Stephen Mihm of the University of Georgia has an article in the Boston Globe that delves into the links between slavery and present-day inequality.
Over on "The Junto," Lindsay Schakenbach, Ph.D. candidate in history at Brown University, has a guest post about the founding of Lowell and the federal executive.
Internet Archive Book Images places online over two million public domain images from digitized books with full bibliographic details and surrounding text. Search, for example, for "telegraph" (making sure to select the Book Images database only). An article about the project can be found here. Note also that the British Library has a similar photostream, though its site does not include accompanying text.
The Guardian has published a series of interesting maps of eighteenth-century shipping trade routes by James Cheshire. In the same article, see the maps put in motion by Ben Schmidt. For more examples of GIS, see Cheshire's home site, Spatial Analysis, and Ben Schmidt's, Sapping Attention.
Pathé News was a producer of newsreels, cinemagazines, and documentaries from 1910 until 1976 in the UK. The Pathé News archive, known today as "British Pathé," has been fully digitized and contents are available online for a fee. But thousands of selected items are now available without charge via a YouTube channel.
Several items of interest from the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History at Duke: they have acquired and cataloged medical promotional materials, 1938-2004, from the collection of Dr. Albert Cornell. They have posted a J. Walter Thompson timeline [have been able to access this only using Internet Explorer] and an administrative history of the company. And third, the JWT company newsletters have been digitized and are now available online.
Fascinating high-resolution photographs from the early history of flight: images of the Wright brothers' experiments from the Library of Congress via The Atlantic.
Naomi Lamoreaux has posted a long abstract of her recent NBER paper, "Revisiting American Exceptionalism: Democracy and the Regulation of Corporate Governance in Nineteenth-Century Pennsylvania," on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Regulation.
Stanford University has mounted a section on HistoryPin called "Living with the Railroads." The site is part of Stanford's Shaping the West project, directed by Richard White, in cooperation with the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis there.