I love old newspapers, and I read a lot of them. As with modern newspapers, they can be hasty, biased, incomplete, and just plain wrong. But there is an excitement in newspapers, an immediacy that you don’t often find in histories written long after the event: I can seldom shake the awareness that a historian writing about a past event knows just how everything is going to turn out, while a journalist writing about contemporary events never can know what will turn out to be significant and what will fizzle into trivia.
“History’s Newsroom” is a new series to let you feel the sense of being present when Mormon history is made. With a minimum of modern interference, I’ll share articles of breaking news from the Mormon past, and editorial opinions about Mormons and their doings. Some will be exciting, others outrageously insulting, or funny, or bizarre, or wrong, or even frightening. I hope you’ll enjoy these as much as I do.
Excellent. I look forward to this, Ardis. Does this mean, though, that you’ll stop posting such excerpts on your fb page?
This should be fun!
QUIT DOING COOL SERIES THAT MAKE THE REST OF US LOOK BAD!!!!
(Also, looks fun!)
This is an exciting development, Ardis. Looking forward to your discoveries.
I’ve seen some of this on facebook, but I am not always quick to click on links to read longer pieces, so I am glad you are sharing them here.
I should maybe explain the Facebook thing to others: While I’m hunting for useful newspaper articles, I sometimes post two- or three-line excerpts from something I find that strikes me as funny, usually because it is so jaw-droppingly wrong in a way that should have been obvious to anyone, even in the 19th century, no matter how they felt about Mormonism. Most of those articles don’t make it into my database. I have every intention of continuing to post those bits at FB because I love to hear the instant laughter that comes from real-time sharing.
And I also should say, I suppose, that while the community at Keepapitchinin is very important to me, and I enjoy just about every exchange with everyone, I try to keep my FB friends list to those whom I know in real life or with whom I’ve developed a more personal relationship through blogging, because I do sometimes use FB to vent, or to connect with old friends or family I otherwise would never hear from. Please don’t be offended if I decline friend requests.
Looking forward to the series
Ardis-
I am looking forward to the series.
I think that each of us MUST have some limits when it comes to technology. I have a FB account, but haven’t used it for almost a year. After three years of constant connection through FB, I find that a lot of people are not as close now that I am not on. At first it bothered me until I realized that the people who cared the most still took the time to find me. If they didn’t find me, and I missed them, I found them.
I have several friends who made the opposite choice. They left blogs that had only been for families and took that info to FB instead. I keep getting tempted to try twitter, but since my husband has barely started reading my blog, I am waiting for him to be comfortable, or not, with twitter.
Thanks for all the valuable information you share. You have created a community with the chance to find kindred souls.
I’m looking forward to the new series, also.