By carlybenard on February 16, 2012
Today’s picture comes from the New York Public Library Gallery and features Francis Marion, a military officer who served in the American Revolutionary War. The 18th century image depicted shows Marion jumping out of a second story window. Though the scene seems simply comical, it is actually an account of a historically true event. Marion once attended a dinner party with a few friends and noticed that all of the doors to the house had been locked while toasts were going on. This was the custom of the time but Marion was unaware of it. The party continued but Marion began to feel trapped and chose to “escape” through the second story window of the house. This resulted in a broken ankle and, in turn, forced him to return home to recuperate. Ironically, his injury actually ended up saving his life as he was home when his troops were captured by the British in Charleston that May.
Crawford, Amy. “The Swamp Fox | Biography | Smithsonian Magazine.” History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places | Smithsonian Magazine. 1 July 2007. Web. 16 Feb. 2012. <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/biography/fox.html>.
Posted in Uncategorized |
By beckel on February 9, 2012
Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) created this drawing and watercolor picture, “Death in the Dissecting Room,” as well as similar others depicting Death. His illustrations of death accompanied William Comb’s (1742-1823) book of poetry, The English Dance of Death, which was eventually published (with Rowlandson’s pictures) in 1903. This picture was created in 1815 and shows Death violently interrupting the dissection of a cadaver. It seems to depict Death entering the room and seeking revenge on grave robbers who have unfairly and wrongly disturbed the graves of certain individuals for profit and research. Elise Beck
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged image of the week |
By beckel on February 2, 2012
Valentine’s Day brings thoughts of love, engagement, marriage, and passion, but William Hogarth’s fifth picture in his Marriage à-la-mode series (1745) portrays a warning to those who jump into love and marriage for the wrong reasons (such as money). Hogarth’s painting depicts a young wife begging forgiveness from her husband, the new Earl of Squanderfield, after being caught in the bath-house with a lawyer, who fatally wounds the Earl and quickly escapes through the window1. The painting is part of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs Collection.
1. Fort, Bernadette and Angela Rosenthal, eds. The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Web. 1 Feb. 2012.
Posted in Uncategorized |
By Dana Wheeles on June 21, 2011
This beautiful map of Haiti and surrounding islands was created by Jacques Nicolas Bellin in 1754. Many other amazing charts, maps and other documents have been digitized by the University of Florida Library and shared in the Digital Library of the Caribbean, searchable here in 18thConnect.
Posted in featured search | Tagged caribbean, map |
By mandellc on April 25, 2011
Gale Cengage and the ECCO Text Creation Partnership have agreed to release 2,231 eighteenth-century texts to anyone who wishes to have them. You can search through those 18thCentury texts here at 18thConnect.org by word or phrase: go to the search page, select “ECCO” under “Other Digital Collections” as one of your search facets (by clicking on it), and then scroll down to select “Full-text” only as a search facet as well. Then enter any text (words, phrase) into the search blank, making it a facet as well.
Though we have no formal way of delivering documents, we are happy to be the source for plain text files: simply send Laura Mandell an email (lauraDOTmandellATgmailDOTcom) to request the texts; we can send you all of them, or selected texts.
As always, we are so grateful to the University of Michigan’s Text Creation Partnership for all the work they are doing to insure that we will send into the future the highest-quality digital surrogates of our eighteenth-century heritage. And thanks to Gale for its openness to scholarly needs.
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO TRY USING TAPoR tools on a subset of the texts, using Voyeur (about; tool itself), please click here:
One subset of the 2,231 documents–more are coming.
Posted in development, digital humanities, resources |
By Dana Wheeles on March 14, 2011
This watercolor vignette is part of an album digitized by the New York Public Library, originally created by a woman named Anne Wagner. Called Memorials of Friendship, this album spans the years 1795-1834, and contains a treasure trove of Wagner’s paintings, collages, poetry and letters. Click here to browse the whole album in 18thConnect.
The New York Public Library provides stable links and helpful metadata for each of its digitized objects, making it an ideal resource supplementing 18thConnect’s collections. We’ll be adding more resources from their digital gallery each month, so keep checking in to see more fascinating objects.
Posted in featured search, resources | Tagged nypl |
By Dana Wheeles on March 9, 2011
- The state tinkers, by James Gillray (1780)
Access to 18thConnect will be intermittent between the hours of 5p.m. and midnight (EST) tonight, March 9, in order for us to complete some upgrades and refinements to the site. Please bear with us as we work to make 18thConnect faster and easier to use!
Posted in development |
By Dana Wheeles on March 8, 2011
Thanks to our collaboration with Adam Matthew Digital, 18thConnect now provides full-text searches for the Eighteenth Century Journals Portal. This archive includes periodicals from the 1680s to the 1810s, and is made up of collections from the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Chetham’s Library in Manchester and the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds.
All 18thConnect users can search this material free of charge, but access to the full documents requires a subscription. Just want to browse? Follow this link for a sortable list of titles.
Posted in featured search, resources |
By Dana Wheeles on January 3, 2011
Happy New Year from all of us at 18thConnect!
Posted in featured search |
By Dana Wheeles on November 5, 2010
[18thConnect's work with Gale/Cengage has been publicized by a press release, copied in this message. Users of 18thConnect already have access to citations from Gale's ECCO catalog here.]
Farmington Hills, Mich., Nov. 4, 2010 — Gale, part of Cengage Learning, and 18thConnect, a scholarly organization dedicated to forging links between eighteenth-century archives and today’s digital research environment, today announced a partnership to share scholarly content and improve the searchability of documents within Gale’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) archive.
“Gale’s partnership with 18thConnect gives us a unique opportunity to collaborate with a leading scholarly organization in order to improve upon the user experience within ECCO, the leading database for research and teaching of the eighteenth century,” said Jim Draper, Vice President and Publisher, Gale.
Gale’s ECCO archive, one of the largest academic research collections of its kind, contains more than 180,000 key English and foreign language titles published primarily in the United Kingdom. Despite Gale’s use of the best in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, eighteenth-century typefaces can still be challenging to capture with perfect accuracy, which may impact results when searching or data-mining.
Continue reading “Gale and 18thConnect Partner to Improve Access to Eighteenth Century Documents”
Posted in digital humanities, resources |
