About the Fund

The David Crockett Graham Historical Fund, Inc. is a nonprofit incorporated in the State of Colorado to promote the legacy and ideals of David Crockett Graham, including through the preservation of primary source materials, fostering scholarship related to David Crockett Graham’s life and work, and other related charitable and educational purposes.

The Fund’s initial plan, which depends on receiving sufficient donations and/or grants, includes funding a work-study student for one or more academic years to digitize primary source documents from the David Crockett Graham Archive Trust so that these materials can be made more widely available to scholars. The plan also includes the possibility of funding one or more undergraduate scholarships for young scholars interested in the Republican Era history of Southwest China from a perspective of missionary work, anthropological studies, or archeological studies with a connection to David Crockett Graham.

The first year work-study project has been initiated at Mount Holyoke College. The work is being done at Special Collections and Archives in the College Library under the supervision of the History department. This project has a dual purpose in helping us process our collection of letters and documents and also providing the history student with a hands on practicum in working with and digitizing primary source materials. Look for upcoming articles in News and Views.

Other projects that are in progress include collecting the complete works of David Crockett Graham, digitizing them, and producing and distributing digital media. With 224 works that have been identified, we currently have 148 as pdf files. Because of the turbulent times in China when many of these were published, it has become difficult to find some of them. We are also working on an English language edition of Graham’s Autobiography. It has already been translated into Chinese and published by Tiandi Press in Chengdu.* The English manuscript has been retyped, proofed, and annotated. We hope to put this out as a digital version alongside the original scanned manuscript and then eventually publish an edited hard copy version with illustrations and added material.

As we scan and digitize more primary source documents, we will begin looking for volunteers in a crowdsourcing effort to transcribe cursive handwritten letters. Graham’s handwriting can be difficult even for those accustomed to reading cursive. For the younger generation, and for those whose first language doesn’t even use the Roman alphabet, it can seem cryptic beyond recognition. Producing typed transcripts will make these historical materials available to a much wider audience.

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*Graham, David Crocket (2022). 葛维汉在华西 (Ge Weihan in West China). Translated by Bian Simei and Peng Wenbin. Tiandi Publishing House, Chengdu. 205pp.