Read the entire trilogy! We have some paper copies and copies on each of our six loanable Kindles. Even with these multiple copies, you may be unable to get a copy from the Libraries; but we also have two e-books, available for use by many readers simultaneously, that offer commentary. There are also other resources that will enhance your enjoyment of the books. Here are the details:

The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games Trilogy, Book One) Lockwood PZ7.C6837 Hun 2008

Catching Fire (The Hunger Games Trilogy, Book Two ) Lockwood PZ7.C6837 Cat 2009

Mockingjay (The Hunger Games Trilogy, Final Book) Lockwood PZ7.C6837 Moc 2010

Kindle-ready! We supply the books and the Kindles, visit: Amazon Kindle.

Movie trailers (and more), for the soon to be released “The Hunger Games” (a film based on book one of the trilogy), are viewable here and at the official Web site. See also the film’s Internet Movie Database (IMDb) page.

Learning more about The Hunger Games is easy with many interviews with its author Suzanne Collins accessible on Google Video. Most are short; but there are some longer ones. Search the terms interview “Suzanne Collins” for starters. As in most matters of popular culture, Wikipedia will not let you down, visit entries devoted to general commentary and a guide to the characters.

Read the entire trilogy!  We have some paper copies and copies on each of our six loanable Kindles.  Even with these multiple copies, you may be unable to get a copy from the Libraries; but we also have two e-books, available for use by many readers simultaneously, that offer commentary.  There are also other resources that will enhance your enjoyment of the books.  Here are the details:

The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games Trilogy, Book One)  Lockwood PZ7.C6837 Hun 2008

Catching Fire (The Hunger Games Trilogy, Book Two )  Lockwood PZ7.C6837 Cat 2009

Mockingjay (The Hunger Games Trilogy, Final Book)  Lockwood PZ7.C6837 Moc 2010

Kindle-ready!  We supply the books and the Kindles, visit: Amazon Kindle.

Movie trailers (and more), for the soon to be released “The Hunger Games” (a film based on book one of the trilogy), are viewable here and at the official Web site.  See also the film’s Internet Movie Database (IMDb) page.

Learning more about The Hunger Games is easy with many interviews with its author Suzanne Collins accessible on Google Video.  Most are short; but there are some longer ones.  Search the terms interview “Suzanne Collins” for starters.  As in most matters of popular culture, Wikipedia will not let you down, visit entries devoted to general commentary and a guide to the characters.

E-books on The Hunger Games offer ways of thinking about the ideas explored.  See: The Hunger Games and Philosophy: A Critique of Pure Treason.  Edited by George A. Dunn and Nicolas Michaud.  Click here for access.  “Katniss Everdeen is ‘the girl who was on fire,’ but she is also the girl who made us think, dream, question authority, and rebel. The post-apocalyptic world of Panem’s twelve districts is a divided society on the brink of war and struggling to survive, while the Capitol lives in the lap of luxury and pure contentment. At every turn in the Hunger Games trilogy, Katniss, Peeta, Gale, and their many allies wrestle with harrowing choices and ethical dilemmas.”  The Girl Who Was on Fire: Your Favorite Authors on Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games Trilogy.  Edited by Leah Wilson.  Click here for access.  Essays discuss the major themes, characters, and social and political commentary contained in the trilogy.  If all this makes you hungry try: The Unofficial Hunger Games Cookbook from Lamb Stew to “Grossling” – More than 150 Recipes Inspired by The Hunger Games Trilogy.  By Emily Ansara Baines.  Click here for access.   – “May the odds be ever in your favor.”

In an academic world obessed with “counting” citations to measure the productivity and the impact of individual scholars — and sometimes the importance of topics and ideas — it is good to see a clear winner. In the latter instance, Abraham Lincoln is a clear winner. With one exception, he now — symbolically as well as literally — towers above the competition. To be specific, like the stele of old erected to commemorate a ruler or his triumphs (generally erected by that ruler), a group of Washington, DC historians has built a tower of books devoted to the 16th president which is 8 feet round and soars 34 feet. [For the story and images see NPR’s Forget Lincoln Logs: A Tower of Books to Honor Abe It might have climbed higher, since it includes only 7,000 of the 15,000 books that are estimated to have been written about Lincoln. And not even included are the legions of journal and magazine articles, dissertations, and enumerable other formats considering his life and influence.

Nor is Lincoln merely a topic for Americans. He has been “constructed” as a historical topic across the globe as well as across time. His global significance is explored in the recently published The Global Lincoln (Lockwood E457.8 G53 2011 and as an ebook), edited by Richard Carwardine (Lincoln, Lincoln: A Legacy of Purpose and Power, and Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World) and Jay Sexton (The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America).

When reflecting on Lincoln — and the attention he continues to command — I feel the same way only when watching a brillant performer or viewing a magnificent work of art — then the simple phrase “That’s the way it’s done” — says it all. When really in the prersence of greatness — finely tuned statistical measures are not needed. Of course, Lincoln was not universally revered or always so recognized in his own time.  For most of past and present humanity, identifying greatness or impact through statistical analysis can be useful and interesting and it has been done for certain aspects of the past, most notably by Charles Murray in Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 (Lincoln is not included).  Murray is the author, most recently, of the troubling Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 and co-author of the hotly debated The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.

So as we celebrate Presidents’ Day (celebrating the birthdays of Lincoln and Washington), it is appropriate to appreciate the importance of Lincoln’s life and the power of our memory of him. Working in a milieu of paper and citations on a lighted screen, it is profoundly moving to so palpably experience Lincoln’s importance through the paper trail his life and legacy have inspired.

Jimmy Wales, co-founder of the Wikipedia, has been interviewed by Charlie Rose (a Wikipedia fan) several times. You’ll learn a lot about the Wikipedia quickly if you watch videos of these interviews and you’ll appreciate the idealism behind the effort.  A Stephen Colbert-Jimmy Wales encounter (there’s a lot of Colbert-Wikipedia history) will alert you to the most persistent complaint against the resource: its accuracy.  Colbert ends this 24 May 2007 interview saying: “It’s the first place I go to when I’m looking for knowledge, or when I want to create some.”  Incidentally, if I were looking for biographical information on the men mentioned above, I’d turn first to the Wikipedia, wouldn’t you?  I occasionally drop into the Wikipedia from my Kindle while reading.

The point is that the Wikipedia includes an enormous number of entries on a huge and expansive diversity of topics, and often achieves comparatively acceptable levels of accuracy through the ongoing efforts of anyone who wants to pitch in. The Wikipedia has been studied a lot: as of 24 August 2010, over 200 monographs and 50 dissertations had pondered it in some way (Taemin Kim Park, “The Visibility of the Wikipedia in Scholarly Publications,” First Monday 16, no. 8 (1 August 2011).  It would be difficult to find someone in academia who has not heard of the Wikipedia, let alone not used an entry found through a Web search.  The peer reviewed open access internet journal First Monday has featured many articles on the Wikipedia and I’ve reviewed several for what follows.  The Wikipedia has become part of contemporary culture; see the Wikipedia’s own Wikipedia in Culture.

You can watch the Wikipedia grow as its edits pop up across a map of the world .  It is not especially hard to learn broadly about the Wikipedia because the source tells you about itself through, what else, Wikipedia entries.  Potential contributors can start by clicking on Help on the left frame of any entry or enter Wikipedia as a search term.  For the Wikipedia’s accuracy see the entry Reliability of the Wikipedia, potential contributors should read Contributing to the Wikipedia and contributors who want to have an enduring and identifiable presence (based on their chosen user name) should read Why Create An Account?  At least one professor was awarded tenure based on his Wikipedia contributions.  A search in Amazon turns up some guides/manuals for anyone who is considering contributing or simply interested, see John Broughton’s Wikipedia: The Missing Manual (2008) and How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It by Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, and Ben Yates (2009).  There’s much about the Wikipedia that should appeal to scholars and instructors and some things that will be frustrating and frightening as well. 

The Wikipedia is not exactly the Wild West; there are many policies and guidelines – and eventually (quickly, someday, maybe) even consequences and corrections when they are violated – what’s lacking is a controlling editorial and curatorial presence. Featured Content and Good Articles are the best of the Wikipedia, meeting its standards for citing sources, what constitutes a reliable source and neutral point of view; but the pieces that do not meet these standards vastly outnumber those that do. Neutral point of view is something that might confuse many academics, as well as student contributors. Taking a stand or expressing an opinion in a Wikipedia entry– or including original research that cannot be footnoted — is not desired. Everything is supposed to be documented.

Studies have been conducted that suggest that students realize the Wikipedia’s information should be corroborated; but its credibility does not trump its many advantages: it’s free, it’s easily searched, and it covers just about every field of study or endeavor.  Some studies argue that it is a bridge between the really unreliable and traditional scholarly sources.  And students, in some studies, state what is the obvious: it’s a good place to begin, for assessing the lay of the land and acquiring the vocabulary to proceed further; but it is never a good place to end.  If we’re honest, many of us reading this will admit that we’ve used a Wikipedia article in these ways; but will counter that we know just how far to trust.  Knowing that so many people use the Wikipedia — and that many of them may not know how certain such trust should be – has led to calls for scholars to contribute to and monitor entries in their areas of expertise. 

The Wikipedia has actively courted academics for a while.  For instance, there is the Project United States Public Policy/Campus Ambassadors program. Ambassadors, a concept born of and tested in the above project, may be students, faculty, staff, anyone really who “provide[s] face-to-face Wikipedia training and support on university campuses, particularly in classes where the instructors are interested in incorporating Wikipedia-editing into the curriculum.” They are also available to students regardless of the student’s affiliation. Perhaps UB should have a campus ambassador?  Most recently the American Sociological Association has encouraged its members to improve the Wikipedia and use it in teaching: “The ASA is calling on members to use the power of Wikipedia to represent the discipline of sociology as fully and as accurately as possible. Additionally, we seek to promote the free [link leads to supporting material for the initiative] teaching of sociology worldwide.”  See the 6 January 2012 Research Blog of the American Sociological Association.  The American Historical Association, according to reporting in the 18 November 2011 Inside HigherEd, may also consider the issue and reported the ASA’s action in its blog AHA Today, 24 November 2011. The Association for Psychological Science also has an initiative as does the Wikimedia Foundation with the Public Policy Initiative; see also Public Policy Initative Learning Points. From this Initiative and Wikipedia’s Education Program, see: Information for instructors, Wikipedia Ambassadors’ portal on English Wikipedia, and Wikipedia United States Education Program.  See especially the useful collection of online tutorials.   

The Wikipedia offers many instructional possibilities as well as ways, of varying intensity and nature, to contribute to the resource’s growth in size and quality.  This is beyond telling students not to cite the Wikipedia, something that is widely done across academia and even made a rule by Middlebury College’s history department in 2007. Although many scholars contribute to encyclopedias, it is not uncommon for them to discourage encyclopedia citations in college-level papers.  This is despite the fact that such sources we pay for as Gale Virtual Reference Library (or more precisely the sources in it) are far more reliable than the Wikipedia. But this content is not as easily found as Wikipedia content.  A student perspective on the Wikipedia issue, which is still discussed at Middlebury, can be found in the college’s student paper The Middlebury Campus, 5 December 2011.  What some instructors have spurned; others have embraced.  For some examples of instructional use, in addition to what already has been mentioned in the above paragraphs, see Wikipedia: school and university projects and Wikipedia:FAQ/Schools.  I personally find compelling the suggestion that having students write and load a Wikipedia entry as part of their course work dignifies the work by giving it a value beyond a grade. Monitoring what happens to the entry can also be instructive and has been part of some instructional designs.  In addition to students in courses, libraries (the University Libraries has done this in some instances), and really any institution, can contribute to the Wikipedia by simply adding footnotes and links for its collections and works to appropriate articles.  The collaborative work of the British Museum with Wikipedians is a stellar example of entry creation and in June 2011 the National Archives announced selection of a Wikipedian in Residence.

Roy Rosenzweig, in many respects the father of digital history, founded the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, now the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.  He saw the promise as well as the challenges and deficiencies of the Wikipedia in “Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past” Journal of American History 93, no. 1 (June 2006): 117-46.  Insightful and detailed, it is essential reading.  Focusing on history, he observes that Wikipedia material is uneven, that biographical entries are usually well done and better than the far more problematic thematic entries and that accuracy comparisons with traditional works are favorable.  He tentatively concludes that professional historians should join with “popular history makers” in writing history in the Wikipedia.  The Wikipedia is also taken up in the first episode of the podcast Digital Campus, maintained by members of the Center, entitled Wikipedia: Friend or Foe? (start in the middle and for ongoing Digital Campus Wikipedia commentary click here).  The podcast considers the ability of the Wikipedia to teach students how knowledge is constructed by recounting a specific course assignment.   

Future scholars — and historians in particular — will be indebted to the Wikipedia as a primary source.  It will be used with care; but it will suggest changing perceptions and interpretations and capture the broad and minute nuances of change across time because entries are works in progress.  It can do this because every Wikipedia article can be reconstituted to reflect a version at any point in time.  It is an encyclopedia with a restore key and every edit is a restore point.  To accomplish this, select “View history” on the upper right of any entry.  To view what often amounts a historiographical conversation about an entry or elements of an entry, select “Talk” on the upper left of any entry.  For instance, a 7,000 page 12 volume book was published showing the edits for the entry on the Iraq War, December 2004 – November 2009.  For a discussion of this effort at the conference dConstruct 2010 listen to The Value of Ruins.  The Wikipedia is discussed half way through this enlightening and humorous 12 minute recording; but it’s worth listening from the beginning.

In protest of the feared passage of the Senate’s Protect IP Act (PIPA)  and the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), on 18 January the English-language Wikipedia went dark.  Links are to the respective Wikipedia entries, which are semi-protected.  Foreign-language versions, which in some instances serve needy parts of the world, and of course their governments are not considering this legislation, remained up.  The duration of the blackout was surely too brief for many to realize how weak the Web would be without the Wikipedia.  How to survive the blackout was a topic.  Alone, the Wikipedia stands as an immensely powerful tool and, in addition, many sites depend on the Wikipedia for their content.  Wikipedia is not the most authoritative of sources; but it is free.  Free to access, freely contributed to, and its content may be freely used.  As Dan Cohen observed on 20 December 2005 “anyone can download the entirety of Wikipedia and use it and manipulate it as they wish .”  In fact, the Wikipedia is the corpus for many text mining projects, see DBpedia and H-Bot.  Free is a very powerful thing.  And it is free not only fiscally, it is free intellectually.  Wiki software, invented by Ward Cunningham, makes the Wikipedia possible and allows it to be democratic, even if despite its impressive organizational efforts it sometimes seems teetering on the edge of chaos and its overall quality is definitely uneven. 

Wikipedia serves a purpose beyond academia; it provides an opportunity for individuals, possessing varying levels of expertise, to contribute to the public good.  When the process works as it should, this is done through dialogue and cooperation. The Wikipedia is the product of an inclusive and welcoming community. Useful and inspiring, it’s free to everyone – and all indications are that just about every kind of person uses it – although not all in the same way.   For reflections occasioned by its 10^th anniversary, visit Sue Gardner’s Blog, 14 January 2011.  Gardner is the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit charitable organization that operates the Wikipedia and other wiki projects.

Thanksgiving means different things to different people.  The ultimate source for learning and teaching about Thanksgiving is teachinghistory.org’s Thanksgiving Web site .  Now that Thanksgiving 2011 is a memory, the leftovers have probably been consumed (or certainly frozen), and most food poisoning victims have fully recovered (food safety is very important), there’s some time for reflection.

Since 1970 Native Americans have mourned the day as a National Day of Mourning and November is Native American Heritage Month . Considering the travail of native peoples, this can be an inspiring but invariably depressing story.  Learn how sadly the New England Indians miscalculated in their help, kindness and diplomacy with the Pilgrim settlers by watching We Shall Remain: After the Mayflower  .  The People of the First Light, the Wampanoag, were rewarded with darkness!  For the Wampanoag, it really did turn out to be about who gets the stuffing (aka stuff)!  To the Pilgrims, it was a harvest festival to thank God for a bountiful harvest and a survival which seemed providential and miraculous (of course, harvest celebrations were familiar to Native Americans. too).  To 19^th century Americans it was an affirmation of their nation’s special place in God’s eyes; to later immigrants, who were not Protestant, it became a customization and acceptance of a new nationality; and, to nearly all of us today, Thanksgiving is a family holiday – with a predictable menu and sequence of activities – that unite us as a common people.  While some holidays, as we’ve become and continue to become multicultural, can actually divide us or at least make some folks less than comfortable – Christmas, for example – Thanksgiving can be celebrated by everybody.  But things are never so simple; because at the turn of the century Catholics and Jews actually needed assurance from their religious leaders that they could join in what was initially viewed as a Protestant holiday.

In 1622, Edward Winslow (1595-1655) wrote a letter which describes the event and it was printed in a pamphlet that historians commonly call Mourt’s Relation . But the description was soon lost, then rediscovered in the 1820s and reprinted in  Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers (1841).  The event also became known by an account written by Governor William Bradford (1590-1657)  — for biography see the American National Biography and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography — titled Of Plimoth Plantation .  It was reprinted in 1855.  Thanksgiving wasn’t made a fixed and recurrent national holiday until 1941 by the hand of FDR. Here’s the text of FDR’s 1939 proclamation  , not a very good year, to be sure.   It was made a national holiday by proclamation by Abraham Lincoln (and annually by subsequent presidents until FDR).   Even in the midst of unparalleled bloodshed (the Civil War killed and wounded nearly 650,000 Americans, North and South), Lincoln reminded Americans of how blessed their country was and looked to a happy, prosperous, and certain future (even when others might have dwelled on uncertainty).  The 1863 proclamation (there were actually two, the first after the Union victory at Gettysburg) said the nation was being punished for its great sin – slavery.  Lincoln’s proclamations was the result of a long Thanksgiving  observance campaign carried on in one of America’s most influential “domestic” magazines of the period, Godey’s Lady’s Book .   Godey’s may be read in the American Periodical Series , and the Libraries also hold some original copies – some hand-colored.   Lincoln’s October 1863 proclamation, which was almost certainly not written by him, but by Secretary of State William H. Seward, is beautiful and poignant.  People, including government officials, could really write back then. 

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom. No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.

So the Thanksgiving we celebrate today had its genesis in ancient harvest festivals and in what ultimately became an exercise in civil religion, that is an ostensibly religious celebration divorced from a single faith.  For a quick Thanksgiving history, minus the dark ironies, virtually visit where it all began,  Plimouth and read the History of Thanksgiving .

Today’s Thanksgiving has some salient characteristics.  For instance, when it comes to food, abundance is more important than delicateness and a turkey is more or less mandatory (for some who can’t afford one “a turkey will be provided” is actually part of Thanksgiving history) – unless of course celebrants are vegans or vegetarians – in which case a tofu turkey is generally substituted.  This doesn’t look like a turkey; it’s generally a voluptuous roundish mass, sort of like a turkey breast.  Another irony: Even if no turkeys loss their lives in the preparation of this meal – they are eaten as symbols or unmistakable turkey substitutes. You’d think vegetarians and vegans would want to forget the whole sad custom (at least from the turkey’s perspective); maybe the practice is just to allay the guilt of other diners and make everyone comfortable.  Incidentally, turkeys once held an honored placed in America’s bird pantheon.  Ben Franklin actually wanted to make the turkey the national bird .  And he had good reasons but mostly he disapproved of the bald eagle because he thought it had bad moral character and was a traditional imperial symbol, not at all appropriate for the young republic – he wasn’t trying to be funny.  Well, not totally.  We’ve so changed the nature of the domestic turkey (the turkey mom on the right is wild) that it doesn’t make sense at all anymore.  And being called a “turkey” is guananteed to hurt your feelings and is obviosuly indicative of the low esteem in which some hold the bird.  We’ve opted for and stuck with the bald eagle — even if we almost managed to kill the national bird off with lead shot in carrion and pesticides and rodent poisons.  The turkey though is the undisputed symbol of Thanksgiving – even used by Google during the holiday above its query box.  This year you could change feather colors.  But I digress, a lot: the preparation of the turkey has always received a lot of attention in cook books and on television, how about this 1956 television American Dairy Association tutorial/advertisement.  By the way, the word is butter!  Now this is a perfect blend of advertising and instruction.  Butterball is to turkey what Google is to searching the Web.  And, of course, there’s the turkey hot line – so that turkey cookers don’t give their families food poisoning by under cooking.  Pumpkin pie is another certain offering, along with potatoes and a dish reflecting the ethnic cuisine of dinners as complements to traditional fare.  An Italian American family might add a pasta dish and stuffed artichokes to its Thanksgiving table.

The ambience of Thanksgiving gets a lot of attention.  What did your Thanksgiving table look like?  Martha Stewart, America’s domesticity maven, suggests how it might look. And Yankee candle (there’s a scent called Be Thankful!) and other companies are more than willing to help you make it smell just right, too.  And, for many, Thanksgiving ambience includes the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and a cavalcade of football games.  You can watch clips on Google Video and get background in the Wikipedia.  Neither was a part of my Thanksgiving, which focused on catching up with family and playing with a four-year-old pretty much non-stop.

Time for popular culture, whether you approve or not, it’s part of our culture.  Of late there have been many satirical accounts of the Thanksgiving story; one favorite of mine is the South Park History of Thanksgiving .  By the time you read this, you should be able to view the episode in its entirety online, but while once this was possible on the Web, as of this writing it is no longer.  This kind of knowledge simply can’t be given away for nothing!  I bet there’s a little more than irony is this observation!  Get over the nuttiness and crudity and the satire is, to my mind anyway, right on.  Fun is poked at the History Channel, expertise (and especially how the History Channel uses it), the imposition of theories on evidence, and the very meaning of critical thinking, as well as the ironies of Native American history.  But were the Pilgrims and Indians really aliens from outer space?  If South Park has only whetted your appetite, try Family Guy . The focus is different and not historical, see what you think.   Ready for something simpler?  Real hardcore traditional history?  The Charlie Brown Origins of Thanksgiving  (click here for part two) is great as far as it goes; but doesn’t touch the irony of the historical event for Indians.   It was all sweetness and light, as they say — and they all lived happily ever after.  Unfortuntely, we know that’s not true.  In fairness to the event, the Wampanoag thought they had a good thing going at the time — it just didn’t last very long. 

Who were the Pilgrims anyway (the Puritans, in a sense, hijacked Thanksgiving)?  You can read some very good  encyclopedia articles (and this piece from a project at the Univesity of Virginia is helpful). For most of us , the period will come more to life by reading the recently published historical novel The Pilgrim ,  but remember, it’s historical fiction.    It was featured on National Public Radio.

So, as always, I ask: What’s the point of all this?  Let your mind wander on the Web and in the library, who knows what you’ll find out and what connections you may make?  Wander and wonder . . . what’s the connection?

Olly Benson, “Mayflower II” October 13, 2005 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.

Computejoe, “Wampanoag” June 27, 2005 via Flickr,  Creative Commons Attribution.

Onlinewoman, “Abraham Lincoln” August 30, 2007 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.

Allan Gatham, “William H. Seward” September 11, 2010 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.

Wade Franklin, “Turkey Family” June 2, 2005 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.

Master Philip, “Thanksgiving Turkey” November 23, 2006 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.

Benjamin Chun, “The Table” November 22, 2007 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.

It’s shockingly true: Pumpkins are aggressive!  And I’m not taking about shark-toothed Jack-o’-Lanterns, either.  Pumpkins got their start in the New World; but something so potentially big, showy, prolific, and sexy simply couldn’t be constrained.   Yes, pumpkin (properly prepared) is an aphrodisiac — at least there’s a 1998 scientific study that says so.  How does this happy chemical concoction work on mind and body?  Search in Academic Search Complete and listen to a Johns Hopkins physician.   As you would expect, there’s actually a pumpkin perfume (neither advertisement nor endorsement intended).  But I digress. 

From the fields and farms of pre-Columbian America the arrival of Europeans unleashed a monster that would soon sink roots into the fields of every continent and find a place in most cuisines.  Cristofooro Colombo (Italian) — our Christopher Columbus (the Anglicized version of his name) — and his bosses Ferdinand and Isabella (he was Colon to them) would have found the use of pumpkins in Chinese food understandable; but with 21st century eyes we find it ironic. By the way, Columbus thought the planet was a pear with a nipple on top – not a pumpkin and certainly not perfectly round.  And there is no evidence that Columbus ever eat a pumpkin!   Come to think of it: Were there even pumpkins on Hispaniola?   

 Why is pumpkin in Chinese food ironic? Alfred Crosby is famous for coining the phrase “Columbian Exchange,” drop into Google Books to sample his  The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 and you’ll find that by the end of the 19th century pumpkins had even overrun Macedonia.  And The Worlds of Christopher Columbus by William D. Phillips Jr. and Carla Rahn Phillips (Cambridge University Press, 1993) makes the same observation.  In fact, the spread of the pumpkin, along with other plants and animals, is eatable evidence of the way the discovery of the Western Hemisphere changed cultures and global economics forever.  In this regard see 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann (Knopf, 2011). 

Pumpkins are easy to grow, nutritious, and easy to force into obesity.  What else can you call an over 1,000 pound pumpkin, the product of countless annual pumpkin growing contests across the land?  These huge pumpkins are an annual demonstration of the effectiveness of down-home genetic engineering.  Pumpkin is such a great food, why you can even drink it: not only as a soup; but as beer and wine.  And of course, pumpkins are staple autumn and Thanksgiving fare (pumpkin pie was not served at the first Thanksgiving — it takes more than pumpkin to make the pie).  You’ll find many old recipes using pumpkin in the cookbooks that comprise the University of Michigan’s Feeding America.  Here you’ll find recipes from historic American cookbooks: pumpkin pie recipes abound, candied pumpkin, canned pumpkin, preserved pumpkin, pumpkin bread, pumpkin soup, and cream de poturons (cream of pumpkins). The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink shows pumpkin pie recipes in American cookbooks in the early 19th century and in English cookbooks in the 17th century.   Google Book and Amazon.com (look-inside-the-book)  are also good places to look for free recipes.  Of course, if you want to just smell like a pumpkin there’s perfume and pumpkin shampoo and teeth brushing time can be more fun with pumpkin flavored toothpaste.

For a quick rundown of pumpkin history, lore, and practicalities and gastronomical applications check out the Gale Virtual Reference Library (search pumpkins, you’ll find entries in the Encyclopedia of Food and Culture) and two recently published food encyclopedias: The Cambridge World History of Food http://histories.cambridge.org.gate.lib.buffalo.edu/uid=1675/book?id=chol9780521402149_CHOL9780521402149 and The Oxford Companion to Food (Lockwood Library: Reference TX349 .D38 1999).  From the former, concerning the ancient peoples of Mexico (pp. 1248-1249):

Another important food for the sedentary people of Mexico was squash, by which we mean a number of plants belonging to the genus Cucurbita, which includes pumpkins, squash, and zucchini, among others.  All were fully employed as food sources. Their stems constituted an ingredient of a soup now called sopa de guias; the tasty yellow flowers have also long been a part of soups, stews, and quesadillas, and the fruit itself can be boiled. In recent times, brown sugar and cinnamon have been added to form a thick syrup that transforms the boiled fruit into calabaza en tacha, the classical dessert for the Día de los Muertos.  Pumpkin seeds are usually left to dry in the sun and then are toasted and eaten with a dash of salt. By weight, they have a higher content of isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, ryptophan, and valine than maize, beans, amaranth, and even egg whites.  These seeds are also known as a medicine to get rid of tapeworms.

But it is not  and was not all good.  Life is cheap when you reproduce so quickly and easily and countless pumpkins continue to loose their lives to simple pranks or as ammunition in the recreation of medieval warfare.  The trebuchet was a medieval artillery piece capable of chucking objects — from stones to corpses (early biological warfare) — over or into castle walls a pretty good distance away.   Today reenactors like to chuck pumpkins.  This could easily lead to “death by pumpkin” if you were walking by at just the wrong (right?)  time!  Smashing Pumpkins is so popular that there’s a famous musical group called The Smashing Pumpkins http://www.myspace.com/smashingpumpkins.  Whoever knew pumpkins could sound so good?  With all the decaying pumpkins around, communities have to dispose of them somehow – so some hold composting and “smashing pumpkin events.”  Is it legal to smash a pumpkin in the street? Why doesn’t such a nice vegetable get more respect?  And though people aren’t generally called pumpkins — except perhaps as a form of endearment — as in “my cute little pumpkin” — bumpkin http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/pdp/index.asp?ID=305 has just gotta (but maybe not) be related to pumpkin — not an often used term of late, but popular once — as in “country bumpkin” or rube.  For other negative terms try pumpkin-head, pumpkin-headed, and the now really obsolete pumpkinism.  But while it’s not all good, Cinderella always arrives in a pumpkin coach in the very height of elegance and, if imitation is the highest form of flattery, then all those plastic pumpkins in stores must mean something good.  And Charles Schultz’s Charlie Brown’s wait for the “Great Pumpkin” must have meaning.

Pumpkins are good citizens as well as a cultural icon.  For men of a certain age – well, really any age — research indicates that pumpkinseed oil – rich in zinc and unsaturated fatty acids — is especially helpful in reducing an enlarged prostate.  So for all those baseball players who have spit a seed into the air or into the ground (or into their hand) — good for you!  Vitamins, minerals, beta-carotene, vitamin C and potassium also promote artery health. 

As a cultural icon pumpkins have been praised in poetry.  Incidentally, The Smashing Pumpkins don’t really seem to care at all about pumpkins!  Use the Columbia Granger’s World Poetry Index (available on the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library http://www.buffalolib.org/ Web site) and you’ll see that pumpkins have been poeticized about for hundreds of years: “Peter, Peter pumpkin eater, Had a wife and couldn’t keep her”; “What calls back the past like the rich Pumpkin pie?”; “bumpkin Amused himself by offering these Reflections on a pumpkin”; “There’s turnip in my pumpkin pie and ashes in my pepper”; and “golden bombs on all the farms Now burst in pumpkin pies!”. 

With Halloween upon us, thoughts turn to Jack-0’-Lanterns; but these scary forms were not first carved into the flesh of pumpkins; instead the horror goes to turnips, among other things.  In fact, the custom is from the British Isles (England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland) and the pumpkin was unknown when it emerged.  I personally don’t care much for turnips.  A carved turnip (or other vegetable) was placed at an entry way on All Hallows Eve to ward off evil spirits.  A pumpkin is much easier to carve than a turnip and the New World produced the easily carved pumpkin in almost shameful abundance.   Picture yourself in a bog or swamp at might, that’s scary, and then strange lights start flickering in the marsh gases.  You’re in the setting in which the Jack-o’-lantern story was born.  In a prescientific world, the explanation is memorable and in the best ghostly tradition.  But vegetable carving predates it.  The Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack-o’-lantern offers two explanations from folklore, cutting to the chase, visit the Wikipedia for the beginning of the tale.  The Devil agrees not to take Jack’s soul; but Jack is far too sinful to go to heaven; but his deal with the devil saves him from going to hell.  With nowhere to go or call home, he must wander.  He asks the Devil for a light and he is tossed an eternal ember from hell.  He carves out a turnip (Jack loves turnips), places the ember safely inside, and begins an endless wandering of the Earth as “Jack of the Lantern” or Jack-o’-Lantern (or even Jack-a-Lantern).  Was Jack really just a night watchman?  Who are those wandering souls in the foggy night?  “Jack-o’-lantern” (Jack-with-the Lantern) wanders into recorded English usage and the Oxford English Dictionary in 1663.  The pumpkin and American Halloween  became associated probably also because of Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hallow http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/41 (1819).  The ghost of a Hessian soldier throws his head at Ichabod, knocks him off his horse, and the next morning Ichabod’ hat is found with a smashed pumpkin beside it. 

So what’s the point: Let your mind wander on the Web and in the library, who knows what you’ll find out and what connections you may make?  Wander and wonder . . . what’s the connection?

 Kam Abbott, “Pumpkin Patch” October 24, 2011 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.

 Patti Gravel, “Big . . . Pumpkin” October 24, 2011 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.

 Wigwam Jones,  “Lake Onion Pumpkin Launch 2001″ October 24, 2011 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.

 William Warby,  “Jack-o’-lanterns” October 24, 2011 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.

Rowie K., "Em literally holds her nose . . . " October 10, 2011 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.

That is to say, the past smells!  Sometimes it smelled good . . . sometimes not so good.   Sometimes it may have smelled good at the time; but wouldn’t make it in our time and vice versa.  And, of course, smell preferences and reactions can be very personal — it’s a matter of taste — I mean smell.

The past had the whole spectrum of odiferous delights and repulsions – just like the present.  Some historians really would like to know how the past smelled.  The April 2011 American Historical Review http://blog.historians.org/publications/1310/american-historical-review–april-2011 carried: “Follow Your Nose?  Smell, Smelling, and Their Histories” by Mark S.R. Jenner.  Jenner’s article begins with a quote from Roy Porter, who said, “Today’s history comes deodorized. How many historians have given us the smell of previous societies? Researchers have been all too silent, repelled, it seems, by modern hygienic sensibilities even from contemplating the stench of the past [http://blog.historians.org/resources/1379/history-of-smells].”  Sniff around a little by doing a simple Google search, search “history of smell” – you’ll find some interesting stuff.  There was even an effort to have movies smell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell-O-Vision.   Not just bad movies – truly smelly and scented ones!

Smell can be very personal and an integral and evocative part of our memories.  David Owen’s 25 January 2010 New Yorker piece entitled “The Dime Store Floor ” http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/01/25/100125fa_fact_owen is an example.  Its abstract begins:

. . .  The first time the writer walked into the grove of pines behind his house in Connecticut, he experienced a form of time travel: the trees smelled exactly like the summer camp he attended when he was thirteen. But the trees soon lost their power to send him back in time. Today, his yard smells only like his yard. On a recent trip to Kansas City, where the writer grew up, he and his sister Anne visited a number of places they remembered from their childhood to find out whether they still smelled the same. They visited a medical building where their dentist’s office used to be. The smell was familiar but disappointingly faint. The most enduring and evocative remembered smell from their growing up, the writer and his sister decided, was the smell of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art where they had gone on many field trips. As they drove to the museum, the writer was able to generate a mental simulacrum of its smell. Yet, once he and Anne were back inside the building, they could find no trace. The smell was gone. Eerily, today, the writer can no longer reproduce the old smell of the museum in his mind.

Nuala Bugeye, "Wake up and smell the flowers" October 10, 2011 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.

Interested in writing something smelly?  If you’re curious about what historians have done with smell —  and historical reenactors, major historical sites and living history museums have a lot to offer here as well – you could begin with America: History and Life http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/pdp/index.asp?ID=29 and Historical Abreacts http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/pdp/index.asp?ID=205 searches.  In AHL you’ll find: “The Nose Knows: The Sense of Smell in American History” and in HA: “Follow Your Nose?  Smell, Smelling, and their Histories.” 

For fun: Oxford University Press publishes a series of children’s books entitled “Smelly Old History.”  Volumes in the series are suggestive: Mouldy Mummies, Medieval Muck, Vile Vikings, Roman Aromas, Victorian Vapours, and Tudor Odours.  For the latter: “Take a deep breath and step back into the world of Tudor Odours. Visit the stinking streets, riddled with rats and plague, or the perfumed country houses of the very rich.” Things smelled so bad for a while that folks thought smell alone carried disease.  They had a word for it: Miasma.  See Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map http://www.theghostmap.com/ – for smell aficionados I recommend the first chapter.  This book is about cholera and a whole lot of really stinky stuff.  Although, as you probably surmise, stink was not really the issue – but sometimes “where’s there’s smoke there’s fire.”  (That’s not quite right . . . you know what I mean.) Check it out in the Wikpedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory and the Oxford English Dictionary http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/pdp/index.asp?ID=305 or,  if you must be more authoritative amd detailed, Gale Virtual Reference Library http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/pdp/index.asp?ID=176.

If you’d like to get a little philosophical, you can check out our philosophy department’s Carolyn Korsmeyer’s Savouring Disgust: The Foul and Fair in Aesthetics http://www.amazon.com/Savoring-Disgust-Foul-Fair-Aesthetics/dp/0199756937/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317468202&sr=8-1.   It’s an Amazon look-inside-the-book book.  Do a search on smell and you’ll find some ideas to think out.  To come to think about it, search on smell in Philosopher’s Index http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/pdp/index.asp?ID=317 and The Philosophy Documentation Center http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/pdp/index.asp?ID=500.  Also use the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/.  There’s a lot on smell; but shockingly not a dedicated entry on smell.  There is one on sounds though: Something smells wrong here?  Be sure to also use the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/pdp/index.asp?ID=343.  It lacks dedicated entries for sound and smell.  These are great sources if you really want to think about smell.  Cognition in the service of sensation, umh.  What does that mean?  Heck, there are a lot of famous quotes explicitly referring to smell.  For a whiff, visit this http://www.bartleby.com/quotations/.

No search would be complete without trolling through Google Books http://books.google.com/books and Google Scholar http://scholar.google.com/.  In Google Books, just type “history of smell”.  Do the same in Google Scholar.  In the latter you’ll find that 295 publications cite Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell and there’s also Jim Drobnick’s The Smell Culture Reader.  Check them out; they both have previews in Google Books.  You can also use a library catalog — the subject heading is “Smell – history and odors – history.”  Use WorldCat http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/pdp/index.asp?ID=400, becuase there are more books on smell than those in our libraries.

John Leslie, "Bloodhound Trials . . . " October 10 2011 via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution.

Smell is a pretty serious and revealing thing. Ask your cat about smell (although dogs have a better sense of smell, most cats usually smell better), of course if your cat could talk he wouldn’t be a cat, but if he could speak he’d probably tell you how very sorry he is for your pathetic olfactory capabilities.  And imagine what your dog would say!  Not to say that people can’t smell (I mean smell and be smelled) – we just have a hard time smelling anything with the nuance of a cat, let alone a dog (or most other animals).  Is that why we have such a reluctance to record or imagine smell in our historical accounts?

So what’s the point: Let your mind wander on the Web and in the library, who knows what you’ll find out and what connections you may make?  Wander and wonder . . . what’s the connection?

Google Books

Over 15,000,000 books and magazine issues may be searched in Google Books. The numbers grows daily as Google moves forward with its mission of scanning literally all the world’s books and magazines. Even materials that are not readable full text are nonetheless searchable. Some texts (pre-1923) may be read in their entirety; while others may be read across a limited number of pages (20% of the book) in ‘preview’ mode and some are only viewable in snippet view. The latter is the least useful to researchers. This massive scanning effort is not without controversy in a variety of aspects; but technologically and legally the effort is remarkable. In addition to reading and downloading public domain books, and searching across the Google Books universe, many books may also be purchased to be read on a computer and a diversity of e-readers (excluding Kindle) http://books.google.com/ebooks. Samples are available. Books purchased and public domain books may be added to a user’s personal library and are brought together in My Library. Organize your Google reading using this feature http://books.google.com/googlebooks/mylibrary/. You must sign in to use it https://www.google.com/accounts/Login?service=print&continue=http://books.google.com/books%3Fop%3Dlibrary&hl=en.

Serious users, as appropriate, should use the advanced search screen http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search. Texts may be read using the online reader or as a PDF. PDFs may be downloaded into software readers such as Adobe Digital Editions http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/, Sony Reader Library software http://ebookstore.sony.com/download/ , and Adobe Reader http://get.adobe.com/reader/ as well as loaded on various e-readers. ADE and Sony support bookmarking and note taking. Load public domain EPUB Google books onto a Kindle using either Calibre http://calibre-ebook.com/ or RetroRead http://www.retroread.com/. Google books already in PDF may be loaded directly. If this does not work, email the Google Books’ PDF file to your free.kindle.com email address. Amazon will send the adjusted and now readable file back to you. Online readers may also read their Google Books using Google’s free GooReader http://gooreader.com/ (a priced version enables the creations of PDFs). It allows one to read purchased Google Books as well as books freely available on Google. Since the full text of all material in Google Books has been scanned – even if it is not available to the reader – Google scanned texts may be mined. Text mining is made possible for subsets of Google Books with Google’s Ngram Viewer software, available at http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/. To stay current with Google Books developments read the blog Inside Google Books http://booksearch.blogspot.com/. See also http://books.google.com/googlebooks/about.html. For the Google take on the Google Book Settlement see http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/. For interpretation from the American Library Association see http://wo.ala.org/gbs/.

Google Books Search Tips:

Google Books are increasingly (but not completely) present in Google Scholar http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/pdp/index.asp?ID=185. See the Google produced http://books.google.com/googlebooks/midterms.html and the University of Michigan’s http://www.lib.umich.edu/files/services/mdp/GoogleBooks.pdf. The latter illustrated guide also explains how to find journal issues and articles. Google Books will help you trace the birth and longevity of an idea, assess the impact of a particular scholar, explore the evolution of language, verify quotes and discover the origin and use of quotes and passages across multiple texts, answer research and reference questions, create and search a rich corpus of primary source material (particularly from pre-1923 material). Note, full-text magazine material even after 1923 is abundant. What you find is limited by your linguistic creativity; subject headings for Google Books are generally insufficient and sometimes even incorrect. HathiTrust records offer better metadata http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/pdp/index.asp?ID=496. Any serious research project – especially in the humanities and social sciences – should include a Google Books search and a HathiTrust Digital Library search.

Google Books Content:

Books and magazines are restricted by neither language nor date of publication. Very old material is rare, however. Use the advanced search screen http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search to isolate material by either publication date or language, or other criteria.

HathiTrust Digital Library

Over 8.7 million scanned items, all described by precise metadata, are currently in the HathiTrust (one word) database. About 73% of the items in the HathiTrust catalog are copyrighted; 27% are in the public domain. The copyrighted items are generally inaccessible, even to institutions associated with the project. 48% of the catalog’s items are in English, although 400 languages are represented. As explained on its Web site: the Trust is “a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future” (Hathi is the Hindi word for elephant – and an elephant NEVER forgets!) and their mission is “to contribute to the common good by collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge.” While Google scans are a critical component of the corpus, it is much more. Unique material is in both Google and HathiTrust and there are topical collections reflecting recent and focused institutional scanning efforts. Google scans that are included have been reviewed for quality of scan and have been assigned full and accurate metadata. In fact, HathiTrust bibliographic records are freely available to institutions for loading in their catalogs. Do a keyword search for “hathitrust” (one word) in WorldCat to retrieve HathiTrust records.

Works in the public domain (generally pre-1923) in HathiTrust are freely available to all researchers and may be read and searched in their entirety. Works in copyright may be searched in “limited” mode, with only the page number and number of hits given. In the future, in partnership with Indiana University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, text-mining projects similar to Google’s Ngram Viewer http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/ will be supported. Use HathiTrust and Google Books http://books.google.com/books in combination. The “readers” and “search engines” of course, are different.

HathiTrust Digital Library Content:

Like Google Books, more than books are in the database. The HathiTrust Digital Library contained, as of 16 May 2011, 8,724,587 volumes or 4,774,586 book titles and 211,665 serial titles.

Downloading HathiTrust Digital Library Titles:

All public domain titles not digitzed by Google and in the HathiTrust Digital Library are available for full PDF download to HathiTrust members and non-members alike. Over 100,000 Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/ digitzed volumes are available in this way. When you attempt to download from HathiTrust you’ll be invited to open a Friends account — this is the only option availabe to you because UB is not a participating instituion.

I think I’ve written this before.  Oh, yes — I have — a number of years now.  This time I’ll make it simple.

Call, email, or visit — don’t hesitate, I’m here to help.  The best thing about coming to a librarian for help is that no one — certainly not an instructor — ever has to know how much help you’ve received.  To paraphrase a popular ad campaign: What happens in the library stays in the library.  And a lot can happen here to help you “look good” and — even more importantly — learn.

My office is in room 321 Lockwood Library, call me at 645-7745, or send  email to  lclcharl@buffalo.edu.  Any question concerning research in the library or on the Web is welcome — and often I send answers, not simply directions on how to do it yourself.  Although I always include the latter.

Recently I gave a brief presentation on iGoogle http://www.google.com/.  Tools for scholarship and for life, RSS feeds for staying up on things, things to share (games, to do lists, documents) with as many friends as you like — you can create an iGoogle world that will start you off informed first thing in the morning and keep you up to date across the day.  So many things at one’s finger tips on one page or a series of pages is simply  inspiring.  Pay special attention to the the APIs created by Google, read about them before putting them on your page or on one of the tabs that conrpise your iGoogle site. They’re the most reliable; but others can be wonderful.   I think you’ll want to do tabs, with them you can create customized pages within your iGoogle site.  Or just put APIs and feeds on and take them off with a click if you don’t like them — or move them around if you don’t like their position on a page.  No computer expertise required  — this is EASY!!!!!

Access your Google Reader, gmail, and a whole range of Google tools from your iGoogle page.  And RSS feeds are EASY to add.  Many tools may be set for local results: Where’s the cheapest gas?  Where are the local eateries?  What’s the latest Buffalo news? What’s this got to do with history — if you capture the right RSS feeds and add the right tools — this can be a GREAT help to you — it’s all about what YOU put on the page. 

Get started by watching this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbf0dlESX8E.  There are many good tutorials on the Web and the iGoogle directions themselves are great.

There’s more to a Kindle than reading books. It’s a very powerful and very flexible machine. Learn Kindle text searching and marking, using a dictionary as you read, text acquisition (finding a variety of free things to read), loading files, loaning books, searching books, and file management techniques. We’ll learn about Kindle for PC, too. Do you use your Kindle for more than reading books? Learn about podcasts and music files and Web searching. Learn how to mail files to your Kindle. If you have a Kindle, don’t be shy, please bring it along. If you have a Kindle app on another device, bring that device along as well. You’ll enjoy your Kindle even more after this session.

Please register for this session at: http://www.etc.buffalo.edu/workshops/workshop.asp?EventID=1396

Presenter: Charles D’Aniello (Kindle Owner)

Date and Time: Tuesday, 1 March, 12:00-1:00

Location: 212 Capen Hall, North Campus (Teaching & Learning Center)