Three Undergrads Remain in Prison

In recent years I’ve gotten used to the idea that anything I put on the Internet will stay up there indefinitely, available to anyone. But it’s been startling to see that newspapers and other organizations have been diligently going through their crumbling archives and posting material that was created long before the Internet was a gleam in Al Gore’s eye. For instance, details of my two weeks of incarceration following a 1977 protest at the Seabrook nuclear power plant are now readily available.

Along the same lines, searching the New York Times database sometimes turns up some startlingly old material, like this 1891 article about a murder prompted in part by the summer heat:

When two respectable and middle-aged citizens so infuriate themselves in a difference originally arising from the waywardness of chickens as to arm themselves with revolvers and start out for mutual extermination, their conduct takes on the proportions of a “difficulty,” and seems much more congenial to the lowlands of Alabama or the bayous of Louisiana than to the cool and umbrageous borders of the Hudson River.