Bureaucracy in the Revolutionary War Era; The Very Human Burden of Applying for a Pension by Olivia Kasmin

This project explores pension data from the American Revolutionary War Pension Files collection. It provides historical context for the files and examines the distribution of applications attributed to each category (including survivors, widows, rejected, and bounty land warrants). Data has been extracted from the text using a lightweight LLM model to collect the dollar amount awarded to the recipient as well as other related fields, such as where the pension was issued and which congressional act it corresponds to. Furthermore, the text has been analyzed for commonly occurring words and themes to discover content included in these files beyond the bureaucratic paperwork. The analysis is presented through interactive interfaces that allows users to discover this rich collection and provide an opportunity to have an individual dialogue with Americans from hundreds of years ago.