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.

Last semester, several of my students ran afoul of a perennial problem with PowerPoint. They had created their slide decks on a large screen, but when they connected to the room’s projector, it forced a lower screen resolution. Blammo! – ugly slides. Text too big, images cut off, broken layouts everywhere. The wreckage was so horrifying, two design students in the audience were forced to avert their eyes. There are several ways to solve this problem, but here’s the trick I use all the time: Instead of showing your slides in PowerPoint, make your presentation deck into a PDF, and show that.

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.