Setting Historical Presidents

Breaking news!
Everything old is new again and now it's free online!
Never again will you have to reel in the microfilm. (Unless you think you might want to investigate this outdated technology. Spoiler: you don't.)

http://founders.archives.gov/

These primary sources have never been so easy to browse. There are now 119,000 letters of the founding fathers online. This is big. I'm talking text-searchable, fully immersible, easy-to-read transcriptions. Now available to everyone! For the low low price of free! And there will be more to come. People are hard at work belting letters to each other as we speak.

If you've ever wondered what the early presidents and founders had to say before they were famous and, by osmosis, became dense historical tomes--look no further than Founders Online. This is a great unbowdlerized way to investigate the early presidents. You can read what they said about slavery. Learn what people wore. Learn what culturally-sensitive rumors are being tossed about:

"Commodore Porter says that the Turks & other people on the Barbary Coast believe that every Jew who dies turns into a Jack ass, & that the Christians Mount & ride them instantly, & directly, to the Devil."*

Learn early American modes of expression, and that every letter ever written has a closer of "your loyal & obedt. servt."

This is your first stop for papers of George Washington, John Adams (and family), Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin. And if you want Monroe, the fifth and forgotten founding father, a search tells me he authored 719 letters in the collection, and received 552. (Let me tell you, his handwriting did not make those 719 letters easy).

Disclaimers & Tips

• Some of them are not authoritative final versions, but by golly, no one can proofread these things but fully trained handwriting experts and archaic orthography experts. 
• If you are searching terms for frequency of use for linguistic research, be aware that editorial footnotes are also text-searchable, so you cannot infer directly without investigating the results.  

Example: This is an early access document. You can see the disclaimers around the doc and on the sidebar. 

This is a project I've been lucky enough to work with for the past year. I don't know how many hundreds of people have contributed to this massive massive endeavor, but many hours of many people's lives have made this a text-searchable, author-searchable reality.

* Citation: “To James Madison from James Monroe, 22 April 1815,” Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/99-01-02-4292, ver. 2013-06-10). Source: this is an Early Access document from The Papers of James Madison. It is not an authoritative final version.

If you are reading this, I assume you were looking for a tiger.

I could apologize for skipping internet-town for a year, but I've been living in an area with a really terrible internet infrastructure. It's not even first world problems at this point. It's mainly just problems.

And I've been busy. My job is very top secret eyes only history brain overload. I can't say much more than it involves some founding fathers and the things they got in the mail. True Fact: Jefferson was sent more hate mail than grizzly bears. Factual no matter how you parse that garden path. Mhm. Anyway, I really can't go into more detail, because it's all very hush hush wobble wobble. 

I've been working hard and singlemindedly at this job, because that's the only way I can work on anything. With a certain OCD exclusion of all else. And that exclusion has included some very important things that I should be doing. Like writing. Well, the first step is admitting you have a problem. 

So today I'm home with a cold and hopped up on cold medication to try to combat the deep fog between my ears and fever and chills and abject misery! And in this miserable state I went to check my email. What do I find in my inbox? Alerts that I am getting spam messages on my blog! Huzzah! I instantly realize two things:

1. Spam? Blogger, what the hell? This is why I couldn't handle Wordpress!
2. Wait, I have a blog!?

So here I am, headache out the ears and smacked in the face with the realization that I would totally get a dishonorable discharge for cowardice and abandoning my post in blogging. 

I locked eyes with my blog and decided that this is going to change. 

First stage of reclaiming my blog space: I decided to look into what my blog had been doing without my presence, and I discovered that the blog traffic patterns had changed dramatically. How do people get here? It used to be people searching things like "Kat Zantow" or "A Face all Planes and Angles" or "Villains by Necessity." Now? Anyone who's everyone gets here searching "white tiger." You can find that one picture with a Google image search, and that's the way it happens. That's cool, but it hardly seems relevant to anything I do...unless...I think it's time for...

THE OBVIOUS CONCLUSION: Retool the site into a furry erotica blog!

Step 1. They come for the tigers.  

Step 2. They stay for the tigers. 

Step 3. They come for the tigers.

Step 4. Profit!

It's the only way to synthesize content and site traffic. Maybe I can start light with some paranormal romance fiction, but I don't know if it will be enough...

An historic lack of updates?

Dear Internet,

You know, a lack of updates is a good thing. It means I'm doing something more interesting with my life than staring at my computer.

Oh wait, all I've been doing is staring at my computer.

No, don't get excited. I don't mean fiction. I've been proofreading (despite the raging success of Henchman, I got tired of being a starving artist) the letters of the founding fathers. It's, like, historical. Too bad I'm not writing historical fiction. I'm getting a good sense of early America. All anyone cared about back then was who got a Brevet. (Pretty much an honor/pay bump/temporary booster rank).

And believe you me that some noteworthy presidents have really awful cursive. Also, I have found, however, that six commas to a sentence is not uncommon.

What I'm trying to tell you is that I'll get more free time in about a month. I'll get time to photo/scan in pictures, to enter more stories in contests, and release a sequel, at the very least.

honorably and respectfully,
Yr. obed. sert.

ZZ.