Posts related to

Historical Imprints

Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee opened on January 9, 1866 more than year before Howard University. While Howard was beset by controversy from its beginning, Fisk seems to have had a...

In this issue: The 19th-century flash press as an underrated repository of

The Methodist Episcopal Church was the first and largest denomination to establish the practice of organizing outdoor religious worship. It originated in the wild frontier of Kentucky and quickly...

Intrepid souls who ventured out into the blizzard in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio, on March 7, 1875 might have encountered a singular apparition: a procession of formally-dressed African-American men...

Founded in 1866, Fisk University is a private university in Nashville, Tennessee, with a long-standing reputation for academic excellence. Fisk is currently ranked #6 among historically black...

Before the American Revolution, postal service, such as it was, was administered by the British. Mail within the colonies was sparse, while the preponderance of mail was between North America and...

Why include primary sources in undergraduate course materials? Even prior to the pandemic, faculty were facing increased pressure from both students and administrators to revisit the use of a formal...

Blame it on a literal reading of the Declaration of Independence. On July 4, 1834, the New Hampshire state legislature granted a charter to found Noyes Academy in the rural Town of Canaan. Because the...

Between early August and early November of 1793 almost ten percent of the population of Philadelphia died after contracting Yellow Fever. At that time Philadelphia was the capital of the young nation...

In 1895 at least one death was ascribed to a work of fiction. Its overwhelming influence was described in viral terms before viruses were well understood as biological let alone social phenomena. That...

That there were witches in the olden times is true, else the Bible fights against shadows: for it tells us not once but many times that there were witches. According to printed sources dating to the...

Opening doors to digital humanities research, Readex Text Explorer is an end-to-end set of workflow tools to help students and faculty analyze texts in new ways. Its data visualization methods include...

This unique digital resource represents the most comprehensive record of Native America in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries. Featuring text analysis tools, author biographies, and suggested...

The earliest American sermons were largely delivered by the most erudite men in the Protestant colonies. These eminent divines were concentrated in the Massachusetts Bay Colony where their influence...

The history of enlightened treatment of the mentally ill in the United States was significantly affected by Dr. Benjamin Rush, the famed Philadelphia physician and signer of the Declaration of...

There’s an entry in Readex’s Native American Indians, 1645-1819 , from a book printed in Philadelphia in 1803 in which British topographical engineer Captain Thomas Hutchins described the “Kahokia...

Perhaps you’ve explored Readex’s five Origins of Modern Science and Technology collections, which include material from the latter half of the twentieth century. For an earlier perspective on the...

Published accounts of the native peoples of North America in the late 18th and early 19 th centuries—as depicted in these wide-ranging early American imprints—were varied in accord with the beliefs of...

An updated version of this blog post (September 2024) is now available. For ten years or more, faculty and students have been asking Readex to “bring history to life” in new ways. “You have tremendous...

Among several common themes in early books for children, instruction in conduct recurs frequently. Searching American Children’s Books, 1654-1819, a new Readex database, whether using Suggested...

There is a peculiar religious sect in Paris and they worship absinthe. Their shrines are the boulevard cafes; their prayer books the muddy green liquid that cages mental rats within their brains and...

The spirit of Black Hawk is alive and well and living in New Orleans. How does the influence of this Sauk war leader inform Creole identity over 250 years after his birth? The answer involves a rich...

The political question of internal improvements challenged lawmakers in the earlier days of the United States with the majority supporting the federal government taking an active role in the...

The experiences of women in wartime have been less well documented than those of men. Their contributions, their sufferings and heroism merit closer attention. The wealth of digitized primary sources...