let me tell you about what i've been reading this last week. i think i told you already that i am taking an OU course in Creative Writing. well, i have it in mind to attempt to write something historical. and i've been uncovering all kinds of fantastic stuff online.
i've two stories in my head, one i'd like to weave around Samuel Johnson's English Dictionary, which was first published in the late 18th C. i haven't been able to trace a digitised copy of the first edition online, but Google Books has made available a badly digitised copy from 1805. i quite like reading dictionaries, and this one is utterly fascinating.
secondly, i've had this story in my head about a young working woman in the US in the early 20thC, and have uncovered all kinds of resources online, including a digital image archive of the Upper Mississippi Valley; i've also, via the OU online library, had access to a digitised copy of Ardis Cameron's, Radicals of the Worst Sort: laboring women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860-1912, which tells the history of a number of vast cotton mills on the Pacific coast, and the women and children who worked there, many of whom were radicalised by the working conditions they faced.
i did a history degree in the early 1990s, and this work was very much library based, with trips to the archives. it is really staggering how much the internet has opened up resources to those with the technology to access them. it's a real delight to be able to sit up in my bed, a stack of plumped up pillows behind me, wireless laptop on my knee, and find myself mooching around beautifully crafted image databases, or pouring over a variety of 18thC literature....
lucky me.
but the tricky bit will be the writing, that's for sure....
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07/03/07 @ 23:58