Elizabeth B. Thomsen

Archive for the ‘History’ Category

The New York Times has announced an oral history project called The New Hard Times. Readers are invited to interview friends or family members who lived through the Great Depression, and have them share their memories and offer their advice for surviving hard times.

A good example is this video conversation between 96-year-old business school professor at New York University and one of his students : Professor Ernest Kurnow.

One woman who lived through the Depression has become something of an Internet celebrity sharing her recipes and memories on YouTube. 93-year-old grandmother Clara Cannucciari is the star of a series of videos called Depression Cooking with Clara, made by her grandson, filmmaker Chris Cannucciari. Clara’s old-fashioned, simple cooking and engaging manner have won her many fans.

These videos are also good examples for anyone interested in doing an oral history project for their family or their community. Many people freeze up in a recorded interview, but are more comfortable and natural when they are demonstrating a favorite activity, and the results can be more interesting for the viewer as well.

Depression Cooking with Clara, Episode 4 – Peppers and Eggs

• Great Depression Cooking with Clara — Clara’s website and blog
• DepressionCooking — Clara’s YouTube channel
• Skaneateles grandmother cooks up memories on YouTube — by Article by Sean Kirst in the Syracuse Post-Standard about Clara’s life and new fame

Living Room Candidate — If you’ve had enough of the 2008 election, how about looking to the past? The Living Room Candidate website is a beautifully-designed online exhibit from the Museum of the Moving Image, showcasing presidential campaign commercials from 1952 to 2008. You can explore by year and read a short article about each candidate’s television strategy, or browse by type of commercial (biographical, fear, real people, etc.) or by issue (corruption, taxes, war, etc.)

But the amazing thing here is that you don’t just read about the commercials, you can watch them online and draw your own conclusions about how fair, accurate and effective they were. These primary sources are invaluable for media studies and political history.

Some of these are quite entertaining, too. I love the contrast between two 1952 commercials, Eisenhower’s cartoon “Ike for President” and Stevenson’s torchy “I Love the Gov.” commercial.
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The Boston Public Library is sharing several collections of artistic and historic images to Flickr, including local brewery posters, rare books, manuscripts, postcards, photographs and much more.

Two collections are of particular interest for local interest to NOBLE libraries. The Tichnor Brothers postcards of New England includes over 1,800 Massachusetts images, including many from our area. These postcards are a good source of images of parks, bridges, statues, libraries, churches and other local landmarks.

The Leon Abdalian collection includes historic sites photographed in 1930 during the Massachusetts Tercentenary celebration, when the Boston Daily Record hired Abdalian as the “Photographer of Historic Shrines,” and it includes some sites in our area, including the Balch House in Beverly.

I did a presentation on this topic at the Massachusetts Library Association conference in Falmouth this morning, and posted the PowerPoint on Slideshare:

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More and more newspapers and magazines are making deep archives freely available on the web, dropping requirements for print subscriptions and registration, making it easy to find the full-text of many well-known and respected publications available online. Richard Pérez-Peña wrote an interesting article called Dusting Off the Archives for the Web for the New York Times, saying:

“As magazines and newspapers hunt for the new thing they need to be to thrive in the Internet era, some find that part of the answer lies in the old thing they used to be…For magazines and newspapers with long histories, especially, old material can be reborn on the Web as an inexpensive way to attract readers, advertisers and money.”

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Two recent news stories caught my eye, quite literally. Each reported the discovery of a previously-unknown childhood photograph of a legendary American woman. The women couldn’t be more different : the notorious Lizzie Borden and the inspirational Helen Keller. In each case, the newly-discovered photographs give us a rare glimpse into the childhood of these women — in both cases, the new photographs may be the earliest known photographs of their subjects.
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