The Bay Observer: HPL Treasure Trove Of Historical Drama Books Goes Digital. “Hamilton Public Library has found a world stage for more than 1,000 books it previously held about 18th and 19th Century theatre. The recent donation to the Internet Archive gives readers all around the world online access to the soon-to-be digitized collection.”
Agenda Georgia: Illustrations of people and places of 19th century Caucasus now in National Archives of Georgia digital collection. “A series of 19th century illustrations of people and places of the South Caucasus, published in a French magazine around 150 years ago, can now be viewed by those interested in history and ethnography on the website of the National Archives of Georgia. Presenting city-dwellers and countryside folks of different ethnicities who lived and worked in cities, towns and villages, the works show Georgia and the wider region as it appeared to ethnographers and travellers between the 1840s and 1870s.”
DigitalNC: New Newspaper Title, The Wilmington Sun, Now Online. “176 issues of The Wilmington Sun are now available for browsing on DigitalNC. This a brand new addition to our newspaper collection and we would like to thank our partners at New Hanover County Public Library for making this possible.”
Ursinus College: Digital Archive of Collegeville’s First Newspaper Now Available Online. “In cooperation with Historic Trappe, Ursinus College’s Library & Information Technology Department has been working to digitize and make available Collegeville’s first newspaper, The Providence Independent, which ran from 1875 to 1898.”
DigitalNC: Eastern Carolina News New to DigitaNC. “DigitalNC is happy to announce that we are now home to 51 late 19th century issues of Eastern Carolina News. We would like to thank our partners at Trenton Public Library for contributing this new title to our digital newspaper collection.”
Qatar National Library: Qatar Digital Library Sheds Light on the First Communications Revolution in the Gulf. “…in the 1860s, Britain sought to build a commercial telegraph line all the way to its most important colony, British India. As a result, the Gulf became one of the most important communication corridors of the British Empire. A series of historical documents held by the British Library and now available on the QDL reveal how the proposal to extend Britain’s telegraph line through the Gulf was first made in May 1860. That month, John Wortley de la More, an entrepreneur in the telegraph industry, outlined his plans to extend the existing lines further through Persia and the Gulf by establishing a link first from Baghdad to Basra, and then from Basra to Karachi, British India’s westernmost port (in modern-day Pakistan).”
Adam Matthew: Adam Matthew Digital announces publication of ‘Nineteenth Century Literary Society: The John Murray Publishing Archive’. “Drawn from the holdings of the National Library of Scotland, AM Digital’s latest collection, Nineteenth Century Literary Society: The John Murray Publishing Archive is an unparalleled resource for scholars and academics interested in the history of the book, literature and nineteenth-century history. From its inception in 1768, the John Murray publishing house worked with influential authors whose famed titles continue to shape literature to this day, including Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Herman Melville and Lord Byron.” If you’re not familiar with Adam Matthew, I’ll let you know it’s not free.
The Text Message (National Archives): Over 650 Newly Digitized Navy Logbooks in the National Archives Catalog. “These firsthand accounts of the Battle of New Orleans during the Civil War are just small snippets from two Navy logbooks, which are part of 653 digitized logbooks from 30 Navy vessels that recently became available in the National Archives Catalog (see list below). These logbooks were digitized in the Innovation Hub at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, DC, by a team of five graduate student interns working on a project titled ‘Seas of Knowledge: Digitization and Retrospective Analysis of the Historical Logbooks of the United States Navy.’ This project will continue through 2021 and will focus on digitizing Navy logbooks for the period 1861-1879, after having made 548 volumes of associated muster rolls available in the NARA catalog last year.”
KCUR: All Of Missouri Painter George Caleb Bingham’s Work Will Soon Be Free To The World Online. “Missouri painter George Caleb Bingham shaped the way the nation saw life on the frontier. His work spanned politics, civil war discord and rowdy riverboatmen, and his genre paintings of 19th century river life are in many major national art collections. Within the next three years, all of Bingham’s nearly 600 known paintings will be accessible online and freely available to the public.”
The Conversation: How tattoos became fashionable in Victorian England. “…we carried out the largest analysis of tattoos ever undertaken, examining 75,688 descriptions of tattoos, on 57,990 convicts in Britain and Australia from 1793 to 1925. We used data-mining techniques to extract information embedded within broader descriptive fields of criminal records, and we linked this information with extensive evidence about the personal characteristics and backgrounds of our subjects. Because the meanings of tattoos are often so difficult to fathom, we used visualisations to identify patterns of use and juxtapositions of particular designs.” This new database of tattoos is one of the new datasets from Digital Panopticon. There’s another new feature that lets you search convicts by occupation.
Digital Library of Georgia: Georgia Civil War and Reconstruction newspapers now freely available online . “As part of a $27,405.00 grant from the R. J. Taylor, Jr. Foundation, the Digital Library of Georgia has digitized over 100,000 pages of Georgia newspaper titles published from 1861 to 1877 from microfilm held by the Georgia Newspaper Project.”
National Tribune: Queenslands lost hi 1800s Indigenous police database launched at museum. Not sure what’s going on with the headline. “The archive – the Frontier Conflict and the Native Mounted Police in Queensland Database – is the result of a four-year project funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) and undertaken by University of Southern Queensland (USQ), Flinders University, The University of Notre Dame, James Cook University and Northern Archaeology Consultancies. It was launched at Queensland Museum yesterday (December 9) and includes more than 11,000 documents about 200 Native Mounted Police camps, 12,000 artefacts, 400 officers, 850 troopers and 1800 frontier conflict events across Queensland through the 19th century.”
State Archives of North Carolina: Early Newspapers Added to DigitalNC. “In 2009, the North Carolina Digitization Project allowed the State Archives to digitize newspapers that were, up until that time, only available on microfilm. Made possible by a LSTA grant provided by the State Library of North Carolina, it included papers dating from 1752-1890s from cities like Edenton (1787-1801), Fayetteville (1789-1795), Hillsboro (1786), New Bern (1751-1804), Salisbury (1799-1898), and Wilmington (1765-1816).”
From RTL News, and translated from Dutch by Google Translate: Digital slave registers Suriname are ‘warning against slavery’. “It took two years, but tomorrow is finally there: the Surinamese slave registers have been fully digitized. The records contain about eighty thousand names of slave owners and people who lived in slavery in Suriname between 1826 and 1863, as well as information about the birth, death, sale and release of slaves.” I didn’t recall hearing about Suriname, so I looked it up and fell smack down a rabbit hole.
Ars Technica: Scientists unlock the chemical secrets of a 19th-century photography technique. “Mordançage is a photographic process that yields striking black-and-white photographs characterized by ghostly veiling effects. Scientists from George Mason University have recently figured out precisely what is happening chemically during the process, according to a recent paper in Analytical Chemistry.”
