The Nathanael Greene Papers Project
Begun in 1971, the Papers project is a multi-volume edition of the correspondence of Greene, drawn from more than 100 repositories in numerous states and abroad. These documents have important national significance as a complete first-person account of the American Revolution, expressed in the words of some of the nation's most noted patriots.
Greene himself was aware of the significance of his letters to the history of his newly independent nation. During the last months of the war, he assembled his surviving documents in some order and filled two trunks with some 6,000 documents of a personal and official nature. He was concerned that Congress should have copies of the papers. Congress ordered Secretary Charles Thomson to furnish Greene with a clerk. In 1785 Greene hired Phineas Miller, a young Yale graduate, to tutor his children and transcribe his papers. At the time of Greene's death in June 1786, Miller had barely started copying the documents.
In 1971, Albert T. Klyberg, then and now the director of the Rhode Island Historical Society, proposed the publication of a letterpress edition of Greene's papers, the "bound books" of correspondence whose creation Nathanael Greene had desired and Congress had endorsed. The William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan, holder of the largest collection of the papers, co-sponsored the proposed project.
In March 1972, Richard K. Showman, who had been the assistant editor of the revised edition of the Harvard Guide to American History, was chosen as editor. Editorial offices were established at the headquarters of the Rhode Island Historical Society. Showman headed the project until his retirement in 1993, when he was succeeded as editor by Dr. Dennis Conrad, a specialist in Greene's Southern campaigns, who had been with the project since 1983.
Website: Nathanael Greene Mini-Edition (http://mep.cla.sc.edu/ng/ng-table.html)