pollen, H-Net, mythstory, and more

Pollen-- I washed the car on the way in this morning. It's green! Of course, by lunchtime, it'll be yellow again. I really don't remember pollen this bad before moving to Georgia.

H-Net-- I told my senior seminar and methodology students about the H-Net (Humanities and Social Sciences Online) discussion groups the other day.

In case you don't know: "H-Net is an international interdisciplinary organization of scholars and teachers dedicated to developing the enormous educational potential of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Our edited lists and web sites publish peer reviewed essays, multimedia materials, and discussion for colleagues and the interested public." "H-Net's e-mail lists function as electronic networks, linking professors, teachers and students in an egalitarian exchange of ideas and materials. Every aspect of academic life--research, teaching, controversies new and old--is open for discussion."

There are nearly 200 discussion networks. They range from very broad to specific. H-Teach is for those who teach college history, H-AmRel is American religious history, H-Albion is British and Irish history, H-South is the history of the American South, H-CivWar is Civil War, etc. There is a list for high school history/social science teachers. And on and on.

Go to the H-Net main page and check it out. (Click on the "discussion networks" link at the top to see the list.) All kinds of good resources.

Mythstory-- Ed Darrell, at Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, directs us to This Day in Mythstory, "just enough facts to ring true," Ed says, "enough humor to make the parodies appealing and likely to be repeated as fact." Chris Regan, formerly a writer for "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," write Mythstory. Good stuff.

Fiesta de Tejas-- Talk about excitement! After seeing how the Carnival for Georgia Bloggers has grown and what it has become in just a couple of months, Ed is getting together the first Texas blog carnival. He says, "It may take us a couple of months to get up to speed, of course, but this is the state that produced Molly Ivins, John Henry Faulk, J. Frank Dobie, Kent Biffle, and Dwight Eisenhower — not to mention Stevie Ray Vaughn." We're expecting great things, a carnival big and grand enough for Texas, on April 2, when the first edition is scheduled to post.

Britannica Blog-- In case you've missed this: "Britannica Blog is a place for smart, lively conversations about a broad range of topics. Art, science, history, current events – it's all grist for the mill. We've given our writers encouragement and a lot of freedom, so the opinions here are theirs, not the company's."

Chronicling America-- Another new database, with all sorts of potential for research and teaching. "This week, the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities unveiled their 'Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers' joint venture which debuted on-line with more than 226,000 pages of public-domain newspapers from California, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah, Virginia and the District of Columbia published between
1900 and 1910."

Description from a posting yesterday on H-SHGAPE, the H-Net list (see above) for the Gilded Age/Progresive Era. See, I told you it was useful!