Found in the archives

A volunteer at the Smithsonian Institute has discovered color photographs of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.

Although hand-colored photographs of the quake's destruction have surfaced before, [Eugene] Ives' work is probably the only true color documentary evidence, Shannon Perich, associate curator of the Smithsonian's photography history collection, told the Chronicle.

Update: the volunteer himself blogs the discovery

TJ's library

In the news today: the discovery that Washington University in St. Louis has (previously unbeknownst to them) been harboring some six dozen books from Thomas Jefferson's private library.

It took a little detective work: knowing that Jefferson's granddaughter's husband had purchased some of his books at auction; learning that the family of said grandson had donated their books to Washington University in 1880; finding an early-20th Century library ledger that helped to identify the donated books; and then discovering Jefferson's initials in the suspect books. It's no wonder that even the library didn't know the noteworthy provenance of their possessions.

Jefferson initialed his books in a peculiar way. When books are bound, groups of pages known as signatures are stitched together; the signatures need to be marked so that they get assembled in the correct order, and were often marked with letters of the alphabet. So where Jefferson found "I," he added a "T" in front of it; after the "T," he added an "I." Why "I"? Doh! You saw Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade! You know that "I" is used in Latin for "J," and why it's a matter of life or death to know that!

This reminds me of a memo I read a few months ago in the Special Collections here at UM. The very first purchase of books for the Library were made in 1838 by Asa Gray, who had been hired by the University of Michigan before some sort of funding mixup led him to take a position at Harvard instead. Around 1970 or so, the Library got a little history-conscious and began trying to track down those books that had been part of his original purchase. Some of the departments that held the books didn't want to give them up and I recall a pleading memo to the effect of, "If you can't take this rare and singular book off your shelves, could you at least put it on reserve and stop letting the students take it home?" I expect Jefferson's books were no longer in open stacks, but had probably experienced similar use in their day.

By the way, how cool is it that some of Jefferson's books would have accidentally ended up in St. Louis, of all places, the Gateway to the West that he had purchased? Seems utterly fitting.

Super Bowl I

It seems odd, in this era of YouTube, where every video in the world finds its way online and becomes harder than kudzu to eradicate, but even classic programs use to get broadcast once and disappear into the ether without an archived film or videotape copy. But a football fan has come forth with one of the most coveted missing links in sports history: a videotape of Super Bowl I in 1967.

Note how the instant replay boasts the technical miracle of "video tape," much as fans a few years later would marvel at "live via satellite."



From the WSJ

San Francisco, 1906

If you didn't catch 60 Minutes Sunday night, you should definitely check out this story on a mysterious film of San Francisco, taken from a cable car moving down Market Street, near the turn of the century. It's an intriguing film in itself, catching a (mostly) candid view of the city in a past era. But it grows even more meaningful when an archivist's careful research discovers it was taken on the eve of the disastrous 1906 earthquake.

Reading old mail

This is really cool - a (possibly) 3400-year-old scrap of diplomatic correspondence between Canaan and Egypt has been discovered in Jerusalem, probably once part of the royal archives. It can be deciphered! Try that with a 3400-year-old thumb drive!

World's first mobile phone

This is remarkably cool: a demonstration of the world's first (AFAWK) mobile phone, in 1922:



I was surprised to see the fire hydrant mentioned as evidence of an American city. British cities don't/didn't have fire hydrants?


Via RAIN

Archival funny

Godwin's law in the archives:




Derangement and Description

Using social media, part Umpteen

Here's an interesting use for Flickr : reuniting stolen photographs with their rightful owners. It seems the FBI has caught a man who has been stealing photographs from archives and libraries, and returned the stolen property to the Denver Public Library. When DPL realized that not all of the stolen photos were theirs, they put the images on Flickr and invited archives and libraries around the country to examine them. At best, they can return them to their rightful owners; short of that, perhaps someone can tell them about the photos' subjects.

Discovered in the archives

Early draft of the Constitution found in Philadelphia

Where better to find a draft of the Constitution, anyway? Researcher Lorianne Updike Toler, working with the James Wilson papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, managed to piece together some long-separated papers and restore the draft.

Wilson, a Scottish-trained lawyer, was one of the more active members of the Philadelphia Convention and, as a member of the Committee of Detail that refined the final language - the language that scholars and justices squeeze for every last drop of nuance and guidance - had a profound influence on the Constitution's final form. It is no accident that drafts of the document would be in his hand.

Wilson's two previously-known drafts had been separated from his papers a long time ago, without realizing that the upside-down writing of "We the People", which appeared on the pages of the second, actually represented the beginning of a new draft. The following pages, sundered from their opening, weren't readily recognized as another complete version of the Constitution and remained with the rest of Wilson's papers, until Toler identified their relation.


[Via the Archives Listserv]

Largest book in the world goes on show for the first time

"It takes six people to lift it and has been recorded as the largest book in the world, yet the splendid Klencke Atlas, presented to Charles II on his restoration and now 350 years old, has never been publicly displayed with its pages open."

I might have written "therefore" rather than "yet."


Via the Maps-L listserv

A linguistics scholar at Western Washington is hoping to recover unknown African history by translating an almost-forgotten writing system:

The Lost Script (at the Boston Globe)

Starting at least in the 10th century, African holy men who had converted to Islam and learned Arabic began to modify Arabic writing to enable them to spread the religion more easily. The resulting Ajami script - the name comes from the Arabic word for stranger - helped make Islam accessible to shepherds and other commoners who could not understand Arabic.
[...]
But officially speaking, it has also been widely ignored. Uncounted Ajami manuscripts squirreled away across the continent have gone untranslated, even unseen, by scholars. Even in African countries where it is still used, the script lacks government recognition. In French colonial archives from Africa, Ngom says, Ajami documents remain classified as “unreadable Arabic” - based on the mistaken notion that writing in African languages simply did not exist.

via the Archives Listserv

Archivists on Wikipedia

This came through the archives listserv a few days back and I meant to blog it, but it slipped my mind. ArchivesNext has the story.

In sum, Wikipedia has a policy against organizations filling their articles with links to themselves; that sort of self-pimping is deeply frowned upon and the links usually get deleted rather promptly. Unfortunately, this entirely reasonable policy was also sweeping up some well-meaning archivists who were trying to improve the documentation in Wikipedia by linking to the sources they knew best - their own archives. Their work was being deleted as illicit self-service.

The good news is that the Wikipowers-that-be have granted a desirable exception to their rules against self-promotion, which can only improve Wikipedia's reliability. Assuming they don't abuse their new privileges, archives will be allowed to link to their own relevant holdings. Thank goodness! The reference section of your average Wikipedia article tends to be an utter embarrassment, a small collection of links to random websites with dubious credentials. Letting archivists in on the act can only make the product stronger.

What did Nixon say?

Remember the infamous missing 18 minutes on the Nixon tapes? They're commonly presumed to have contained recordings of Nixon ordering the cover-up of the Watergate break in, and to have been erased deliberately. Of course, no one can prove that.

But a researcher (and former NSA analyst) thinks we can now find out the gist of the conversation. It seems that H.R. Haldeman's notes from that conversation are uncharacteristically light, and there's physical evidence to suggest that they were unstapled and restapled - perhaps to remove some pages? Hmmm?

So the idea is that maybe, just maybe, Haldeman pressed hard enough with his pen to leave very faint impressions on the papers beneath the one he was writing on, and perhaps we now have the technology to read those impressions? Then we would at least have Haldeman's (presumed) missing notes, if not the actual words.

Stay tuned.

[via the archives listserv]

DNA archives

Endangered species' DNA to be stored at NYC museum

[O]fficials of the American Museum of Natural History and the U.S. National Park Service signed an agreement for samples from endangered species in America's parks to be added to the museum's existing DNA collection.

Via Global Museum

East German archives still busy

Requests to see Stasi files unabated 20 years on

Marianne Birthler, who manages the miles of intelligence files communist East Germany kept on its own citizens and many Westerners, told reporters that interest in the records had anything but abated two decades on.

"More than 100,000 applications to look at files were submitted in 2007, somewhat fewer last year with 87,000, but demand rose again in the first months of 2009" at a rate of about 10,000 per month, she said.

"It could be related to the (20th) anniversary year. At the same time, we have observed time and again that many people are only asking to see their files now because they have apparently needed time to prepare themselves to confront their pasts."

Köln Archives destroyed

Very sad news in the archives and history worlds: the building housing the state archives in Köln collapsed Tuesday with almost no warning.

The city without a memory: treasures lost under collapsed Cologne archives

The archives included the minutes of all town council meetings held since 1376. Not a single session had been missed, making the collection a remarkable resource for legal historians.

The earliest document stored in the building dated back to 922, and there were hundreds of thousands of documents spread over six floors, some of them written on thin parchment. A total of 780 complete private collections and half a million photographs were being stored.

Many of the documents had been recovered from library buildings smashed by Allied bombing during the Second World War.

As of this posting, at least two people are still missing and presumed lost under the rubble. As for the documents, while not everything will be irretrievably damaged, much of what is lost will be completely irreplaceable.

Soviet archives

Front Page Magazine has an interesting interview with Olga Velikanova, a professor of Soviet History at the University of North Texas.

FP: So what is the current situation with the access to the archives in Russia?

Velikanova: Historians can call this situation an “archival counter-revolution.” With Vladimir Putin coming to tenure in 2000, historians noticed a gradual imposition of limitations to access to archives. For example, many files were stalled in “de-classification commissions” and were not given to scholars. I got refusals to my requests to see even those files that I had studied in the 1990s. A "Re-secretizing" process got momentum after 2001 when Putin signed a Presidential decree substituting de-classification commissions with "the Interagency Commission to Defend State Secrets.” Even in the Hoover guide to the CPSS archives, we can see this reverse process - some documents became unavailable and probably were re-classified again. I know the student who had to change the subject of his dissertation because the sources became unavailable again.

I recall a conversation with a Russian historian when I was still at Oregon, who commented that one effect of the various "thaw" periods in Soviet history was the release of some previously-secret documents. Compared to the opening of the archives in the 1990's, these were relatively small,and so each document could be scrutinized carefully and never be effectively made secret again. The current situation is more muddled, because the authorities can lock up things that aren't so well documented. On the other hand, there's still no comparison with the Soviet era, because so much more historical information is now known and will remain known.

That crazy Booth family

From the archives listserv:

Letter threatening Jackson's life determined to be written by father of man who killed Lincoln

Dismissed for 175 years as a fake, a letter threatening the assassination of President Andrew Jackson has been found to be authentic. And, says the director of the Andrew Jackson Papers Project at the University of Tennessee, the writer was none other than Junius Brutus Booth, father of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth.

...

The letter, which addressed Old Hickory as "You damn'd old Scoundrel," demanded that Jackson pardon two prisoners named De Ruiz and De Soto who had been sentenced to death for piracy in a high-profile trial of the day.

...

Pardon the pirates, the letter writer demanded, or "I will cut your throat whilst you are sleeping."

Upon further research, which apparently hadn't been done before, it turns out that the envelope had the return address of the hotel where Booth normally stayed and that Booth had written to his theater director to apologize for writing letters to "authorities of the country." And the handwriting also matches. I'm not surprised that Jackson scholars never took it seriously, but surely someone has done enough research on Junius Brutus Booth to have made these connections? Maybe not.

First lunar map

From the archives listserv: The 17th-century drawings that prove a humble Englishman mapped the moon BEFORE Galileo

Thomas Harriot beat Galileo in showing the world what the lunar surface looked like nearly six months before the Italian invited the world to come and see his etchings in December 1609.

Harriot had already drawn and plotted his chart in July that year, dated documents show.

Ephemera

On the archives listserv, someone asks if anyone is trying to collect "all" the Obama ephemera being hawked at the Inauguration today; another opines that it would require more money than we've spent on the financial bailout. That's probably an exaggeration, but the project is no more workable than if it were accurate.

Here's an example of what you can get:

Barack Obama: keeping America safe in bed since 2009.