Neglecting This Blog

Hello, everyone.

I just wanted to apologize for neglecting this blog over the last week. It was quite a week for us — midterm papers to grade, daycare centers to visit, and, most importantly, a new house to move into!

I'll be back with new content on Monday.

James Arcene

Check out my guest post about James Arcene over at Executed Today.

Around the Internet

• Christopher Beam at Slate discusses the Library of Congress' Twitter archive.
• J.L. Bell at Boston 1775 tells the story of Asahel Porter (with gravestone!).
• Henry Louis Gates, Jr. addresses the complexity of the Atlantic slave trade in the New York Times.
• A dying man sells ad space on his urn to save his family the expense of his cremation.
• Laura Wattenberg (and readers) eagerly await the release of the 2009 Social Security name list (any day now!).
  

New Templates!

The lovely and talented Pete has been working diligently for several months to bring new templates to Blogger users.

If you have a Blogger blog, you can customize your template by going to Blogger in Draft, clicking on "Layout," and selecting the "Template Designer" option. Then, you can play with templates, colors, backgrounds, and fonts.

I will be fiddling around with VPI's template over the next day or two, trying to find something I like. I liked Scribe well enough, but every history blogger used it and it was too narrow, so I'm excited about getting something new.

Good job, Pete! Congrats on launching your project!

Captions!

Lois Porter, 1792, Hadley, Ma

If you use Blogger, you can now caption photos! Just make sure you are using draft.blogger.com, then upload your photo. After it appears in the post, click on it and select "Add Caption." The caption will move with your photo if you resize the photo or change the alignment.

Curious Expeditions

While doing some background research on a new course about the history of life and death issues, I came across an intriguing blog: Curious Expeditions.

It specializes in documenting strange and extraordinary objects, places, and events. Many of the entries tend toward the macabre — ossuaries, medical museums, mourning jewelry — and might hold some interest for those of you interested in the material culture of death.

Links!

Still grading, so I'll let others generate content. Enjoy!

• The Top Ten Books of 1709
• The Death of Washington, 14 December 1799 
• Gravestones Hold Secrets to Earth's Climate Past
• Images of the Antislavery Movement in Massachusetts
  

The Lazy Scholar

Do you enjoy doing archival research . . . from your couch? If so, you will doubtless find The Lazy Scholar invaluable reading.

And Gravestones!

Kfrancher's comment that my post on Scalia concerns "some obscure matter" caused me a moment's pause. This is, after all, a blog (primarily) about gravestones, so I thought that it should be obvious that all gravestone-related matters, while obscure elsewhere, are right at home here.

Then, I thought that this would be obvious to long-time readers, but that anyone who followed a link and saw just one post might not know what the blog is about.

In light of that realization, I have changed my little sub-heading to read, "History, grad school, and gravestones!" That way, there will be no confusion.

Vast Public Indifference: The Book

Yesterday, Pete presented me with an early birthday gift: the first six months of Vast Public Indifference in book form.

Blogger has partnered with Blog2Print, a company that publishes hard copies of blog posts. The first six months of my blog translates to about 200 pages of text and pictures.

I'm enjoying this book on several levels. First, it's been a lot of fun browsing through posts that I'd forgotten about long ago. It's also interesting to see how the blog developed in its early months — I spent much more time writing about the books I was reading. I feel like I should get back to that a bit.

On top of that, I think this book is a fascinating object — a book made from online content about books. Of course, the book can never be what the blog is. The most glaring difference is the lack of links. It's really a stark illustration of how writing is genre- and context-specific.

If there is a blogger in your life, particularly if he/she is also a lover of books or a skeptic about the permanence of online content, a Blog2Print book would make an excellent gift.

There is one major caveat: the formatting is not great. For posts made in the old Blogger editor, Blog2Print cannot reproduce italics, bold, or block quotes. The printed version is not a reproduction of the blog, but an interpretation of it. I've heard that books made from posts that were created in the new editor are somewhat better.

Mysteries of the Google

In the past two months, 44 Google searches for "Wayte-A-While Makepeace" have directed readers to this blog.

Is there a Wayte-A-While Makepeace fan club out there? If so, may I join?

500 Posts

I passed the 500 post mark a few days ago. In celebration, Pete made me this lovely word cloud in the colors of my blog:

Blogging Through History

In this strange little cartoon-illustrated piece, CBS compares Publick Occurrences, 18th-century pamphlets, and 19th-century newspapers to modern blogs.

I don't know that I'm quite as optimistic about the "many voices" characterization of either the 18th century or the present as the CBS story. After all, no amount of friendly faux-crayon doodling will change the fact that this piece ran on CBS' national program, CBS Sunday Morning, which is broadcast over the public airwaves (for now), while this blog gets about 100 hits per day.

Happy Blogiversary to Me!

One year ago today, I fired up the blogging engine here at VPI. Since that time, I've had 9,768 visitors from 98 different countries. Here's some interesting information I gleaned from Google Analytics:

Most Popular Post: Pixar's Gender Problem

Most Fruitful Linking Site: Civil War Memory

Strangest Google Search Leading to VPI: "carmine galante disneyland"

Thanks for visiting, everyone, and special thanks to commenters RJO and Lori Stokes for contributing!

Executed Today

The first of my two guest posts is up at Executed Today!

Today: Hannah Ocuish, Connecticut, 1786

Tomorrow: Celia, a slave, Missouri, 1855

Sarah Jackson Inches

To the person who is running Google searches for "Sally Jackson Inches" and "Joseph Jackson Esq Boston":

If you are interested in more information on these people, please leave a comment here and I will email you. I have a whole thesis filled with trivia about them.

- CGDH

Sadness

Oh no! Executed Today seems to be gone. :(

Update:
It's back! Maybe my internet just sucks.

Funny How That Happens

The New York Times is running a story on the BlogHer conference. The teaser reads, "Although women and men are creating blogs in roughly equal numbers, many women believe that they are not taken as seriously as their male counterparts."

This article is running in the "Fashion & Style" section, rather than the "Technology" section.

Funny how that happens.

(via Pandagon, Feministe, and surely many others)

Things You Should Read

I'm taking it easy for a few days. Enjoy these excellent posts:

Civil War Memory: the US Army has a strange public stance on the Civil War

The Feminist Underground: more on girls and movies

Executed Today: concealing the birth of a bastard child in NH, 1739

Town Called Dobson: "Smile When You Are Sold"

The Truth About Black Confederates (via Lawyers, Guns, and Money)

Google Analytics

I am happy to report that, according to Google Analytics, at least one person has found this blog with the Google search,

"black confederate" + bullshit.