Sometimes one just wants to query some data, right? I recently found myself again wanting to query the excellent work of the Supreme Court Database (SCDB for short), which is an important resource for legal historians and political scientists of all stripes. Several years ago, I pulled together a quick SQLite database and have used it since then. It’s now time to generate a fresh database with updated SCDB data, so I figured I would document how I do it, in case it might be useful to others.

My colleague Dr. Brian Leech, a history professor at Augustana College, and I are seeking the opinions of mining historians about the best books in mining history. The survey is anonymous. The results of the survey will be publicized at a future conference of the Mining History Association (and perhaps other academic conferences), and a journal article exploring the results in greater detail will be prepared for consideration by an academic journal in the field.

For more than four years, I’ve been working on a digital legal history project called 9CHRIS – the 9th Circuit Historical Records Index System. The potential for historical analysis that comes from having some 40,000 briefs and transcripts available is what keeps me perpetually interested in continuing to improve this project. Each time I open one of the documents, I think of the potential that such rich detail can offer to historians and others studying the West, especially the relationship between western places, western residents, and the law.

In working with manuscript census materials, modern data derived from them, and published documents from the Census Bureau, I found myself coming back to particular resources time and again. In a hope this might be of use to someone else, I’ve put together this list of those I use most frequently. If you have suggestions or corrections, please contact me or leave a note in the comments, below. Manuscript materials Main page for manuscript population schedules, 1790–1930, digitized from NARA microfilm, hosted on the Internet Archive: https://archive.

As I’ve noted before, manuscript records collected by the census can be fascinating and informative windows to the past. They can be used to learn more about groups of people that appear only occasionally in the historical record, and since they are generally well-structured, they can be used (with care) to ask data-driven historical questions. When most historians think of using historical census sources, it’s the forms from the decennial census of population that come immediately to mind.

Census microdata, such as that produced by the NAPP project, can help illuminate interesting issues surrounding work and labor. Investigating the history of work using microdata must begin with the questions asked by the census enumerators about employment. These varied depending on the country and year, but were generally quite simple. For example, the U.S. 1880 census form had two questions pertaining to work, and a third that hinted toward labor as well.

Historians often try not to fall in love with our sources, but sometimes I just can’t help it. For me, aside from the chatty personal journal (what historian can resist?) and the underground mine maps I’ve studied for years, my greatest fondness may be for big compilations of small bits of data, called microdata. What’s microdata? It’s small bits of information that, by themselves, might be virtually useless, but when aggregated and analyzed can show bigger trends.

This post is an explanation of the napptools scripts, including how they transform NAPP download files into a SQLite database. The tools napptools consists of three script programs: napp2csv.sh: A Bash script that uses traditional unix tools cut, sed, and tr to chop a NAPP data file into its respective columns, guided by a SAS-format command file. This also creates secondary tables in .CSV format from the variable descriptions in the SAS file.

In an earlier post I discussed some of the limitations of full-text searching in digitized copies of historic mining engineering literature, and suggested several historic index publications specific to mining engineering that could be used to augment your search by looking for information the old-fashioned way. Mining engineering information also appeared in historic indexes that covered engineering as a whole. Third-party indexes that cover engineering topics generally include at least some of the more popular mining engineering journals in their coverage.

Many excellent historical books on mining and mining engineering are now available from archive.org and Google Books. In some cases, these repositories also have partial (or, rarely, complete) runs of historical technical journals of interest to mining historians. Full-text search of these digitized books is a godsend, but sometimes it doesn’t work right. Maybe you are looking for a topic instead of a keyword, or the conversion to text mangled the word you want, or the website doesn’t allow you to look inside several volumes at once (ahem, archive.