TimesMachine

If you are a New York Times home subscriber you now have browsable access to electronic copies of every issue of The Times from September 18, 1851 to December 30, 1922.

 

[via NICAR-L]

The 1790 Census

You can get a PDF copy of the first Census on the U.S. Census Bureau's Web site:

The first enumeration began on Monday, August 2,1790, little more than a year after the inauguration of President Washington and shortly before the second session of the first Congress ended. The Congress assigned responsibility for the 1790 census to the marshals of the U.S. judicial districts under an act that, with minor modifications and extensions, governed census-taking through1840. The law required that every household be visited and that completed census schedules be posted in ''two of the most public places within [each jurisdiction], there to remain for the inspection of all concerned...'' and that' 'the aggregate amount of each description of persons'' for every district be transmitted to the President. The six inquiries in 1790 called for the name of the head of the family and the number of persons in each household of the following descriptions: Free White males of 16 years and upward (to assess the country's industrial and military potential), free White males under 16 years, free White females, all other free persons (by sex and color), and slaves.

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers

This online exhibit by The Library of Congress lets you read newspapers from 1900 to 1910 from Kentucky, California, District of Columbia, Florida, New York, Utah, and Virginia. The Courier-Journal isn't included -- the only Kentucky newspaper listed is The Bourbon News from Paris. An explanation of the project says the goal over the next 20 years is to "create a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers from all the states and U.S. territories published between 1836 and 1922. This searchable database will be permanently maintained at the Library of Congress (LC) and be freely accessible via the Internet."

Digital History Hacks blog

I learned about How to Read a Book, mentioned previously, on Digital History Hacks, a blog about applying a geek's tools to history. The author is William J. Turkel, an assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario. If journalism truly is the first rough draft of history, then journalists have something to learn from historians. Posts I liked included "Teaching Young Historians to Search, Spider and Scrape" and "On N-gram Data and Automated Plagiarism Checking." And check out his recently posted "Readings for a Field in Digital History."

Malcolm X Project

The Malcolm X Project at Columbia University is an in-depth look at the late activist and Muslim leader.

My Dad, the Aladdin, hydroplane racing and searching Google's news archive

Google unveiled a news archive search last week that lets you search for news from as far back as 200 years ago. I finally got around to giving it a try.

The archive isn't Google's. What Google is doing is making it possible to search archives from a variety of sources -- The Washington Post, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Lexis-Nexis, NewspaperArchives.com and more. Some of the content is free, some you get only a summary of the story and have to pay the provider for the rest.

As I always do when trying out a new Web search -- I Googled myself. That turned up almost nothing. That had me thinking, how good of a news archive search could this be if it doesn't even turn up any of my hardy Web perennials, like Woody Harrelson on hemp, the hepatitis inmate or the sex-addicted doctor? Apparently most of the content for publications I've written for, including The Courier-Journal and the Wilmington Star-News, isn't included. If there's a detailed explanation of what is, I didn't find it.

Then, just for the hell of it, I started searching for my father, Louis Schaver, who died in 1979. Immediately, I was onto something.

First I found advertisements he had placed in the Lincoln Evening Journal in 1959, before I was born. At the time he was working as a district manager for Ross Laboratories in Omaha, Nebraska, and he was looking for "a college graduate under 35" to call on doctors and hospitals. The job paid a lush $5400 a year.

Then I found a 1963 AP story that ran in several small Midwestern newspapers. They quoted my father when he owned a teen-age nightclub in L.A. The story, which chronicled this strange, new scene, began: "Was it the Watusi? The mashed potatoes? The surfer stomp? Whatever it was, all the dancers have gum on the bottom of their shoes. ... "

Family lore has it that when he ran the nightclub, the Aladdin, his main competitor was Bob Eubanks, who went on to fame as the host of the Newleywed Game. The proof was there -- Bob, then the 25-year-old manager of the Cinder, was the focus of the story ("I sell two commodities here -- dancing and boy-meets-girl"). My mother once told me that Bob's nightclub was more successful than my father's because he was hipper than my Dad. The story demonstrated that not only by relegating my father's quotes to the end, but also by what he said:

"The kids won't do the twist any more because the adults took it over," the 30-something Schaver explained. "The stomp's the big thing now."

And just what is the stomp? the reporter asked.

"Dancers stand three feet apart and jump up and down," my father said. "I guess the kids wouldn't like that description, though."

I can just see the line at the door growing shorter ...

That was all I could find on my father, but I was having too much fun to stop, so I looked up one of my father's heroes: His uncle, Jack Schafer, who owned a Detroit bread bakery and raced hydroplanes, or so I'd been told. About all I knew of Jack Schafer was that one of his cuff links, depicting a boat called "Such Crust," was embedded in a framed Christmas Tree, constructed from old jewelry, an aunt had given to us. It hung on a wall, year round, most of my childhood.

There, in the search results, was my father's Uncle Jack, in all his glory. Time magazine wrote that Such Crust, "the $25,000 boating toy of Jack Schafer," won the 1948 President's Cup Regatta in record time. Dozens and dozens of briefs in small newspapers chronicled Such Crust's fortunes over three decades. (I should point out that the "bread tycoon," as one story called him, didn't actually drive the boats. He hired professionals for that) The Washington Post even published his obituary, in 1969.

My point in belaboring this family history is to show what a fabulous tool this is. Yes, I could have found this in other ways -- searching one by one each of the Web sites Google indexes, or digging through archives myself across a continent, but how likely would that be? I'll be retired before I have time like that. But in the space of an hour, Google found it all for me. I had no idea the AP had ever written an article quoting my father, or that he placed want ads in Nebraska in the late 1950s. Imagine how useful this could be if you're writing a biography, or tracking down a news subject's shady history, or are just curious about a particular moment in time. That's why I'm rooting for Google in its battle with publishers. The publishers want to keep all this fabulous information locked up in silos, impossible or too expensive to find.

Google, whatever its faults, wants to share it with us all.