Appalachian Figures When historians tell the story of the Food and Drug Administration, the main characters are usually big city reformers, New Deal politicians, and Washington lawyers. Missing from that picture is an Appalachian attorney from Knox County, Kentucky, who quietly helped build the regulatory state that still watches over our food and medicine.

Appalachian Figures “A Native of Strunk, Kentucky” On 30 October 1944 a young private from McCreary County held off wave after wave of elite German troops near the French village of Saint Jacques. For more than five hours he fired a single light machine gun, refusing to withdraw even when his company was nearly destroyed and his own ammunition was gone.

Appalachian Figures A Kentucky Birth, A Texas Legacy On paper, William Pitt Ballinger belongs to Texas history. His name is on a West Texas town, in railroad casebooks, in studies of Confederate law and Reconstruction politics. Yet his story begins far up the Cumberland River, in the small Appalachian courthouse town of Barbourville, Kentucky.

Appalachian Figures Barbourville Roots and a Family of Mountain Republicans James Stephen Golden was born on September 20, 1891, in Barbourville, the small river town that serves as the seat of Knox County in southeastern Kentucky. By the time he arrived, Barbourville was already a crossroads of regional politics, education, and law.

Abandoned Appalachia If you grew up in Perry County in the 1980s or 1990s, it is hard to imagine Highway 15 without Fugate’s Entertainment Center. For a generation of mountain kids, the castle-front cinema, the boat-shaped water park, the roller rink, and the Bowl-A-Rama were where you spent birthday parties, youth-group trips, first dates, and long summer afternoons. By 2016 that world was already gone.

Appalachian Churches “For with God nothing shall be impossible.” – Luke 1:37 KJV Constructed in the late eighteenth century, the Old Stone Church, formally known as Old Providence Church, stands as one of the state’s oldest surviving church buildings. Nestled away on Boonesboro Road in Clark County, Kentucky, the limestone walls have witnessed the growth of frontier faith and community division and reunion.

Vier Zeichnungs-Konvolute aus Architektennachlässen des 19. Jahrhunderts aus der Sammlung Albrecht Haupt sind nun online: Es ist immer wieder überraschend, welche ungeahnt bedeutsamen historischen Schätze in den Sondersammlungen der Technischen Informationsbibliothek schlummern.

XploreOpen is a Pakistan-based non-profit initiative dedicated to advancing equitable access to knowledge through open science, open infrastructure, and open cultural heritage.

I recently attended the 4th BioHackathon Germany hosted by the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure (de.NBI). I participated in the project On the Path to Machine-actionable Training Materials in order to improve the interoperability between DALIA, TeSS, mTeSS-X, and Schema.org. This post gives a summary of the activities leading up to the hackathon and the results of our happy hacking.

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