Follow Friday: AHA (American Historical Association) Today

(Copyright (c) 2010 Cynthia Shenette) A while back I started reading AHA Today, the blog of American Historical Association. According to the blog's "About" page, AHA Today is "...focused on the latest happenings in the broad discipline of history and the professional practise of the craft that draws on the staff, research, and activities of the AHA." The staff hopes the blog will "...serve as a clearinghouse for interesting, and perhaps useful information about the profession." While not specifically designed for genealogists and family historians I've found a number of articles which have peaked my interest.

I particularly like their weekly What We're Reading posts, kind of a historian's reading round-up, a la Randy Seaver's Best of the Genea-Blogs weekly post at Genea-Musings. This week's What We're Reading: August 19, 2010 Edition includes a link to Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943, originally published at Plog, Photo Blogs from the Denver Post. The color images, mostly of rural America, bring a warmth, currency, and sense of vitality I sometimes find lacking in black and white photos. I found another interesting link at the bottom of the Captured: America entry, Captured: Color Photography from Russia in the Early 1900's. It's a fascinating look at photos by a Russian chemist and photographer who used his own unique process for creating color images to capture photographs of ordinary people across Russia.

This week I found AHA Today's post, The 90th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment and the links within particularly interesting. Sometimes I still find it hard to believe that I am only the second generation of women in my family born with the right to vote. Another "find" in What We're Reading: August 12, 2010 Edition was Winners: Most Innovative Archives, which led me to The HerStory Scrapbook. The HerStory Scrapbook includes over 900 articles from the New York Times, written between 1917 and 1920, "...about the women who were fighting for, and against, the right to vote."

I also found reference to London Lives 1690 to 1800 via AHA Today. The project description on the website says, "London Lives makes available, in fully digitised and searchable form, a wide range of primary sources about eighteenth-century London, with a particular focus on plebeian Londoners." London Lives provides access to historical records with 3.35 million name instances. All I can say is, wow!

Other items of interest found through the AHA Today site include the post History, There's an App for That and a link to Historical Fiction: The Ultimate Summer Getaway at NPR.

With all that and much, much more, don't wait until tomorrow. Check out AHA Today, well, today!