Library of Congress Adds New Material to Online American History
The Library of Congress has further enriched its already large collection of material on American history, with digitized versions of Samuel Morse Papers, Woodie Guthrie correspondence, and material on American expansion, the Haymarket Affair, and the church in the Southern black community. All these are available from the library’s popular American Memory site at https://www.loc.gov.
The Morse Papers, consisting of about 6,500 items that document the invention of the telegraph as well as aspects of Morse’s life, includes the first telegraph message sent on May 24, 1844. The Guthrie correspondence, dating mostly to the early 1940s provide insights into the singer’s art and life. The Haymarket Affair collection contains images of original manuscripts, photographs and artifacts relating to the trial of the “Chicago Anarchists,” and was digitized by the Chicago Historical Society. The documents on the American expansion are from a collection of Mystic Seaport detailing maritime expansion in the 19th century. A compilation of printed texts from the libraries of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill constitute the collection on the church in the Southern Black Community. These texts, which include slave narratives, trace the evolution of protestant Christianity in the South. The digitization of all these collections was made possible by grants from the AT&T Foundation and the Ameritech National Digital Library Competition.
Concluding Volume of Jameson Documentary Edition Published
The third and concluding volume of John Franklin Jameson and the Development of Humanistic Scholarship in America has been published by the University of Georgia Press. This documentary edition providing a conspectus of the life and work of a pioneering AHA president who was instrumental in the founding of the National Archives, was sponsored by the AHA, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives. The National Historical Publications and Records Commission and the National Endowment for the Humanities provided major funding for the project, which began in 1984.
The third volume of the three-volume study covers Jameson’s years in Washington, D.C., from 1905 until his death in 1937, when he was the chief of the manuscript division in the Library of Congress. Jameson held the presidency of the AHA in 1907 and served as editor of the American Historical Review between 1905 and 1928.
The first volume of the edition, published in 1993 presented Jameson’s lectures, speeches, and essays, providing a representative sample of his scholarly concerns and of his public statements as an advocate for history. The second volume, published in 1996, covered the years from Jameson’s birth in 1859 to his arrival in Washington, D.C. It contains diary entries, selections from correspondence, and reports that trace Jameson’s emergence as a historian and scholar.
The three volumes were edited by Morey Rothberg, who also served as project director. Jacqueline Coggan was coeditor on the first volume and Frank Milliken and John Terry Chase served as assistant editors.
Emerson Prizes Awarded to High School Essayists
The eighth annual Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes for the authors of exemplary high school history research papers were presented on March 12, 2002, at the Kidger Reception of the New England History Teachers Association in Boston.
The prizes—a copy of David McCullough’s Truman and a check for $3,000—went to five authors, chosen from among 44 high school students whose work was published in volume 11 of The Concord Review, a much acclaimed quarterly journal founded in 1987 by Will Fitzhugh for publishing articles in history by secondary students.
The five prizewinning authors are Emily Alter (Carleton Coll.), from the Brandon School in Ross, California, who wrote an essay on the Spiritualist Movement in the U.S. and its early association with the Woman Suffrage Movement; Jonas Doberman (Harvard Coll.), from Boulder High School in Boulder, Colorado, who wrote a paper on the treason charges brought against Ezra Pound for his radio broadcasts from Italy during World War II; David Gopstein (Princeton Univ.), from Hunter College High School in New York, who wrote an essay on the history of the constitutional law on impeachment; Tanya Sibai (Tulane Univ.), from St. Mary’s Episcopal School in Memphis, Tennessee, who wrote a history of the witch trials in Germany in the 16th and 17th centuries; Sarah Weiss (Yale Univ.), from Lincoln Park High School in Chicago, Illinois, for her two essays, one on a column for immigrant letters in the Jewish Daily Forward and one on the black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, at the turn of the century in Chicago.
GPO to Provide E-mail Alerts for New Publications
The superintendent of documents of the U.S. Government Printing Office has announced that it is now providing free e-mail alerts on new military history publications from all branches of the armed services. The GPO calls this service “a convenient way for scholars, historians, and avid readers to find out about the latest military history publications from the U.S. government.” The “New Titles by Topic” e-mail alert service offers notifications on the military history titles as soon as they are available for purchase.
American Folklore Society Annual Meeting
The American Folklore Society will hold its 114th annual meeting October 16–20, 2002, in Rochester, New York. The theme for the meeting is “Image, Object, and Processes of Documentation” The meeting organizers view “object” broadly, as created in various media.
The society invites presenters from any discipline to prepare presentations and organize sessions about these topics, or about any other subject related to folklore.
Partnership and collaboration in the production of knowledge will be emphasized at the Rochester meeting, continuing the highly successful theme of the 2001 annual meeting in Anchorage, Alaska. Session organizers have been encouraged to include community scholars, tradition bearers, and colleagues from other disciplines as session participants.
The deadline for proposals is April 15, 2002.
