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Archive for February, 2012

Jill Lepore: The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity

The bookseller recommended Brogan’s Penguin History of the United States of America. I bought it. An early clue that this might not have been a good decision came when I noticed ...

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New blog (and pilot ‘live chat’ scheme) at the UK National Archives site

The UK National Archives has just launched a blog, to which people from various departments will contribute posts not just about their own work, but about ‘the wider archives sector’.

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‘Pretty Little Mrs Cassell Honorably Discharged’: what happened next in Hoboken, 1893

Yesterday I posted about Agnes Mills Kosel’s arrest on her wedding day, as reported in the 8 March, 1893 New York Herald. The incident was covered in more than one paper, and the next day this follow-up appeared in New Jersey’s Evening Journal. Note the Anglicized spelling here of Agnes’s married surname, which was actually Kosel; I’m inclined to wonder whether this was deliberate, as other newspapers – less local to the events – got it right. Read more

‘Law’s Cruel Hand Takes the Bride’: an incident in Hoboken, 1893

I’ve been reading a lot of old US newspapers online in the course of my research recently. They are fascinating: I particularly love the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America site, which has a wide range of digitized newspapers dating from 1836 to 1922 in searchable, downloadable PDF form, free. I’ve found tons of useful things there, as well as at GenealogyBank (a paid site) and in the New York Times archive (mixture of free and paid).

I keep spotting all kinds of interesting stuff in passing. This New York Herald article from 8 March 1893 came up as a false positive on a search I was doing for Hoboken, NJ weddings in that year. I am easily distracted, so I ended up reading the whole thing and then searching for more information, even though the people concerned were in no way connected to my family. I was completely drawn in by the poetically embellished story of brave, stoical Agnes with her rosy cheeks, her manly young fruit-growing suitor, and her firm Scottish father in thrall to Agnes’s wicked young stepmother. Read more

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