Founders Online, a tool for seamless searching across the papers of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, launched in 2013. Since then, the tool has grown to a fully searchable online database of over 165,000 documents, including thousands of documents that have not yet appeared in the published volumes.
The site has had nearly 750,000 unique visitors—an average of over 42,000 people each month.
We continue to hear remarkable stories about how researchers are using the site and the surprising items they’ve found. Here are some unique uses of the content found on Founders Online:
- Founders Online is cited in Harvard’s Arnoldia magazine article, “The Pawpaw, a Forgotten North American Fruit Tree”.
- The Philadelphia Museum of Art used Founders Online to conduct research for their catalogue of American silver in their collection.
- Users can also search Founders Online for Oaths of Allegiance during the Revolutionary War. One noteworthy oath is the one taken by Alexander Hamilton when he was Washington’s Aide-de-camp.
- Gates Thomas, a composer and associate professor at Berklee College of Music, has written a cantata based on George Washington’s Revolutionary War letters found in Founders Online. You can hear the cantata in this “With Good Reason” radio broadcast at about the 26:00 mark.
What have you found in Founders Online?