Proposing a Primary Text for the Teaching Transatlanticism Website
We welcome submissions of new primary text entries for the website.
To propose an entry, please:
• Identify a text originally published between 1776 and 1920 that you think would be of interest to our website’s audiences. Avoid texts already published in our print anthology. If you want to propose a text already represented in the digital anthology, yours could be a different excerpt from a long piece but should not directly duplicate an entry already available in our online collection.
When choosing potential entries, ask yourself what makes your candidate text “transatlantic”? (For instance, did it circulate on both sides of the transatlantic? Did it come from one geographic [e.g., national] space but address questions/topics related to the other or to the larger transatlantic world?)
• Consider what theme or themes in our digital and print anthologies your proposed text addresses.
• Find a public domain copy of the text that you could use for transcribing an accurate copy. Your source text version doesn’t need to be from the original date of publication, but it does need to be from within the 1776-1920 time frame for our project. Save the link to the specific copy you identified, unless you’d be working from a print original. (Print originals to use might include a copy held by a university library or a personal copy.)
Good places to look for digital public domain copies include HaithiTrust, Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg. Note that copies from subscription services such as ProQuest are not possible to use, despite an original publication date within the category of public domain texts. Prepare a citation of your source for the text.
• Consider a few topics you would like to address in a headnote. Generally, one of these should position the text in a transatlantic context; others might focus on the author as a transatlantic figure, the history and impact of the text’s circulation in a transnational way, and reasons/ways the piece links intertextually with themes and/or other entries in the print or digital anthology.