8 July 2012
by andrew
Comments Off on learning to cursive
Judith Thurman’s recent post at the New Yorker blog on cursive handwriting and the Declaration of Independence reminded me of something I wrote some time ago about my own experiences learning to write and read cursive. Reading it over now, I … Continue reading
23 December 2009
by andrew
Comments Off on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in storage
If you read this post and were wondering what I was writing about the Declaration of Independence, you can now read it here at the Edge of the American West.
18 December 2009
by andrew
2 Comments
You know those stories about immigrants having their names changed, not by their own choice, upon arrival at Ellis Island or other points of entry? I hadn’t given them much thought, but it turns out that most of the stories, … Continue reading
18 December 2009
by andrew
Comments Off on merely synthetic
Years ago, ex-blogger (and current twitterer) Caleb McDaniel wrote a post about academic plagiarism called “Good Fear and Bad.” The good fear was the fear of committing plagiarism that keeps academics vigilant, guarding against carelessness and error in their own … Continue reading
6 December 2009
by andrew
Comments Off on off file
I saw this last year over on Crooked Timber, but I was reminded of it recently and it’s still good, so I’m posting it here. This was one of four short films made using archival content from Getty Images’ Hulton … Continue reading
3 December 2009
by andrew
Comments Off on historians and their fact-finding
I’ve been browsing through studies of archival users over the past few days and have been finding them fascinating. (This probably says something about me.) There seems to have been a huge upsurge in interest in studying users within the … Continue reading
9 October 2009
by andrew
2 Comments
From the “News Notes” section of the October 1952 edition of The American Archivist: Messages addressed to the Senate by Presidents Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Van Buren, and Polk are among documents sent to the National Archives … Continue reading
1 February 2009
by andrew
2 Comments
I’m a huge fan of re-photography – the practice of re-staging old photographs as precisely as possible and then comparing the earlier and later. Third View, focusing on the American west, is a good example. But these shots of St. … Continue reading
29 January 2009
by andrew
Comments Off on following leaders
0.2: Fifty-five Bostonians, including the president of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell, signed a petition accusing Brandeis of lacking the “judicial temperament.” It was the kind of campaign that could get people muttering that if those guys didn’t like Brandeis, maybe … Continue reading
8 January 2009
by andrew
Comments Off on if it’s not in a dictionary, is it even a word?
Often, yes.