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Posts Tagged ‘Library of Congress’

Are You Super?

Posted in Other, tagged , , , , , on January 15, 2025| Leave a Comment »

It turns out I’m super, and you might be too!

The National Archives needs Citizen Archivists who can read cursive

“Reading cursive is a superpower,” said Suzanne Isaacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog in Washington, D.C.

If you’d like to help the Library of Congress decipher History (yes, with a capital H), consider becoming a volunteer Citizen Archivist.

Because History is cool, and so are you.

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This is in Italian so I can’t read it, but you get the point. Photo by 
Alessio Fiorentino on Unsplash

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Real-Life Superhero

Posted in Likes, Other, Science!, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on February 7, 2019| Leave a Comment »

From the Library of Congress:

Today in History – February 7
On February 7, 1867, Laura Elizabeth Ingalls, the author of the beloved semi-autobiographical Little House series, was born in Wisconsin, the second daughter of Charles and Caroline Ingalls.

Little House on the Prairie etc. were some of the first real books I read.* They were also where I learned (among many other things) to make candy from maple syrup and snow, twist straw into logs, cast bullets, make candles, that nails were once a precious commodity, and that life before modern medicine was often hard and sometimes deadly.
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Speaking of modern medicine, I’ve been following the new measles outbreaks. Here’s a little public service announcement:

“Are you feeling all right?” I asked her.
“I feel all sleepy,” she said.
In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.
— Roald Dahl, on his daughter Olivia and Measles

 

Now, some people can’t be vaccinated.** That’s why the rest of us should. “You are a human shield”! (I love that, and I love being a real-life superhero and all-around good neighbor.) Thank you to the researchers who made vaccines possible, to the public policies making it a requirement, and to my parental units for helping me be part of a healthy community by keeping my vaccinations up to date!

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* Ok, Hop on Pop and other such books are real too, but these had chapters and everything! Also Little House was only semi-autobiographical and had some race issues, but acknowledging that lets us know how far we’ve come.

** For more on the “don’t” rather than the “can’t,” check out this TED Talk: Why (Some) Parents Don’t Vaccinate.

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