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THE OREGON HISTORICAL SOCIETY (OHS) has a longstanding relationship with the Yasui family that began in 1991, when Homer Yasui and his family donated more than 100,000 documents and over [...]

THE OREGON HISTORICAL Society's (OHS's) research library holds over 7,500 sound recordings, clocking in at around 14,000 hours. This collection includes speeches, lectures, radio programs, musical performances, and even Fred [...]

Lucy Briggs and Sally Ball lived in a world of extremes in antebellum Richmond, Virginia. For Black Virginians the city simultaneously represented the hope of freedom and the horrors of [...]

This article examines the fictional origins of a widely reproduced broadside for an 1852 slave auction in Charleston, South Carolina, that has for the last century been accepted as an authentic relic of the slave trade. Close analysis of the document's content and the local history of Charleston reveals numerous discrepancies that establish the document's inauthenticity and illustrate the value of basic corroboration and contextualization to historical inquiry. Tracing the document's actual origins to an 1892 fictional illustration, the article shows how its long career as an object of historical memory can shed light on the shifting and contested ways in which Americans have remembered the role of slavery and African Americans in the nation's past. Keywords: memory of slavery; museums; public history; South Carolina; African Americans; domestic slave trade, In the decades before the American Civil War, the brokers, buyers and sellers who conducted the domestic slave trade sold off an estimated two million enslaved African Americans, diligently documenting [...]

In the quiet corners of the Harriet Irving Library at the University of New Brunswick, many family mysteries have been solved, research projects have started and finished, and loyalist lives [...]

ONTARIO AND WOODBURN, OREGON, share many characteristics. Historically both towns depended heavily on an agricultural economy, farms surround both towns geographically, and large numbers of farmworkers reside in both places, [...]

WHEN IDA NEA TRIBOLET moved to Baker City with her mother and two sisters in 1897, it was a bustling commercial and transportation hub. At the time, it was the [...]

The number and location of tornadoes in the greater Chicago area is a topic of frequent interest among the media, public, and local government agencies served by the National Weather Service (NWS) Chicago Forecast Office. While accounts of tornadoes over the last several decades are generally clear, tornadoes occurring prior to 1950—especially those considered to be weak—are often more difficult to discern owing to limited corresponding detailed reports. As part of an effort to review and update all tornadoes known to have occurred within the modern-day boundaries of Chicago, NWS Chicago staff reviewed the 22 May 1855 tornado, which is regarded as the first to impact the city of Chicago. Multiple sources reported that the tornado occurred near the town of Jefferson, which eventually became the Jefferson Park neighborhood of Chicago. However, after reviewing multiple historical records, newspaper articles, property maps, and genealogical information, the actual location of the tornado was determined to have been in present-day Des Plaines. Confusion over the name "Jefferson" likely led to the misunderstanding that, until now, has been perpetuated through numerous reports and media accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study situates an early text-to-speech computer developed for blind persons, the Kurzweil Reading Machine (KRM), within a broader history of speech synthesis technologies. Though typically no more than a footnote in the technical history of speech synthesis, the KRM was still a powerful symbol of innovation that reveals how disability can be used as a pretext for funding technology development. I argue that various boosters held the KRM up as a symbol of technological solutionism that promised to fully enroll blind people into the US political economy. However, the success of the KRM as a symbol belies its technical flaws, the federal subsidies needed to bring it to fruition, and the structural barriers to its use that were elided by its Utopian promise. KEYWORDS: text to speech, speech synthesis, reading machines, assistive technologies, IN EARLY 1976 WALTER CRONKITE DEFERRED HIS USUAL sign-off on the CBS Evening News to a new text-tospeech computer system, the Kurzweil Reading Machine (KRM), named for its twenty-seven-year-old inventor, [...]

While the history and practices of collecting have received considerable attention over the past few decades, the notion of erasure - of the deleting, removal or destruction of material, whether deliberate or otherwise - has remained largely in the shadows. We challenge this neglect by placing erasure centre stage and treating it as a productive phenomenon in its own right. Indeed, we suggest that it forms a significant precondition for the very possibility of memory and collections. This article draws upon a recent turn to consider questions of forgetting, ignorance and ending to lay out the grounds for analysing the various roles played by erasure in making and unmaking our world. Inspired by Paul Connerton's discussion of different types of forgetting, we present five distinct forms of erasure that we regard as principally important: (i) repressive erasure, (ii) protective erasure, (iii) operative erasure, (iv) amending erasure and (v) calamitous and neglectful erasure. In each case, we discuss the characteristic logic of the erasure at hand and provide examples of the historical and media-specific forms in which it has been enacted. Our aim in doing so is to provide future researchers with some of the analytical tools and perspectives necessary to engage in further erasure studies. For if we are interested in making sense of the shifting and complex world we inhabit, then the interdisciplinary study of the compelling yet elusive phenomenon of erasure is an excellent place to start. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ASSOCIATION NEWS ACHA Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, January 4-6, 2023 The American Catholic Historical Association held its 103rd annual meeting from January 4-6, 2023, in Philadelphia. The program committee consisted of [...]

IN 2021, the staff of the Oregon Historical Society's (OHS's) research Library embarked on a project to update and improve selected collection guides for older collections. This work has included [...]

Ben Winans worked as a printer in Brookville, Indiana, but he was also an amateur photographer who enjoyed roaming all of Franklin County. He photographed the Big Four Crew at [...]

Pinellia Tuber (the dried tuber of Pinellia ternata (Thunb.) Makino [Araceae]) (PT) is a crude drug used in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and Japanese Kampo medicine. PT is subjected to additional processing before use in TCM because of its toxic, while the processing has not been used in Kampo medicine. The aim of this study is to clarify the reason why the differences about the processing of PT between TCM and Kampo medicine have been appeared. We investigated successive literatures published in China and in Japan from the Han dynasty to the modern age. The descriptions about the processing of PT in China had appeared since the Later Han dynasty as washing, and after that, various processing methods have been recorded, such as boiling, steaming, making cakes, and fermenting to prepare PT malt (PTM) with various drug additives. The objective of the processing for PT was not only to remove its toxicity but to change drug properties, and several kinds of processed PT had been developed to treat different types of "phlegm" in the Ming dynasty. The current Chinese Pharmacopoeia recommends the use of processed PT to avoid the toxicity, and registers unprocessed PT as well as three kinds of processed PT except for PTM which had been deleted in 2015 edition. These processing methods for PT have been established in the Qing dynasty. The oldest description in Japan was appeared in 1363, and the processing methods had been influenced by the literatures in the Song dynasty. After that, the processed PT in Japan had mainly been PTM until the 18th century. In 1738, Shuan Kagawa wrote that PT should not be processed because its pharmacological effects disappeared and the toxicity of PT disappeared by preparing its decoction without processing. Then, the processing of PT has been unpopular, and the Japanese Pharmacopoeia has registered PT since 1939 without any processing. Compared to TCM, Japanese Kampo medicine has tended to avoid ideologism based on traditional knowledge and to adopt positivism. This policy has reflected the differences in the processing of PT between Kampo medicine and TCM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prominent roles played by John Wesley and George Whitefield in the eighteenth-century British book trade has been widely observed by scholars. Scholars, however, have hardly glimpsed how the various works authored by Wesley and Whitefield were discussed and critiqued in the era's leading literary periodicals, the Monthly Review and the Critical Review. As self-appointed -- and publicly recognised -- arbiters of literary taste, the Monthly and the Critical wielded tremendous influence in the marketplace of books and ideas, informing not only what and how readers read, but shaping public perception of the various issues discussed in the print media of the day. These issues included the two Methodist leaders and the movement they founded, which created its share of controversy throughout the eighteenth century. Although both the Monthly and the Critical routinely registered their antipathy to the Methodist movement in their reviews, their opinions about the revival and its leaders proved more nuanced than most anti- Methodist writers, who usually castigated Wesley and Whitefield in unequivocal terms. The reviewers' objective -- to offer ostensibly unbiased reviews of newly published books based on objective standards -- meant that they did not permit authors, whether pro- or anti-Methodist, to rail without reason or make assertions without backing. The reviewers thus found themselves navigating between their own anti-Methodist sentiment and their critical principles. This process resulted in a relatively balanced strain of anti-Methodist discourse while exposing how politicised the entire project of popular review criticism became when grappling with a complex and controversial topic like Methodism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]