Two Hundred Years of Acquiring the Fifty Years of the Colonial Records of Georgia: A Chapter in Failure in Historical Publication

Authors

Robert Scott Davis Jr., George C Wallace State Community College - HancevilleFollow

Date of this Version

3-2001

Document Type

Article

Citation

Documentary Editing, Volume 23, Number 1, March 2001.

ISSN 2476-1796 (electronic); ISSN 2167-1451 (print)

Comments

2001 © the Association for Documentary Editing. Used by permission.

Abstract

In 1799, Georgia made the earliest attempt of any state to obtain copies of its colonial records from Europe. The history of its subsequent efforts to obtain and publish this earliest documentation well represents the problems and attempted solutions made by the many other such projects in the two centuries that followed. After all of the efforts to make its colonial records accessible, the state still does not have . a complete and credible publication of these records, and this goal remains elusive.

Part of the difficulty stems from decisions on editing, problems that originated in the acquisition of copies of the records. After copies were obtained, the editors of Georgia's colonial records have had to address other questions of how much of this material to publish and in what formats. The editing, like the acquisition, has a history of decisions based too often on politics and limited funds. Even now, no project has yet attempted an electronic publication of the available colonial records.