"Wolfgang" wrote ...

"Daniel-San" wrote ...

...Great stuff.



Dan
...who apparently needs to poke around the LOC site a bit more....

LOC is good. There are many others. There is currently more free
literature available on the web than one could possibly read in a
lifetime. In fact, the volume is growing so fast that a lifetime could be
spent merely in keeping track of it. The trick today is to find and sort
through what one is interested in......and there's something for
everyone's interests. While the bulk of what's freely available is older
stuff that has lapsed into the public domain by virtue of expired
copyright (despite the absurd laws currently in force) there is also much
that is hot off the presses.....so to speak. Tons of stuff emanating from
various governmental agencies at all levels is never copyrighted and is
thus freely available to anyone who can find it. Lots of people are also
writing things for free distribution on their own hook.

It gets even better. In addition to plain text, there are also HTML
versions of many documents, allowing one to see what the originals look
like. There are also millions of photographs, film clips, maps, and other
graphic materials, and music. Want to see what your home town looked like
150 years ago? Look he

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/...ubjindex1.html

Fun. A good hour or two spent looking at towns I've never heard of.

Emphasis on the word "good". :-)


Not really sure what it is that makes me facinated with old things. Perhaps
a bit of romance for a 'simpler' life. Perhaps, dare I say it, a bit of
"pageantry?" I have no idea. I do know that I look at the dates on every
coin I receive as change. Why? Because I think it's cool to hold a quarter
(dime, whatever) that is sixty, or seventy, or more years old. Certainly, a
coin can't tell its story, but imagine how many -- and whose -- hands have
touched that coin in its 'life'. Imagine what was purchased with it. Imagine
what work was done to earn it. A simple quarter -- a few grams of
essentially worthless metals melted together and emblazoned with a
picture -- can tell so much, all without saying anything. I'm no
numismatist -- I don't care about any monetary value an older coin may hold.
Nor do I much care about the appearance of its mint marks. I just like the
fact that this little trinket has witnessed so much of our history. In my
bizzarro world, receiving a coin in the normal course of a transaction that
is that old just makes me a part of our shared history. Buying an old penny
from a collector, however, is cheating.

So if I like quarters that much... imagine a map. Especially the ones of the
early colonial times. As an undergrad, I took a course that covered the
witch trials in Salem. (Interestingly, under the History and Women's Studies
rubrics.) Various theories were covered, and I suppose that some of them may
have held some merit, but what held my interest in the class (other than,
ahem, studying the women, of course) was the plethora of maps available for
study. They probably held some relevance to the topic at hand, but who
cared, I was into them for the stories they told. Buy a map of town X today,
and it'll show roads, hospitals, and some other points of interest (assuming
said points exist in town X, anyway). A map from the 17th or 18th century
(and, to a somewhat lesser degreee, IMO the 19th and early 20th, too) will
show not only roads, but where _everything_ was. It shows the pasture lands,
the common areas, the shops, the . . . It's very easy to get a feel for what
the place may have looked like. A difficult thing to accomplish with an
atlas today. Maybe it's a simple function of population growth, or changes
in cartographic method, or whatever, but maps today just tell you how to get
somewhere.


I guess I've rambled a lot. I just like old stuff that tells a story. Even
if I have to imagine that story.

Moral of the above: Thanks for the link to the maps. Very good stuff.

Dan