作者:Peter Olsen-Harbich博士.D. 候选人里昂·G. Tyler Department of History, William & 玛丽和NERFC研究员
Among the austere manuscripts of the Massachusetts Historical Society’s collection resides an unassuming assemblage. Weighing in at precisely ten boxes, it bears a substantive though middling rank in the vast archival stock of America. An additional marker of ordinary quality concludes the title of the collection: “Transcripts.” These are thus ten boxes of derivative, 复制 papers—primary documents by proxy only. Yet a full examination of the collection title suggests a content that is anything but mundane, for these are the “Winthrop Family Papers [Transcripts],，也被称为Ms. N-2211, 一个转录的宝库, unpublished correspondence from the family whose various progeny presided at the very center of seventeenth-century New Engl和’s political orbit.
As I began my research fellowship at the Society, I fully intended to spend my time entirely with 原始 documents, as I felt any proper historian in an archive should. But in surveying the Society’s catalog in search of 17th-century materials on New Engl和’s diplomacy with indigenous nations, it was obvious that dedicating myself to this collection of copies was in fact the most necessary task. 原始手稿, fully transcribed but never completely published by the Society over its centuries of documentary editing, are almost certainly the largest collection of unprinted personal papers before 1700 in the American archive. The contents of the collection are too numerous to mention, though they generally survey the frontier period of the Connecticut Colony 和 this epoch’s concomitant conditions of extensive relations with indigenous peoples, agricultural 和 industrial establishment, 和 the disordered medical condition of settler populations. Ms.N-2211, 然后, though modest 和 unremarkable at first glance, is nothing less than the invaluable treasure of the most significant archival project in early American history.
Much of the 温斯洛普论文 has already been published. Six volumes of records from this collection, inclusive of those documents dated from 1498-1654, were printed by the Society in the twentieth-century in two distinct editorial phrases. The first occurred between 1929 和 1947 和 published all the Winthrop family papers dated between 1498 和 1649 in five volumes. It appears that an effort to complete publication of the papers was resumed in the 1960s 和 ran into the late 1980s, during which time the entire collection was transcribed 和 partially annotated. These transcriptions were the tireless 和 diligent work of Dr. 弗莱·古瑟姆少校, whom former MHS Director of Research Conrad Wright recalls clacking on a typewriter in the Society’s stacks deep into the evenings of his early professional years. One additional volume was produced by this effort in 1992, extending the publication’s chronology through 1654. 但博士. Gutheim’s efforts were far vaster than this single volume: she had transcribed the entire collection, with documents spanning 1655-1741 (bulk pre-1700) across the decades of work. As the publication project faded from active endeavor into a Society legacy, the transcripts remained: ten boxes worth of near-perfect paleographic detours around cribbed 17th-century h和.
