Darwin Manuscripts Project Launches New Two-Year Project

The Darwin Manuscripts Project has been awarded a two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize 30,000 of Darwin's scientific manuscripts and letters. The "Foundations of Darwin's Science: A Digital Manuscripts Collection" will allow the Darwin Manuscripts Project to mount high resolution scans of the entire set of Darwin's scientific manuscripts that are directly concerned with evolutionary science. The collection includes all the creation of On the Origin of Species documents and all the documents of Darwin's post-Origin evolutionary science. Thus all Darwin's botany and all his work on human evolution are included. The Darwin Manuscripts Project already provides high quality edited transcriptions for many of these documents, so the scope of this effort is transformative to the historical significance, quality, and amount of Darwin manuscripts that will be publicly accessible. This digitization project will be carried out as a close collaboration between Cambridge University, the Darwin Correspondence Project, and the Darwin Manuscripts Project of the American Museum of Natural History.