This week on Twitter, we’ve been featuring 4th of July-related excerpts from the Civil War Diaries and Letters digital collection, as transcribed by our crowdsourcing volunteers. Unfortunately for the soldiers, the holiday typically held business as usual — the fatigue, discomfort, and anxiety of life on the battlefield — mixed in with the occasional historicContinue reading “A frivolous 4th”

This and other images of 4th festivities, now featured on the Iowa Digital Library Pinterest site:

During a war conducted without telephones, Skype, or even reliable mail delivery, Civil War soldiers treasured their letters from home – and lucky for us, because they kept them all their lives and passed them down through their families to us. William Titus Rigby expresses his gratitude to his correspondents eloquently: “I never received aContinue reading “Letters from the home front”

Celebrate the solstice with this selection of summery items from the University of Iowa Museum of Art Digital Collection:

The University of Iowa Libraries is pleased to announce the release of the Office of the State Archaeologist Photographs Digital Collection: digital.lib.uiowa.edu/osa. This unique digital collection currently includes over 23,000 original photographs and slides from the State Archeological Repository curated by the Office of the State Archaeologist (OSA), the University of Iowa. Digitization is ongoingContinue reading “Historic Iowa archaeological images now online”

Join Nixon, Brownie Scouts, and the Women’s Army Corps at the Iowa Digital Library beach party, happening over at our Pinterest account:

Digitized images of people reading, currently featured on our Iowa Digital Library Pinterest site:

A recent post at the Smithsonian’s Paleofutures blog — “A history of the future that never was” — cites the University of Iowa’s W9XK as the first American university station to broadcast TV. Read about this failed experiment to bring free education to the masses below. Predictions for Educational TV in the 1930s Today mostContinue reading “The UI’s distance learning future that never was”

In an interview on NPR May 29, Professor J. David Hacker was interviewed about his census data research which leads him to posit that the accepted estimate for number of Civil War casualties is too low, and instead should be roughly 750,000. This is an enormous number, but to truly convey the magnitude of theContinue reading “Civil War death toll”

In celebration of National Bike Month, we’re featuring historic cycling images on our Iowa Digital Library Pinterest account — please stop by for a look (no helmet required).