The Wilson Center is, right at this moment, running a live webcast of its panel discussion of KGB officer turned journalist Alexander Vassiliev’s newly released notebooks.   Drawn from the KGB archives, these notebooks offer an unprecedented look into Soviet espionage activities in the US from 1930-1950.  Some topics discussed will be Alger Hiss, and I.F. Stone.

The webcast is available here. The agenda is available here (PDF).

English language translations of the notebooks (now held by the Library of Congress) and available as PDFs here.

As part of it’s very interesting “Remade in America: The Newest Immigrants and their Impact” series, the New York Times has put up a fascinating interactive map that displays the country of origin for the foreign-born population by county.

This is pretty cool in itself but the demographics fun is multiplied when you notice the slider that lets you look at the map using data from every census back to 1880.  Want to see how the population of your home county has changed over the last 128 years?  Just move the slider and watch the color coding shift.  Want to see where people from a particular county settled, and when?  Just choose one of the countries a drop-down menu and you can see what counties they settled in.  Sadly the list of countries isn’t very long but does cover the most common countries of origin.

A mouse-over of the county will cause the county, it’s number of foreign-born residents, and total population — all for the selected census–to be identified in a bubble.

New York Times–Immigration Explorer

The New York Times has an interesting web feature up right now that presents a timeline of all of the presidential Inaugural addresses from 1789 on.  While that is pretty useful in itself, this site is particularly interesting because it shows you a tag cloud of the frequently used words in each speech.  It’s a great way to quickly survey the changing language and themes.

The page is available here: Inaugural Words: 1789 to the Present.