As the 4th anniversary of this blog nears (November 12) I’ve been revisiting research that was near impossible when I began it. The namesake of this blog was Island 94, formerly sitting within the Mississippi River, which I was introduced to through the very excellent book When the Mississippi Ran Backwards by Jay Feldman. When I first started this blog, it was very difficult to find primary sources through the internet. Fortunately, many libraries and archives have worked to digitize their collections and make them available online. Because of that there is a lot more to say about this blog’s namesake and inspiration.
The title page above is from Zadok Cramer’s The Navigator, a navigational aid published when the Mississippi was a navigational challenge—before the Army Corps of Engineers pulled the snags, built the levees and made it all into a generally uninteresting commercial thoroughfare. It is from the 1824 edition published after Cramer’s death and after the absence of the Island 94 for which this blog is named.
As you can tell from the ample account given even on its title page, this book is from a day when to publish something, you had to really mean it.
Related posts:
- Two tales of Island 94 The title promises two tales; both are actually the same story, told with different levels of detail and suspense. The...
- Notes of the first water Above is from the addendum of Zadok Cramer’s The Navigator from which I have quoted previously. Written buoyantly, it makes jokes...
- Not another Rogue’s nest The following is from the 1824 edition of Zadok Cramer’s The Navigator on Island 94: No. 94, Stack or Crow’s...
- The journalism landscape in a nutshell This lede is the baseline from which I think any discussion of contemporary journalism should begin: There have been various...
[...] is from the addendum of Zadok Cramer’s The Navigator from which I have quoted previously. Written buoyantly, it makes jokes of specie (‘new notes of the “first [...]