Tag: titles

Digital Highlights: Care for Ailing Sailors

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Names of the wards and numbers of beds in each of the buildings of the Greenwich Hospital. (42)

Modern-day students of history learn the use of primary sources almost from the minute they enter an undergraduate program; some, from high schools with engaged history faculty or by taking part in programs like History Day in Massachusetts, before then. Analyzing, closely reading, considering, debating, and writing about primary sources is a key part of any history student’s education.

What makes today’s digital highlight particularly interesting, then, is that not only is it now a primary source in its turn but it uses primary sources in their entirety. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Gambling, Duelling, and Suicide

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Title page of Hey's first dissertation.

Perhaps duelling is no longer the concern it once was, but gambling and suicide are still concerns for many people. With the rise of the Internet and widespread public access to a nearly global network of communication, both issues have been complicated once again with, among other things, the lure of online gambling. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: “I Do Believe in Spooks!”

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Title page of "Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men," by John Harris.

John Harris’ Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men is a great read as we look forward to the Halloween season. Harris’ work is best approached in a kind of smorgasbord state of mind: there is no single through-line argument, rather Harris has assembled a collection of anecdotes and evidence to discuss psychic phenomena of one kind or another including hypnotism, thought transference, and hauntings. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Healthful Travelling

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Title page of "Change of Air."

A trip to “recover one’s health” seems to have been something of a hobby in the nineteenth century. In the United Kingdom, Europe, and America, the health retreat to a spa, a seaside resort, the mountains, or the beach was a reasonably regular occurrence — for those who could afford it, anyway.

In 1831, “physician extraordinary to the King” James Johnson wrote Change of Air, or the Pursuit of Health to reflect not only on the need for such trips but an excursion he had himself taken and “…remarks and speculations on the moral, physical, and medicinal influence of foreign, especially of an Italian climate and residence, in sickness and in health.” (i) Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Physical and Emotional

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"Diagram of the more important distributions of the autonomic nervous system." From Cannon's "Bodily Changes..." (24)

The experience of having a great meal disturbed by an argument is a common one and a headache can make a work-day seem like it lasts 10 times as long. In 1915, Walter B. Cannon wrote Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear, and Rage to describe the physical changes that accompany certain emotions. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Abduction!

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Title page of Ann Brookhouse's narrative.

Tabloid-style stories have been popular for far longer than what we think of as tabloid journalism. A Narrative of the Seizure & Confinement of Ann Brookhouse from the end of the eighteenth century is just such a piece. Purporting to be the true life narrative of a young female victim of abduction “as related by herself” and “written by a friend.” Continue reading