"Little Boxes (in the Archives)"

In honor of American Archives Month, here's a sweet little parody of the folk song "Little Boxes" that transforms a critique of suburbia into a tongue-in-cheek portrayal of the work that archivists do and the little boxes ("there's a gray one and a gray one and a gray one and a gray one") into which they place paper records. I don't know who LettersFromTheAbyss is, but it's quite evident that he's either an archivist or someone who spends a lot of time around archivists.

Thanks to Nathan Tallman for drawing my attention to this charming little video.

Happy Thanksgiving

"World War II-Kids Reenacting Thanksgiving." Image courtesy of the New York State Archives. (New York (State). Dept. of Health. Bureau of Communications Production. Photography Unit. Photographic prints and negatives of department officials, facilities, and activities, ca. 1920-1983. Series 14655-88, Box 58.)

Wherever you are and whatever you're doing, I wish you a happy and safe Thanksgiving. Blogging is probably going to be light during the next few days, so here are a few holiday-related links to tide you over:

• The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration offers a handy explanation and digitized records that detail how Thanksgiving came to be a national holiday. The process wasn't as straightforward as you might think: for the first two thirds of the 19th century, the day of observance shifted around quite a bit, and in 1939 and 1940 some states celebrated it on the second to last Thursday of November while others waited until the last Thursday of the month. The current day of observance -- the fourth Thursday of November -- was enshrined in federal law in 1941. (Somewhere, someday, someone's going to win a trivia contest because s/he knows this.)
  

• The State Library of Massachusetts has posted on its blog a listing, with images, of some of its Thanksgiving-related holdings, which date from ca. 1650 to the present day. (If you're a Bay Stater, please let your legislators know that you're thankful for your State Library and that you want it to remain open! Contact info is here.)

• The Navy Department Library has digitized menus documenting Thanksgiving (and Christmas) meals served on several ships and at several bases from 1905-1950.

• The New York Public Library has digitized lots of great 19th and early 20th century Thanksgiving-related material: photos of parades and other observances, hotel and railroad menus, engravings and holiday postcards such as the Arts and Crafts beauty below.

"Thanksgiving Day Greetings." Image courtesy of the New York Public Library. Vintage Holiday Postcards Collection. Mid-Manhattan Library -- Picture Collection. Record ID 1065827. Digital ID 1588308.

The Van der Zanden Memorial Pirate Research Center

"Do you care about pirates? You should!" The Cornelius and Anneke Van der Zanden Memorial Pirate Research Center seeks to "collect, organize, preserve, and make available both published and unpublished sources pertaining to the history of maritime piracy in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and to serve the needs of the community interested in this phenomenon."

This promo film for a fictional archives was put together by some real-world archivists (the reference to "EAD-encoded finding aids" is a dead giveaway). It's smart, funny, and just generally awesome, and it made my day. I hope you like it, too.