Sunday Notes

Current Events: James Traub,"Taunting the Bear," NYT, 9 August, does a good job on background to the conflict between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia and Abkhazia. For current developments on the ground, A Fistful of Euros has a correspondent reporting from Tblisi and Global Voices offers samples in translation of bloggers in cyrillic script on the scene.

Primary Sources: As previously announced, the Orwell Prize has launched a blog, the Orwell Diaries. In blog format, it will reproduce a lightly annotated version of George Orwell's daily diary entries 70 years after he penned them. Probably the best known example of this kind of venture is The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Yet, there is a remarkably eclectic group of primary source blogs on the internet. Like the Orwell and Pepys diaries, they are commonly devoted to the texts of single individuals. Others, however, are anthologies of primary texts about particular events, such as the American Civil War, or of historical cartoons, graphics, maps, photographs, or videos. BibliOdyssey, Giornale Nuovo, stwallskull, Shorpy, Strange Maps, and Weirdo Video are among my favorite blogs.