The Notable Kentucky African Americans Database (NKAA) is a continuously updated reference tool for studying African Americans in and from Kentucky from the 1700s to the present day. The database is freely available online, and receives well over 100,000 hits each year. It was created by librarians Rob Aken and...
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Life out of Darkness: The Recovery of Julia Peterkin, Forgotten Pulitzer Prize Winner
If asked to name the first southern novelist to win a Pulitzer Prize, most Americans might guess William Faulkner or Margaret Mitchell. The honor actually belongs to Julia Peterkin (1880-1961), a largely forgotten, self-styled plantation mistress from South Carolina whose meteoric career rendered her name and novels household words for...
The Female Marine
In 1814, Boston printer Nathaniel Coverly Jr. published a pamphlet entitled An Affecting Narrative of Louisa Baker, which became an immediate bestseller in New England. It is an autobiography in which Miss Baker relates the story of her journey from idyllic rural Massachusetts to the depths of urban degradation in...
The Index of Virginia Printing: Building an Online Reference with Print and Digital Resources
How does a researcher handle dated reference works still in print and still widely used? From the masthead of a Virginia newspaper This has been a recurring challenge in my twenty years of research into Virginia’s early printing trade. Historians of the Old Dominion have long repeated the assertions of...
The American Peregrinations of a Blockhead Mummy: A Not So Eternal Rest
The first Egyptian mummy to be exhibited commercially in America was a stonecutter from Thebes named Padihershef. This ancient gentleman arrived in Boston in early May 1823 and was exhibited up and down the East Coast, visiting twelve different cities in 1823 and 1824. By the end of 1824 several...
