The content of this site was written by six Grinnell College students-- Betsey Blanche, Elizabeth Braverman, Sarah Cornwell, Elisa Lenssen, Sara Millhouse, and Justin Wallace--in the summer of 2004 as part of a Mentored Advanced Project (MAP) directed by Erik Simpson of Grinnell's English department.

The students began the summer seminar by immersing themselves in some parts of the literature and history of Britain and the United States in the 1790s. They then collaborated on a detailed chronology covering the years 1789 to 1800 and an annotated bibliography of critical writing on the same period. Near the end of the ten-week term of the course, each student produced a project addressing a narrower concern of their choice. The summer students developed this site with multiple audiences in mind, including the local audience of Simpson's seminar on the same subject in the fall semester of 2004, which will build on the work you see here.

All of the content of this site, including the HTML code of the project pages, was written by the six students named above. Eschewing the conveniences of Web design software in favor of the old-school pleasures of working raw code, they composed their pages in a basic text editor. Erik Simpson, the faculty director of the project, coded the HTML and PHP of the rest of the site's pages and administered the MySQL databases that underlie the dynamic parts of the site.

The MAP was a full-time project for ten weeks. Thanks to many kinds of support from Grinnell College, the group was able to use three different locations as bases for group work: a seminar room on campus, Grinnell's Technology Discovery Center, and the Main Library of the University of Iowa. In many ways, the MAP attempted to explore ways in which group research--here and elsewhere generally the province of scientific and social scientific disciplines--could work in the humanities.

The participants of this project wish to thank Marci Sortor, John Stone, Sam Rebelsky, and Karen McRitchie for their logistical support.