Historians recommend the books they love. Backlist was an online publication that connects general readers interested in history with book lists and short essays by historians organized around big themes and questions. (Picture your favorite scholar’s office filled with piles of books grouped by project — that’s what we’re going for.) We launched the site in December 2015. And here’s an interview we did over at the Melville House blog in January 2016. We are no longer adding new content, but you can still find all of the recommendations online!
The Appendix is a digital journal of narrative and experimental history. I joined the editorial team in May 2013, and we put out two volumes of quarterly issues before wrapping up the project. The journal’s name comes from an anecdote about the academic world that many of us have heard before: that too many pieces of our research, often the parts most strange and wonderful, never make it into the articles and monographs we write. The Appendix is a place for those sources and stories–which remain available for all to read on the web. Head on over there and have a look around!
“Linking Sources and Specimens: Dr. Mearns’s Birds” is a collaborative outreach-oriented project I completed with the Division of Birds at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Using the papers of Dr. Edgar Mearns and the scientific study skins he donated to the museum, we created a website that reconnects individual bird specimens with the narratives of their collection. Unfortunately, the project is no longer available on the NMNH website due to compatibility issues with a Smithsonian-wide web update.
***
That’s my Appendix mug (and my Ithaca porch); the third image on this page is one I took of a drawer full of tanagers at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s Division of Birds in May 2013.
