This lecture examines the more than 600 new manuscript additions to the David Bates Douglass Papers and provides a glimpse of an early nineteenth-century American family.

"Getting to work with the David Bates Douglass Papers has helped deepen my understanding of the ways that librarians, information technology specialists, and archivists shape historical work. For example, as a historian who always incorporates gender and class in my scholarship, I could use those skills to identify elements of gender and class within the overall collection, thus showing how much broader the collection is in its scope. Therefore, one of the most important aspects of this experience, for me, was learning the significance of bringing diverse people and skills to the work of organizing and preserving the objects that connect us to the the past, and that make up the material historians use for its interpretation."

-Katie LaPlant