic campaign brings together manuscript collections chronicling the daily lives of four women: Anne “Nancy” Home Shippen Livingston, Rebecca Lloyd Nicholson, Margaret Bayard Smith, and Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton. Through their writings in letters, diaries, commonplace books, and other papers, these elite women recorded their firsthand experiences of the political landscape of the American Revolution and the foundation of the new American republic, though women’s lives remained circumscribed by the prevailing social order.
Manuscript Reading Room historian Elizabeth Novara says “making these women’s stories more accessible through transcription, along with other collections from across the Library, will help us better understand elite women’s crucial and often complicated roles during the early American republic.”
The By the People team will also publish three campaigns from the Rare Book and Special Collections Reading Room as part of The American Revolution in Context – one centered on a selection of books and pamphlets, one on cookbooks, and the final on early copyright ledgers. The selected books and pamphlets in North American Print Culture in a Revolutionary Age cover a wide variety of topics and formats printed between 1700 and 1830. This campaign provides a glimpse into the texts that were circulating as the colonies formed, during the events of the American Revolution and in the newly forming nation. Early Copyright Ledgers: A New Nation’s Intellectual Pursuits chronicle the publications of an industrious new nation. The cookbooks campaign (coming in 2026) showcases some of the cookery books that would have been found in American kitchens throughout the 18th-century.
Also launching in the coming months is the first By the People transcription project with the Library’s Geography and Map Reading Room. The Atlantic Neptune nautical atlases contain nautical charts published for the Royal Navy of Great Britain depicting the most detailed surveys of North American coastal areas and harbors in the 18th-century. Because of this detail, they were heavily used by British warships during the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783). Significant text accompanies charts and views of the eastern coast of North America from Cape Breton in Nova Scotia to the West Indies. You can learn more about these atlases in a 2020 blog post from the late Ed Redmond of the Geography and Map Reading Room – The Atlantic Neptune: An Unparalleled Collection of British Nautical Charts.
Another campaign we’re looking forward to is Early American Sheet Music from the Performing Arts Reading Room. Published in America before, during, and soon following the Revolution, these pieces document musical and social trends in early American society, identify key figures that shaped American music, and demonstrate the strong cultural ties to their homelands that remained a part of everyday life for European-Americans, even after the Revolutionary War.
Dive into The American Revolution In Context now on the By the People website and keep an eye out for the additional transcription projects this coming year!
Are you a librarian or educator? Learn more about how to get your community involved in an upcoming By the People webinar in collaboration with the Long Island Library Research Council. Details and registration information available here.
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