Charles Chesnutt: A Digital Archive
FAIN: PW-264128-19
University of Nebraska, Lincoln (Lincoln, NE 68503-2427)
Matt Cohen (Project Director: July 2018 to present)
A structural redesign of the Charles Chesnutt
Digital Archive, with the addition of more works by Chesnutt. The online reference resource would include
all of Chesnutt’s published fiction and nonfiction, a manuscript section with
hand-corrected galleys of four major works, including his first and second
novels and his biography of Frederick Douglass, and a collection of 300 contemporary
reviews of six book-length works Chesnutt published between 1899 and 1905.
Writing as Reconstruction failed, Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932) chronicled the relationships that zigzag across America’s color line. His fiction is widely taught and studied, but important works are hard to find and little attention has been given to his manuscripts. We seek an HCRR Implementation grant to transform and expand the HTML Charles Chesnutt Digital Archive into a standards-based, extensible digital archive with (1) all published works; (2) a manuscript wing with an initial collection of hand-corrected galleys held by the Cleveland Public Library, (3) contemporary reviews, and (4) the infrastructure for an archive that will grow to include three thousand manuscript pages, correspondence, and photographs. Chesnutt’s work cries out for collection: we do not have robust archives for pre-Harlem Renaissance African American writers other than Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, and students and scholars are eager to probe in new ways one of the nation’s finest writers.
Associated Products
The Charles W. Chesnutt Archive (Web Resource)Title: The Charles W. Chesnutt Archive
Author: Stephanie Browner
Author: Kenneth M. Price
Author: Matt Cohen
Abstract: The Charles W. Chesnutt Archive seeks to make Chesnutt's writings conveniently accessible to all. Writing in the years after Reconstruction as white supremacy took new virulent forms, Chesnutt addressed topics of vital concern, then and now, including race, identity, violence, class, and the familial and economic relations that zigzag across America’s color line. Drawing on the resources of libraries and collections from around the world, the open-access, online Charles W. Chesnutt Archive is the most comprehensive record of works by and about Chesnutt.
Year: 2021
Primary URL:
https://chesnuttarchive.orgPrimary URL Description: The Charles W. Chesnutt Archive entry page.