History @ CUL

More Digitized Historical Newspapers Available

As part of its effort to return the Cornell University Library to its position among the top ten academic institutions in terms of collections support, the Library has started to draw down on funds that have been in reserve for a range of projects and divert them to collections support.We were able to make several one-time purchases at the end of the calendar year which are now available through the catalog.  Two are of special interest:

• We have added Series 2 of America’s Historical Newspapers.  That means that we now have Series 1, 2, 3, and 6 in addition to a collection of African American Newspapers from 1827-1998.  All are cross-searchable from http://resolver.library.cornell.edu/misc/5719541. Series 2 adds 250 significant 18th- and 19th-century newspapers from all 50 present states.
• We have also added the Times Digital Archive to the collection.  This consists of the full-text of Times of London from 1785 to 1985.  For the time being, it can be searched as part of Gale’s News Vault at http://resolver.library.cornell.edu/misc/7563970. In the future, you should be able to search for “Times Digital Archive” in the catalog for a link that will take you to just this paper.

 

An Award-winning Set of LBJ Recordings

The Presidential Recordings of Lyndon B. Johnson Digital Edition has won the Association of American Publishers’ 2011 PROSE Award for Best eProduct in the Humanities, and CHOICE magazine named it an Outstanding Academic Title for 2011.  Published by Rotunda, the digital imprint of the University of Virginia, the Edition contains “hundreds of hours of presidential tapes covering the major issues of Johnson’s administration, from the War on Poverty to the Civil Rights Movement to the Vietnam War…. Each conversation in the edition is fully transcribed and annotated and accompanied by its audio file, and the multimedia presentation includes photos and video galleries, a linked timeline, and powerful XML-based searching ability.”

The Cornell University Library subscribes to the Edition.  You can find it at http://resolver.library.cornell.edu/misc/7183041.

Recognition for Hyman’s Debtor Nation

Congratulations are due to Louis Hyman for the selection of his book Debtor Nation: A History of America in Red Ink as one of Choice magazine’s “Top 25 Outstanding Academic Titles of 2011.”

If you want to read more from Prof. Hyman, be sure to see his recent opinion piece for Bloomberg on “How Did World War II End the Great Depression?“

House of Commons Parliamentary Papers

At the urging of several faculty in the History Department and at ILR, the Library has acquired access to the digital version of the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (HCPP).  HCPP includes over 200,000 House of Commons sessional papers from 1715 to the present, with supplementary material back to 1688. It offers page images and searchable full text for each paper, along with detailed indexing.

This resource should be invaluable to anyone interested in areas that interacted with the British Empire. It encompasses all areas of social, political, economic, and foreign policy, and demonstrates “how issues were explored and legislation was formed. Many contributors to the papers were found outside the official world, providing evidence or supplying memoranda to committees and commissions.”

Digital Microfilm at The National Archives (UK)

The National Archives in the UK has an exciting new initiative.  Called “Digital Microfilm,” it is PDF versions of microfilm reels that can be downloaded for free.  The PDFs are quite large and the records have not been indexed so you will need to scroll through them, much as you would when using a microfilm.  Nevertheless, this should greatly increase the utility of some of their most popular film.

Films are available from a variety of ministries and cover records from the mid-17th century through World War II.  A complete list of available records is found here.

Full-text links added to 19th Century Masterfile

Many Cornell historians know about 19th Century Masterfile, the online version of many standard 19th century periodical indexes, including Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature, 1802-1906, the Index to Legal Periodical Literature, 1786-1937, and the Royal Society’s Catalogue of Scientific Papers, 1800-1900.  But did you know that it has been adding links to a variety of full-text resources so that it is possible to move directly from index to the article or book?  Currently there are over 13 million links to full-text included in the index.  The most recent addition is 2.5 million links to titles included in the Hathi Trust database, which was described in this History@CUL posting.  Future plans include links to many of the items included in the ArtSTOR database of images.

19th Century Masterfile was always a useful resource, but with the addition of these full-text links, it has become even more important for any scholar of the period.  You can find its catalog record here, or connect directly from here.

Reviews: Parmenter’s “The edge of the woods: Iroquoia, 1534-1701”

“Parmenter (Cornell) offers an intriguing new approach and argument to a heavily studied subject: the Iroquois League’s response to European colonization.” <snip> “Summing Up: Highly recommended” M. D. Bergmann, Randolph-Macon College.  Choice, April, 2011.  Full review here.

Steven Kaplan on the History of the History of Food

The Browser magazine recently interviewed Steven Kaplan for its “5 Books” feature, in which the interview discusses five books that he considers to be of importance to food history.  Along the way, Kaplan has a chance to talk about the field’s historiography and his own interactions with the study of food.  Highly recommended.

Reviews: Norton’s “Separated by their Sex”

Reviews for Mary Beth Norton’s new book, Separated by their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World, are starting to appear.  They will be posted here as I become aware of them:

Joyce E. Chaplin, “When Women Lost the Vote,” NY Times, Sunday, 17 June 2011.

“The gendered public-private divide originated in eighteenth-century England:” An interview with Mary Beth Norton, ROROTOKO, 15 June 2011.

Added on 4 July: My attention was just drawn to two related older items: Prof. Norton’s essay from April on “How to Write a Trilogy Without Really Trying” on HNN, and a blog entry about the essay on the Chronicle blog Tenured Radical.

Book Reviews in European History

There is a new, free metasearch tool that presents book reviews in European history. Recensio.net is intended to be “a Europe-wide, multi-language platform for reviews of historical literature.” It is a joint project of the Bavarian State Library (BSB) Munich, the German Historical Institute Paris (DHIP) and the Institute for European History (IEG) Mainz, and is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

Currently 23 journals are contributing their book review sections to Recensio.net. You can find a list of participants at http://www.recensio.net/rezensionen/zeitschriften. In addition, authors are encouraged to add abstracts and descriptions of their articles, books, and online resources. It is possible to subscribe to feeds that provide access to new content as the site is updated.

Recensio.net promises to become an important tool for those interested in current historical publications in European history.

« go back — keep looking »