December | 2019 | Congressman Frank J. Guarini Library Blog

Archive for December, 2019

Christmas Annuals

December 25, 2019 at 10:19 am · Filed under Holiday, Literature

This type of publication has been around for almost two hundred years and is still popular today. Produced by magazine publishers, these once-yearly special issues were given as Christmas presents; many contained copious stories and illustrations and were expensively bound in leather with gold lettering. Forget-Me-Not published by Rudolph Ackermann is generally acknowledged as the first of its kind, appearing in 1823.

Select volumes can be seen at Nineteenth Century British & American Literary Annuals (University of South Carolina); The Belgravia Annual (Online Books Page); Forget-Me-Not and Juvenile Forget-Me-Not (HathiTrust); Beeton’s Christmas Annual (HathiTrust); Boy’s Own Annual (HathiTrust); and Routledge’s Christmas Annual (Online Books Page).

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How the Victorians Celebrated Christmas

December 25, 2019 at 4:38 am · Filed under Holiday

This delightfully informative online exhibit from The British Library is replete with links and visuals to give us an understanding of Christmas through Victorian eyes.

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“Christmas Carol” on Film

December 24, 2019 at 5:18 am · Filed under Films, Holiday

Almost 400 versions of this venerable title can be accessed here, from Blackadder’s Christmas Carol to a 1969 animated version shown on ABC to the 1910 interpretation done by the Thomas Edison studio. This latter title was remastered, retitled, tinted, and supplied with a new soundtrack in 2010; for the original, please come here.

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Hundreds of Christmas Broadsides

December 23, 2019 at 3:35 pm · Filed under Holiday, Music

Brown University has a very large collection of broadsides – Harris Broadsides Collection – of which over 15,000 are available online; here are the almost 1,000 dealing with Christmas.

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Christmas Stories

December 23, 2019 at 10:09 am · Filed under Books, Holiday, Uncategorized

Here you will find a collection of hundreds of volumes of stories pertaining to Christmas, some as far back as the 1840s.

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Congressional “Debate” Over Impeachment

December 19, 2019 at 11:31 am · Filed under Current Events, Government

The term “debate” is a misnomer. What actually occurred is that members of the House could briefly express their opinions and then allow the next legislator to state her/his opinions. If you want to read what the various speakers said, you have recourse to today’s Congressional Record, starting at page H12135; a video of this 12-hour proceeding can be found at C-SPAN.

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Continuously Updated Bibliographies On Terrorism and Related Subjects

December 18, 2019 at 11:54 am · Filed under Research Tips, Security

Perspectives on Terrorism, a bimonthly publications from the Terrorism Research Initiative, contains a wealth of material of especial interest to those in the security field. Some examples of what each issue includes are:

Recent Online Resources for the Analysis of Terrorism and Related Subjects – a bimonthly listing of copious, linked sources culled from a wide variety of sites and dealing not just with terrorism but also delving into the areas of cybersecurity and resilience studies;

a guide to open access theses/dissertations on specific topics, such as 475 Academic Theses (Ph.D. and MA) on Countering Violence Extremism (CVE), Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) and Terrorism Prevention;

a recurrent feature highlighting recent books on terrorism, here is the most recent example- Counterterrorism Bookshelf: 12 Books on Terrorism & Counter-Terrorism-Related Subjects;

an ongoing examination of terrorism by region, here is the latest entry – Bibliography: Terrorism by Region—Indian Subcontinent;

multi-part examinations of a specific topic such as Bibliography: Terrorism and the Media (including the Internet) (Part 4);

and topical bibliographies on selected terrorist groups such as Bibliography: Boko Haram .

The bibliographies can be quite long, 40+ pages, and if there are operational links, they are included; in most cases, these bibliographies contain hundreds of active links.

Access to the entire archives is here.

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Read the House Judiciary Impeachment Report

December 17, 2019 at 8:38 am · Filed under Government, Security

This document, running over 600 pages, presents the reasons for the impending impeachment of President Trump. An overview of this report can be found here.

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The Wealthiest in Congress

December 13, 2019 at 3:23 pm · Filed under Government, Lists

This 2018 listing from Roll Call lists every single Congressperson from the 115th Congress (2018), their net worth, and where that wealth comes from. There are multiple filters that can be employed as well as access to profiles and previous lists.

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2019 Year in Pictures

December 12, 2019 at 10:49 am · Filed under Photos

The editors at The New York Times sifted through 5.6 million images to present these that they consider the best of the best; They range from the heartbreak of Yemen to a Siberian ice marathon. Here are last year’s chosen ones.

Other sites have also displayed their picks for the best pictures: CNN, People, USA Today, The Atlantic, and Reuters.

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“The Afghanistan Papers”

December 9, 2019 at 9:57 am · Filed under Interviews, Security

America’s longest war has been fought under the umbrella of misstatements and false reports. Such are the conclusions of The Afghanistan Papers, a trove of previously undisclosed interviews (more than 400) comprising thousands of pages. The frankness of these documents reveals the bitterness and resentment of many officials who have damned successive administrations for their involvement in this conflict, misleading the American public over the progress of this war.

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