A young woman repairs a bicycle while three others watch and help, c. 1895. From Montana State University Library, via Wikimedia Commons.

Along the rutted, moonlit roads just north of Leeds, England, a cyclist in skirts pedals to her local pub. After a pint, she..

Lincoln County Courthouse, Kentucky. Photo by Russell and Sydney Poore via Wikimedia Commons.

In July of the summer of 2013, my husband and I took a driving trip through the back roads of Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri, so I could visit courthouses and see documents..

When I was growing up, my father would sometimes solemnly remind me to remember Francis Ward Lewis. I would just nod absentmindedly in..

This year, January 22 marked the beginning of the Lunar New Year, a holiday that is celebrated by millions of people from many Asian cultures around the world. The lunar calendar is based on the moon’s twelve phases, so the starting date..

Even before I earned my master’s degree in public history, I liked to fancy myself a bit of a family historian. I am lucky enough to still have three living grandparents: ages 86, 89, and 94. I have taken up the task of..

It was a busy and exciting year for the Wyner Family Jewish Heritage Center (JHC). In a belated celebration of the eight nights of Hanukkah, which..

Two hundred eleven years ago today, on 6 August 1810, Assistant Marshal Ebenezer Burrell set out to make a full and accurate count of the residents of Salem, Massachusetts. He was instructed to make a formal inquiry at each dwelling house, or with the head of..

As we reach the end of this extraordinary year – one marked by titanic public stresses and private losses – it is time to review a few of the blog posts that appeared in Vita Brevis in 2020. Most posts, of course,..

One of the features of this anniversary year – the four hundredth since the Mayflower’s landing at Plymouth as well as the 175th anniversary of the Society’s founding in 1845 – has been a focus on early members of the Society, people no one alive today can have known...

Two weeks after an explosion leveled parts of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in December 1917, a survivor named Walter Hoganson wrote a letter to a friend in Stoughton, Massachusetts. In the letter..