It's that time again.
- John Hodgman's "Massachusetts, 'Bulwark Against the Kingdom of the Anti-Christ': A brief guide to the most important state in the union," which is a chapter in State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, can be read in today's Boston Globe. A mildly irreverent but entirely amusing look at the Bay State, written by one who knows it well.
- Ed's got the latest on the progress of the Poe Wars; he recently went into the belly of the Baltimore beast for some interviews.
- John Overholt has news on the upcoming (and eagerly awaited) "Johnson at 300" Symposium coming up at Harvard next August.
- Via AHA Today, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database is now online. It includes information on all known slave voyages, estimates on the size and scope of the slave trade, a large collection of scanned documents, maps, and illustrations, plus a significant names list. Great project.
- Also from today's Globe, Jonathan Gottschall has an essay on the importance of Homer's works on various fields of modern scholarship, from archaeology to linguistics to anthropology.
- Author Dorothy Gallagher had a poignant essay in Friday's NYTimes, "What My Copy Editor Taught Me."
- In a Guardian piece, Antonia Fraser comments on the craft of writing historical biography.
- J.L. Bell recounts a great anecdote about Sam Adams destroying his correspondence during the Revolutionary War.
- Paul Collins points out the new blog from the Times (London), Times Archive Blog.
- LISNews discovers some historical books about libraries and librarians on Google Books.
- From the Southtown Star (IL), Susan DeMar Lafferty writes about a growing movement in public libraries to scrap the Dewey Decimal System in favor of a more 'intuitive' classification system (a movement which has much in common with LT's Open Shelves Classification idea).
Reviews
- Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello continues to achieve much press attention; the author was on NPR this week to discuss the book, and James Smethurst reviews the book in today's Boston Globe.
- Louis Masur reviews John Demos' The Enemy Within, also in today's Globe. My review here.
- In today's NYTimes, Jill Abramson reviews Woodward's The War Within.
- Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder is reviewed by Mike Jay in The Telegraph.
