I recently started reading Andrew Roberts’ The Last King of America. This is an extensive biography of King George III. I am in about fifty pages to write this blog post. So far this has been an enjoyable reading though I wouldn’t consider it a “quick read” or a “light read”.
I’m not like jumping straight into the first chapter of a book, avoiding the author’s notes, introductions, or acknowledgments. I would like to know a little bit about the author’s background and in the case of a book like The Last King of America, I would like to see who or what the author consulted while writing the book. I read the acknowledgments I learned about the online Georgian Papers program.
Roberts used in his research to write many papers for the Georgian Papers program The last king of America. He said no, but I guess he used physical and digital copies of the papers in the collection. Not all Georgian Papers program documents are available online, but more than 200,000 are accessible online.
You can simply browse through the collections available online and start reading things that might seem interesting. You can search through collections for specific items. Here are some tips on how to search the catalog. But to get a better idea of what’s in the Georgian Papers program and how researchers have used it, check out the Georgian Papers program’s virtual exhibitions.
The two virtual exhibitions of the Georgian Papers program that fascinated me were The Madness of King George Explored and The Essays of George III.
The Madness of King George Explored is a set of papers that Mark Gatis saw in preparation for his role in the Nottingham Playhouse Theater Company. The madness of King George. Papers with commentary are presented in the exhibition to illustrate the context in which they were written and who wrote the papers and who was mentioned among them. There was a crash course reading through exhibitions about how mental illness was viewed and treated in the late 18th century. Reading the commentary also gives some refreshment about the dynasty of the royal family.
The composition of George III is a collection created by Jennifer Buckley. A collection of thirteen articles selected from 8,500 documents. The articles in this collection focus on the teachings of King George III and are written on a variety of topics, from economics to the arts. For someone who is not an expert on the history of the Royal Family, the commentary is as valuable as the primary sources.