I’m not sure how I missed this yesterday, but the American Historical Association blog announced that a number of titles in the Gutenberg-e series (learn more about the Gutenberg-e prize/series) were now available open access via the Gutenberg-e Publications page:

The electronic monographs published by Columbia University Press in the Gutenberg-e Project are now available in an open-access form through the University’s Libraries, and are also being made available through ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB). By taking this new step, we will continue the project’s ongoing experiment with different forms of electronic publication, and also hope to demonstrate whether open-access publications will garner greater use and more citations from students and scholars.

These are really nice online books (check out Tonio Andrade’s How Taiwan Became Chinese, for example) and are also examples of excellent historical scholarship. I would encourage librarians to catalog these titles so that students and faculty at your institution can access them via your OPAC (if you are reading this and are not a librarian, please contact your librarian and ask that these titles be added to the catalog).

Kudos to AHA and to Columbia University for making this happen (thanks also to the financial support provided by the Mellon Foundation). It’s nice to see history’s professional organization continuing their support for open access to historical scholarship.

The Council on Foreign Relations, in conjunction with the National History Center, sponsored a talk by Ernest R. May on surprise attacks in history and their relevance today; watch the video or listen to the audio of the lecture.

[link from Docuticker]

The Kennedy School of Government at Harvard recently held a panel discussion to reflect on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Docuticker has links to the audio (mp3) and to the video (Quicktime).

I can’t read German very well, but for those out there who do here’s an article on the problem of “European commemorative culture:”

Europäische Erinnerungspolitik Revisited
European commemorative culture is an integral component of the post-national process. But how can such a “European memory” be justified? And if we aren’t to refer to a continental, quasi-national memory, how is “European memory” special?

This is very cool – mp3 files of some of the papers given at the 2007 World History Association Conference. To quibble slightly: this isn’t really a podcast (as the web site claims) since there’s no feed available.

While you’re over at the WHA site, be sure to check out the list of recommended books. This would be a useful checklist for librarians wishing to do a quick assessment of world history holdings at their library.

["podcast" link from Jonathan Reynolds at Cliopatria]

The Library of Congress has launched a series of podcasts, starting with speakers from the 2007 Book Festival. One of the speakers was Ken Burns, who talks about his book The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945 (co-authored with Geoffrey Ward) as well as his upcoming PBS documentary.

Ethan Persoff has digitized a comic book created by George Wallace for his run for governor in 1962. This is a very interesting piece of campaign literature and a great bit of history.

[link from BoingBoing]

Now online, courtesy of the Library of Congress Rare Book & Special Collections Division, is the Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson; Compiled with Annotations by E. Millicent Sowerby. Washington, D. C., The Library of Congress, 1952-59. (5 volumes). This is a great bibliographical tool and kind of fun, too. Also of note, digitized books from Jefferson’s library: A Summary View of the Rights of British America and History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark. Be sure to check out some of the other digitized material while you’re there (like H.P. Kraus’s pictorial bibliography of Sir Francis Drake).

[Jefferson Catalogue link from PhiloBiblos]

As noted over at Cliopatria, the eminent historian of the Holocaust Raul Hilberg died recently. Here’s the press release from the University of Vermont (where Hilberg was Professor Emeritus), the Times of London obit, and also an obituary by Gustav Seibt from Signandsight. Hilberg is best known for his work The Destruction of European Jews, but take a look also at Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders and The Politics of Memory:The Journey of a Holocaust Historian.

[more scribblings]

In the “old days,” bibliography (of the enumerative kind) was important because of scarcity: researchers needed to know where things were because it was difficult to find things (articles, books, whatever). Nowadays, there’s not really information scarcity to the same degree? There’s too much information, so historians just need to know what’s really good/important. Thus, a different kind of bibliography is necessary – more things like the AHA Guide to Historical Literature (which is now getting a bit too old): an annotated list of the most important scholarship. Citation indexes become more important, as do review essays (doing cited reference searches and finding review essays need to become more central to advanced library instruction). Using wikis to create online, collaborative guides to historical literature (e.g., Mason Historiographiki). This is something I’ve advocated for before.