Search Results for "Historic New England"
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Your search for posts with tags containing Historic New England found 32 posts
I came a delightful short memoir quite by accident yesterday; it was so well-written and charming that I couldn’t stop thinking about it so I decided to write about it today to get it out of my head! It’s not about any BIG thing or event; in fact,...
I think this might be the first time I’ve written up a “things to do” in Salem for Halloween, a holiday that lasts for at least two months here and seems to be on the way to becoming a year-long “celebration” with perhaps a month break for Christmas....
So every year in early September we journey to Cape Cod on the weekend after Labor Day for my husband’s birthday. It is an odd time, just after “summer” is over and we have established our fall routines, and I always complain, but off to the Cape...
Like several summers in the past, this was supposed to be my “Historic New England Summer” in which I made a determined attempt to visit and write about as many HNE houses as possible. I started out very close to home at the Phillips House, and then...
Sometimes I try to look at Salem as a tourist, a casual tourist taking a stroll, rather than with my historian/resident intensity. It doesn’t work for long, but I can pull it off for a few hours. I haven’t been home for very many weekends this summer,...
I can’t believe that I’ve been blogging here for eleven+ years and have not featured 1) the only house museum; 2) the only house belonging to Historic New England; and 3) the only house which was (partially) moved to its site on the street where I...
I LOVE Diaries: they offer such personal perspectives into the past, encompassing both “big” events and everyday occurrences. I read diaries, teach with diaries, and think about diaries often. I even like books about diaries, such as Kate...
I was reading and writing about the 1563 plague in London—very deadly and very overshadowed by later Tudor and Stuart plagues—when I had to take a break for ice cream in the midst of a stifling afternoon. The break went on a bit longer than...
Sunny June continues, showcasing gardens all around me in the Seacoast region of southern Maine and coastal New Hampshire. I’m back to Salem today, and then off on other adventures, but first I wanted to share some photographs of gardens along (or...
I’ve got a (virtual) stack of papers to correct but yesterday I gave myself the morning off to go visit the Patton Homestead in nearby Hamilton, the summer home of General George S. Patton Jr. and farm of his son Major General George S. Patton IV....
I am pleasantly tired at the end of a busy weekend, which included: a sunset sail, several garden walks, a tour of the Coast Guard’s tall ship Eagle, long conversations into the night, the annual vintage car show on Chestnut Street, and...
Historic New England offers comprehensive “nooks and crannies” tours through several of its properties occasionally, and I was fortunate to go on one of these basement-to-attic-and-all-the-closets-in-between tours of Beauport, the rambling...
Well, I knew the day had to come: my first visit to the Phillips Library in Rowley. Even as many were protesting the move of the Peabody Essex Museum’s research library, which includes the historic records of hundreds of Salem families,...
I had two appointments in Boston yesterday, but I parked my car in a spot that was rather inconvenient to both just so I could go over the hill: Beacon Hill, one of the few neighborhoods in which all the variant architectural styles of the nineteenth...
I miss the Assembly House, a Georgian structure on Federal Street built as an assembly house in 1782 and transformed by Samuel McIntire into a more elaborate residence in the next decade: its proper name is the Cotting-Smith Assembly House (although it...
I’m using the expression “turnkey” in typical contrary fashion here: it’s a real estate term which generally means a house that requires no repairs or refurbishment, just turn the key and you are home in your new purchase. The...
Portsmouth always struck me as a Georgian town, even from a young age, when I first developed an appreciation for historic houses at Strawbery Banke and first spotted what is still one of my very favorite houses nearby. There are Federal houses too, but...
Nestled between busy Boston, Quincy, and Route 128, the town of Milton, Massachusetts still wears signs of its pastoral past. It’s an original streetcar suburb, but the Blue Hills drew prosperous Brahmins south to build country estates, and several...
The century-old Classical Revival mansion in nearby Swampscott which served as the “Summer White House” for Calvin and Mrs. Coolidge in 1925 is not long for this world, as just last week the Swampscott Historical Commission agreed to reduce...
I’m in a bit of a funk about our city right now, but still mid-June is glorious nearly everywhere in New England, and Salem is no exception: it’s time to celebrate the roses, and the lushness all around us. Roses are spilling under and over...
Notes on Post Tags Search
By default, this searches for any categories containing your search term: eg, Tudor will also find Tudors, Tudor History, etc. Check the 'exact' box to restrict searching to categories exactly matching your search. All searches are case-insensitive.
This is a search for tags/categories assigned to blog posts by their authors. The terminology used for post tags varies across different blog platforms, but WordPress tags and categories, Blogspot labels, and Tumblr tags are all included.
This search feature has a number of purposes:
1. to give site users improved access to the content EMC has been aggregating since August 2012, so they can look for bloggers posting on topics they're interested in, explore what's happening in the early modern blogosphere, and so on.
2. to facilitate and encourage the proactive use of post categories/tags by groups of bloggers with shared interests. All searches can be bookmarked for reference, making it possible to create useful resources of blogging about specific news, topics, conferences, etc, in a similar fashion to Twitter hashtags. Bloggers could agree on a shared tag for posts, or an event organiser could announce one in advance, as is often done with Twitter hashtags.
Caveats and Work in Progress
This does not search post content, and it will not find any informal keywords/hashtags within the body of posts.
If EMC doesn't find any <category> tags for a post in the RSS feed it is classified as uncategorized. These and any <category> 'uncategorized' from the feed are omitted from search results. (It should always be borne in mind that some bloggers never use any kind of category or tag at all.)
This will not be a 'real time' search, although EMC updates content every few hours so it's never very far behind events.
The search is at present quite basic and limited. I plan to add a number of more sophisticated features in the future including the ability to filter by blog tags and by dates. I may also introduce RSS feeds for search queries at some point.
Constructing Search Query URLs
If you'd like to use an event tag, it's possible to work out in advance what the URL will be, without needing to visit EMC and run the search manually (though you might be advised to check it works!). But you'll need to use URL encoding as appropriate for any spaces or punctuation in the tag (so it might be a good idea to avoid them).
This is the basic structure:
http://emc.historycarnival.org/searchcat?s={search term or phrase}
For example, the URL for a simple search for categories containing London:
http://emc.historycarnival.org/searchcat?s=london
The URL for a search for the exact category Gunpowder Plot:
http://emc.historycarnival.org/searchcat?s=Gunpowder%20Plot&exact=on
In this more complex URL, %20 is the URL encoding for a space between words and &exact=on adds the exact category requirement.
I'll do my best to ensure that the basic URL construction (searchcat?s=...) is stable and persistent as long as the site is around.