The following teaser is from a posting by Rebecca Onion at Slate.com:
The American Philosophical Society‘s library holds four fascinating admissions books offering details on prisoners held at Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary in the 1830s and 1840s. Three of those books seem to have been kept by Thomas Larcombe, a Baptist minister who was the first to hold the position of “moral instructor” at the prison.
It’s a little difficult to read the scanned versions of the books, but Scott Ziegler, of the American Philosophical Society, and Michelle Ziogas have transcribed the information within and made the data available through the University of Pennsylvania’s Magazine of Early American Datasets. Two admission books’ worth of Larcombe’s notes on Eastern State’s prisoners, one dated 1830–1839 and the other 1839–1843 appear here in .csv files…
View the Eastern State Penitentiary Scanned Admissions books by clicking here.
Read the Eastern State Penitentiary spreadsheets by clicking here.
Thanks to ResearchBuzz for the heads-up.
