ResearchBuzz

The Harvard University Library Open Collections Program launched “Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics” at the end of February. It’s available at http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/contagion/ . This collection contains more than 500,000 pages of digitized books, serials, manuscripts, etc and was designed to offer historical perspectives on epidemiology.

There are a few different ways to review the collection. A timeline covers 1494–1948, and starts with “Syphilis, 1494–1923” and ends with the founding of the World Health Organization in 1948. Some of the entries on the timeline are just data points and facts (”Morton presents the first detailed clinical description of malaria and its treatment with cinchona.”) while the red-bold-italicized entries are links to data pages.

The data page for “The Yellow Fever Epidemic in Philadelphia, 1793”, for example, starts over with an overview of the disease and the way it impacted Philadelphia in 1793, with notable figures in the fight against the epidemic. After the overview there’s a pointer to Web pages (or in this case, Web page) and then a list of publications. At the end there are references for the page as a whole, but let’s get back to the publications.

The publications are fascinating in that they’re contemporary, written within ten years of the epidemic. “A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia…” was written in 1794; ” Observations Upon the Origin of the Malignant Bilious, or Yellow Fever in Philadelphia, and Upon the Means of Preventing It: Addressed to the Citizens of Philadelphia” was written in 1799. Click on the title of a publication and you’ll be able to page through the publications, viewing their pages as either text or images. In this case I think I like the images better; I took a look at a text page and it was still doing the f-for-s thing, so I was reading things like this: “They are firft afted upon, by the heat of the fun…” I can handle this better when it’s the original image.

Epidemics and diseases certainly do not make for light reading, but from a historical perspective this is an amazing exhibit.

Recently, some old documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy were found. And the Dallas Morning News wants your help going through them. There are 54 groups of content on this page, each of which contains a list of contents scanned into PDF format.

There’s a forum devoted to discussion of the documents, but it doesn’t appear to be very busy at the moment. There’s also a place you can contact if you find something in the documents, but you have to be a member of DallasNews.com to use it.

Did you know there were over 800 university history departments and historical organizations in the US and Canada? I didn’t either until I saw the directory at http://www.historians.org/pubs/directory/index.cfm .

You can browse by institution name, search by name, or search by degree type and state. Searching New Hampshire listed five results, with detail pages giving the address of the university and e-mail and Web contacts for the history department. The level of degrees offered by the department are also listed.