Hyperallergic: A New Illustrated Database for Women Artists Spans the 15th to 19th Centuries. “‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,’ Virginia Woolf famously said from a college lecture podium in 1928, in what later evolved into a major feminist book. Surely, those two amenities would facilitate the career of many a woman visual artist, too. But even the privileged combination of financial independence and a studio (plus talent, of course) hasn’t been enough to secure many female creatives a place in the pantheon of art history.”
19th Century
Virtual Victorians: Using 21st-century technology to evaluate 19th-century texts (Princeton University)
Princeton University: Virtual Victorians: Using 21st-century technology to evaluate 19th-century texts. “In the 19th century, printing technology changed the way readers experienced texts. Today, students and researchers are using digital technology to access historical literary texts in new ways and finding surprising echoes of the past in their own lives.”
New Online: Diarist Documents Eventful Times on the Confederate Home Front (Library of Congress)
Library of Congress: New Online: Diarist Documents Eventful Times on the Confederate Home Front. “‘A diary, faithfully kept in such eventful times as these, must be interesting to our own children,’ wrote Betty Herndon Maury on June 3, 1861, explaining her purpose in keeping a journal after Maury’s family chose to leave Washington, D.C., to cast its lot with the new Confederate States of America. By October 1861, Maury feared that she already had recorded so much that her diary would be ‘too voluminous’ for her daughter, Nannie Belle, to read later. Fortunately for posterity, Maury continued to write, recognizing that ‘these are such eventful times and there are so many interesting incidents that I do not know which to omit.’ Maury’s two-volume diary is now available online at the Library of Congress.”
Fold3: New Naval Records Added to Fold3!
Fold3: New Naval Records Added to Fold3!. “This month, Fold3 is pleased to highlight two new collections of naval records we’ve added to our archives. The first collection is Letters Received by the Secretary of Navy (‘Captains’ Letters’) dated 1805-1885. The second collection is Letters Received by the Secretary of the Navy from Commanding Officers of Squadrons between 1841-1886. These letters are in original manuscript form.”
Library of Congress: Exploring Late 1800s Political Cartoons through Interactive Data Visualizations
Library of Congress: Exploring Late 1800s Political Cartoons through Interactive Data Visualizations. “Over the course of my three month internship with the LC Labs team, I developed a website/interactive data visualization which allows users to explore the late 1800s through political cartoons contained in the Cartoon Drawings collection. The main feature of the website is an interactive timeline that displays the number of cartoons in this collection, graphed by year. Users can select specific topics like ‘Grover Cleveland’ or ‘Caricatures’, then the timeline will update to show how these topics are represented over time.” How cool is this?
BBC: Cambridge University anti-women students ‘confetti and rockets’ digitised
BBC: Cambridge University anti-women students ‘confetti and rockets’ digitised. “Confetti and fireworks, collected at an 1897 street protest opposing women’s rights to get university degrees, are to be digitised for public record. They date from a demonstration in Cambridge held by male students opposed to student equality.”
UCR Today: Historian’s Database Offers New View of Colonial California
UCR Today: Historian’s Database Offers New View of Colonial California. “Understanding American history is a challenge, but what happens when some of that history is scattered, inaccessible, and in another language? Steven Hackel, a professor of history at the University of California, Riverside, knows these obstacles all too well. Hackel was recently awarded an archival grant by the John Randolph Haynes Foundation to continue his work with The Pobladores Project Database, which aims to provide a greater understanding of the non-American Indian population in colonial California through 1850.”
