Found History

How to make a Leyden jar out of a two-liter Coke bottle, from MAKE Magazine. Top Ten Moments in Sitcom History. I think you’d have to put Lucy and Ethel’s stint at the conveyor belt at the top of the table, but a good list nevertheless. (Thanks, Jerm.) Prolific “junior ranger” Chance Finegan on the [...]

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Regular readers of Found History may have noticed that I removed the old tag line “unintentional, unconventional, and amateur history all around us” from the blog. When I first envisioned Found History, I thought I’d use it simply as a place to document my interest in and chronicle my chance encounters with non-professional history, mostly [...]

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Jason Calacanis got some heat yesterday for his list of 17 tips for running a startup. Some of his suggestions are typically over the top, but I have to admit that the vast majority seem right on to me, not just for startups but for digital humanities shops like CHNM. Buying Macs and second monitors, [...]

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In an interview on the most recent Digital Campus, PublicDomainReprints.org founder Yakov Shafranovich notes that one of the most popular uses of his print-on-demand service for public domain Google and Open Content Alliance books is to supply out-of-print manuals to latter day blacksmiths, pigeon breeders, and others still working in ancient, but declining, trades. Last [...]

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Just a quick reminder to Found History readers that the THATCamp deadline is quickly approaching and space is getting tight. We’ve received lots of great applications, and it promises to be a fantastic weekend. If you’re free the weekend after Memorial Day, send us an application by March 15th to join us in Fairfax for [...]

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Yesterday I spoke at the 2008 conference of the National Humanities Alliance on a panel entitled “Federal Support for History.” The purpose of the talk was to give some concrete examples from our work at CHNM of the different funding sources available from the federal government to historians and public history projects. This was supposed [...]

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In an earlier post I wrote about the early buzz around Omeka, both in the forums and among education, museum, public history, and library bloggers. One thing I didn’t mention—and frankly did not expect—was the buzz about Omeka on Twitter, the popular SMS-centered microblogging, won’t-get-it-till-you’ve-used-it social networking platform. Twitter has been getting a lot of [...]

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