About the Project

Welcome to the Naval Documents of the American Revolution Digital Edition

With more than 22,000 documents, the Naval Documents of the American Revolution are a rich resource for anyone studying the Navy during this period and the American Revolution in general. Each volume has more than one thousand documents with annotations and source notes that indicate where the original documents are held. Introductions to the volumes are searchable and included in full and provide detailed information on the history of the series (see volume one) and the many people who contributed to, what President William J. Clinton described as a "monumental publishing project" (Volume 10, Front Matter).  

The Naval History and Heritage Command's predecessor organization, the Naval History Division, published the first NDAR volume in 1964. It includes a foreword by President John F. Kennedy. Succeeding volumes include forewords by presidents Johnson (volumes 2 & 3), Nixon (volumes 5 & 6), Ford (volume 7), Carter (volume 8), Reagan (volume 9), Clinton (volume 10), George W. Bush (volume 11), and Obama (volume 12). William Bell Clark, Dr. William James Morgan, and Dr. William Dudley preceded Dr. Michael J. Crawford as editors of the series. Dr. Crawford produced Volume 12 in 2014, the 50th anniversary of the series, with associate editor Dr. Dennis M. Conrad and assistant editors E. Gordon Bowen-Hassell and Mark L. Hayes. Charles Brodine is now the series editor. RADM Samuel Cox is the Director of the Naval History and Heritage Command and oversees the series, providing the foreword for volume 13.

Digitizing the Print Volumes

This digital edition of volumes 1-13 of the Naval Documents of the American Revolution was made possible by a generous grant from Andrew and Barbara Taylor to the Naval Historical Foundation in November 2017. Instrumental matching funds were received through the Maritime Heritage Grant from the District of Columbia Historic Preservation Office and the National Park Service1. Perdue Digital Services, LLC (PDS), was contracted to do the work of digitizing and encoding the volumes from their original Adobe Acrobat format. In 2018 PDS partnered with the Center for Digital Editing to use their Drupal-based publication platform. Staff from both contributed to the work of putting these documents online. Brumfield Labs, LLC., contributed programming work to transform XML files for ingestion to the site.

As much as possible the original appearance and structure of the print volumes has been maintained. The editorial method represented in the print volumes is respected and no revisions to the text have been made during digitizing. Every effort has been made to clean up errors that might result from optical character recognition. Complex documents with tables are frequently presented in Adobe Acrobat format in order to preserve the original presentation and alignment of numbers and columns which are necessary for meaning and accuracy. Front matter and appendices are also presented as Adobe Acrobat documents in the supplementary material. Abbreviations in the text and accompanying source notes are explained in the volume front matter. Volume indexes are not included but the user will be well served with full text search, search by date, author, recipient, volume, and series headings. Efforts have been made to create a single names list but that work is still in progress. Therefore searches on author and recipient from the pull-down menu may not be exhaustive and should be supplemented with a full text search.

Users will not find the complete Adobe Acrobat files for the volumes on this site. Those can be found at https://www.history.navy.mil/research/publications/publications-by-subje...

1. This material was produced with assistance from the Historic Preservation Fund, administered by the National Park Service, Department of the Interior. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of the Interior.