Falmanac: The Fallston Almanac of American History
Posts
All Comments
(YDR) York, PA - A thick layer of dust and dirt coats nearly every surface in the attic of York's former city hall.
A canopy of exposed beams spans the expanse, sheltering thousands of yellowing folders and stacks of hardbound books. The lights are dim, and the air is heavy with the scent of aging paper.
For the last 70 years, the third floor of York's city hall has been a catch all for records of the city's history -- tax assessments, license applications and even criminal histories.
This week, those records have been unearthed for the first time in decades, as city officials prepare to renovate the building for the use of the city's police department. Continued
(LoC) Today, the Library of Congress celebrates its birthday. On April 24, 1800, President John Adams approved the appropriation of $5,000 for the purchase of "such books as may be necessary for the use of congress."The books, the first purchased for the Library of Congress, were ordered from London and arrived in 1801. The collection of 740 volumes and three maps was stored in the U.S. Capitol, the Library's first home. Continued
(Washington Post) The old photograph shows a young Confederate soldier posing proudly in an elegant uniform, with a pistol in his belt and a saber in his hand.
It is a well-known 1860s ambrotype worth thousands of dollars, and experts had identified the rare style of his buckle, the make of his English revolver and the cavalry outfit in which he served. But scholars at the Library of Congress, which was given the photo last year, had no idea who he was. Like scores of Civil War portraits, his was listed as “unidentified.” Until this week. Continued
(Baltimore Sun) Document thief Barry Landau may have sold more of the national treasures he stole from museums — including the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore, where his scheme unraveled — than previously thought, according to the National Archives inspector general, who said Wednesday that his investigators have uncovered new evidence.
Members of the agency's Archival Recovery Team are now targeting historic document dealers who illegally, if unknowingly, bought pieces from Landau for $500 to $6,000 apiece, based on the disgraced collector's own sales records, which were found during an FBI search of Landau's Manhattan apartment.
"We're giving them the opportunity now to play right" and return the goods, said Inspector General Paul Brachfeld, urging holders of stolen items to come forward before they're contacted. Continued
(NYTimes) How a near pristine black-and-white reel of the entire television broadcast of the deciding game of the 1960 World Series — long believed to be lost forever — came to rest in the dry and cool wine cellar of Bing Crosby’s home near San Francisco is not a mystery to those who knew him.
Crosby loved baseball, but as a part owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates he was too nervous to watch the Series against the Yankees, so he and his wife went to Paris, where they listened by radio. Continued
(NYTimes) ... Martin Ernest Dannenberg was born in Baltimore on Nov. 5, 1915, and began working as a mailroom clerk at the Sun Life Insurance Company after graduating from high school. He attended Johns Hopkins University and the University of Baltimore School of Law at night.
He dropped out of law school when his boss pointed out the window at men selling fruit. “Each one of them used to be a lawyer before the Depression,” he said. Continued
(AP) North Carolina's claim that it lost the most men during the Civil War is getting a recount from a state historian who doubts the accuracy of the accepted, 144-year-old estimate.
"The time has come to get it right," said Josh Howard, a research historian with the Office of Archives and History in Raleigh. "Nobody has gone through man by man looking for the deaths."
Howard is reviewing the military records of every Tar Heel who served in the 1861-65 conflict, as the state prepares to mark its sesquicentennial, The News & Record of Greensboro reported Monday. Continued
(NYTimes) A month after the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Joseph P. Kennedy, the American ambassador in London and father of a future president, expressed grave doubts about “this war for idealism” against Hitler.
“I can’t see any use in everybody in Europe going busted and having communism run riot,” Kennedy wrote to Marguerite LeHand, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s personal secretary. Continued
Image: Library of Congress
(New York Times) When told with enough four-letter words and forensic research, the back stories of antiques can make for the kind of nonfiction thrillers that publishers save up for summer release.
One of this year’s page turners, David Howard’s “Lost Rights: The Misadventures of a Stolen American Relic” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), tracks the covert travels of North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights. Mr. Howard, an editor at Bicycling magazine, explains that, in 1789, a state clerk tucked the document into the files, where it stayed until a Union soldier looted the place in 1865. Continued
(Reflections on Delmarva’s Past) Marylanders and historians worldwide can now access and text search 100 years of the Maryland Historical Magazine, the most definitive journal on Maryland history, directly from their computer screens for free, thanks to a joint project of the Maryland Historical Society and the Maryland State Archives.
Starting June 1, 2010, all issues of Maryland Historical Magazine published between 1906 and 2005 will be available, for free online search and retrieval at http://www.mdhs.org/. These issues contain an enormous wealth of well-documented, peer-reviewed research covering subjects with far-ranging popular and scholarly appeal, says Patricia Dockman Anderson, the journal’s editor. Continued
Image: The rebel chivalry as the fancy of "My Maryland" painted them; as "My Maryland" found them. From Harper's Weekly, 1862. (Library of Congress)
(Reuters) - A remarkable archive of antique manuscripts which opens a window on to the experiences, hopes, fears and interests of people who lived during the 15th to 18th centuries has been put online. The University of Cambridge Scriptorium Project, which can be found online at scriptorium.english.cam.ac.uk/ features thousands of pages taken from 20 different handwritten "miscellanies," some of which date back as far as the Wars of the Roses.
Project team leader Richard Beadle said miscellanies of this sort have not always received the treatment or attention that they deserve. Continued
(NCH) The “Preserving the American Historical Record Act (PAHR)” (S. 3227) was recently introduced by Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Carl Levin (D-MI). The PAHR legislation would establish a new federal program of formula grants to the states and territories to support archives and the preservation of historical records at the state and local level. Continued
(Lowering the Bar) Yet another presidential scandal broke over the weekend, as a library in New York accused George Washington of failing to return valuable library materials checked out during his presidency.
The former president could not be reached for comment. Continued
(LoC) Have you ever sent out a “tweet” on the popular Twitter social media service? Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress. That’s right. Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions. Continued
(NYTimes) William John Scott is a freshman at Drew University. He studies political science. He plays defense on the lacrosse team. He describes himself on Facebook as a night person who likes to party.
But federal prosecutors say he is something else: a busy archives thief who stole famous letters written by a founder of the United Methodist Church and world leaders, including Abraham Lincoln and Madame Chiang Kai-Shek. Continued
Image: Library of Congress
(NYTimes) Dust off a disc. Maybe it’s video of a Bob Hope Christmas show, or maybe it’s the Apollo 11 moon landing. Insert a blank disc. Duplicate.
It sounds monotonous because it is. But every time Liz Pruszko presses the start button on a DVD machine, she knows she is helping to unlock the thousands of videos tucked away in the National Archives. Continued
(Via boingboing)
