People of the Founding Era (PFE)
About PFE
An award from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation has allowed Documents Compass to begin work on a scholarly resource to create a biographical glossary combined with a group study (prosopography) of Americans born between 1713 (the end of Queen Anne’s War) and 1815 (the end of the Napoleonic Wars
People of the Founding Era (PFE) is be an important new scholarly resource. It consists of both a biographical dictionary and a platform for the study of groups, also known as prosopography. Readers will be able to move from the individual to the group and back again.
The project has begun by extracting biographies from the documentary editions of the founding era such as the Papers of George Washington, the Adams Papers, the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, the Dolley Madison Digital Edition, and the Letters of Benjamin Rush. The intention is to include as many and various sources as possible.
PFE will allow scholars, students, teachers, and members of the general public to locate literally thousands of people who lived during the founding era. Not only will PFE provide basic biographical information about well-known leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, Mercy Otis Warren, and Henry Knox, it will make available facts about the lesser known people of the era including county lawyers and farmers, artists and writers, merchants and store keepers, wives and daughters, and slaves and native Americans. This information will be gathered into a database that will allow the reader to explore the nature of these groups and how they changed over time. Who were the Virginia county lawyers; who among those born in Virginia stayed there and who migrated south, north, or west; where were the members of American Colonization Society drawn from, and what might we find out about the members of a literary society formed in Cincinnati in 1803.
People of the Founding Era will expand our knowledge and our understanding of the founding era of the American nation.