Here are your last historical highlights for 2016! Some articles are short and some are long; they touch on libraries, war, maps, and archaeology; and a few deal with intriguing mysteries.
I hope you find one that catches your interest.
To start us off, here is some good news about libraries.
In other news, “the Navajo Nation Library is looking for help to digitally preserve thousands of hours of oral histories that were once thought lost to the world.”
Take a peek into one of the world’s largest map collections.
Bookbinding is something I’d love to learn more about, and this article fuels that interest even more.
Need a compelling reason to visit Wales? You can book a hotel room inside this library!
This is the fascinating and moving story of the founder of Purple Hearts Reunited, a man who returns military medals to family members of soldiers killed in action.
And here is a short article about the interesting photo shown below. (You might also be interested in my interview with Melissa Caza of the Ontario Jewish Archives.)
In a similar vein: “How a Team of Reenactors Helped Solve a Revolutionary War Mystery”
Have you heard of the Antikythera Mechanism? This lengthy article talks about it — and so much more.
“No amount of technology or depth of curiosity can bring back what’s forever lost. This is why searching is, and will always be, a ‘necessarily uncertain’ endeavor, as Swanson put it. Searching for lost knowledge is its own kind of science, but ultimately an incomplete one. ‘In that sense,’ Swanson wrote, ‘there are no limits to either science or information retrieval. But then, too, there are no final answers.’
“And yet people keep searching, sifting through the sands of time for traces to the past. They continue looking, in dank archives and distant oceans, against all odds of discovery. We search because we must, because in every direction, stretching back to the beginning of human history, is the irresistible possibility that we might yet find a strange new sliver of who we were, and better understand what we have become.”
Last but not least, I like this idea for an Anne of Green Gables LEGO set!
Enjoy this festive weekend. I’ll have more links to share in 2017.