Starting in the early 1920, writers and other literary types who stopped by Frank Shay's bookshop in Greenwich Village began autographing one of the doors in his store. Eventually 242 different artists and others signed the door, and it eventually found its way to the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin. The door is a fascinating document "that defined this slice of Bohemia...

A book worker is one engaged in the hand book arts, which includes "bookbinding, conservation, printing, papermaking, calligraphy, marbling and artist's books." The Guild of Book Workers is a century-plus-old American organization that sponsors workshops, lectures, and exhibitions. Their website is a great resource for book workers, or for those interested in viewing and learning about the hand...

The History Makers organization and the Carnegie Mellon University Informedia Project came together to bring this trove of 310 African American video oral history interviews to the general public. The HistoryMakers group started their oral history interviews in 1999, and over the next six years they interviewed Marian Wright Edelman, Julian Bond, and other prominent individuals in the African...

Back in the middle of the 18th century, what was a young parent to do when it came to providing a meaningful and lasting education for their son or daughter? It would be a few decades before Rousseau's Emilie, and a bit longer for John Dewey to make the scene, so parents had to be a bit more creative. One particularly enterprising soul was Jane Johnson, who decided to create a set of materials...

While the English poet John Keats is best known for his romantic poetry such as "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," he was also a prolific correspondent who wrote dozens of letters to family and friends before his tragically early death from tuberculosis in 1821 at the age of 25. Today, the Keats Letters Project explores the poet's epistolary legacy by publishing each of his...

The Library of Congress has indeed chronicled much of America, and this latest stellar effort will be of great interest to just about anyone with a penchant for learning about American history. Working with the National Digital Newspaper Program, the Library of Congress has created this prototype website to provide direct access to select newspapers from the period 1900 to 1910. Additionally, for...

What exactly was Abraham Lincoln doing on June 11, 1850? As it turns out, he was writing a letter to one Nathaniel Hay, describing the details of a potential home-improvement project. If you're looking for more details on Lincoln's daily doings, click on over to The Lincoln Log. The information on the site was compiled by the Lincoln Sesquicentennial Commission, and in 2003, the materials were...

Those visitors unfamiliar with the unsettling and terrifying short story, "The Yellow Wall-Paper", by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, are fortunate that this National Library of Medicine website provides a PDF of the story in its original form that first appeared in 1892 in The New England Magazine. At the bottom of the homepage, visitors need just to click on the image of a page underneath the heading...

Artist colonies have always fascinated the American public, and whether they have been informally organized or not, they seem to provide great opportunities for a variety of collaborations. One of the oldest of these colonies is the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. The colony was started in 1907 by the composer Edward MacDowell and his wife Marian, and over the past century it has...

While George Plimpton may be gone, the Paris Review continues to soldier on, much the same as it has done for the past fifty years. Over its long history, this literary periodical has published important works by Philip Roth, V.S. Naipul, and Samuel Beckett. Their website offers selections from both current and previous issues, and for various members of the intelligentsia, this site will merit...