SCOS co-directors Jim Ambuske, Randi Flaherty, and Loren S. Moulds have published a new article on the project in Scottish Archives, the journal of the Scottish Records Association.
Entitled "Recovering Hidden Histories of Early America and the British Atlantic World with the Scottish Court of Session Digital Archive Project," Ambuske, Flaherty, and Moulds argue that Session Papers are a largely untapped resource for reconstructing the lives of Scots, British Americans, enslaved peoples, and countless others who came into contact with Scotland's supreme civil court in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Their work explores Session Papers as historical artifacts, illuminating the critical role they played in shaping the law and legal knowledge in this period, and reconstructs the history of the UVA Law Library's own collection of these documents. They also details the project team's efforts to build a digital framework that will enable scholars and the public to use Session Papers in research and teaching, allowing them to recover the hidden lives within them.
The essay resulted from the project team's November 2017 presentation on SCOS to the annual meeting of the Scottish Records Association in Edinburgh.
