Link posts

I am grateful to have worked for Mills Kelly for the past four years as he has served as the executive director at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. In a blog post on our website, he reflects on the last four years at RRCHNM, and a bit beyond.

A new podcast—or rather, a longstanding podcast—has joined R2 Studios at RRCHNM.

Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant is a women’s history podcast that showcases 18th and early 19th-century women’s letters that don’t always make it into the history books. Using her training as a historian and documentary editor, Kathryn Gehred and her guests dig into the story behind each letter and the lives of the women who wrote or received them.

Gehred began the podcast in 2020 and has released 38 episodes with approximately 50,000 downloads to date. “I am THRILLED to announce that Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant is joining the R2 Studios podcast network!,” Gehred said. “This means you’re going to see more episodes, with better editing, produced on a regular schedule, with all the same great 18th and 19th-century scandals you’ve come to expect.”

News about four students from GMU’s PhD program in history: one off to be a postdoc, one off to work at the Center for Military History, two off to positions as assistant professors.

The May newsletter from RRCHNM contains news of a visualization about Victor Recording’s expeditions in Latin America, two graduate student successes, and a grant for American religious history. Subscribe here.

If you care about the open web, you probably use RSS feeds. And if you use feeds and you’re on a Mac or iOS, then NetNewsWire is the best RSS reader available. And it’s free and open source.

The Congregational Library and Archives has kindly invited me to talk about America’s Public Bible: A Commentary with them on April 19. The event is online and open to the public if you register here.

Join us for a virtual discussion with Lincoln Mullen to celebrate the release of America’s Public Bible: A Commentary, an interactive scholarly work that uncovers the history of the Bible in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States.

Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, newspapers in the United States—even newspapers which were not published by a religious denomination or organization—made frequent recourse to the Bible. Newspapers printed sermons and Sunday school lessons. They featured jokes whose punchlines required familiarity with the Bible and aired political commentary that cited the Bible on all sides of a given issue.

By identifying and studying quotations in American newspapers, America’s Public Bible offers a commentary on how the Bible was used in public life, uncovering trends and patterns that would be invisible to a single scholar’s reading of these documents.

The Guardian has a three-part series combining visualizations and prose to explain about Manchester’s rise as an industrial textile city and its connection to the slave trade:

• How Slavery Made Manchester the World’s First Industrial City
• Accounting for the Cotton Capital’s Human Cost
• How The Guardian Covered Slavery

My colleagues Jason Heppler and Mills Kelly in the Washington Post today about their collaboration with two local public history sites in Northern Virginia. The houses contain graffiti left by Civil War soldiers, which they will be digitizing and preserving.

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is launching a newsletter. You can sign up here. This is the best place to keep up with how our students and staff are creating history for public audiences. The first issue is out tomorrow, featuring news of a new podcast on the history of the American revolution; a grad student exchange with a European university; and a new data visualization about the plague in early modern London.

My colleague Jason Heppler writes about “Building A Data API For Historical Research.” A follow-up to this post.

A very helpful list of best practices for shell scripting. I’m no expert on shell scripting, but I write lots of little scripts, so it is helpful to have a template for best practices.

Pleased to welcome a new colleague, Jim Ambuske, to RRCHNM. Jim will be working at R2 Studios.

The most recent issue of the American Religion @ RRCHNM newsletter features an announcement of our Luce Foundation grant for a podcast on the history of American antisemitism, a new map of male and female preachers in the National Spiritual Alliance, and a new collection of oral histories about the Jewish experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, among other things.

Caroline Greer writes about a National Spiritual Alliance church named after its pastor, Dorcas Brown, and maybe the biblical Dorcas too.