Need a Historian for Hire?

I can help with that! I have almost twenty years of experience researching and writing about local history. I have particular experience with:

Architectural research like National Register of Historic Places nominations or Historic Tax Credit research
Documenting buildings with digital photography
Writing, preparing and leading a specified walking tour of Winchester, VA for a small group, or helping you design a self-guided tour to meet your needs
Writing historical markers or other explanatory texts and finding relevant historic images to illustrate your project (think Civil War Trails markers)
Tracking developments for a niche topic, especially in Winchester or Frederick County, VA
Editorial help for books and publications; fact checking and clarity are specialties
Transcribing cursive documents into typed format for easy reading and research
Bonus! Familiarity with creating files for print to multiple online providers to their specifications

A resume is available on request.

Does it seem like I could help you? Drop a note in the contact form (see the sidebar) and tell me about your project! Alternately, I have a profile on Upwork and commission slots on Ko-fi.

Comments

Bisulphide of Carbon - Across the Country on One Tank of Fuel?

The People's Voice from April 17, 1880 continues to turn up weird and delightful stories. In "Supplanting Steam," the article claims the invention of a new fuel source that could be used with current steam engines with minimal alterations (essentially adding a condenser). The extraordinary properties of bisulphide of carbon have been long known, but no one has hitherto discovered the means of utilizing its forces until recently, when its union with petroleum solved the difficulty. This substance, bisulphide of carbon, is more commonly known today as carbon disulfide . Petroleum, of course, needs no introduction (but in this invention, it seems to have been used primarily as a lubricant). The article claims this combination, when heated in the steam chamber to "lukewarm" temperatures around 140-200 F (60-94 Celsius), "acts precisely as steam, only more dense, and with greater force...It is claimed that three-fourth of the fuel required for steam is save

Ditch Your Window Screens and Banish Flies Naturally!

Spring is in the air, the plants are flowering, and life is returning...including the pesky insect kind. It's a struggle as old as time for humans to repel insects, and the home is one area of special concern. No one wants to find bugs chilling in their kitchen or climbing in bed with them at night. In addition to squeezing through cracks and under gaps in doors, windows are a traditional entry point for insects into the house. Until about 150 years ago, there was not a good way to enjoy fresh air and keep the flying bugs from coming inside. A failure in fly-paper , detail, from Puck, v. 16, no. 397 (October 15, 1884) Window screens came into use after the Civil War, when wire mesh became easier and cheaper to manufacture. Despite the benefits, window screens were not universally hailed as savior of the summertime when houses would need to have the windows opened for ventilation. If you were not an early adopter of screens, what other method could you use to keep flies away fro

Ambrotypes, Melianotypes, and Firnotypes, Oh My! Photography after the Civil War

An ad placed in the Winchester News for August 18, 1865 shows Winchester getting back to some semblance of normalcy. One of those signs was Nathaniel Routzahn, a local photographer, noting a reduction in prices for his services to previous costs. His prices before the war? According to an 1859 ad , they ranged anywhere from 50 cents to $50. An 1858 invention to display photographs like a slideshow, advanced by the knobs on the top of the cabinet in The American Journal of Photography . The inventor believed "it has numbered the days of the fashionable album." Suppose you were hankering for a portrait. Mr. Routzahn's company offered several options, so let's take a look to explore what each type of image was: Ambrotypes : This is an image printed on glass, which first proliferated in the United States in the 1850s. While they were cheaper to produce and clearer than the earlier daguerreotype, by the time of this ad, ambrotypes were falling out of favor, in part due t

Relic on the Lethe

Search This Blog