This is the first in a series of posts exploring a fantastic resource: Classics in Washington History. This digital collection from the Washington State Library is "brings together rare, out of print titles for easy access by students, teachers, genealogists and historians." This treasure trove of over 
100 books and documents includes a lot of classics in Northwest History, including Army Life on the Pacific by Lawrence Kip, Folk-tales of Salishan and Sahaptin tribes by Franz Boas, and Ka-mi-akin, the last hero of the Yakimas by A. J. Splawn.
All of the above titles are also available full-text in Google Books, which is a superior format to the DjVu browser plug in that the Washington State Library employs. (I will write more on this subject later this week.) However, many of the classics are available no where else online and are real gems for doing local and regional history. The Deposition of Ranald McDonald is one example. McDonald was the son of a Scottish Hudson's Bay Company fur trader and a Chinook mother. In 1848 he purposely had himself stranded on the coasts of Japan, then a closed kingdom cut off from the rest of the world. His deposition is an invaluable source for both northwest and Japanese history, and the library also has MacDonald's autobiography online. The picture on the right is a monument to MacDonald in Nagasaki, Japan. He lies buried in obscure corner of Ferry County. Some other gems of Washington history include 12th Session of the Washington State Legislature, a delightful set of caricatures of early Washington leaders by the artist Alfred T. Renfro, and Annals of old Angeline : "Mika Yahoos delate klosch!" by Venen, Bertha Piper.
I am trying something new on the Northwest History blog this week, each day I will explore a different book or issue related to this site. Tomorrow: Amusing drawings of politicians. Let's see how it works!
Monday, November 17, 2008
Great Washington History Resource from the State Library
Monday, November 10, 2008
Monday, November 3, 2008
Botanicus - Digital Library from the Missouri Botanical Garden
Botanicus - the Digital Library from the Missouri Botanical Garden is an interesting approach to digitization. Botanicus is designed to fill a specific niche: "Comprehensive collections of botanical 
literature are only available in a handful of libraries, all located in North American and Europe. For botanical researchers, these library-centered literature searches, while a crucial requirement of any project, delay hypothesis development or recognition and publication of new plant discoveries. For those traveling in remote parts of North America or stationed overseas, lack of access to library resources compounds these difficulties." Botanicus now has over one million pages of rare botanical manuscripts online.
This is a very different digital collection than those I usually highlight here. Though there is a lot of historical information within these volumes, the focus here is on botany, and many of the older volumes (the oldest book is from 1480!) are in Latin as well as French, Spanish, Italian and German. (The image to the left is from Tabacologia, a 1616 treatise on tobacco.)
There are a lot of things to like about this project. Though the search function is weak, there are a lot of ways to browse the collection, including by date of publication, as a tag cloud of LOC headings (I've never seen that one before!) and as a list of locations on a Google Map. The user can zoom in and out of the page images using the mouse scroll wheel. The project has a blog to allow users to follow along with the progress and to comment on features. Titles may be downloaded as PDF files or even reprinted via the internet publishing service Lulu.com. And many of the illustrations in the books are simple breathtaking, as in the 1801 muscorum frondusorum.
A few items at Botanicus need work. The search function is simple, allowing only keyword searches. And it does not work very well, searches for "tobacco" and "Indians" get zero results, though the collections do contain items about tobacco and Indians and both appear as tags on the tag cloud page. And given the project's emphasis "primarily on beautifully illustrated volumes from our rare book collection" an image search or at least an image browsing capability would be nice.
Botanicus is an excellent model of a large scale digitization project that utilizes some innovative technologies and strategies for sharing information.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
The Holy Grail of Audio Recognition
Big news today from the Washington State Digital Archives! (Full disclosure: I am an Assistant Digital Archivist here.) Today we put the audio files of the House of Representatives
Committee Meeting Recordings online--and they are keyword searchable.
The House of Representatives Committee Meeting Recordings cover 1973 to 2001. This is almost 6000 hours of hearings and the files take up 1 terabyte of data.
This list of house committees will help give context to some of these files. The files came from 30,000 cassette tapes.The tapes were converted to digital files and cleaned up starting in 2005. Putting them online and making them searchable is a cooperative project between the Washington State Digital Archives and the Microsoft Corporation.
The technical breakthrough is that these files are keyword searchable. Users can enter keywords or phrases and the search engine will dig through all of the files and discover when 
anyone spoke those words. The search results give some details about the file but also a snippet of the text showing where on that file the words were spoken. Click on any of the strings of words between the dashes and the in-line player will take you directly to that point in the recording. Some good keyword searches are salmon and dams, "Indian gaming," "state history," and "Lewis and Clark."
This, my friends, is one of the holy grails of computing: untrained voice recognition over thousands of hours of tapes and many different voices. We rolled out this technology with the legislative hearings because we are a state archives and this gives the Washington State public unprecedented access to these public records. But think of the other uses for the keyword searching of audio files. I have never visited an archives that did not have boxes of decaying audio tapes from an oral history project that never quite got to the transcribing stage. These tapes can be digitally preserved and put online. Television and radio interviews and news and talk programs will become searchable. This is a digital history breakthrough.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Henry David Thoreau, Climatologist
A fasinating article from the New York Times about a group of researchers using Thoreau's journals to map climate change:
"On average, common species are flowering seven days earlier than they did in Thoreau’s day, Richard B. Primack, a conservation biologist at Boston University, and Abraham J. 
Miller-Rushing, then his graduate student, reported this year in the journal Ecology . . . 27 percent of the species documented by Thoreau have vanished from Concord and 36 percent are present in such small numbers that they probably will not survive for long. Those findings appear in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“It’s targeting certain branches in the tree of life,” Dr. Davis said. “They happen to be our most charismatic species — orchids, mints, gentians, lilies, iris.”
Of the 21 species of orchids Thoreau observed in Concord, “we could only find 7,” Dr. Primack said."
(Photograph of Walden Pond from the Walden Woods Project website.)
Friday, October 24, 2008
A Roundup of Very Early Films of Cities
Check this out--London, 1904:
This is a fragment of a film made by an American, Charles Urban, and was just recently discovered in an Australian archive. I learned about the film from this post on Metafilter. And the great thing about Metafilter is how when someone posts something cool, other members add their own related links in the comments. So courtesy of Metafilter let's take a tour of turn-of-the-last-century cities around the world, through film:
Here is another Charles Urban film, of the Indian holy city of Varanasi. The quality is much lower than that of the London footage:
These reminded me of this 1906 film of San Francisco, taken soon after the earthquake:
(You can also see a film of San Francisco made just months before the earthquake at the Library of Congress.)
If you like these old films the British Film Institute has a generous collection of British films posted at YouTube. The Library of Congress has several excellent collections of very early American films online.
I had hoped to finish off this post with a very early film from the Pacific Northwest, but I have come up blank. If you know of any email me.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
History Talk: Quintard Taylor at Gonzaga
(I just received this interesting announcement. Dr. Taylor is a major historian of the American West so this should be good!)
"The Other Black Northwest: Beyond
This FREE public program, presented by the Center for Columbia River History (CCRH), provides a broader understanding of African American history in the region. Dr. Taylor will explore rural communities such as
Sponsored by the Center for
Monday, October 6, 2008
Indians and Law in Territorial Washington
As Americans established control of what was Washington Territory in the 1850s, what legal status was provided for the American Indians?
I was searching today to see if the laws of the State of Washington are online. What I found were bits and pieces, not a comprehensive legal record but some valuable information. One treasure is the Laws of Washington, Volume 1, 1854-1862. This is part of the Classics in Washington History online collection provided by the State Library. "This digital collection of full-text books brings together rare, out of print titles for easy access by students, teachers, genealogists and historians," and will be the subject of future posts here. Today, I did a keyword search for "Indians" through this collection of early laws and got some fascinating results.
This 1854 law lists persons "not competent to testify" in the civil actions:
Later on the laws specify who may testify in criminal matters, and here there is more leeway for Indians to speak: "Witnesses competent to testify in civil cases shall be competent in criminal prosecutions, but regular physicians or surgeons, clergymen or .priests, shall not be protected from testifying as to confessions, or information received from any defendant, by virtue of their profession and character; Indians shall be competent witnesses as hereinbefore provided, or in any prosecutions in which an Indian may be a defendant. " (302)
On the other hand the laws specify that "the property of all Indians" is exempt from taxes (p. 526) and a law governing the construction of wharves and regulation of watercraft emphasizes that "No part of this act shall be construed as applying to Indians, or to the property of Indians." (p. 556)
An 1854 "Act to Regulate Marriage" declares "That all marriages hereafter solemnized in this Territory, where one of the parties to such marriage shall be a white person, and the other possessed of one-fourth or more of negro blood, or more than one-half Indian blood, are hereby declared void." Any official who married such a couple was subject to a fine of between 50 and 500 dollars, to be paid to the common schools. In an apparent afterthought, Section 3 of the law states that "nothing in this act shall be so construed as to prevent any parties from being united in marriage, who may be living together at the time of the passage of this act." (651-52) This seems designed to allow established mixed race couples, who had perhaps been married for years in the Indian fashion and had children together, to legalize their ties.
An act authorizing county assessors to take the census directs them to "make separate lists of all taxable half breed Indians, negroes, kanaka [Hawaiians -ed.], and mulatoes, and chinamen" in their counties. (704)
Overall the laws paint a picture of white Washingtonians as eager to define citizenship in racial terms with a limited place for American Indians.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Bruce Levine to Speak at EWU and Spokane
Heads up! Civil War historian Bruce Levine will be speaking at EWU this Thursday noon and at the MAC in Spokane Thursday evening. Levine's newest book is Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves During the War. (A review of the book is here.) Levine will deliver two lectures:
"The Myth of the Black Confederate"
Thursday Oct. 2 at 12 noon
Monroe Hall 205, Cheney WA
"The Confederacy's Plan to Emancipate (and Arm) Slaves"
Thursday Oct. 2 at 6 p.m.
Eric A. Johnston Memorial Audition - Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture
2316 W. First Avenue, Spokane WA
These are important lectures. In recent years neo-confederate "heritage" groups have worked hard to refashion the public narrative of the Civil War, downplaying or dismissing entirely the central importance of slavery and racism. One of their efforts has been to argue that there were large numbers of blacks who fought on the side of the South because they just loved their Massa Lee or something. It is nonsense of course and academic historians have mostly ignored the black confederate mythology even as the neoconfederates have created websites, educational programs, and shoddy publications based on the myth. Levine is among the few historians willing to tackle the topic head-on. (For more on the topic, check out The Myth of Black Confederates tag at the Civil War Memory blog.)
This opportunity to hear a top historian is thanks to a Teaching American History grant from the U.S. Department of Education to Spokane Educational Service District 101.
(If you can't make it here is an MP3 of Levine delivering the second lecture at UC Santa Cruz.)
Monday, September 29, 2008
First-Person Accounts #2: Many Pasts
Today's post continues the series looking at first-person historical accounts, with an eye to mining the websites for accounts of the Northwest.
Many Pasts "contains primary documents in text, image, and audio about the experiences of 
ordinary Americans throughout U.S. history. All of the documents have been screened by professional historians and are accompanied by annotations that address their larger historical significance and context." It is part of the terrific History Matters website from George Mason University's Center for History and New Media.
Many pasts contains over 1000 primary accounts and is searchable. A search for "Wobblies" produces an evocative anti-IWW cartoon (seen on on the right), a Wobbly poem titled “The Lumberjack’s Prayer ("I pray dear Lord for Jesus' sake, Give us this day a T-Bone Steak...), a description of the difficulties of rural work from an IWW 
organizer, and The Paterson Strike Pageant Program (a public page ant in support of an IWW strike, organized by John Reed and Bill Haywood).
Other northwest material include “For Oregon!” Settlers From Illinois Describe the New Territory, 1847; Executive Order 9066: The President Authorizes Japanese Relocation; Congress Investigates the 1934 San Francisco Strike; and the delightful “Nobody Would Eat Kraut”: Lola Gamble Clyde on Anti-German Sentiment in Idaho During World War I.
The advanced search option at Many Pasts is very sophisticated, allowing searches limited by topic and primary source type and across different History Matters collections.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
New Job in a New Town
As of last month, I have a new job. I am now an Associate Professor of History at Eastern Washington University and an Assistant Digital Archivist
at the Washington State Digital Archives.
This is a dream position for me and I could not be happier. The primary goal of this joint appointment is to build up the MA in Public History program at EWU and to give it a digital edge. My position brings together the amazing technical resources and expertise of the first and largest digital archive in the world and a first-rate history program. Add to that the cultural resources of nearby institutions such as the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, the Spokane Public Library's Northwest Room, the National Park Service, and the many Indian peoples in the region, and the possibilities are endless.
That my scholarship is about this region is an added bonus.
It is funny how life works out. When I began this blog I was living in Missouri and expected to remain there. I thought the blog would help maintain my profile as a northwest historian and force me to keep abreast of the latest developments in digital and northwest history. Now that I am back in my beloved inland northwest I expect to bring things up a notch, with more posts, more digital projects, and hopefully a wider readership.
Enough with the personal note, let us get back to the history.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
History as an Advertisement
I quite like this ad from Hovis Bread, with one boy running through 122 years of English history:
(via)
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Free Historic Pictures for Teachers
NEH Announces Second Picturing America Application Period: "The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced today that a second round of applications for Picturing America will be accepted online through October 31, 2008. Picturing America is a free educational resource that helps teach American history and culture by bringing some of our nation’s greatest works of art directly to classrooms and libraries. In June, the NEH awarded Picturing America to over 26,000 schools and public libraries nationwide."
You can learn more about Picturing America and view some of the pictures and teaching materials at their website. The images are both historically important and visually arresting, as with George Caleb Bingham's painting of antebellum electioneering above. And the website includes a wealth of teaching materials for each. These would be a fantastic addition to any history teacher's classroom.
It is not clear how the NEH is going to sort a few tens of thousands of applications, but if I were them it would be first-come-first-serve. Get cracking!
Friday, September 12, 2008
Marco! Polo!
Here is fun project at the blog Indulgence & Sin: A Historian's Craft.
Blogger and grad student Rachel Leow has a copy of Marco Polo's Travels, and an internet connection and she is not afraid to use them. The result is a fun use of Google Maps, an illustrated journey of Marco Polo with photographs and illustrations pulled off the web and links to relevant websites for many of the places mentioned by the explorer. Here is a direct link to her full scale Google map.
This approach has a lot of potential, especially for teachers. So many history topics could be explored geographically--exploration, famous journeys, wars and battles, historic trails, historic sites in a community. Google Maps offers a way to have students work on a collaborative project that is much greater than the sum of its parts.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Inlander Article on Indian Wars of the 1850s
A Beginning and an End: "Hangman Creek' received its name from an incident that took place 150 years ago this month in a little meadow 25 miles south of Spokane. The name, which the state Legislature has been trying to abolish (to be replaced by Latah Creek) by proclamation for 
more than a century, persists for a good reason. Like many pioneer names ('Leadville,' 'Tombstone,' 'Crazy Woman Creek' 'Dead Man's Gulch,' 'Death Valley'), it's an honest reminder of a gritty past."
This is a nice historical article by William Stimson in the Spokane weekly The Inlander. There is no new ground here but rather a solid and well-written summary of the White-Indian wars of the 1850s.
(The illustration is Sohon's painting of the Battle of Steptoe Butte.)
