Primary source documentation of the American Chestnut Blight in Tennessee, 1905 - 1950

This datasets was collected for a case study that sought to reconstruct the spatio-temporal spread of the American chestnut blight in Tennessee by collecting, reconciling, and analyzing heterogeneous archival and special collections materials from 1904 to 1950, the major period of infection and tree loss. Using the spread of the American chestnut blight in Tennessee as a case study, the project explored the potential for archival resources to serve as proxy data sources for the compilation of historical climate datasets., The spread of the American chestnut blight in Tennessee was recreated using data obtained from the archival record. Digitized primary source materials were gathered through keyword searches in Chronicling America, Google Books, the National Agricultural Library Digital Collections, Newspapers.com Southeast Edition, Open Parks Network, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, the Tennessean Archives, Tennessee Virtual Archive, University of Tennessee Digital Collections, University of Memphis Digital Commons, Archives of Appalachia, and the digital collections listed on the Tennessee Archives Directory webpage. The initial keywords used to locate relevant resources were selected according to the Library of Congress authorities file for the American chestnut tree. These topical terms include the subject heading American chestnut and the tracing and reference terms American chestnut tree, Castanea dentata, and Castanea. Other keywords were identified from the metadata and text of relevant primary s..., , # Primary Source Documentation of the American Chestnut Blight in Tennessee, 1905 - 1950

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.h70rxwdrr](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.h70rxwdrr)

## Description of the data and file structure

This repository contains the complete raw data used to model the socio-temporal spread of the American chestnut blight, as recorded in the human record.

Measured variables include date, location, latitude, longitude, chestnut status, document type, document title, search terms, source, website, and URL. Latitude and longitude entries support spatial modeling, while the date entry supports temporal modeling. The file is compatible with GIS software, Jupyter Notebooks, and RStudio.

No codebook is needed to interpret the dataset.

## Sharing/Access information

Data was derived from the following sources:

* Chronicling America
* Google Books
* National Agricultural Library Digital Collections
* Newspapers.com Southeast Edition
* Open Parks Network
* ProQuest...