Canadianist and historyblogger Andrew Smith, now teaching in the UK, announces a day-by-day Twitter feed of the events of the War of 1812 (+200 years).
Andrew
reports:
Over the next three years, a team of undergraduates working under my direction will be live tweeting the War of 1812, plus 200. Events will be reported exactly 200 years to the day after they took place…. Our tweets will include links to digitised primary sources related to the event being discussed. (For instance, on 18 June 2012 we will send out a tweet to a scanned image of President Madison’s formal declaration of war against Britain). The aim is to get readers to explore that vast number of primary sources that have been placed online in the last decade. Most of the online primary sources we will link to are materials from US, British, and Canadian archives.
Andrew hopes
the twitter feed will help bring “the great wealth of online primary sources
about the war to the attention of the public” (and also give some
undergraduates experience in digital public history, “while putting some cash
into their pockets.”)
The twitter
feed will be @Warof1812Live. The related
blog, Warof1812Live is here. Having looked into this kind of project myself and flinched from the amount of work required, I'm delighted to see Andrew applying his organizational skills to this. I wish his team well and I'll be looking in.
The war
starts June 18. Keep your powder dry.
Update, May 30: Charles Levi tells me that the Archives of Ontario has begun to tweet from the 1812-era diary of Ely Playter, York-area farmer and militiaman @elyplayter1812
Update, May 30: Charles Levi tells me that the Archives of Ontario has begun to tweet from the 1812-era diary of Ely Playter, York-area farmer and militiaman @elyplayter1812
[Image: Wikipedia via Warof1812Live.]
