Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving by the Numbers - from CNN - 
find fun facts to liven up your Thanksgiving festivities from  Butterball, U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Turkey Federation, Smithsonian Institution, Macy's, Harris Interactive, U.S. Fire Administration, Pro Football Hall of Fame, & CNN - Everything you ever wanted to know about the November holiday.

Who's traveling for Thanksgiving?  - some 43.6 million Americans ! are you ? ? 

President Barack Obama took on the annual tradition of pardoning the National Thanksgiving Turkey on Wednesday, with Cobbler the turkey being the lucky bird.

Explore the history of Thanksgiving, a U.S. holiday that dates back to colonial times. Learn about the first Thanksgiving feast, traditions and more, from the History folks - Thanksgiving: Fact or Fiction? take the quiz ! Thanksgiving's Ancient Origins !

Thanksgiving Remembered: from the Library of Congress !

A safe and happy holiday to all !

The Papers of Abraham Lincoln

The Papers of Abraham Lincoln, from the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency et al.
Since his sudden death in 1865, a scramble has ensued to collect, publish, and analyze the papers of President Abraham Lincoln--a difficult process because over the years, many documents were scattered, edited, cut, lost, withheld, and even forged. The Library of Congress and the National Archives have the biggest collections, but even today, new documents are showing up in private collections. Many editions of selected texts written by Lincoln have been printed, and many black-and-white microfilm collections of Lincoln documents have been issued. But all are incomplete and lack the advantages of modern computer technology and modern historical interpretation.

Check out the new video !

In anticipation of the 2009 Lincoln Bicentennial, the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency (IHPA) set a goal to digitally scan--in clear, color form--all known Lincoln documents, including cards, envelopes, letters, legal papers, certificates, and scraps of paper with writings to or from Lincoln. The aim was to eventually make them available for free online. . . . Now in its second edition, this resource is available online. Searching is easy via an excellent set of topics, legal terms, and personal names. The site will be a boon to writers and Lincoln scholars, who now can go to a single source to search out a particular interpretation of Lincoln's thought and action. Summing Up: Recommended. general readers. -- R. J. Havlik, emeritus, University of Notre Dame Choice, Dec 2012
and check our Library Resources for more about our 16th president! Books, videos, ebooks and more.

Google Art Project

Google Art Project

"Visitor's Guide: How to use the site: Simply select a museum from the homepage and then either choose ‘Explore the museum’ or ‘View Artwork’. Once you are in the main site use the drop-down menus or the side info bar to navigate between artworks and museums. Finally create and share your own collections online."
"NYT: The greatly expanded second iteration of this online compilation of self-selected art museums and artworks was unveiled last week. It makes available images of more than 32,000 works in 31 mediums and materials, from the collections of 151 museums and arts organizations worldwide, forming a broad,

deep river of shared information, something like a lavishly illustrated art book fused with high-end open storage.. . .

One of the glories of the Google Art Project is that it is a collective, additive work in progress that allows any museum or art-related organization to join and upload as many — or as few — high-resolution images of artworks as it chooses. . . . 

In the meantime the grand potential of the project and of its collaborative structure is fully evident in the new version. In all, it ranges through several millenniums of art history and also across actual space in ways that boggle the mind, and it ushers in a new era of interconnected access both to world art and among the institutions that preserve it. It is light-years beyond the first version, which had its debut early last year and featured 17 participating museums from Europe and the United States and a selection of just over 1,000 works in a single medium — painting — that represented but a few centuries of Western art.

At the time the air was thick with wait-and-see caution. Now museums large and small from around the globe have jumped aboard, joining early adopters like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin and the National Gallery, London.

Some newcomers are similar in stature and location, including the Kunsthistoriches in Vienna, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Scotland, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Others are much further afield in terms of geography or mission. There are major museums from Mexico City, Australia, Japan, India, Taiwan, Australia and Israel, as well as the new Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar. There are several artist museums, including those dedicated to Edvard Munch (Oslo), Frida Kahlo (Mexico City), Norman Rockwell (Stockbridge, Mass.) and Fernando Botero (Bogotá, Colombia). And there are definite moments of weirdness. The Ayala Museum in Makati, the Philippines, has uploaded 15 images of painted dioramas depicting scenes from Philippine history. The 20-year-old Olympics Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland — the single Swiss participant — is displaying lots of fairly awful statues of athletes. . . . " read the complete article "An Online Art Collection Grows Out of Infancy", by Roberta Smith, New York Times  April 11, 2012
and be sure to check our catalog for resources on ~ Art History ~ Artists ~ Art Museums ~ 

World Wide Words

Website users who enter "kibosh," "the whole nine yards," or any one of 2,000 unusual words or phrases into their favorite search engine may well be directed to World Wide Words www.worldwidewords.org, Michael Quinion's online compendium of articles on new words, word histories, words in the news, and curiosities of native English speech.

The site, aimed at language enthusiasts, provides Quinion, an independent British lexicographer, the opportunity to engage with his readers, debunk folk etymologies and myths about language, and otherwise explore the peculiarities and vagaries of English. He brings the skills of a detective to his columns. Quinion contributes citations to the Oxford English Dictionary (online version) provided many entries for the Oxford Dictionary of New Words; and has written popular books on language myths, vanishing words, and word origins. Some of the site's content is available both in print and online.

Quinion's most recent book derives from the question-and-answer section of the website, and definitions from his 2002 work, Ologies and Isms, are now freely available via a link on the home page titled Affixes Dictionary. New entries are added weekly. Erudite and wonderfully eclectic, this website is a good source of information on words both too new for the dictionary and those vanishing from it. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and general audience. -- J. Adlington, McMaster University Choice Reviews Online, Nov 2012

Be sure to check TCC Library Databases for access to Oxford Reference Online: Fully-indexed, cross-searchable database of over 100 dictionary, language reference, and subject reference works published by Oxford University Press. In addition to a wealth of facts, figures, definitions, and translations, also includes detailed information across a broad subject range from titles in the world-renowned Oxford Companions Series. Access requires a TCC ID card. Contact the Library for more information.