At the beginning of 2017, Vita Brevis can boast 1,177,549 page views: while individual readers have surely read multiple articles on a given visit, that million+ reader count is still impressive!
Vita Brevis reached its one-millionth page view on 7 July, some..
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Each December I gather up a dozen blog posts from the year just ending, in hopes of giving new (and long-time) readers a sense of the breadth of content Vita Brevis offers.
On 13 January, Zachary Garceau published a post on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, marking..
Continue reading[Author’s note: This series, on Mrs. Gray’s reading habits, began here.]
[Editor's note: This blog post originally appeared in Vita Brevis on 26 December 2015.]
In 1860, when Regina Shober Gray began keeping her diary, gift-giving was..
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On the face of it, my mother’s immediate family was Southern: her father was born in Norfolk, Virginia, and her mother in Baltimore, Maryland. Things quickly get complicated, though, as my grandfather’s mother and my..
Continue reading[Author's note: This series, on Mrs. Gray's reading habits, began here.]
[Author's note: This series, on Mrs. Gray's reading habits, began here.]
I trace my interest in genealogy to my early childhood. We lived surrounded by family – my paternal grandparents and uncle and aunt lived across the Ipswich River from us, and more distant cousins lived in nearby towns in Essex County,..
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It might seem odd, but the 1860 election – pitting Congressman Abraham Lincoln and Senator Hannibal Hamlin against Senator John Cabell Breckenridge and Senator Joseph Lane – did not particularly transfix the nation – at least if one goes by..
Continue reading[Author’s note: This series, on Mrs. Gray’s reading habits, began here.]