In the news this week, JSTOR is now offering free access to content before 1923, interviews with Jackie Kennedy are released, and Twitterstorians celebrate their second birthday. Read on for two articles on public history, C-SPAN’s new program on past presidential contenders, a man who used his retirement to earn a PhD in American history, and Jennifer Howard’s look at the lineages of scholarship. Finally, look back at September 11, 2001, through oral histories and online resources, and look forward to this year’s Constitution Day with EDSITEment and TeachingHistory.org.

News

• JSTOR Opens Up U.S. Journal Content from before 1923
  The Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog reported last week on the news that “[u]sers anywhere now have free access to JSTOR’s Early Journal Content, a corpus of scholarly articles published in the United States before 1923 and elsewhere before 1870.”



• Jackie Kennedy Tapes
  In 1964, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. conducted a seven-part interview with Jackie Kennedy. Yesterday, the recordings of these interviews were released 47 years after they were made. The New York Times, New Yorker, and Washington Post Reliable Sourcehave had a listen, and offer a range of reactions to her words, from calling them “intimate observations” to “catty” remarks. The interviews are being released as a book and audio recording, titled Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy.
• Twitterstorians Turn Two
  Last week the Twitterstorians celebrated their second birthday of tracking historians on Twitter. A number of other historians, including Jonathan Dresner, Mark Cheathem, Sharon Howard, and others, also put up posts to celebrate the anniversary. We wish them the best!

Insights

• Changing History
  Two historians, Alexandra M. Lord and Michelle L. McClellan, share their experiences navigating the history job market and ultimately both finding places in public history.
• Historians in Public
  Related to the article above, Tom Bender (NYU) ponders the waning relationship between academics and the public sphere, and also notes a few areas where that connection remains alive and vital.
• C-SPAN: The Contenders
  Last Friday, C-SPAN launched a new weekly program called The Contenders that’s meant to put “America’s present electoral politics in historical perspective” by looking “across time, political parties, and geography to present some key figures who have run for president and lost, but changed political history nevertheless.”



• A PhD in History for a Man Who Has Seen a Good Bit of It
  Richard Smith put his retirement to good use, pursuing and earning a PhD in American history from Florida International University, “becoming the oldest graduate in the institution’s history.”
• Citation by Citation, New Maps Chart Hot Research and Scholarship’s Hidden Terrain
  Jennifer Howard at the Chronicle offers a fascinating look into the way citations move across disciplines (using all the JSTOR journals as a source base). Among other findings, her article suggests history may be more connected to biology than the classics.

September 11

• U.S. House of Representatives Remembers September 11, 2001
  As we noted on Facebook and Twitter last week, the Office of the House Historian has created a valuable oral history site on 9/11, called “Due to the Circumstances of Today.” It offers almost “90 video and audio clips with 30 individuals ranging from Representatives to House officials, Pages, and staff.”
• Teaching September 11
  Teachinghistory.org has put together a collection of online 9/11 resources for use in the classroom, including an 8th grade teacher’s article on a 9/11 interview project and links to the September 11 Digital Archive, a collection of 2,000 9/11 primary source documents, and more.

Constitution Day

• EDSITEment Resources
  Prepare for Constitution Day, September 17, 2011, with these resources from EDSITEment.
• TeachingHistory.org Resources
  TeachingHistory.org has also put together a portal to Constitution Day resources, including learning resources, teaching resources, and quizzes.

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

This post first appeared on AHA Today.