Jessamyn
"On May 1, 1886, Albert and Lucy Parsons led 80,000 people down Michigan Avenue, in what is regarded as the first-ever May Day Parade, in support of the eight-hour work day."
Lucy Parsons was a Black anarchist and she continued her May Day activism into her 90s. Her legacy is complex but that doesn't make it any less powerful. Know her name.
Jessamyn
From my State Librarian: "[we] received a notice [yesterday] from IMLS for a partial 2025 Grants to States award" in an amount that was one half of what we were allotted in 2024. My department thinks they will get the full amount which was allotted to them for 2025.
My question for the larger library community: does anyone else know if all the states got these notices, or just the 20 which sued?
(graphic by Marc Fischer of Halfletter Press)
Jessamyn
@evan I've seen three of the "other finalists" but none of the main ones listed in the article. So I picked zero but I just wanted to let you know (and they were on three different continents).
Jessamyn
@luis_in_brief My town seems to have a grand tradition of bonfires for various things (Solstice, end of wintertime, just because) and I sure do like it.
Jessamyn
What I like about this Date Due card in particular (from a deaccessioned book on the history of Vermont libraries which I took home) is that you can see that my library got a stronger privacy policy in 1982.
Jessamyn
Mentioned this over on Bluesky but in case you're here and not there...
Every Californian with an email address and an internet connection can now visit California’s Bookshelf and access more than 300,000 ebooks and audiobooks via the Palace Project app. Linked PDF describes the program.
https://www.library.ca.gov/uploads/2025/03/pressrelease-2025-03-26-californiasbookshelf.pdf
Jessamyn
@evan I said "Yes, but" because I feel like it is (for me) now but it might not be later. And I think for other people it's not safe now. There are a lot of people in the US who really don't seem to understand how this topic gets discussed on a more international stage. And safety can mean different things to different people. Freedom from consequences (arguments, social media backlash) or freedom of liberty and life?
Jessamyn
Another day, another "Gosh I should be working" day writing a Wikipedia article. This one is about Carol Lashof, a playwright who likes to look at classic texts and turn them around, make them more feminist ("What if Eve were created first?") or more socially justice oriented ("What if Tituba was the one telling the story of The Crucible?")
I swear I had not seen this picture of her until after I'd written this article.
Jessamyn
Early American photographers usually have interesting stories. Also, it's fun to track down selfies because most photographers have a picture of themself. Alvan Harper moved from PA to Tallahassee where he took a lot of photos of day-to-day life of both White and Black people. Much of his work was lost but some was found again. I did not write this article but I polished/expanded it AND found the picture of him. Easier to research once I realized he was also A. S. Harper
Jessamyn
New year, new #Wikipedia list.
Billy Craigie was an Aboriginal Australian activist who was one of the original people creating the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra protesting the government's Australia Day statement on land rights (supporting leasing of the people's ancestral lands). They set up a beach umbrella, camped out, got arrested, started a movement. We had a photo of him in Flickr Commons so I wrote this up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Craigie
Last year's list is here. https://glammr.us/@jessamyn/111715750451779186
Jessamyn
Anafesto Rossi was an Italian opera singer. He toured the world with fourteen trunks of costumes and a diamond ring given to him by the Kaiser. His career spanned two decades and ended with the implication of mental health issues (I could not find sources). I just found his photo and was like "Who is THAT guy?" and now I know. And you do too.
Jessamyn
Meroë Morse was a scientist at Polaroid and oversaw their black and white research lab. She worked closely with Edwin Land and Ansel Adams. She died young in 1969 and many of her accomplishments are buried in the Harvard Business School's Polaroid archive. They're doing an exhibition about her, now her story can be told. Because of umlauts and a middle name, this article has three redirects. I also added her to the Polaroid Corporation template, where she deserves to be.
Jessamyn
The Lucasie Family were three, maybe four people, with albinism who were from Europe. P.T. Barnum said they were "white Negroes" from Madagascar (the place one of them was born) and spun a whole tale about them, playing on racist sentiments. It was so over the top, he had to take some of it back when he published his next sensationalist pamphlet about them. They were photographed by Matthew Brady and were the subject of Currier & Ives lithographs. Hard to research.
Jessamyn
A friend just finished the book The Lost Boy of Santa Chinonia and learned that the book was inspired by the work of Ann Cornelisen. She wrote a book about poverty and power in rural Italy in 1969 when she was living there and working as an aid worker for Save the Children. Her history is all private schools, society mentions, and marrying (tho not staying married to) the "right" men, but she got attention where it was useful, helped where it was needed.
Jessamyn
I've been reading a book about Native Americans in comedy and there was a whole chapter on Paul Littlechief who played the Vegas Strip in 1970 and was an excellent self-promoter. He was a Kiowa-Comanche man from Oklahoma. Hard to verify some of the other parts of the story from the book (his second wife was only known as Baby Rae in all sources I could find) but it was a lot of fun trying to track down his old music and photos.
Jessamyn
Occasionally someone just pings me on social media and says "Hey this person really should have a Wikipedia page, don't you think?" and I can assemble one. Laverne Jacobs is a law professor and disability rights expert who is the first Canadian member of the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. She wrote the first Canadian disability law textbook. I'll be honest, this article mostly wrote itself.
Jessamyn
@evan I'm not totally sure I know what "remote actor" means in this context. After Googling, I'm guessing it has to do with users on other servers and for me the hardest part of Fedi stuff (which for me, so far, is Mastodon) is following a link someone gave me to a Masto post but then having to somehow copy that link into an open Masto tab f I want to reply to them. So it's not "seeing" it, it's the UX of it when I'm coming from somewhere else, and I'm nearly exclusively on desktop.
Jessamyn
Vermont's in-home and site based vaccination is available for anyone who has difficulty getting to or using a community vaccination location, including children ages 3+. You must have insurance of some kind.
This program is available until March 31, 2025. Please share.
Jessamyn
@overholt This is a neat project! Do you know offhand if Harvard is claiming copyright of the scans it's making of what I presume is public domain material or if they're just making them available? I clicked around what I though was a reasonable amount of time before asking you and couldn't find it stated anywhere.
Jessamyn
Moving domain registrars. I'm an old hand at this. Except I forgot that I built a one-page website using my old registrar's "site builder" tool that even they discontinued (and so I couldn't update).
So... I had to find the old version on the Internet Archive, view enough of the source to realize it was awful, got a freebie web template from the folks at HTML5 UP, fought with HTML today which was a welcome distraction and now my moss-enthusiast one-pager is live again!
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