• Washington, July 7, 2020 •

Today we added a new section to the website: Transcription Challenges! This new feature will offer our volunteer transcribers the opportunity to work with particular sets of correspondence in the German Heritage in Letters collection. Each challenge will focus on a group of letters written by a single person, found in a specific collection, or based on a particular theme, and we will seek our volunteers’ help in transcribing the letters and adding to our knowledge about the important historical sources that are part of our collection.

Our first challenge focuses on a small set of letters written by astronomer Peter Hansen to his daughter, Marie Hansen Taylor. They are part of the Marie Hansen Taylor Correspondence, a large group of letters drawn from the Bayard Taylor Papers, named for Marie Hansen Taylor’s husband, author Bayard Taylor, now held by the Houghton Library at Harvard University.

We look forward to finding out more about Peter Hansen’s letters and other collections that will be shared in future challenges!

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