Historicalstudiesblog

The publication of Livingstone’s 1871 Field Diary: A Multispectral Critical Edition reveals for the first time the original record of a remarkable and traumatic period in the life of David Livingstone, the celebrated British abolitionist, missionary, and explorer of Africa. The date of publication coincides almost exactly with the date Livingstone completed this diary in Central Africa 140 years ago. The original, previously unpublished text of the diary has remained inaccessible until now, due to the fragility of the paper and the near-illegible script. The David Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project has restored the full text of the diary by using cutting-edge spectral imaging and processing technology, and now makes the diary available through this electronic edition.

Source:  Peter Scott's Library Blog

In celebration of Heritage Month,  there are a number of events happening in Cape Town.     The Cape Town Family History Society annual Heritage Day Exhibition is on Saturday 17th September at St John's Church in Wynberg from  2.30 - 4.30 pm.       

One of the exhibitors will be ancestry24 who will also be exhibiting at the Cape Town Civic Centre on the Concourse Level from 20 -23 September.     

Google has announced that historical copies of the Kenya Gazette (dating from 1906) will be free,  searchable and viewable via Google Books or KenyaLaw.org.

The Gazette is a weekly official government publication, containing important notices such as government appointments, as well as individual notices that are required to be made public by law.

The History Data Service (HDS) is housed within the UK Data Archive (UK Data Archive) at the University of Essex and is a national data service that collects, preserves and disseminates digital data created by academic historians.  In addition to its collection of historical digital resources the HDS provides online advice to data creators and works towards promoting and facilitating increased and more effective use of historical data in esearch, learning and teaching.

This archive of primary documents from the Great War period is international and presents both primary and secondary documents between 1890 - 1930.    

The Internet History Sourcebooks Project is a treasure-trove of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts.     It's a project located at the History Department, Fordham University, developed and edited by Paul Halsall.  It is aimed at providing easy access to primary sources and other teaching materials.  

Here's the link to the Internet African History Sourcebook.  

 Spotted on Marcus P Zillman.

The Register of the Second Anglo-Boer War, 1899 - 1902,  is a database containing over 258 800 names, including a completely revised casualty list of 59 000 casualty records. 

Story spotted on Neatorama.

In 1919, after the close of World War I, Germany was assessed 226 billion marks in reparations payments against its foes. On Sunday, that nation will pay its final installment of this bill:

The final payment of £59.5 million, writes off the crippling debt that was the price for one world war and laid the foundations for another.[...]

“On Sunday the last bill is due and the First World War finally, financially at least, terminates for Germany,” said Bild, the country’s biggest selling newspaper.

SA History Online is working closely with history and heritage institutions, historians, photographers, architects and archaeologists in compiling a heritage project, One City, Many Histories to share online the histories of the nine 2010 FIFA World Cup host cities.   

Here's the link to Cape Town.  

Researchers at UCT now have access to the African Newspapers collection from the World Newspaper Archive.  

More than 40 nineteenth- and twentieth -century African newspapers are featured and include titles from Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe. 

ProGenealogists Inc, have announced their top 50 most popular genealogy sites for 2010.   The rankings are based on the number of most visited sites over the last three years.    

<snip from the press release>

The study was designed in a manner similar to the popular “places rated” lists that appear regularly in the media. By ranking the websites on different criteria, and then averaging those rankings, a consensus list of the most popular sites emerges. In addition to popular and well-known Alexa.com, the other companies, whose rankings are all based on different web traffic criteria, used in this study were Compete.com, Quantcast.com and Ranking.com.

The Western Cape Archives and Records Service invites you to join our celebration of National Archives Week at the  Western Cape Archives and Records Service, located at 2 Roeland Street, Cape Town. National Archives Week offers a great opportunity for everyone to visit the archives and to learn about the importance of preserving our documented memory and its impact on our daily lives.

The special program for National Archives Week will run every day from Monday to Friday 08:00 – 15:00. The activities include guided tours of the building, video shows and exhibitions. The duration of the visit, which includes a tour of the building, will take approximately an hour.

In addition to the tours, a two-day workshop on paste paper making and basic bookbinding will be offered (17 – 18 May 2010); and the very popular workshop on researching your family history using the many documentary sources at the archives on 19 May 2010 from 8:30 – 12:00. Due to the intense one-on-one instruction required for both courses, participant numbers for the two workshops will be limited to 20 participants each. We recommend that bookings for both workshops be made well in advance, in order to avoid disappointment.

Our purpose is to make this event a learning experience for the public with our main goal to promote the use of archives by the general public and learners.   To book for the workshops contact the National Archives Cape Town  on: Tel: (021) 466 8100. Fax: (021) 465 2960

We have trial access to the two products listed below until 14 April 2010. They are accessible at http://infoweb.newsbank.com .     (Only available to the UCT community.)

World Newspaper Archive:  Africa 1800-1922
This database recently launched in January with 8 titles.  Over the course of the year the remainder of the content will be added.   The current trial is more to test the functionality (as opposed to the content), but should give us a good overview nonetheless. When the rest of the content is loaded we will ask for another trial to evaluate this aspect of the resource.

We also have trial access to the Foreign Broadcast Information Service Daily Reports (FBIS): Africa 1974-1996 database.  The Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Report has been the United States' principal record of political and historical open source intelligence for nearly 70 years. Similar to BBC Monitoring, the FBIS created daily reports on countries in Sub-Saharan Africa that included the most important political, social, economic and military events from newspapers, radio & television broadcasts, speeches, government announcements etc.  This archive of transcripts of African broadcasts and news provides daily insight into the key events that shaped Africa and particularly South Africa during the second half of the 20th century.