2013 Retold.
A quarterly archival briefing from the editors of the Louisville 2013 Archive. Each issue folds a season of the city's most consequential year — bourbon receipts, oral histories, Cardinals dispatches, ledger scans — into a single long-form dispatch delivered the first Thursday of March, June, September, and December. Now read by 41,800 subscribers across 38 states and 12 countries.
Every issue, permanently catalogued.
Forty quarterly dispatches since 2017 — each a sealed record of a three-month window inside the 2013 file. Browse the four most recent below, or write the editors at [email protected] to request an older issue.
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DOC. NL-040 QUARTERLY · WINTER
No. XL — Winter 2024 The Bourbon Export Files
Dispatched 07 Dec 2024A 9,400-word reckoning with the export manifests that turned Louisville into America's bourbon capital — cross-indexed against KDA revenue returns and 41 distillery label registrations filed between January and November of 2013. Includes the first public reproduction of the Louisville Metro port-authority memo dated 18 March 2013.
38 pp.· 12 scanned plates· 4 oral-history pullouts -
DOC. NL-039 QUARTERLY · AUTUMN
No. XXXIX — Autumn 2024 Cardinals' Watershed Season
Dispatched 06 Sep 2024A reconstruction of the 2013 Louisville Cardinals season from 217 box scores, locker-room notes, and a previously unpublished ledger of the Yum! Center's $1.3 billion economic ripple effect. Closes with a transcript from the post-season press conference of 6 April 2013, recovered from a discarded cassette held in private hands.
34 pp.· 9 scanned plates· 2 oral-history pullouts -
DOC. NL-038 QUARTERLY · SUMMER
No. XXXVIII — Summer 2024 The Oral-History Drive
Dispatched 07 Jun 2024An audio-rich issue drawing on 28 of the 380 recorded interviews from the "2013 Remembered" project conducted with the Louisville Free Public Library. Bartenders, brewers, teachers, and church leaders recount the year in their own voices, with timestamps linking each clip back to the original archival WAV.
42 pp.· 6 scanned plates· 9 oral-history pullouts -
DOC. NL-037 QUARTERLY · SPRING
No. XXXVII — Spring 2024 The 1,400th Document
Dispatched 07 Mar 2024A milestone issue marking the archive's 1,400th catalogued primary document — a Louisville Metro 2013 budget appendix scan donated by a former council aide. The issue includes a 12-page index of every accession added in 2023, plus a long essay by advisory-board chair on the editorial standards guiding new acquisitions.
48 pp.· 14 scanned plates· 3 oral-history pullouts
What lands in your inbox, each quarter.
A typical issue runs 34 to 48 pages: a long lead essay, three to nine scanned plates with accession captions, an oral-history pullout, a "ledger" data section, and the editors' notes. Designed for reading in the browser or as a print-ready PDF.
Read by serious Louisville watchers.
2013 Retold is the only quarterly briefing I read cover to cover. The editors treat a single year — our year — with the seriousness most publications reserve for centuries. It arrives four times a year, and it is essential.
Subscribe to the 2013 Archive.
Four long-form dispatches a year, delivered the first Thursday of March, June, September, and December. No marketing copy, no promotional forwards — only the archive's editors, writing to a small, serious audience. Free, always.