FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 11, 2025

Naval Documents of the American Revolution Announces Collaboration with the Prize Papers Project

Charlottesville, VA —  Naval Documents of the American Revolution (NDAR), based at the University of Virginia’s Center for Digital Editing, is proud to announce a new collaboration with the Prize Papers Project, a joint initiative of the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg and The National Archives (UK), funded by the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony.

The Prize Papers Project is digitizing, cataloging, and making publicly accessible an extraordinary archive of documents captured at sea between the 17th and 19th centuries. These papers—drawn from the records of the High Court of Admiralty—include ship’s logs, cargo manifests, legal testimonies, intercepted correspondence, and court proceedings. Together, they offer a vivid and unfiltered glimpse into global maritime history.

For NDAR, the partnership brings unprecedented access to records relating to the American Revolutionary War, particularly those from the New York Vice-Admiralty Court. These materials illuminate the daily realities of wartime at sea:

• Loyalist privateers operating from occupied ports;
• Enslaved and free Black sailors navigating a dangerous Atlantic world;
• Women aboard captured ships as passengers, traders, and witnesses;
• Intercepted letters revealing private thoughts and political secrets;
• Cargo lists and testimony exposing transatlantic commerce under blockade.

“Even in our early review, the Prize Papers have revealed stories and perspectives that rarely appear in traditional archives,” said Christopher Minty, Managing Editor and Project Director of NDAR. “This collaboration allows us to expand our digital catalog, create new themed exhibit-editions, and make these documents accessible to scholars, educators, students, and the public.”

The collaboration will feed directly into NDAR’s two major digital platforms:
 

• NAVDOCS, an open-access digital catalog of Revolutionary War naval records.
• Themed exhibit-editions, which use curated document clusters to tell human-centered stories of the war at sea.

This initiative not only enriches NDAR’s holdings but also strengthens transatlantic scholarship, connecting researchers across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. The first materials from this collaboration—focused on Loyalist maritime networks, enslaved and free Black sailors, and women’s experiences at sea—will be integrated into NAVDOCS in the coming months.

About NDAR
The Naval Documents of the American Revolution is a long-running scholarly edition of primary sources documenting naval operations during the Revolutionary War. Now published by the University of Virginia’s Center for Digital Editing, NDAR combines rigorous historical editing with innovative digital tools to make this critical history accessible to a global audience.

About the Prize Papers Project
The Prize Papers Project is a collaboration between Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg and The National Archives (UK), under the auspices of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony. The project’s goal is to digitize and catalog the Prize Papers collection, which contains hundreds of thousands of documents seized from captured ships between the 17th and 19th centuries.