Automotive sales tracker R. L. Polk & Co. recently announced that the Ford Focus was the best-selling passenger car in the world in 2012. Impressive! By contrast, Ford Motor Company’s ill-fated Edsel, sold for the 1958-1960 model years, is a dark icon of product failure even today. Ford sunk $250...
A biannual publication offering insights into the use of digital historical collections
Historical Newspapers
The Resignation of John Russwurm: Individual Lives in Early American Newspapers
Visiting archives to view old documents can stir strange emotions. Handling manuscripts, the historian sees not only the private words of someone else but even a physical presence: the quiver of an elderly hand, the smudge of a young thumb, the jagged strokes of impatient fingers flying across a page...
War of the Dictionaries
The Georgian brick building of the Merriam-Webster company on Federal Street in Springfield, Massachusetts, is considered by some world headquarters of the English language. Scholars, heads of state and judges alike often deem the Merriam-Webster dictionary the final authority in spelling, pronunciation and definition. That standing is the outcome of...
A Patron-Grown Reference Tool: The Notable Kentucky African Americans Database
The Notable Kentucky African Americans Database (NKAA) is a continuously updated reference tool for studying African Americans in and from Kentucky from the 1700s to the present day. The database is freely available online, and receives well over 100,000 hits each year. It was created by librarians Rob Aken and...
Life out of Darkness: The Recovery of Julia Peterkin, Forgotten Pulitzer Prize Winner
If asked to name the first southern novelist to win a Pulitzer Prize, most Americans might guess William Faulkner or Margaret Mitchell. The honor actually belongs to Julia Peterkin (1880-1961), a largely forgotten, self-styled plantation mistress from South Carolina whose meteoric career rendered her name and novels household words for...
