148 Years of New York Times Presidential Endorsements

Here's a nice feature on the New York Times' website that chronicles the presidential candidates they've endorsed over the years and links to PDF copies of the original endorsements.

The list begins with the 1860 race that brought Abraham Lincoln to the White House and ends with this year's endorsement of Barack Obama.

Popular Uploads

Back in March, gengal called Footnote to tell us about an 1864 newspaper illustration of "Rebel Barbarities in Texas" that she had recently had scanned on a large format scanner. She wanted to add it to Footnote, but the image was so big that she wasn't able to upload it to the site. Fortunately for us, she lived pretty close to the office and was willing to bring it in on a disc so that we could put it up on the site.

I'd forgotten about it, but today, as I was looking at the list of popular uploads for this week, I saw the image sitting there in second place. Thanks again to gengal for going the extra mile to get this great image on the site.

While I was looking at the list, I also noticed that ruthcalhounbaker1951 uploaded a variety of pictures in September that have been quite popular this week. You can see a list of images that ruthcalhounbaker1951 has uploaded here.
The rest of the popular list is filled out with a combination of regulars like ldrew and bgill and relative new comers like norskmom.

Thanks to everyone for your contributions.

Footnote Pages

It's been great to see people using the new Footnote Pages since the launch of the beta version last week. The feedback we've received so far has also been great. We hope see more of both in the future.

Here are a few Pages people have been working on:
Fairy A Spurrier
Henry Mellem
Jimmy Stewart

In addition to the Pages for people, you can create a Page for an event, a place, an organization or another topic.

Clio, our history maven, has been busily making pages for some of the events in the timeline. Here are a couple of examples:
Vietnam War
Brown vs. Board of Education

We hope that everyone will continue to use these Pages and send us your feedback so we can continue to improve them.

Footnote at TechCrunch50

A new feature that we've been working on at Footnote was accepted as a finalist in this year's TechCruch50 conference. CEO Russ Wilding will be presenting the feature sometime after 2:15 Pacific Time today.

During the presentation we'll update the homepage with a link to the new feature.

Here's the video stream for the conference: [removed since the video stream is over]

Gallery of Quilts

Footnote Member sharonquilts is using a Footnote Story Page to create an on online gallery for master quilter Sharon Greathouse of Richwood, WV.

Here's the page and here's a sample quilt block:

The long necked eagle looks like many found in US letter head and stamps, like this one from an 1839 passport application:

You'll find more eagle images on this Story Page by burnsfamily.

margaretann1858 found a collection of automobile ads from 1909 and 1910 in The Atlanta Constitution. Brands include, Mitchell, Speedwell, Lambert, Cole and White.

Found on Footnote.com

Of Interest To Parents

Here's an interesting article from The Chicago Tribune of 2 February 1886.

It seems that Edma H Blackmer gave his 2 year old daughter up for adoption and then, when he disapproved of the lifestyle of her new parents, tried to get her back and the case went to trial.

Capturing the American Eagle

burnsfamily has started a Page on Footnote that is a "collection of eagle letterhead emblems." Interesting to see the way the eagle has been represented through the years.

Here's one example:

Early Coke Ad

Here's an 1885 newspaper ad for Pemberton's French Wine Coca, an early version of Coca-Cola.

3 Milliseconds with an Atomic Blast

Here are three great photos uploaded to Footnote by tbrewer.

These were reportedly taken by Harold Edgerton with an automated camera set 7 miles from the blast, with a shudder speed of 1/1000,000,000 of a second.

The blast at 1 millisecond.


At 2 milliseconds


At 3 milliseconds, vaporizing joshua trees in the foreground.