Here are a few historical highlights for your weekend reading. If you’re interested in archives, Around the World in Eighty Days, calculus, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or philately, you should find something interesting in today’s post.
The work of an archivist involves more than meets the eye: “I get much more satisfaction from dealing with a binbag of filthy, mixed up documents than simply transferring information from already well described and sorted records. Rummaging through one of these binbags, or a box or a trunk, really is like looking for treasure.”
Have you heard of “the real Phileas Fogg”?
If you like my historical highlights posts, you should probably just head over to the Smithsonian website, but here are three of their articles that I particularly enjoyed this week:
- “The Story of Josiah Henson, the Real Inspiration for ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin'”
- “How the Inverted Jenny, a 24-Cent Stamp, Came to Be Worth a Fortune”