The Papers of William Short aims to illuminate a native Virginian, who lived seventeen years in Europe and then almost half a century in Philadelphia, and who, throughout his life, showed an ability to navigate confidently and with vision the choppy waters of an Atlantic world in full convulsion and reconfiguration, as well as an early United States in transformation and development.

This ten-year project, which started in fall 2022, will complete the full editorial treatment and publication of approximately 3,000 documents and the calendaring of the other 9,000. The edition will be updated on a regular basis with the addition of documents, that is the transcriptions of Short’s incoming and outgoing correspondence, and the translations to English of his letters in French and Spanish.