U.S. WWII records

Some new resources are available at the National Archives' World War II Records website, including:

Finding Information on Personal Participation in World War II, a brochure on some of NARA's relevant records, and how to get started.

Missing Air Crew Reports (MACRs)

World War II Honor List of Dead and Missing Army and Army Air Forces Personnel

State Summary of War Casualties from World War II for Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard Personnel

And don't miss the link at the bottom of the page, to the Archives Library Information Center's WW2 page for even more research resources.

Google Life images

Have you explored the Life photo archive on Google images yet? There are many, many maritime images. A fast way to start searching is to go directly to Google Image Search, images.google.com and in addition to your search terms, enter: source:life

If you'd like to browse by decade or topic, head to the collection's site, where a few topics are listed, and photo collections by decade from the 1860s to the 1970s are available.

vads

vads, "the online resource for visual arts," has many images of interest to the maritime community. There is a link to the separate collections for easy browsing, but the search tool is excellent. Searching for "ship" returned images of ships as expected, but also of tableware used on ships, nautical fashions, and a toy cargo ship. The descriptions are thorough, and many types of images are included--photographs, paintings, posters and prints.

Whalers' Curious Art of Scrimshaw

If you're in San Francisco on April 14, 2009, at 8 p.m., you may wish to attend Stuart Frank's lecture, "The Whalers' Curious Art of Scrimshaw." The event is preceded by a member mini-exhibition of scrimshaw and nautical objects at 7:15. Part of the American Decorative Arts Forum of Northern California, more information is available on their website, www.adafca.org or by phoning 415-249-9234.

ADAF members are free; $15 for the general public.

Taking the sea

The Friends of the San Francisco Maritime Museum Library send along this lecture announcement:

Taking the Sea
Sunday, April 5, 2009, 5:00 p.m. In the Maritime Library.

Maritime author and historian Dennis Powers will discuss his new book, Taking the Sea, which tells of the maritime business of wrecking, or ship salvaging, and the operations of Captain Thomas P.H. Whitelaw, an emigrant Scot who, beginning as a hard-hat diver in San Francisco in the late 1860s, founded a marine-salvage empire covering the California and Pacific Northwest coasts.

TIA: This is the library where I work.

New Villiers resources, and pirates!

Douglas McCarthy (with the Picture Library at NMM, Greenwich), sends along some wonderful new resources. First, new collections are available at nmmimages.com, the Picture Library online:

Pirates: Buccaneers, treasure, dastardly deeds aplenty (real and fictional). This is a wonderful collection, including famous, familiar images, and delightful surprises such as the pirates dressed as women to try to fool a merchant ship.

Alan Villiers: life in the last days of sail. A talented photographer, Villiers' images are full of life and beauty.

In addition to these large collections of images, the Museum has just published a new book on Villiers, Alan Villiers: Voyager of the Winds by Kate Lance.

Even if you don't think you'll buy the book, go to its website and follow the links on the right side of the page--there's a clip from his film, "The Cape Horn Road" (don't miss the adorable cat!), and links to Villiers photos both on the nmmimages.com site and on Flickr commons.

Thank you, Douglas!

100 Hours of Astronomy

Part of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, 100 Hours of Astronomy begins on April 2 and continues through April 5. Events are scheduled around the world and there are many ways to participate--if you have clear skies, you can use this site to find an event near you and resources for observing. If skies are cloudy, this site will lead you to remote observing opportunities and live streaming events you can tune into online.

Lectures in San Jose, California

If you're going to be in the San Francisco Bay Area (California) for the The North American Society for Oceanic History, Steamship Historical Society of America and National Maritime Historical Society 2009 annual conference, you may want to consider heading south to San Jose on Sunday, May 17 to catch two lectures on environmental awareness around water issues: "The Rising Tide – Climate Change and San Francisco Bay Wetlands," a lecture by Adam Parris, and, "Raising Environmental Awareness for Water through Textile Art," a lecture by Linda Gass.

The lectures will be held at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, and details are available on their calendar site. It's a wonderful, small museum, right downtown, and well worth a visit.

(TIA: I'm not just a fan of the museum, I'm a memeber.)

Gold Rush Port

The Friends of the San Francisco Maritime Museum Library send along this lecture announcement:

Gold Rush Port—the Maritime Archeology of San Francisco
Saturday, March 28, 2009, 6:00 p.m.

Drawing on excavations in buried ships and collapsed buildings from the Gold Rush period, maritime archeologist James P. Delgado re-creates San Francisco's unique maritime landscape, shedding new light on the city's remarkable rise from a small village to a boomtown of thousands in the three short years from 1848 to 1851. Copies of his new book, Gold Rush Port—the Maritime Archeology of San Francisco, will be available for sale.
The Sixth Karl Kortum Award for Maritime History will also be presented at this time by John Kortum, Esq. The Award of $1000 is presented every other year for the best research in selected fields of maritime history. For more information and guidance, please see the Friends’ website at www.maritimelibraryfriends.org. Submissions are accepted at any time, and will be considered in the succeeding September 12 deadline period for each award cycle.

TIA: This is the library where I work.

Lady travelers

Thanks to the Librarian's Internet Index, I've discovered the online exhibit, Wilder Shores : Lady Travelers of the 18th and 19th Centuries. From their site:

Wilder Shores is organized geographically, loosely following the structure of Barbara Hodgson’s book No Place for a Lady: Tales of Adventurous Women Travelers. (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2002). The exhibit features books and manuscripts, both by and about, women who traveled to these regions: Europe, Russia, Turkey, The Middle East, India and the Far East, Africa, The Americas.

The web exhibit doesn't include the texts, but does include portraits of these intrepid women and selected illustrations from their accounts, all excellently attributed with easily followed citations for further reading.

The Ocean Wireless Boys

Now you can easily join Jack Ready and Noddy Nipper in their high seas adventures, for The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code by Captain Wilbur Lawton has been published at Project Gutenberg.

The author, also known as John Henry Goldfrap, may have been better known for his Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol series, but the availability of this book may change that--daring rescues are the norm for the Ocean Wireless Boys!

Wooden Ships and other poems

From Wooden Ships:

They are remembering forests where they grew,—
The midnight quiet, and the giant dance;
And all the murmuring summers that they knew
Are haunting still their altered circumstance.

Read more in Project Gutenberg's eBook version of Ships in Harbour by David Morton, originally published in 1921.

Women in science

Institutions continue to celebrate Women's History Month by releasing wonderful resources. This photo of "Mary Jane Rathbun (1860-1943), working with crab specimens" is part of the Smithsonian's Flickr photostream and their "Women in Science" set.

Perhaps coincidental with these great images, the Library of Congress' Science Reference Services has published Women and Minorities in Science and Technology: a guide to Selected Resources. Like their other guides, this one contains screen after screen of references to books (general and specialized), journals, and recommended websites.

Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears

Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears is a free online magazine aimed at K-5 teachers, with beautiful photographs and interesting articles. The link to the archives is at the top of the page, and many articles are linked to a "Virtual Bookshelf" bibliography.

If you'd like to go strait to a listing of many, many children's books, follow their "Book Club" link to their Shelfari site. Also worth reading is their blog, highlighting resources of interest in their magazine and elsewhere.

WAVES

This lovely image is from George Eastman House's Flickr photostream, and their new "Women!" set. WAVEs, or "Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service," were women returning to general Navy service in 1942. Yes. Returning. Women first entered U.S. Naval service in 1917.

For more on the women in the U.S. Navy, the Naval Historical Center's World War II era WAVES overview and images, and World War I era Yeomen (F) overview and images are a great place to start.

When the English warship became a gun platform

The BBC has published a fantastic article on its website, 'Superguns' of Elizabeth I's navy, outlining what's been learned from a reproduction cannon. The cannon, modeled on one recovered from an Elizabethan-era shipwreck, is providing the evidence to back up the historical accounts of the Elizabethan navy as outstanding gunners, much feared.

The article is well worth reading if you've ever been curious about naval gunnery. Wonderfully written, it's explains the technical issues and why these discoveries are so exciting beyond historical interest in the English battle with the Spanish Armada--why the development of uniform cannon changed the role of the warship to one of an effective gun platform, and led to the naval warfare that is practiced even today.

And it also has a cool video of the replica gun's first firing.

A Three-Hour Tour

In Seattle, Wash., the Center for Wooden Boat's 33rd Annual Dinner and Auction on March 7 sounds like wonderful fun--there will be a Gilligan's Island costume contest! From the flyer:

How it works: 1) Come to the auction dressed as your favorite Gilligan's Island character, 2) Register as a contestant at the door, 3) Pose for a quick photo to be placed at the voting table, 4) Mix, mingle and have fun! Attendees will vote for you, their favorite character by placing dollar bills in your ballot box on the voting table. Winners will be announced during the live auction. One winner will be selected for each Gilligan's Island cast member to receive a great prize, so come to the auction and show off your creative side!

Don't feel like dressing up? That's okay! Be sure to bring lots of dollar bills to 'vote' for your favorite character!

I hope they share photos on their website!

Jurn

Jurn is a new search engine, available at jurn.org which searches 1148 (as of Feb. 9, 2009) hand-picked publications, mainly in English. Focusing on the arts and humanities, many articles on preservation and history are included. It's a great search engine, returning highly relevant results. I searched very broad terms, such as sea and retrieved fascinating articles, both popular and scholarly. Specific searches, such as vessel names, also retrieved wonderful hits.

Interested in its development? Add the Jurn news blog to your feeds.

Great War archives

The Great War Archive contains over 6,500 items contributed by the general public during 2008, and continues to grow through its sister-site, the Great War Archive Flickr group. There is a wealth of maritime-related images here; just searching ship turns up pages and pages of images.

The Great War Archive is hosted by the University of Oxford, as is The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, where one can find Robert Graves' poem, "I wonder what it feels like to be drowned" (retrievable through the search ships).

Wellcome Images

Wellcome Images, from the Wellcome Library collections, has some wonderful maritime imagery. Searching the term navy brings up anti-VD posters, diagrams of mortality, and even advertising images featuring sailors. The indexing & search interface works very well; searching the term star retrieves star-shaped antibodies and Christmas decorations, as well as images of the stars in the heavens.

Following the link to the Wellcome Library leads to other electronic resources such as the electronic edition of one of their most popular manuscripts, The Physician's handbook, Wellcome MS.8004, an English medical and astrological compendium from the mid-15th century.

Above: Image no. L0019401, Credit, Wellcome Library, London