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Archive for the ‘History on the Web’ Category

…isn’t that one can purchase an article of clothing bearing an image of Revolutionary War financier Robert Morris.  The surprising thing is that it’s this particular article of clothing.

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I’ve posted before about some of the online gimmicks that allow you to virtually visit historic sites, whether via aerial photos or webcams.  Lately I’ve been trying the same thing with Google Street View, which allows you to travel along roads and look around for a 360° view.  The images come from car-mounted cameras, so it only works [...]

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File this one under “Signs of the Times.”  Somebody at the Massachusetts Historical Society noticed that John Quincy Adams wrote very brief entries in the diary he kept after his appointment as minister to Russia.  Next thing you know, Adams has his own Twitter account. 
They’re posting the diary entries on a daily basis, exactly two centuries after Adams [...]

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Here’s an interesting news story, via a blog devoted to John Brown, about an event attended by descendants of Brown and his followers.  One of the attendees was Brown’s great-great-great granddaughter, Alice Keesey Mecoy of Allen, Texas.
For some reason the notion that I’m sharing the planet with John Brown’s great-great-great granddaughter struck me as pretty darn [...]

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Lee Chapel & Museum has added a neat feature to their website.  It’s a virtual tour of Lee’s office that allows you to examine each of its objects in detail, with explanations of how they fit into the larger story of his time at W&L.

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Hey, speaking of Cumberland Gap National Historical Park—check out this list of “America’s Undiscovered National Parks and Monuments” that popped up on MSN’s front page today.  Cumberland Gap is the fourth one featured.
I’m not sure the Gap is as obscure as they’re making it out to be.  The crowds aren’t anything like what you’ll run [...]

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I ran across an interesting story via The Posterity Project.  Relatives of Meriwether Lewis are trying to persuade the federal government to allow them to exhume his remains, so they can settle the mystery of whether foul play was involved in his supposed suicide.  Here’s the website they’ve set up.  So far, the Park Service has blocked it, [...]

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Someone was kind enough to direct my attention to a relatively new blog devoted to Kenneth L. Roberts, twentieth-century author of several well-known works of historical fiction.  Roberts, who died in 1957, used his novels to examine misunderstood or unpopular characters from early American history, like Benedict Arnold and Robert Rogers.  (More books to add to my [...]

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When I went to Springfield a few years ago, one of my priorities was to make the short drive up to Lincoln’s New Salem State Historic Site.  I hit a lot of Lincoln sites on that trip—the Presidential Library and Museum, his home, his law office, his tomb—but New Salem was pretty hard to beat.
Since [...]

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During the Civil War a few hundred women disguised themselves as men and fought as soldiers.  We know some of their names—Sarah Edmonds, Jennie Hodgers, Frances Clalin.  In some cases, we have photos, we have pension documents and other records, and we have enough biographical information to reconstruct their life stories.  So if you said that “women fought in [...]

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