Open Access: Kangaroos and California, Peanut Butter and Jelly

The University of California Press has made all their journal articles freely available for the month of April.

UC Press, which is celebrating their 125th anniversary, publishes California History, where you can read Kangaroos and the California Gold Rush by Cyler Conrad. The first kangaroos arrived in California in 1850 in the form of rugs, or skins; it wasn’t until 1852 that a live kangaroo made the voyage over from Australia.

kangaroo
Source: Photo by Josh Appel on Unsplash

Other journals are Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians,  Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, The Public Historian, and Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies, which recently published  a history of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Source: Evan-Amos [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons
References:

Conrad, Cyler
2017 Kangaroos and the California Gold Rush. California History 94 (3):62-65.  DOI: 10.1525/ch.2017.94.3.62

Estes, Steve
2017 PB&J: The Rise and Fall of an Iconic American Dish. Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies 17 (2):5-15.

“Women who have really done things:” The Jazz Age Founders of The Society of Woman Geographers

You may known Marguerite Harrison from the silent-film era documentary Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life, which she made with the two men who later went on to make King Kong. In 1925, the same year Grass was released, she and three other women formed The Society of Woman Geographers. The story of The Intrepid ’20s Women Who Formed an All-Female Global Exploration Society, by April White, is at Atlas Obscura.

 

Ain’t No Nuns Like Colorado Frontier Nuns (Actually, Most Nuns Are Probably Like That)

“Their supposed status as the most poor, obedient women made it easy to overlook their decidedly “unfeminine” feats, like camping, living without men, traveling long distances, and managing their own money”

Erin Blakemore and JSTOR Daily on Sister Perpetua and other nuns who served the Colorado Frontier.

Coffeehouse Archaeology in England

Artifacts from the Claphams Coffeehouse assemblage. Source: Cressford et al. 2017: Figure 8.

Before England fell in love with tea, there was coffee. Beginning in the 1600s, coffeehouses spread through England. Historians think of them as the more polite, refined counterpoint to taverns and alehouses, a place where the customers – mostly male – could drink and discuss and debate the news of the day.

It’s a bit surprising that almost no coffeehouses have been explored archaeologically, but Craig Cessford and colleagues now describe artifacts, tightly dated to between 1770 and 1780, from a small brick cellar associated with Clapham’s Coffeehouse in Cambridge, England.

Continue reading Coffeehouse Archaeology in England

Frans Ferdinand Blom: Danish Dixie Bohemian Archaeologist

Frans Blom 1922. Source: Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Public Domain

“My first encounter with a cave filled with human skulls and bones occurred in 1928 at Huxjal.” Frans Ferdinand Blom knew how to start an article. His bio is now up at Jazz Age Adventurers.

Annie Alexander’s Contribution to Passenger Pigeon Research

An eyewitness account of trapping passenger pigeons in New Jersey in the early 1800s is one of only two publications by the woman who founded one of the premier paleontological museums in America.

In 1927, a short communication was published in the journal The Condor that quoted a letter from John Thomas Waterhouse to his parents back in England. Waterhouse described how the New Jerseyans hunted passenger pigeons using nets and guns.

Continue reading Annie Alexander’s Contribution to Passenger Pigeon Research