Found History

For the past few years, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has undertaken a series of public-private digitization partnerships, especially with a company called Footnote.com. These partnerships provide NARA with free digitization services, and visitors to NARA’s reading rooms with access to the products, but allow Footnote.com and NARA’s other private partners to charge [...]

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Along with “the perfect is the enemy of the good,” “release early and often” is something of a mantra around CHNM, especially when it comes to software and web application development. For a variety of reasons, not least the invaluable testing and feedback projects get when they actually make it into the wild, CHNM has [...]

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Ahoy, Mateys! Mills Kelly’s fall semester course “Lying about the Past” was revealed today in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Read how Mills and his students perpetrated an internet hoax about “the last American pirate” and what they learned in the process. The Chronicle is, unfortunately, gated, but you can read more on Mills’ fantastic [...]

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Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum & Library explores our ongoing fascination with Abraham Lincoln with 21st Century Abe. Launching officially on Lincoln’s bicentennial on February 12, 2009, the site will present reflections on Lincoln’s legacy by leading scholars and artists. More interesting is that between now and February, the project’s curators will also be using Twitter, Facebook, [...]

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The D&D crowd at MIT pays tribute to the late Gary Gygax with a large 20-sided die in Killian Court. Cartridge Save, a British ink and toner retailer posts a surprisingly in-depth history of print on its corporate blog. Yet again we find that history is good for sales.

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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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(my) History of Technology by Verie Sandborg. A retiree’s recollections of a lifetime with personal technology. Roots Television. User-generated genealogy videos. Interesting, but too many ads. Technica. An archive of lego history, including early advertisements, a numbered set listing, and an extensive timeline.

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Mark Fortner, an open source web developer who blogs at IdeaFactory, has stumbled upon a potentially useful new analytical construct for historians. In a post entitled “WTF Moments in Java History”, Fortner introduces the concept of the “WTF moment” in which contemporary observers and later analysts of historic events can only exclaim “WTF.” He writes: [...]

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More from the grocery check-out. I suppose I understand the pairing of John-John and Diana. But John Lennon and John Ritter?

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Readers of Found History and friends of CHNM will want to know that a celebration of Roy Rosenzweig’s life will be held at George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia on December 9, 2007. Please see the attached invitation for details. Directions to Mason’s Arlington campus can be found online. Additional information, along with a memory [...]

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