While schools are closed, we're creating a series of "Talk of Iowa" episodes that will be fun and educational for learners of all ages. Every Tuesday, we'll learn about Iowa wildlife, and every Thursday, we'll learn about Iowa history.

Can you read your grandma's handwritten recipe cards, or your great-grandfather's old letters? Turn your cursive skills to something useful -- help an archivist transcribe a document! The United States National Archive's "Citizen Archivist" initiative seeks volunteers to help out with documents from a wide range of areas, from correspondence from job-seekers at the Schyuylkill Arsenal during the US Civil War to the 1975 trial of Leonard Peltier: https://www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist But if these topics don't interest you, there are lots more projects under the fold.

Libraries and archives are turning to volunteers to help out with transcribing handwritten documents, tagging them, and adding comments to existing transcriptions. All of these activities help make often inaccessible historical documents available to the public, both by making them readable and by making them easier to find in online catalogs and search engines.

Help the Smithsonian Institute make historical documents and biodiversity data more accessible by transcribing field notes, diaries, ledgers, logbooks, currency proof sheets, photo albums, manuscripts, biodiversity specimens labels, and more. (previously, previously, previously)

The Library of Congress has several transcription campaigns going on right now. If your Spanish is good, they're in particular need of people to help transcribe documents written in Spanish, Latin, and Catalan between 1300 and 1800, and open the legal history of Spain and Spanish colonies to greater discovery.

If your Spanish is good and you've got some paleography skills, Neogranadina offers opportunities for students, researchers, and history buffs to contribute to the cataloging of thousands of digitalized documents from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries held by Colombian archives.

Volunteer with the Boston Public Library to turn its collection of handwritten correspondence between anti-slavery activists in the 19th century into texts that can be more easily read and researched by students, teachers, historians, and big data applications.

Freedom on the Move is a transcription project that draws on an archival collection housed at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. With the advent of newspapers in the American colonies, enslavers posted "runaway ads" to try to locate fugitives. Additionally, jailers posted ads describing people they had apprehended in search of the enslavers who claimed the fugitives as property. Transcribers can help transform the ads into a searchable database. (previously)

Chicago's Newberry Library seeks help in transcribing letters and diaries that reveal everyday life in the 19th and 20th century. Areas include family life in the Midwest, American Indian history, and U.S. western expansion.

University College London's project to transcribe original and unstudied manuscript papers written by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the great philosopher and reformer, has won multiple awards.

Interested in colonial US history? Harvard's libraries need volunteers to help transcribe 18th-century handwritten materials from its North America Collection.

The Library of Virginia has a plethora of transcription projects, from private papers and business records that contain biographical details of enslaved people, to petitions, court records, summonses, patents, accounts, proceedings, returns, grants, proclamations, and more from Virginia's colonial past.

Help transcribe "Information Wanted" advertisements taken out by former slaves searching for long lost family members. The ads taken out in black newspapers mention family members, often by name, and also by physical description, last seen locations, and at times by the name of a former slave master.

Phillips Academy seeks volunteers to help transcribe legal documents, letters, books, and original works of several members of the Phillips family including Samuel Phillips (founder of Phillips Academy Andover) and his uncle John Phillips (founder of Phillips Exeter Academy).

The United Kingdom's National Archives "Africa Through a Lens" project aims to improve knowledge of colonial period Africa photographs. They seek volunteers who might recognize anything or anyone in the photographs, or can help identify inaccuracies in the descriptions and help us to map the images for which they don't have locations.

Stanford University has multiple transcription projects up and running, including materials related to the 1906 earthquake, the papers of railroad mogul/robber baron Leland Stanford, and more.

The Georgian Papers Programme (GPP) is a ten-year interdisciplinary project to digitize, conserve, catalogue, transcribe, interpret and disseminate 425,000 pages or 65,000 items in the Royal Archives and Royal Library (UK) relating to the Georgian period, 1714-1837.

The papers of the War Department, which burned in 1800, recorded not just the military history of the early United States, but Indian affairs, veteran affairs, naval affairs (until 1798), as well as militia and army matters. Papers of the War Department 1784-1800, an innovative digital editorial project, seeks to reconstruct this lost archive through a painstaking, multi-year research effort available online to scholars, students, and the general public.

From the Page, a software for transcribing documents and collaborating on transcriptions, has a impressive list of transcription projects that may be of interest.

While Kelly Lytle Hernández was growing up in San Diego near the U.S.-Mexico border in the late 1980s and early '90s, she watched as people from her community, friends and neighbors, disappeared: Black youths disappeared into the prison system; Mexican immigrants disappeared through deportations. These experiences affected her deeply. "It was growing up in that environment that forced me to want to understand what was happening to us and why it seemed legitimate," Lytle Hernández tells All Things Considered . "And I wanted to disrupt that legitimacy." For answers to those questions, Lytle Hernández turned to the past. A historian and expert on immigration, race and mass incarceration, she is now a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is one of this year's 26 MacArthur Fellows . "History is a narrative of the past. It is based upon the sources that we regard as relevant or that we can find," she says. And so her work includes tracking down records that reflect

Updated at 11:43 a.m. ET The Labor Department delivered a historically bad employment report Friday, showing 20.5 million jobs lost last month as the nation locked down against the coronavirus. The jobless rate soared to 14.7% — the highest level since the Great Depression. The highest monthly job loss before this was 2 million in 1945, as the nation began to demobilize after World War II. The worst monthly job loss during the Great Recession was 800,000 in March 2009. Loading... Don't see the graphic above? Click here. Unemployment was 4.4% in March as the coronavirus began to take hold in the U.S. It approached 25% during the Great Depression and remained elevated until World War II. Loading... Don't see the graphic above? Click here. The carnage was felt across industries in April. With most travel shut down, leisure and hospitality jobs fell by 7.6 million. The retail and health care sectors each dropped by 2.1 million. Manufacturing lost 1.3 million and government jobs fell by 980

Updated at 11:43 a.m. ET The Labor Department delivered a historically bad employment report Friday, showing 20.5 million jobs lost last month as the nation locked down against the coronavirus. The jobless rate soared to 14.7% — the highest level since the Great Depression. The highest monthly job loss before this was 2 million in 1945, as the nation began to demobilize after World War II. The worst monthly job loss during the Great Recession was 800,000 in March 2009. Loading... Don't see the graphic above? Click here. Unemployment was 4.4% in March as the coronavirus began to take hold in the U.S. It approached 25% during the Great Depression and remained elevated until World War II. Loading... Don't see the graphic above? Click here. The carnage was felt across industries in April. With most travel shut down, leisure and hospitality jobs fell by 7.6 million. The retail and health care sectors each dropped by 2.1 million. Manufacturing lost 1.3 million and government jobs fell by 980

Updated at 11:43 a.m. ET The Labor Department delivered a historically bad employment report Friday, showing 20.5 million jobs lost last month as the nation locked down against the coronavirus. The jobless rate soared to 14.7% — the highest level since the Great Depression. The highest monthly job loss before this was 2 million in 1945, as the nation began to demobilize after World War II. The worst monthly job loss during the Great Recession was 800,000 in March 2009. Loading... Don't see the graphic above? Click here. Unemployment was 4.4% in March as the coronavirus began to take hold in the U.S. It approached 25% during the Great Depression and remained elevated until World War II. Loading... Don't see the graphic above? Click here. The carnage was felt across industries in April. With most travel shut down, leisure and hospitality jobs fell by 7.6 million. The retail and health care sectors each dropped by 2.1 million. Manufacturing lost 1.3 million and government jobs fell by 980

Before his album of duets with Carla Thomas, before "Dock of the Bay," even before wowing the crowd at the Monterey Pop Festival, Otis Redding was in a band not as the front man, but mostly because he could drive. That band was Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers, a staple of the Macon music scene in the early days of rock and roll. And yes, guitar ace Jenkins couldn't drive, but he also had the foresight to give Redding the microphone. The partnership led to one of Redding's first singles, the rocker "Shout Bama Lama." In this Songs On Site, the teenage punk rockers of Failing Acts of Society fill you in on the history of the song. With the Field Note Stenographers

Until she was in her 30s, Vivian Howard was ashamed of being from rural North Carolina, and the food she grew up eating felt embarrassing. Thankfully, a number of influential cooks, critics and restaurants ushered in a revival of Southern food — and Howard is among them. She’s a chef, restaurateur, writer and Peabody award-winning television host. Her new series, Somewhere South , began last month on PBS. Each of the six episodes explores a single dish, and how those foods reflect the history, evolution and people of the region.

Don't take this personally, but Google wants your Web search history.

It was exactly 34 years ago Wednesday that Clemens, at the time a highly promising but still unproven Red Sox pitcher, put himself on the baseball map. On one cool, magical night at Boston's Fenway Park against the Mariners, he mowed down a Mariners lineup that had been struggling all season to make contact.

Shula became an institution during his 26 seasons in Miami. He died Monday at home. He was 90.

Before plunging into our own likely decade of consequence, take a shallow dive into the gene pool of Northwest civilization at the dawn of the last '20s.

Ballet and fashion have an undeniable connection — a bond currently on display in the "Ballerine: Fashion's Modern Muse" exhibit at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.

It was exactly 34 years ago Wednesday that Clemens, at the time a highly promising but still unproven Red Sox pitcher, put himself on the baseball map. On one cool, magical night at Boston's Fenway Park against the Mariners, he mowed down a Mariners lineup that had been struggling all season to make contact.

BALTIMORE (AP) — Brutal. Horrific. Tragic. Choose your description. The April jobs report showed, in harrowing detail, just how terribly the coronavirus outbreak has pummeled the U.S. economy. Most obviously, there’s the 14.7% unemployment rate, the highest since the Great Depression. And the shedding of more than 20 million jobs, by far the worst one-month […]

This is a stressful, frightening and unprecedented time in American history. Nonfiction books can inform us about past disasters in American history, and help guide us as we navigate the coronavirus pandemic.

Benstiti takes over a team that has had six straight winning seasons.

U.S. employers shed a record number of jobs in April, as the unemployment rate climbed to the highest since the Great Depression. The coronavirus crisis has locked down much of the economy.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s new digs sit on a nine-hectare piece of prime real estate in Beverly Hills, where the couple and their one-year-old son Archie can play endless games of hide-and-seek in the eight-bedroom, 12-bathroom mansion.

In honour of the 15th anniversary of Google Maps, we explore all the ways we have learned to navigate the world by sight, smell and sound.

Winnipeg woman celebrates her fortieth birthday with forty acts of kindness,Shane Koyczan at 2010 Olympics,details on bison re-introduction program and Periodic Table of Black Cdn History in Ottawa

St. John's history of pandemics, Calgary kids paint self portraits on utility box near school and Montreal conversation with family whose father/husband works in south Korea.

From plantation tours to the myth of the black Confederate soldier, the history of slavery and the American Civil War has often been whitewashed. In this special episode, Tapestry investigates how distorted versions of the past can do so much harm in the present.

In Jennifer Kent's award-winning follow-up to the Babadook, a young convict woman teams up with a young Aboriginal man for revenge in 19th century Tasmania.

From Ireland's heartland to coastal Victoria, Australian convicts brought with them magic and superstition. Their symbols are still being uncovered today.

Audio recordings from people, events & curiosities on this day in history.

Stories about pandemics and the way humans respond to them have a long history in Western literature.

Attorney-General John Quigley intervenes to order woman's release from prison for murdering her partner after her history as a victim of domestic violence came to light, declaring "now is the time for mercy".

Gerard Ross vanished while holidaying with his family south of Perth in 1997 and the 11-year-old's body was found a fortnight later. Now police are launching a new push to find his killer.

From veterans to millennials, two-up is a celebrated pastime on Anzac Day. But why do we play it?

The headstones at Broken Hill's cemetery tell the story not only of the city's colourful history, but the progression of workers' rights.

An empty station homestead in drought-stricken outback New South Wales may look unassuming but has gained renown by being featured on the new $20 banknote.

Crosswords are a daily devotion, an obsession even, for millions. But where did the crossword start, and how did it become a staple of any newspaper worth its salt?

Some historians believe the White Australia policy played a part in covering over the early history of Chinese miners in Australia.

As we left the theatre after seeing this 90-minute show, a young male voice behind me was effusive. "I learned more about world history than I did in the entirety of my school career!" he declared loudly.

Indigenous skydiver Marley Nolan-Duncan makes history by jumping out of a plane and into Gamilaraay country, the home of his ancestors.

AgQuip will not run in August, as it has done since 1973, due to the coronavirus pandemic, with organisers flagging November for the event which usually attracts about 100,000 people to north-west NSW.

A team of archaeologists is working with Indigenous people along the Murray River to discover stories of the land that could now be tens of thousands of years old.

The plight of thousands of "blackbirds" is being highlighted in a short film and helping younger generations to understand the sacrifices of their relatives.

Duneira is a late Nineteenth Century country house in Mt Macedon - but it has a curious history.

An unsealed road leading to a family farm between Albany and Denmark reveals an unexpected treasure trove of military artefacts.

Bells have rung out across Australia to mark the 70th anniversary of Victory in the Pacific Day, including at a church in Orange, NSW where the ancient art of bellringing is alive and well.

A quirky, German-styled house at Orange in central west New South Wales tells of the city's heritage of migrants and their close ties with the Electrolux refrigeration factory.

It was a chance encounter with a scrap metal truck that led to a 15 year journey of collecting historical New South Wales fire fighting equipment.

Rob Minshull produces Weekends with Warren and is an avid reader.

It startled the cows, intrigued the locals and excited scientists around the world. Fifty years on, the Murchison meteorite still defines a town and yields new discoveries every year.

When the ACT Government decided to rename William Slim Drive following allegations the former British military commander and 13th governor-general of Australia abused children, it pulled a trigger that could see history books rewritten.

Background checks on people suspected of having a history of domestic violence introduced in South Australia last year are already helping to save lives, a domestic violence support service says.

Victoria's state political reporter Richard Willingham tells of a dramatic week during the COVID-19 pandemic when everything changed, and the particular challenges of reporting a story unlike any other he's covered.