After Google launched an ambitious project in 2008 to digitize many local newspapers, the giant e-content provider scanned about 2,000 publications, including a Wilmington newspaper, the Sunday Morning Star. In the era when many dailies didn’t have Sunday editions, these periodicals functioned like newsweeklies, the broadsheet having a form distinct from the weekday news. They pulled together features and more in-depth, colorful pieces…
Prohibition Talk Focuses on New Hampshire
I recently had the opportunity to examine the subject of temperance and prohibition from a New England perspective. While framing this within a national context for the Nashua Public Library, the lecture considered the centuries-long attempt to control and regulate the consumption of alcohol in a regional context. This took in stories of rumrunners landing…
Finding Old New Jersey Map
Thanks to the World Wide Web, public digitization initiatives, and the growth of social media, researchers and curious types have almost unlimited, convenient access to an enormous array of rare historical maps. As these old cartographic renderings, many seldom used or seen, come out of storage vaults and are made available virtually, they allow a…
Salem County Cold Case
While studying the array of officials who made up New Jersey’s 19th-century criminal justice system, I often pore over aging coroner’s reports, trial transcripts, and police blotters. While doing that in South Jersey, I came across an unsettling Salem County Cold Case, the murder of Abigail Dilks in 1874. From the beginning, the mystifying case…