6 May 2014 We all know the problem. At least we've heard about it, even if we haven't experienced it firsthand: The urban poor—newly arrived immigrants, uneducated laborers, tenement dwellers or at least renters ...

5 May 2014 The statutes published for each session of Congress—and for the corresponding state legislatures—contain laws that did not eventually make their way into the compiled "codes ...

4 May 2014 A single hyphen should never be substituted for a dash. The hyphen's purpose is to connect. The purpose of a dash is to separate. In days of yore when ...

2 May 2014 On the eve of America's Civil War, roughly one out of every eight African-Americans was considered free—either freeborn or emancipated from slavery. The census of 1860 identified 488,079 Americans as ...

1 May 2014 When citing unpublished vital records, we have four key issues to consider: :

30 April 2014 Such quaint terms! We seldom see them, when doing American research in relatively modern times; but when our research pushes back into Europe or the British Isles ...

29 April 2014 A historical monograph published by a university press invokes the agricultural schedule of the 1850 U.S. census and asserts: "Considering [this individual's wealth], the census statistics ...

28 April 2014 Historic records are frequently filed or bound in chronological sequence. Across the years, many have been misfiled or bound amid records of a different time frame ...

27 April 2014 In historical writing and citing, italics have one purpose: emphasis. We most commonly see them used in five ways: ...