An easy week of blogging for me.

In theory, I should be able to do nothing but link to pieces that I’ve already written as they get published – like this bit of refrigeration blogging at the Historical Society’s place. I think I’d like to say something about Chronicle Vitae in this space when it finally exits Beta, which should be very soon. I also have a MOOC post in my head that I’ll write up if I get the time. However, it’s likely that you’ll mostly just be seeing links here for at least a while.

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Victorian ephemera at the British Library.

One other cool thing about Twitter is that it gives me yet another place to learn about cool stuff on the web that I probably wouldn’t have heard of otherwise. The Evanion Collection of Ephemera at the British Library got tweeted by J-Store (of all places) this morning, and on the basis of a quick look around it seems quite wonderful.

Got notecards?

I’m blogging about Zotero again over at the Historical Society’s blog. If you don’t read it already, you really should (and I promise I would have said that even before they let me do a guest post).

Chicago in the 1890s.

Got into a friendly argument with a friend of mine as to whether the cold storage plant at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago was inside the fair grounds or not, and while settling it I ran into “Chicago in the 1890s,” an amazing collection of maps at the University of Chicago Library’s web site.

They’re comprehensive, they’re zoomable and I think I won my argument with this one. Look due south of the gate at 64th Street and you’ll see that the cold storage plant is on the grounds, just as I thought.

Not another post about plagiarism.

I was going to devote today’s post to this terrible New York Times article about plagiarism, but really the illustrious Historiann has already written everything that I might have written myself (and she’s much funnier than I am too).

So, instead, let me tell what I was doing most of the day. I was watching Matt Pinsker from Dickinson College (who’s here for the week) talk about slavery and he’s got some incredible resources on slavery and the Civil War up over at his place. [Update: Ugggh, I fixed the link.] The visuals at their site on the Dred Scott case, which is actually hosted at Gilder-Lehrman, are particularly good. The picture above is of Dred Scott’s mark (he was illiterate) on his original lawsuit. What a great way to illustrate that point!

If the mid-19th century falls within your teaching realm, you should definitely check all this stuff out.

Howard Zinn’s FBI file was released today.

And you thought I read Gawker just for Lindsey Lohan updates.

There goes my next 24 hours or so…

Via Boing Boing, Cool Tools is listing and (this is what’s really amazing) linking to the best magazine articles ever written.

Some thoughts on how the list stands at the moment that I’m writing this:

– It’s fairly skewed towards the last twenty years or so, but there are still a few here that you’d have to consider historically significant like John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” and Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic.”

– In a strange nod to historians, I had no idea that Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” first came out in Harper’s.

– The link I just sent them is to Michael Pollan’s “Power Steer,” which was the very first step in turning me into a vegetarian.

– There’s got to be more stuff that belongs on this list that came out before 1960. Oh yeah, most of Joseph Mitchell’s work! Since I just read Up In the Old Hotel again, I’d say that I’d definitely pick “The Bottom of the Harbor” from 1951. My second choice would be “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” from 1956.

– The list skews heavily towards pieces from The New Yorker, Harper’s and the NYT Magazine. I have subscriptions to the first two so I can read most of it. You’ll be blocked by firewalls in more than a few places if you don’t. Nevertheless, I still think there’s a lot of good stuff here. It looks like the five best Esquire magazine articles of all time are open to everybody and I’ve seen all of New York Magazine on Google Books.

– A lot of people really seem to like David Foster Wallace. I know he’s dead, but I still always thought he was pretentious for writing a gigantic book that nobody ever seemed to get all the way through. Perhaps I was wrong. Either way, it looks like I have some reading to do.

Happy reading, yourself.

Business ephemera at the New York Historical Society.

In anticipation of my trip to NYC in a couple of weeks, I was skulking around at the New York Historical Society’s web site, and found that they have a huge portion of the gigantic Bella C. Landauer Collection of Business and Advertising Ephemera online.

Good times. Good times.

Best. Historical top-ten list. Ever.

Top ten worst Popes. Via Gawker, of all places. Or come to think of it, knowing the way Popes used to behave the link from Gawker makes tons of sense.

The best ten minutes of radio that I’ve heard in a long while.

There were two excellent stories back-to-back on Morning Edition this morning on two subjects close to my heart.

The first one was about a teacher training program in Boston that has some really nice discussion about the nature of teaching in general. Best line: “Teaching is not just about preparation, it’s about thinking on your feet.”

The second one was about the discovery of documents relating to the 1881 shootout at the OK Corral.