As we round out the last weeks in May we note that this month many celebrated Asian Pacific Heritage, and we link to a Library of Congress page of resources for that. Speaking of commemoration, sometimes it comes with challenges. For instance, we’ve been reading articles about the ongoing design debate over the Martin Luther King memorial. From the National Coalition for History we’ve learned about recent grants and awards, while we look to the National Trust for Historic Preservation for its most recent list of the Most Endangered Historic Places. Then read about obscure online databases, Western adventure, what a history major can do, digitization in Timbuktu, and a new D.C. museum. Or, just for fun, revisit political election logos from 1960 to the present.

• Asian Pacific Heritage Month Resources
  In additional to National Preservation Month, May is also Asian Pacific Heritage Month. The Library of Congress has a page of Asian Pacific heritage resources, including an interview with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and links to the library’s exhibits and collections celebrating Asian heritage, as well as the Veterans History Project.
• Unhappy With ‘Confrontational’ Image, U.S. Panel Wants King Statue Reworked
  There has been interesting coverage of the plans for the Martin Luther King memorial in the Washington Post, in this first story and a recent follow up article. The complaint that the statue is too "confrontational" raises interesting issues about memory of the civil rights movement, commemoration, and the visual language of memorials.
• History Coalition Reports on Grants and Awards
  The National Coalition for History reported news on two sets of grants and awards recently given out. First, the news that the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) gave out “78 grants of $4.66 million for projects across the nation.” Then, there’s the 2008 Preserve America Presidential Awards, which supports “community efforts to preserve the Nation’s cultural and natural heritage.”
• 2008 List of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places Announced
  The National Trust for Historic Preservation recently released their annual list of the most endangered historic places.
• Obscure Online Historical Databases
  Jeremy Young at the Progressive Historians blog has started “a thread on online historical sources nobody’s ever heard of” and is looking to his readers to add to it.
• Tales of Western Adventure
  Historian Patricia Nelson Limerick published an interesting piece about the challenges and rewards of public scholarship in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
  
• A History Major Riffs on Jazz Greats at Columbia University’s Radio Station
  What can a history major do? That is a question we are often asked, and which we attempt to answer through our pamphlet, Careers for Students of History and the online miniguide, Careers for History Majors. For one Columbia University history major (class of 1973), the answer seemed easy: be obsessively passionate and eidetically informed about his chosen topic, Jazz. Phil Schaap, who hosts the radio show "Bird Flight" on Columbia University’s radio station WKRC, is profiled in the New Yorker of May 19, 2008. In "Bird Watcher," David Remnick, the magazine’s editor, who also riffs about history and memory.
• The digitization of manuscripts in Timbuktu
  The Aluka blog notes coverage of their efforts to digitize manuscripts from Timbuktu in a recent article in the New York Times, and then points to a number of different links that further expand on the project.
• D.C.’s Newest Museum: Crime & Punishment
  The Washington Post’s Raw Fisher reviews the new Museum of Crime and Punishment and finds an emphasis on entertainment over education.
• USA Political Election Logos 2008-1960
  The web site Logoblink.com has compiled a fascinating collection of logos from the past 40 plus years of presidential campaigns.

Contributors: David Darlington, Debbie Ann Doyle, Elisabeth Grant, and Pillarisetti Sudhir

This post first appeared on AHA Today.