In writing an essay on the public reception of the Nebular Hypothesis, I repeatedly referenced James Secord’s Victorian Sensation. It is a terrific (albeit sometimes ridiculously detailed) book, but one thing I found quite frustrating:
When doing historical research, I don’t think it is appropriate to simply passively read a work like Victorian Sensation. In order to get something out of it, and develop your own opinions, it is important to look critically at the sources used by the author and see if you come to the same conclusions. Therefore, the bibliography is your best friend 🙂
Now, because of legal reasons, it is impossible for each bibliography entry to include a link to the appropriate book on Zlibrary or Anna’s Archive. But for newspaper articles from the mid-nineteenth century, there is no excuse for not posting an easily readable HTML document. Secord – you’ve gone through the effort of digging up this article, reading it thoroughly, and quoting from it to support a claim about the public understanding of science. Now why can’t you just transcribe the article and post it on your blog!
This is exactly what I decided to do for my own essay in the history of science. It draws heavily on 19th century newspaper articles, and each article has a link to an entry on my new website.
The project is open-source and anyone can submit an article by submitting a pull request. I am considering developing it further if there is interest from my fellow historians, but for now it is my personal archive of cool newspaper articles!
Links
- Essay which inspired the creation of “Old News”
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