It is with great pleasure, and no small amount of trepidation, that I announce the launch of the Early American Foreign Service Database (EAFSD to its friends).  While the EAFSD has been designed as an independent, secondary source publication, it also exists symbiotically with my dissertation “Revolution-Mongers: Launching the U.S. Foreign Service, 1775-1825.”

I created the EAFSD to help me track the many diplomats, consuls, and special agents sent abroad by the various American governments during the first fifty-years of American state-building.  Currently the database contains basic information about overseas assignments and a few dives into data visualization (an interactive Google map and Moritz Stefaner’s Relation Browser).

I have been a reluctant convert to the principles of Web 2.0, and I keenly feel the anxiety of releasing something before my perfectionist tendencies have been fully exhausted.  The pages of the EAFSD are therefore sprinkled with requests for feedback and my (hopefully humorous) under construction page, featuring Benjamin West’s unfinished masterpiece the “American Commissioners of the Preliminary Peace Agreement with Great Britain.”

Over the next few months (and coming years) I will be adding more information to the database, allowing me to trace the social, professional, and correspondence networks from which American foreign service officers drew the information they needed to represent their new (and often disorganized) government.  I will also be enhancing the data visualizations to include hypertrees, time lines, and network graphs.

This launch has been over two years in the making.  As I look back over that time, I am amazed at the generous support I have received from my colleagues at the University of Virginia and the Digital Humanities community writ large.  I wrote an extended acknowledgments page for the EAFSD, my humble attempt to recognize the help and encouragement that made this project possible.

Launching the EAFSD also gives me a chance to test Project Quincy, the open-source software package I am developing for tracing historical networks through time and space.  The EAFSD is the flagship (read guinea pig) application for Project Quincy.  I hope my work will allow other scholars to explore the networks relevant to their own research.

To that end the EAFSD is, and always will be, open access and open source.