Early Modern Notes

This should be of interest to many users of the Old Bailey Proceedings, especially teachers and researchers: you can now use the ‘one-click’ function in Zotero to bookmark documents on the site – when browsing, you’ll see the Zotero icons appear in the browser address bar.

It definitely works for single trials, full sessions and Ordinary’s Accounts, saving the key metadata for the page; it may also work in non-trial sections of sessions (adverts, supplementary material, etc), but I haven’t checked this. It also works from search results (but not stats and map searches); it’ll bring up a list of all the results on the page with checkboxes to save as many or few as you want.

(I believe that Adam Crymble should get the credit for writing the translator, but will happily correct this if I’m wrong!)

At last it’s official, and the work I started in Sheffield in 2006 (yikes!) is almost complete:

London Lives 1690-1800 is open for business.

There are more than 200,000 pages of manuscript material from parish, criminal justice and hospital records, transcribed and marked up for searching in the same way as the Old Bailey Proceedings Online. Plus the 18th-century Proceedings and Ordinary’s Accounts and a group of additional datasets.

The emphasis is on searching for people (although there is also a keyword search) and on nominal record linkage, to facilitate writing the biographies of ordinary and extraordinary 18th-century Londoners.

We’ve started some biographies for you. We’ve also written extensive background material and information about the project itself.

Oh, and next week we’re holding a conference at the University of Hertfordshire to mark the launch.

Do go and explore for yourselves.

Carnivalesque 62 (early modern) has been posted by Lucy Inglis at Georgian London, with everything from 18th-century paint colours to tiny dogs.

The next History Carnival will be hosted by Warren Stewart on 1 June at Magnificat. To nominate the best history blogging of the last month, email warren {at} magnificatbaroque(.)com or use the nomination form.

The next Carnivalesque will be an ancient/medieval edition at The Cranky Professor, date to be confirmed but probably around 20 June; usual nomination form.

Welcome one and all to the 86th edition of the History Carnival, and many thanks for all the nominations.

March was Women’s History Month and we had a rich seam of posts about women in history. Let’s open proceedings with the Tenured Radical’s question: It’s Women’s History Month: Do You Know Where The Women’s History Blogs Are?

At Zenobia: Empress of the East, Judith Weingarten explored the life and work (and afterlife) of one of my favourite artists, Judith Leyster, in An Uppity Dutch Master: Part 1 and Part II.

Abigail Quinnley at the Quinnley Stand wrote about the mythology of Lilith, the first wife of Adam, in Original Sin?

At The Vapour Trail, Melissa Bellanta posted on Trained on rashers and ice-pudding: the Victorian skirt dance.

The Women’s History Network Blog published fine posts from various historians throughout the month, so here are just a few of the highlights:

Shall We Go to the Pictures?: Rachel Freeman on the efforts of the Mothers’ Union to “safeguard the morality of society” in the mid-20th century.

In a post for Ada Lovelace Day on 24 March, Katie Barclay looked at Mary Fairfax Somerville, a 19th-century mathematician.

The International Year of the Nurse: Sue Hawkins reminds us that nursing history isn’t all about Florence Nightingale.

Wars, Revolutions and Soldiers

Jack Le Moine at History Moments Serbian Revolt Begins, spotlights the beginning of the Serbian revolt against Ottoman rule in February 1804.

Kevin Levin has been Looking for Silas Chandler, at Civil War Memory and challenging some of the dubious attempts to rewrite the stories of black people who fought for the Confederate states in the American Civil War.

Soldier’s Mail: Letters Home from a New England Doughboy is a fascinating blog posting the letters home to his family of the First World War US Sgt. Sam Avery. On 15 March 1919, he was at Laigne-en-Belin, France.

Tim Abbott unravelled the mystery of the Revolutionary War Service Record of Jacob Maurice De Hart at Walking the Berkshires.

Medicine, Anatomy and Quackery

Øystein Horgmo at The Sterile Eye explores the amazingly detailed anatomical drawings of Jan van Rymsdyk – Drawer of Wombs, illustrator of William Hunter’s “The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus” (1774).

In early modern Europe, the modern science of anatomy was largely founded on the dissected corpses of criminals. Executed Today uncovered a similar story in Japan.

At Civil War Medicine and Writing, Jim Schmidt uncovers Quack Medicine Advertising Disguised as Military History.

Caroline Rance at The Quack Doctor has another story of a quack’s misleading claims, with fatal consequences: The Tragic Story of Ching’s Worm Lozenges.

Religion, Culture and Food

Jeremy Dupertuis Bangs guest-blogged at American Creation on his research on early modern ideas of hierarchical authority.

How could I possibly have resisted a post from the Wellcome Library Blog to celebrate National Pie Week? The crust of it!

Got Medieval skewers some risible research in What’s All This about Super-Sized Last Suppers?

Alun Salt reports on archaeologists’ investigation in Australia of a case of 20th-century aboriginal culture and resistance in Preserving a culture in wild honey.

Closing thoughts

At Past is Present, Christine Graham-Ward recounted how a mundane check on the identity of a copyright holder led to a story of scandal, unrequited love and tragedy in Oregon.

And of course, no Carnival should be without a little crime and mayhem, so we have the real story of Dick Turpin from Dainty Ballerina.

And that’s it for this time! The next History Carnival will be at The Vapour Trail on 1 May. See you there!

(Where did the last three months go?!?)

The latest early modern Carnivalesque has been posted at the Quack Doctor.

The next History Carnival will be right here at Early Modern Notes, on about 2 April. Email nominations to sharon {at} earlymodernweb.org(.)uk, use the nomination form, or tweet @sharon_howard using the hashtag #historycarnival. Easter-themed nominations will be particularly welcome.

The Digging into Data challenge is an international grant competition (UK, US, Canada), which announced its first eight winners yesterday.

What is the “challenge” we speak of? The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to answer the question “what do you do with a million books?” Or a million pages of newspaper? Or a million photographs of artwork? That is, how does the notion of scale affect humanities and social science research? Now that scholars have access to huge repositories of digitized data — far more than they could read in a lifetime — what does that mean for research?

The most exciting bit for historians of crime and fans of the Old Bailey Proceedings Online, and of Zotero and TAPoR, is that the Old Bailey Online is one of the eight:

Using Zotero and TAPoR on the Old Bailey Proceedings: Data Mining with Criminal Intent

Awardees: Dan Cohen, George Mason University, NEH; Tim Hitchcock, University of Hertfordshire, JISC; Geoffrey Rockwell, University of Alberta, SSHRC.

Additional Key Participants: The National Archives (United Kingdom), McMaster University, the Open University, Amherst College, University of Sheffield, Trent University, and the University of Western Ontario.

Description: This project will create an intellectual exemplar for the role of data mining in an important historical discipline – the history of crime – and illustrate how the tools of digital humanities can be used to wrest new knowledge from one of the largest humanities data sets currently available: the Old Bailey Online.