It feels like summer in D.C. (where the AHA headquarters resides) so it seemed appropriate this week to include some links to a favorite summer sport: baseball. But first, some newsworthy items: Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell revives  Confederate History Month, a recent forum discusses graduate humanities education, a grad student unearths Haiti’s Declaration of Independence, and the New York Times investigates the legality of unpaid internships (another summer staple). We also bring you two articles related to research and technology: evaluate Martha Ballard’s Diary through “topic modeling” and discover the new book2net scanner at the Library of Congress. Finally, EDSITEment takes a look at poetry this month, Curtis J. Bonk offers 30 writing tips, and the UpNext wiki holds discussions on libraries and museums.

News

• McDonnell’s Confederate History Month proclamation irks civil rights leaders
  Virginia Governor Robert F. McDonnell revives Confederate History Month as well as the controversy that comes with it.
• Graduate Humanities Education: What Should Be Done?
  The AHA’s Robert B. Townsend partook in a recent discussion forum at The Chronicle of Higher Education on the topic of graduate humanities education, along with longtime AHA member Jon Butler of Yale, and twelve other contributors.
• Haiti’s Founding Document Found in London
  Julia Gaffield, a Canadian graduate student, has discovered the original Haitian Declaration of Independence in the British National Archives.
• Growth of Unpaid Internships May Be Illegal, Officials Say
  A recent article from the New York Times, that may be music to college students’ ears, examines how “unpaid internships violate minimum wage laws” and cases where “officials in Oregon, California, and other states have begun investigations and fined employers.”

Baseball

• Getting to Home Plate With Sheet Music and Tobacco Cards
  The Lazy Scholar blog takes a look at America’s pastime, with a peek into the Baseball Sheet Music Archive and a collection of American Tobacco Company cards.
• Baseball Americana
  Baseball season has begun, President Obama has thrown the first pitch at Nationals stadium, and the Library of Congress presents a collection of Baseball Americana on Flickr.

Technology and Research

• Topic Modeling Martha Ballard’s Diary
  A new look into Martha Ballard’s diary (featured in former AHA president Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale) through “topic modeling” and data visualization.
• Scanning the Possibilities in the Newspaper Reading Room
  The Library of Congress introduces the book2net scanner into their Newspaper and Current Periodicals Reading Room to make it possible for researchers to scan a document and email it to themselves.

More

• National Poetry Month: Celebrating World Poetry
  EDSITEment celebrates poetry this month with Epics, The Ramayana, Arabic Poetry, Japanese Poetry, and World Poetry Sites
• 30 Writing Tips
  Curtis J. Bonk at Inside Higher Ed offers 30 writing tips he’s given, learned, and just thought up. For more thoughts on academic writing, see the articles from recent Perspectives on History series “The Art of History,” including: “Teaching Scholarship,” “How Writing Leads to Thinking (and not the other way around),” “Crafting Histories: For Whom Does One Write?,” and “In Defense of Academic History Writing.”
• It’s Wiki Wednesday! Are you UpNext?
  In a press release from the Institute of Museum and Library Services learn about the UpNext wiki, a place to hold discussions on museum and library procedures and plans for the future. 

Contributors: Elisabeth Grant, Vernon Horn, and Robert B. Townsend

This post first appeared on AHA Today.