Northwest History

Barry Moses on Drumheller Spring and Grand Coulee Dam

2012-01-21T13:58:00.000-08:00

Here is a fine short video of Spokan tribal member and Spokane Community College instructor Barry Moses, speaking about how the Spokans used (and still use!) some of the natural resources of the area. I love his story about his grandmother and Drumheller Springs, and how he brings the tale around to his own discovery of bitter root in the park. There are some good observations about the impact of Grand Coulee Dam as well.

Moses also blogs (sometimes in Salish) at Sulustu. He may be the only person in the world blogging in Salish?

The video, but the way, was originally filmed during a 2010 educational tour of the Spokane River sponsored by the Center for Justice. I had the privilege of being on the tour and it was great--the experts on the tour were Barry Moses, Jack Nesbit, and Bill Youngs, and we had stops at Spokane House, along the Little Spokane River, and at the Spokane Falls. A film of highlight of the entire event airs sometimes on Spokane's open-access cable channel, Community Minded Television.

Progress in the Battle to Save the Jensen-Byrd

2012-01-19T12:28:00.000-08:00

Jensen-Byrd building by Flickr user Terry Bain.
(Thank you Terry for choosing Creative Commons licensing.)

This morning we have some good news about the fight to preserve Spokane's most-endangered historic building, the Jensen-Byrd. According to a Spokesman-Review article, the Historic Preservation Commission has ruled that the Jensen-Byrd is eligible for historic preservation: "The commission’s decision Wednesday designates the Jensen-Byrd building, which has been vacant since 2004, as eligible to be nominated for the Spokane Register of Historic Places.That decision now places a burden on Campus Advantage to establish reasons why it should proceed with demolition, said Kristen Griffin, the city-county historic preservation officer."

The article went on to state that the developer planning to raze the building, Campus Advantage, "has a contract with WSU to buy the building, but that deal has contingencies that could cancel the sale...Macejewski [a Campus Advantage executive] said he couldn’t comment on whether the restrictions on obtaining a demolition permit would jeopardize the sale."

What does this mean for Spokane history? I think if the public outcry is great enough, we can either get WSU to reverse the decision, or perhaps scare off the developer by adding uncertainty and delays to the process. Keep up the pressure! Spokane Preservation Advocates has been spearheading the public effort to save this historic building, their advocacy page has information on how to contact WSU to protest this unnecessary destruction.

Spokane has lost a lot of great buildings that could have been saved. But I have a sense that we as a community have reached a tipping point, where we come together and say enough is enough. If we save this building, it could mark a new era of historic preservation in Spokane.

The History of Hawaii as a Series of Plate Lunches

2012-01-17T10:30:00.000-08:00

I am all for quirky ways of using technology to teach history, and this is absolutely charming. The video is "Unfamiliar Fishes" by "social observer" Sarah Vowell. Vowell is also the author of Assassination Vacation, a book about visiting the sites of presidential assassinations, and is an all around internet-enhanced author/personality. Enjoy. And keep an eye out for my upcoming YouTube viral video, "The History of Spokane as a Series of Chili Cheese Dogs."

Northwest History at Common-Place

2012-01-15T11:34:00.000-08:00

It has been a while since I mentioned the marvelous online history journal Common-place, which describes itself as "a bit friendlier than a scholarly journal, a bit more scholarly than a popular magazine, Common-place speaks--and listens--to scholars, museum curators, teachers, hobbyists, and just about anyone interested in American history before 1900."

It is difficult to find that historical sweet spot in-between popular storytelling and academic rigor, and Common-Place hits that mark more often than any publication I know (except maybe for Montana the Magazine of Western History).

Common-place deals mostly in colonial and early national history, but if you poke around in their archives there are some real gems of northwest history. Below are some fine pieces on Francis Parkman, the fisheries at Celilo Falls, a photographer on the Oregon Trail, and first contacts in Alaska.

Common-place: The Pathfinder's Lost Instruments

It became the Emigrant Road, the main trunk of the trails to Oregon, Utah, and ...Benton had his eye on Oregon, which at the time meant all the country west of ...

www.common-place.org/vol-04/no-04/rea/

Common-place: Talk of the Past

The Horseshoe Falls, the most photographed part of Celilo Falls, was close to theOregon shore. Until its inundation, Celilo Falls was by far the biggest tourist ...

www.common-place.org/vol-06/no-02/talk/

Common-place: Hayden's Gaze

Science and art come to the Oregon Trail. When the photographer William Henry Jackson posed fourteen men around a table in a field, propped a deer head on ...

www.common-place.org/vol-06/no-02/rea/

Common-place: First Meetings in the North Pacific

For the best recent history of Alaska, see Stephen Haycox, Alaska: An American Colony (Seattle, 2002). For a recent and more pro-Russian position see ...

www.common-place.org/vol-05/no-02/namias/index.shtml

Act Now to Save a Spokane Landmark

2012-01-07T18:01:00.000-08:00

What is a community to do when a university is destroying its historic fabric?

The Jensen-Byrd building, 1909-2012 (?)

Washington State University announced last week that one of Spokane's landmark historic buildings, the Jensen-Byrd building, would be torn down to be replaced with student apartments. This despite the fact that a local developer has offered to buy the building for the same price and save it. A WSU spokesperson explained that they went with the wrecking ball because that buyer offered to pay WSU more quickly.

It might not be too late to stop the destruction of this important piece of Spokane history. The Spokane Preservation Advocates has issued an action alert calling on citizens to mount an email campaign to save the building. They ask that you contact WSU President Elson Floyd at presidentsoffice@wsu.edu and Chair of the Board of Regents Theodor Baseler at hoytc@wsu.edu (also that you CC spa@spokanepreservation.org). Ask them to preserve this Spokane Landmark. Here is the letter I just sent, which you may adapt if you like:

Dear President Floyd and Chairman Baseler:

I think you would be surprised to know the amount of disappointment and anger that has been generated here in Spokane over your decision to tear down one of our most historic buildings, the Jensen-Byrd building.

Dating from 1909, the building is a grand testament to Spokane at the peak of its early growth. The Spokane Preservation Advocates recently recognized the Jensen-Byrd building as one of the top historic structures in the Spokane region.

All over the country buildings such as the Jensen-Byrd are being renovated and breathing new life into their communities. Indeed a local developer, Ron Wells, has offered to buy and preserve the building. But you have chosen instead to tear down a piece of Spokane history, simply (according to press reports) to get your money more quickly.

It is not too late to reverse this decision, which is a disaster not only for Spokane but also for the reputation of WSU. If you tear down this building it will take a generation to repair the damage to the reputation of your institution. For your sake as well as ours, please spare the Jensen-Byrd building.

Sincerely,

Larry Cebula

Possibly the Greatest Flickr Group Ever

2012-01-06T17:20:00.001-08:00

Allow me to present customized bomber jackets of World War Two:

Bomber Jackets, a set by D. Sheley on Flickr.

Spokane Prohibition Documentary tonight

2012-01-05T11:15:00.000-08:00

Raid on an underground still, via the Spokesman-Review.

KSPS is airing a documentary that should be of interest to readers of this blog: Rumrunners' Paradise: Spokane During Prohibition, which airs at 7 p.m. tonight. Unlike the east coast and midwest, where the bootlegging business was dominated by already-established organized crime networks, the inland Northwest liquor trade was more of an amateur hour. Bootlegging in the Inland Empire was shaped by our peculiar history and geography and involved unemployed timber men, Indians whose reservations were handily located between Spokane and the Canadian border, and not a few enterprising women and children. This HistoryLink article, "Prohibition: Booze Routes to Spokane" outlines the business. Edmund Fahey's Rum Road to Spokane is a wonderfully entertaining first-hand narrative from a rum runner.

Rumrunners' Paradise features historians Dale Soden, Bill Stimson, William Rorabaugh, Jim Kershner, Jim Price, and Tony Bamonte. An all-star lineup! Here is a good Spokesman-Review story on the documentary.

The Internet Archive and the Beauties of Spokane

2011-12-30T00:00:00.000-08:00

So I was playing around on the Internet Archive and discovered a few things. The Internet Archive is "a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format." It is a fabulous and growing resource. I have used items from the Internet Archive to post about the Grand Coulee Dam and an 1950s educational film about Lewis and Clark.

So what's new? First, there seems to be a lot more content, at least concerning Spokane, than a year or two ago. This includes a substantial number of volumes that are not on Google Books, such as the 1895 booklet The Beauties of Spokane (see below).

Second, there is something odd going on with images at the Internet Archive and Google Books. Take for example Durham's 1911 History of the City of Spokane. The Google Books version has the images that were included in the text, such as this Birdseye View of Spokane on page 3. Yet the image is missing from the Internet Archive scan of the same page. Why is that? I smell a copyright dispute...

Third, Internet Archive now has the very best tools for online reading and sharing of scanned print books of anyone. Check this out--an 1895 book, The Beauties of Spokane. The volume itself is quite rare--Google Books not only lacks a scan, it doesn't even know about the book. And the volume is a treasure trove of high-quality images of Spokane buildings, many now lost. Check it out below:

.

Recovering Memory in Joplin

2011-12-18T19:18:00.000-08:00

From the Flickr group Lost Photos of Joplin

I taught in Joplin, Missouri for 12 years, from 1996 to 2008, and the town has been much on my mind this year since the devastating tornado on May 21st. The loss of life and property were terrible, with 160 dead and in excess of $2 billion in property damage. The tornado tore a gash across the center of town, destroying 7000 homes and many of the people inside of them.

Lost Photos of Joplin

The tornado was also destructive to the history of Joplin. The twister missed the historic downtown and the local history museum, but it tore up many historic buildings (particularly residences). More damagingly, it destroyed the personal history of many of who survived. The tornado ripped the roofs off of houses and scattered possessions over miles, newspapers stories were full of tales of personal photographs, birth certificates, and family heirlooms being found in yards and fields for weeks. And the area was hit by drenching rains for days after the tornado, destroying the personal libraries and documents left unprotected in those shattered roofless homes.

Now an interesting virtual effort to reunite tornado survivors to their lost photographs has been launched a Facebook named Lost Photos of Joplin, MO Tornado. The idea is to use the social networking power of Facebook to allow volunteers to post photographs they found after the storm with the owners. There is also a website, Joplin Rescued Photos, and a Flickr group. Here is a Joplin newspaper story and an American Public Media radio piece about the effort. Photographs that were damaged in the storm can even be restored by the volunteers at Operation Photo Rescue.

What is most interesting to me is the decentralized but highly effective nature of the effort, made possible by social networking tools, the proliferation of scanners, and existing networks such as area churches and genealogical societies. The process will probably play out over years, and many of the photographs will never find their owners, but it is hard to imagine such an effort even taking place just a few years ago.

Don't Mind the Mess

2011-12-18T12:42:00.000-08:00

I am playing around with the template, so this site may go through quite a few different looks before I settle on something. Wish I had saved the old one before I started!

Meanwhile, courtesy of my employer the Washington State Archives, Digital Archives, here is a mysterious 1888 death certificate from the frontier town of Spokane Falls, Washington Territory. Because I know you like that sort of thing:

I cannot find out anything more about this case online--there are no digitized newspapers for this period online. If you know anything, post it below!

Update: You guys are fast. A tip from the excellent Charles Hansen showed me that there are digitized newspapers from this period and I found an article about this case. Hansen writes the Eastern Washington Genealogical Society Blog, which often has valuable research tips for local and regional history.

Teaching American History Program Emergency

2011-12-15T14:59:00.001-08:00

Today I received the following alarming message from the NCHE. The TAH program is on the verge of extinction. Please call your representatives RIGHT NOW.

Dear Advocacy Team,

We need your help right away. The first report on the federal omnibus spending bill was released today and TAH funding for 2012 has been completely eliminated!

As you know, the House had already voted to defund the entire TAH program as part of Rep. Duncan Hunter’s (R. California) Setting New Priorities in Education Spending Act. Now, the Senate has decided that insofar as $46 million (the amount funded for 2011) would not fund all the 2012 continuation grants, that they would agree to eliminate the program!

The timing is extremely limited to get to our Senators and House members to fight for this. Congress will need to pass the compromise bill, or a short-term extension measure, by tomorrow to avoid a government shutdown. But, even though Democrats and Republicans have agreed to these numbers, the measure could face a rocky road because of political factors that have little to do with education spending.

So…. please act today.

1) Call your House and Senate members and ask them to restore funding for TAH in the omnibus compromise-spending bill. If you do not know their phone number, email me for that information or check http://www.contactingthecongress.org/

2) Email your House and Senate members and ask them to restore funding. Make sure to emphasize the impact of TAH not only upon teachers and students BUT also the economic impact to your state’s economy.

Finally…

Spread the word! Let folks know that the future of TAH is at stake. To lose the funding will make it that much more difficult, if not impossible, to secure funding in the future of any history education professional development.

A Beguiling History of the World via Paper Cutouts

2011-12-07T16:12:00.000-08:00

Kalle Mattson - Thick As Thieves (Official Video) from Kevin Parry on Vimeo.
An arts and crafts history of the world.

Forgotten Highways and Historic Preservation

2011-12-07T08:56:00.000-08:00

The Spokesman-Review recently had an interesting story and accompanying photo essay about attempts to revive interest in the the historic Three Flags Highway. Later known as US 395, this "Mother Road of the West" was first laid out in the 1920s and connected Canada to Mexico via eastern Washington, Oregon and California. The route was heavily promoted in the early days of auto tourism, particularly in California, with the saying "three countries one road." Today, according to the Spokesman, "historians in southern California are trying to revive the name as part of an effort to reclaim the motoring past."

The story got me thinking about how many economic revitalization schemes depend on history, and the role that historic highways can play in the process. As little towns across America look for some way to brand themselves and establish a public identity, they often reach into their past and heritage tourism. And there are so many historic highways that can be promoted. We all know about Route 66 but that route was a relative latecomer compared to the Lincoln Highway (see above, the first automobile route across America, established in 1913), the Jefferson Highway (Winnipeg to New Orleans, 1919), the Dixie Highway (Chicago to Miami, 1915) and a host of others.

Coordinating the interpretation of a historic highway is necessarily a difficult feat, involving hundreds of communities and their small museums and historic societies, multiple state historic societies, and city and state tourism offices. For the same reasons it makes a good grass roots public history project--markers, displays and commemorations can come into being one community at a time, with or without any broad formal plan.

Writing this post reminded me of a visit a few years ago to the surprisingly excellent Great Platte River Road Archway Museum in Nebraska. The innovative museum covers the history of transportation and travel along the river corridor from pre-contact times to the present. The exhibit I liked best was a section depicting an auto campground along the Lincoln Highway in the 1920s. I wish I had taken more pictures:

This aspect of American history--life and travel along the early pre-war highways--seems relatively under-interpreted to me. I don't know of a major museum or museum exhibit on this fascinating era.

The Simpsons on Graduate School

2011-12-02T13:50:00.001-08:00

I promise this is the last post on this topic for a while, but this is too good not to share:

No, You Cannot be a Professor--the Reactions

2011-11-28T22:02:00.000-08:00

My recent post, Open Letter to My Students: No, You Cannot be a Professor, was far more widely read than anything I have posted before (27,000 page views and counting). It provoked considerable discussion--not only in the comments section of this blog but also on Twitter, Facebook, and other blogs. Some excellent points were made and I thought I should address them in one place. Reactions fell into a few broad categories:

What, this again?

Yeah I heard that one before

Brian Sarnacki tweeted "Not sure the world needs another "don't go to grad school" article, but if it does here's one from @larrycebula..." Others pointed out that all of my points had been made before, with the best known examples being Thomas Benton's essay Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go. I pretty much agree with this criticism. In fact I keep a few copies of Benton's essays in my desk to share with students contemplating a PhD. So why another "don't go to grad school" article? I guess because I feel like the situation is even worse than Benton and other have presented, and because my students need the reminder.

"stark but truthful picture of the higher education job market"

The bulk of the reactions were similar to the above comment from Ted Schwab. An old friend from grad school emailed to say that her program had added the post to the assigned readings for incoming MA students. Digital history guru Dan Cohen called it "depressing but sage advice." Thanks, guys.

The Opportunity Costs Debate

I was properly called out for my offhand remark that the opportunity costs of a humanities PhD are "over a million dollars." I should admit this was a wild guesstimate on my part--but I am not sure I was wrong. In a thoughtful reply to my post, Sean Takats calculated his own opportunity cost. Takats gave up a well-paid job at IBM to pursue a history Ph.D. and in six years sacrificed by his calculation $450,000 in earnings. But his calculation is incomplete, not taking into account the investments he might have made it that time (IRAs, home equity, etc.) and how those investments might have appreciated from that time until his retirement. He also does not calculate the differential between what he makes now as a professor and the larger amount he would be making had he stayed in the IT field. If you add those up, surely we are well over a million dollars.

"Charlie Brown, aren't you going
to the AHA this year?"

But wait, you say, very few humanities PhD students are walking away from a job at IBM. A better starting point is average starting salary of someone with a fresh B.A. in history--provided they can find a job at all in this economy. Zachary Schrag does the math and comes up with $120,000 in opportunity costs for a six-year doctoral program--but again, he is calculating only the lost wages for those years.

Of course, many college graduates are not finding work at all right now. For them, a fully-funded grad school gig is far better than moving back home with the parents. One person commenting about my post on another discussion board (unfortunately I cannot find the link) said that I did not understand the realities of the economy right now. He said he was a new college grad and was back at the crappy job he had right after high school and for the same money. A fair point. But even for those students, surely the economy will recover int he better part of a decade they would spend in grad school.

My Students Can Too Be Professors! They are Special.

Source of poor career advice

(Alternate version: I am special.) Part of the reason the job market is so overcrowded is the many professors who continue to urge impressionable young people to "follow your dreams!" without offering any realistic advice about this career path. Every department has a couple such professors, usually very popular with students. I was recently trying to warn a student about the odds in pursuing an academic career. She listened for a bit and then shut down. "I rely on Professor Sparkle Pony for career advice," she said. Good luck with that.

Holger Syme takes on my post point-by-point to argue Yes, You Can be a Professor--but his only argument is that since he overcame great odds and became a professor, his students can too. Sean Takats properly calls this response "a textbook example of survivorship bias." Takats quotes Wikipedia: "Survivorship bias can lead to overly optimistic beliefs because failures are ignored […] It can also lead to the false belief that the successes in a group have some special property, rather than being just lucky." This is a better explanation of the point I made in my post, that asking professors if you should go to grad school in history is "like asking lottery winners if you should buy a ticket." Nate Kreuter expanded on this point with a column over at Inside Higher Ed titled You Aren't the Exception.

We Need to Reform Humanities Ph.D. Programs

I like it that a lot of commenters thought that the job market was in part a symptom of the wretchedness of current history PhD programs--which in this country take an average of nine freakin' years to complete, have terrible drop-out rates, and with few exceptions are focused exclusively on preparing one for a career as an academic historian at a research-focused university. There is a lot to say on this topic and I will reserve my ideas for a later post.

"You are a world class ass"

Me?

A substantial subset of readers think I am a jerk. "I'm not a professor, but your condescending know-it-all tone further confirms how lucky I am to have chosen a career path outside of academia," one anonymous commenter wrote. "It's nice to not have to deal with pompous a$$hats all the time." I didn't even realize that my mother read my blog! Others described the post as "snotty," "tinged with condescension," "shortsighted" etc. etc.

They may have a point. Yet I do not like giving the advice in "No, You Cannot be a Professor." I have any number of students who would make great history professors, given the chance. But realistically they will never have that chance, and I have a responsibility to tell them.

For New Readers: Northwest History's Greatest Hits

2011-11-16T09:02:00.001-08:00

Adolph Wolgast (LOC)

Ever have a blog post go viral? Me neither--until this week, when Open Letter to My Students: No, You Cannot be a Professor received 11,000 visits in 48 hours. Modest traffic by internet standards, but a major event here at Northwest History, where I usually get 50-200 visits per day. The post generated a lot of discussion and I will post some follow-up thoughts soon. For new readers in the meantime, here are some recent posts that might be of interest:

How to Read a Book in One Hour was previously my most popular post, it appears in a slightly revised form in the book Hacking the Academy.
Patrick Henry Said What?: Or, How to Fact-Check an Internet "Quote" attempts to establish a procedure using Google Books to fact check those dubious historic "quotes" that your uncle is always posting on his Facebook wall.
A Digital Toolbox for Graduate Students in History offers some tips for what I consider the minimum digital skills for a new graduate students. Chances are you are not going to learn these from your professor!
Advice for Academic Bloggers, in which I am proscriptive.
Finally, my favorites are the Baron Von Munchausen Saga (Part 1, Part 2) in which your intrepid blogger tries to improve the interpretation at a historic house museum, and finds that no good deed goes unpunished.

Open Letter to My Students: No, You Cannot be a Professor

2011-11-13T13:25:00.000-08:00

[Note: In response to the interest generated by this post I have also posted No, You Cannot be a Professor--the Reactions and For New Readers: Northwest History's Greatest Hits.]

In a way it is the greatest compliment a student can give. I ask them what they want to do with their history degree. They get all passionate and earnest and vulnerable as they answer, "I want your job. I am going to be a college professor!" Then they turn their smiling faces towards me, expectantly awaiting my validation and encouragement of their dreams. And I swallow hard, and I tell them....

No, my esteemed student, you are not going to be a history professor. It isn't going to happen. The sooner you accept this the better.

This is not because you are not bright enough. You are plenty bright. In any case, finishing a Ph.D. program is more a matter of persistence than intelligence. The reason you are not going to be a professor is because that job is going away, and yet doctoral programs continue to produce as many new Ph.D.s as ever. It is a simple calculation of odds--you are not going to win the lottery, you are not going to be struck by a meteorite, you are not going to be a professor. All of these things will happen to someone, somewhere, but none of them will happen to you.

First, let's look at the odds. Tenure track jobs are declining. The AHA recently reported that "The number of job openings in history plummeted last year, even as the number of new history PhDs soared. As a result, it appears the discipline is entering one of the most difficult academic job markets for historians in more than 15 years." And the job market was terrible 15 years ago. Very few of the people in history PhD programs right now are going to get teaching jobs--the Economist recently concluded that "doing a PhD is often a waste of time."

Not you.

Ah, but you say, I am special. I am a 4.0 student (except in your class where you gave me that 3.8 and ruined my life). Every teacher since kindergarten has told me how delightfully clever I am. I have interesting ideas and I really really love history. I know how hard it is to become a professor, but I am willing to work hard, so those odds do not apply to me.

Yes they do. The thing about grad school is that everyone else is at least as special as you, and most of them are more so. They all had 4.0 GPAs, they all have gone through life in the same insulating cocoon of praise, they all really, really love history. Hell, some of them shoot rainbows out of their butts and smell like a pine forest after a spring rain--and they mostly aren't going to get jobs either.

I know that some of your other professors are encouraging your dreams of an academic career. It is natural to turn to your professors for advice on becoming a professor, and it natural for them to want to see you succeed. Remember though that we 1) mostly have not been on the job market lately and 2) in any case are atypical Ph.D.s in that we did land tenure track positions. To return to the lottery analogy, it is like asking lottery winners if you should buy a ticket. For our part, there is a lot of professional satisfaction in mentoring some bright young person, encouraging their dreams, writing them letters of recommendation and bragging of their subsequent acceptance into a good doctoral program. Job market? What job market?

Your professors are the last generation of tenure track faculty. Every long-term educational trend points towards the end of the professoriate. States continue to slash funding for higher education. Retiring professors are not replaced, or replaced with part-time faculty. Technology promises to provide education with far fewer teachers--and whether you buy into this vision of the future or not, state legislators and university administrators believe. The few faculty that remain will see increased service responsibilities (someone has to oversee those adjuncts!), deteriorating resources and facilities, and stagnant wages. After ten years of grad school you could make as much as the manager of a Hooters! But you won't be that lucky.

Also not you.

For a more accurate gauge of the job market speak with some of the people you find adjuncting at your university. Ask them about the pay and benefits they get for the hours worked--most are earning little more than minimum wage with no benefits. Or head over to the well of bitterness and despair that is Adjunct Nation, and peruse the articles on topics such as Avoiding Freeway Flyer Burnout or Kent State Faculty Senate Opposes Collective Bargaining For Part-time Faculty. This a far more likely vision of your future than is the happy mid-career faculty member who biked to work yesterday and met you in her sunny office with the pictures of her European vacation on the wall.

Finally, I want to look at one factor that is too-little addressed in these discussions: the opportunity costs spending 6-10 years preparing for a career that, even in the event of your actually landing a tenure-track job somewhere (and again, that is not going to happen) will leave you hundreds of thousands of dollars in the hole compared to your friends who started professional careers right out of their undergrad program. In six years you could have entered a career, risen to mid-rank, bought a house, and had your IRA off to a healthy beginning. If you go on for a PhD, instead you will find yourself with student loan payments equivalent of a home mortgage but no home (and no equity), no retirement savings, and banking on the thin chance of landing a job in some part of the country usually only seen on American Pickers. The opportunity costs are at least a million dollars. You don't care now, because you are young, but you will.

So no, my bright-eyed young scholar, you are not going to be a history professor. That is not to say that you cannot work with history. There are some great jobs in public history--working for local government, or federal agencies, or museums, or as an independent contractor, or a hundred other things. These jobs are also competitive and hard to break into, but there are more of them and you only need an MA. Or you could get certified and teach history in the public schools--again, quite competitive but not nearly so much as college teaching. Good luck!

If Lincoln Were Running for Reelection Today

2011-11-10T08:17:00.000-08:00

What is it about the Civil War era that produces so many great mash ups and parodies?

Tacky Events at Public History Sites?

2011-11-09T09:33:00.000-08:00

Here is a slick little video from the Public History program at Temple University about Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary and the annual haunted prison event there:

Eastern State Penitentiary is the most important prison museum in the United States, respected for its programs and the quality of its interpretation as well as the historic significance of the building. It is also home to the annual Terror Behind the Walls event where this nationally-significant historic site is turned into a fun house entertainment.

This Philadelphia Weekly article goes deeper into the controversy over the exhibit, which even Program Director XX admits "compromises the mission" of the museum. According to the article the event used to be much worse than it is now:

In the mid-’90s, “Terror”—which brought in new consultants to conceptualize the haunt—started transforming from the creepy candlelight tours of the first few years to something far more outrageous and sensationalized, with its actors recreating scenes specific to the prison’s history: Women crying because they’d been raped. Prisoners going crazy and climbing the walls due to the unyielding solitary confinement that the prison’s Quaker founders believed would cause inmates to reflect and repent their misdeeds. And a man standing on the roof stabbing himself, fake blood spurting all over the place.

The article also notes that Terror Behind the Walls is "a crucial cash cow" that "generated 65 percent" of the museums $4 million budget last year. I am shocked that a haunted house event could produce that much revenue--good for them!

I am interested in similar events--are there other historic sites that make compromises to host popular events in return for revenue and public support?

Advice for Academic Bloggers

2011-11-06T17:34:00.000-08:00

I recently received an email from a professor who want to start a professional blog. "What advice would you give about having a blog?" she asked. "Is there anything you wished you knew at the start? Anything you did and wished you hadn't? What are the best ways to get out the word about the blog?"

My usual answer to would-be blogger: "Try standing in the garage and talking to yourself for twenty minutes a day. If you like it, you might also enjoy a running a history blog."

That answer is too flippant--and wrong. I began this blog with no particular expectations of readership or impact. And Northwest History remains a small fish in the blogging world--even in the history blogging world. I am sure that I do not receive a fraction of the readers that Kevin Levin enjoys over at Civil War Memory or that read AHA Today. But this blog has brought me a modest professional reputation in my field, some interesting collaborations with people whom I have met through the blog, and serves as a resource for my students. At history conferences someone usually comes up to me and introduces themselves as a reader--perhaps the only one at the conference, but still. And when I went up for tenure this year I presented this blog as a work of public history scholarship and my Cliopatria award as peer review. I received tenure. Not bad for something I began on a whim in 2007.

Four years is a long time for a blog to remain active--it is like a century in dog years or something. A lot of what I considered my peer history blogs when I began aren't around anymore (others are still going strong). What have I learned in four years? My mission statement covers some of this ground. Here is my advice:

Decide what your blog is about, and stick to it. This blog covers the history of the Pacific Northwest, digital history and resources, and sometimes teaching. You topic does not have to be a straight jacket (perhaps 10% of my posts are outside of my usual topics), but keeping a tight focus helps you build an audience and reputation.
Don't make it about you. Blogging about your academic work is fine, but if you find yourself posting pictures of your cats, it is time to retire from academic blogging.
Don't make it about politics. It is so tempting to become political--what the hell is wrong Eric Cantor anyway?! And political posts will get you an audience more quickly that anything else you could do. But the political quickly drives out the historical, and soon you are running a miniature version of the Daily Kos.
When you have an idea for a post, go ahead and start it. Save it as a draft and come back later. The 'Blog This' browser button helps you get a fast start to a new post.
Not every post needs to be an essay in miniature. Sometimes sharing a video or a new online resource requires only a few words of introduction. Blog posts should be pithy.
Share what you are working on. The other day I posted a brief letter from William F. Cody that I had just transcribed, along with a video clip I found online.
Don't expect comments. According to Google Analytics I have a readership. 35,000 people visited Northwest History last year (either that or 1 person 35,000 times--same thing right?). Most of these people came here on purpose-my leading referrals are from Facebook and Twitter and other history blogs. But I don't get 100 comments a year.
Try to keep a semi-regular posting schedule. My Google calendar nudges me to post something twice a week.
It is OK to stop. A blog is not a lifelong obligation. With a blog as in life, when you run out of things to say you should stop talking.
I don't have any insights into promoting your blog beyond the usual advice--comment on related blogs, put the URL in your email signature, and sign up with a service that automatically published your new posts to Facebook and Twitter (I use Networked Blogs).
Have fun! When blogging begins to feel like a chore, your days are numbered. (See #9.)

Do you have an academic blog? Tell me about it in the comments.

How History Gets Rewritten

2011-11-02T17:42:00.000-07:00

This is very funny but there is also an actual historical point to be made. (Warning--vulgar language):

Event: Historic Cemeteries of Spokane County

2011-11-01T16:41:00.000-07:00

The Spokane Valley Heritage Museum is sponsoring a talk/fundraiser, “Historic Cemeteries of Spokane County” presented by John Caskey on Saturday, November 12th. The talk will take place at the Opportunity Presbyterian Church at North 202 Pines in Spokane Valley. The event is from 11:30am-1:00pm and the cost is $20 ($15 for seniors). The museum asks that your RSVP at (509) 922-4570.

This is an interesting event for a good cause. John Caskey is the historian on staff at the Fairmont Memorial Association, which maintains some of the most historic burial sites in Spokane. Caskey recently spoke to one of my history classes at EWU and it was a treat.

Creepy Vintage Halloween Pictures

2011-10-31T01:00:00.000-07:00

Modern Halloween is a holiday full of fake chills--plastic vampire teeth, puny fog machines, and pumpkins carved to look like Simpsons characters. You grandparents, on the other hand, knew how be really scary. Enjoy.

Burton Holmes Archive of 20th Century Travel Films

2011-10-26T13:15:00.000-07:00

Check out this charming silent travel film of a 1920-something visit to Glacier National Park:

The film is part of the Burton Holmes Archive:

The Burton Holmes Archive is the world’s largest repository of films, photographs, programs, scrapbooks, and other ephemera related to the life and career of Burton Holmes, the “Father of the Travelogue”, and that of his cameraman and associate, Andre de la Varre. If you’d like to see more of this collection, take a look at our Photostream, our Photo Sets, or watch a slideshow of the entire collection. In addition, you can watch films made by Holmes at: Burton Holmes Films, as well as those by de la Varre at Andre de la Varre Films.

The above film appears to be the only one from the Northwest, however there is also a film of a 1920s visit to the Grand Canyon (check out the clothes on the tourists!) and such exotic destinations as Bits of Life In Japan 1920s or Nine Glories of Paris - 1920s. The casual racism of some of the captions are striking to the modern eye (the Japanese entertainers are "charmingly childlike") but overall the films are striking and intimate glimpses into the world of 90 years ago.

Happy Saint Crispin's Day!

2011-10-25T12:25:00.001-07:00

Do not hold your manhood cheap on this, Saint Crispin's Day:

(Via friends Margaret and Karl, who know who they are.)

Two Sides of Buffalo Bill

2011-10-24T14:52:00.000-07:00

For the last two years I have been an Associate Editor at the William F. Cody Papers Project. The goal of this project is to encourage scholarship and public understanding of William F. Cody--Buffalo Bill to most of us. Cody was the most famous American in the world for much of his life, and you can explore nearly any topic in late-19th century history through the lens of the Wild West, from the formation of gender to transportation to white-Indian relations.

Part of the project is to gather together as much of the vast contemporary writing by and about Cody that we can. There is also a YouTube channel for sharing video as we find it--such as this snippet below:

My current project within the Papers is to gather and edit the writings of Cody's business partner Nate Salsbury. Viewing the Wild West through Salsbury's eyes is showing me that Cody was a hard guy to work with. Below is my preliminary transcription of a letter that William F. Cody wrote to Salsbury in 1884. I have not yet located the letter by Salsbury to which Cody was responding, but you can get the idea:

My Dear Salsbury,

Your very sensable [sic] & truly rightful letter has just been read. And it has been the means of showing me just where I stand. And I solemnly promise you that after this you will never see me under the influence of liquor [.] I may have to take two or three drinks to day to brace up. That will be all as long as we are partners. I appreciate all you have done [.] Your judgement and business is good. And from this on I will do my work to the letter. This drinking surely ends today. And your pard will be himself. And be on deck all the time.

Yours always,W.F. Cody

[The original letter is at the Yale Beinecke Library]

Mark Twain, Failed Blogger?

2011-10-20T22:15:00.000-07:00

Roughing It has long been my favorite work by Mark Twain. Of his autobiographical works, it is more mature and less contrived than Innocents Abroad and A Tramp Abroad, more vital than Following the Equator, and less sloppy than his Autobiography. For some reason the following passage, about his brief stint as an editorial writer for the Territorial Enterprise, has been stuck in my head for years. Tonight I recalled the passage again and suddenly realized--he sounds like a struggling blogger:

In the Editorial Chair

I wanted a change. I wanted variety of some kind. It came. Mr. Goodman went away for a week and left me the post of chief editor. It destroyed me. The first day, I wrote my "leader" in the forenoon. The second day, I had no subject and put it off till the afternoon. The third day I put it off till evening, and then copied an elaborate editorial out of the "American Cyclopedia," that steadfast friend of the editor, all over this land. The fourth day I "fooled around" till midnight, and then fell back on the Cyclopedia again. The fifth day I cudgeled my brain till midnight, and then kept the press waiting while I penned some bitter personalities on six different people. The sixth day I labored in anguish till far into the night and brought forth--nothing. The paper went to press without an editorial. The seventh day I resigned. On the eighth, Mr. Goodman returned and found six duels on his hands--my personalities had borne fruit.

Twain being a bad ass (1901)

Nobody, except he has tried it, knows what it is to be an editor. It is easy to scribble local rubbish, with the facts all before you; it is easy to clip selections from other papers; it is easy to string out a correspondence from any locality; but it is unspeakable hardship to write editorials. Subjects are the trouble--the dreary lack of them, I mean. Every day, it is drag, drag, drag--think, and worry and suffer--all the world is a dull blank, and yet the editorial columns must be filled. Only give the editor a subject, and his work is done--it is no trouble to write it up; but fancy how you would feel if you had to pump your brains dry every day in the week, fifty-two weeks in the year. It makes one low spirited simply to think of it. The matter that each editor of a daily paper in America writes in the course of a year would fill from four to eight bulky volumes like this book! Fancy what a library an editor's work would make, after twenty or thirty years' service. Yet people often marvel that Dickens, Scott, Bulwer, Dumas, etc., have been able to produce so many books. If these authors had wrought as voluminously as newspaper editors do, the result would be something to marvel at, indeed. How editors can continue this tremendous labor, this exhausting consumption of brain fibre (for their work is creative, and not a mere mechanical laying-up of facts, like reporting), day after day and year after year, is incomprehensible. Preachers take two months' holiday in midsummer, for they find that to produce two sermons a week is wearing, in the long run. In truth it must be so, and is so; and therefore, how an editor can take from ten to twenty texts and build upon them from ten to twenty painstaking editorials a week and keep it up all the year round, is farther beyond comprehension than ever. Ever since I survived my week as editor, I have found at least one pleasure in any newspaper that comes to my hand; it is in admiring the long columns of editorial, and wondering to myself how in the mischief he did it!

EWU History Department Offering Prize

2011-10-20T15:29:00.000-07:00

The History Department at EWU is running competition for high school students, Commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. Thanks to a generous private donor, there are cash prizes for $400, $300, $200 and $100. This is the first year of what we hope will be an annual contest in historical writing for regional high school students.

Notes Towards a Guidebook for Attending Scholarly Conferences

2011-10-16T16:27:00.000-07:00

What are your rules of thumb when you go to a scholarly conference? In recent years I have done a fair bit of conference-going and I think I have it partially figured out. Some of my rules are:

Do not approach

Leverage the technology to improve your conference experience. Twitter is a powerful (and for history conferences, under-utilized) tool to extend scholarly discussions and also to meet people.
Bring a graduate student or two to the conference if you can. Encourage your institution to fund graduate student travel, even if they are not presenting. "As long as grad students keep showing up this organization has a future,” a friend told me.
Avoid round tables, plenaries, “wither our field” sessions, and other sessions where the presenters are allowed to talk about themselves, because they will talk about nothing else. Some academics see the world as a movie in which they are both the star and narrator. Ugh.
On a related note, don't try to approach or make eye contact with the senior scholars in your discipline--the silver backs. Though they might be nice enough if you met them anywhere else, at the disciplinary conference they must stay focused on their elaborate rituals--chest-thumping, mating displays, and grooming one another's luxurious academic coats.
Also to be avoided are panels where all of the presenters are linked by a single institution or all of the presenters are graduate students.
When in doubt, sit in back near the door so you can skip out to a different session.
If you don’t know many people at the conference, the breakfasts, luncheons, and banquets are a good if expensive way to meet some. But once you have attended a few years, it is more productive and fun to go out to dinner with your conference friends.
Dine arounds are good. A dine around is where a set of lists are created according to sub-disciplinary interest--women's history, mining history, advanced footnoting--and folks sign up to go to dinner with the group. If the conference organizers do not set this up you can do it yourself and put the word out through your disciplinary mailing list.
Stay in the conference hotel if you possibly can. A lot of the best networking happens in the elevator, the book displays, and the conference bar. And by networking I mean drinking.
Some presses sell their display copies of books at a steep discount on the last day of the conference--thought I don't see this as often as I used to.
Explore the city! Don't hesitate to blow off the afternoon sessions and rent a bicycle or something. When you are on your deathbed you will not say "If only I had listened to more historians read their papers out loud!"

What about you guys--what are your conference rules of the road?

Western History Association Conference in Oakland

2011-10-14T09:48:00.000-07:00

I am in Oakland for the WHA conference. I love this organization. The WHA is one of the more vital scholarly organizations--by the way such things are normally measured. Attendance at the meetings is good, the journal comes out on schedule and with interesting articles, and...

Well, that is it. Like most of our professional organizations, the WHA consists almost entirely of a conference and a journal. Its members include academic historians and a scattering of other history professionals such as Park Service historians, archivists, and editors.

There was some discussion at last night's plenary session about the disappearance of history buffs from the organization in the last decade or so. Nobody was sure where they have gone, but we were assured that they are fine. I think they are living on a farm in the countryside or something.

Maybe this is not a problem--there is tremendous value in historians talking with other historians. I certainly enjoy learning what my friends and colleagues are working on, in formal sessions and hallway conversations and drinks at the hotel bar. ($10 for drink!) I just wish we were a part of the public of the public conversation about western history. There is a huge public interest in what we do.

Digital History in the Public History News

2011-10-13T10:09:00.000-07:00

Posted: Visualizing US expansion through post offices. from Derek Watkins on Vimeo.

Public History News is the newsletter of the National Council on Public History. Back issues are here. A regular feature of the newsletter is "Worth Another Look," which offers capsule introductions to various articles and public history projects. In the latest issue it is striking to me how many of the public history projects are digital projects. Some interesting examples:

The World Memory Project is a partnership between the Holocaust Museum and Ancestry.com to utilize volunteers to index some of the museums 170 million documents. So far 3000 volunteers have indexed over 600,000 records.
Speaking of Crowdsourcing, Scripto is "a lightweight, open source tool that allows users to contribute transcriptions to online documentary projects." It is the latest digital tool from the folks who brought us Zotero and Omeka.
Visualizing US Expansion through Post Offices (seen above) is a straightforward project that scraped some public databases and added some computer magic to create a neat video showing what we might dub the Post Office Frontier. The link in this paragraph will take you to an interactive map where you can sort the results by date range and zoom in on a region. Did you know that the first PO in eastern Washington was established at Colville in 1862?
What Big Media Can Learn From the New York Public Library is an Atlantic Magazine article that highlights how the library is doing "some of the most innovative online projects in the country." These include "Biblion, a storytelling app whose iPad icon features the lion head, is the flashiest of these efforts...Then there is the library's slick crowdsourcing projects, which allow users to digitize beautiful old menus from New York's restaurants and plot historical maps of the city onto the GPS-enabled digital maps of today. Both projects are both useful and feature user interfaces that best most commercial crowdsourcing applications. The library is even improving its basic infrastructure to keep pace with the big social networks, announcing this week that they are launching a new log-in system through Bibliocommons that will bring simplified and more powerful catalog and account services to the library's users.
4Humanities is a Canadian digital humanities site offering digital tools, news, and a valuable Humanities Showcase.

A few years ago I was at a ThatCamp where one of the participants proudly announced that "Public History is Digital History!" This is a silly overstatement. But it might not be too much to say that Digital History is Public History.

Shushwap Films about Native Culture

2011-10-10T15:00:00.000-07:00

I don't know much about this excellent short film of a native elder giving a tour of a Plateau winter house. A series of similar films were uploaded to YouTube by user SCES about a year ago. The films look to me like they were made a few decades ago and have been converted to digital. From internal evidence they were made by members of the Sushwap Nation. If anyone knows more, please tell tell me!

In any case, the films are wonderful--straightforward tribal-centered descriptions of various aspects of traditional life on the northern Plateau. Subjects include Tanning a Hide, Smoking Salmon, Making Moccasins, and Secwepemc Worldview. There are ten of these films in all. They would make a great addition to any educational unit on the native peoples of the Columbia Plateau. Enjoy!

Data Visualization: Journalism's Voyage West | Rural West Initiative

2011-10-05T10:46:00.000-07:00

The Growth of US Newspapers, 1690-2011 from Geoff McGhee on Vimeo.Here is neat project from the Rural West Initiative at Stanford: Data Visualization: Journalism's Voyage West
. The patterns are about what you would expect--newspapers spread west with white settlement, filling in the rural areas for most of the 20th century, and declining in those same areas in recent decades. Clicking on the circles links you to the relevant page over at the Library of Congress's Chronicling America website, from which the data is drawn. It is a fun site to play around with and familiarize yourself with the history of newspapers in your region.

What was the Odor of Early Spokane?

2011-10-03T10:25:00.000-07:00

...or anywhere else?This newspaper article about history and smell has been making the rounds. “It seems remarkable to me that we live in the world where we have all the senses to navigate it, yet somehow we assume that the past was scrubbed of smells,” says "sensory historian" Mark Smith. The article discusses current attempts to preserve, for example, the scents of certain endangered plants. It also discusses the difficulty of reconstructing the olfactory worlds of our ancestors. The latter relies on written accounts, chemical traces, and a lot of educated guesswork.

The nose knows, or knew

The article made me wonder if it is possible to know the odors of early Spokane? A quick search through the Google News Archive for Spokane turned up hundreds of stories with the keywords "smell," "odor," and "scent." After sorting out the advertisements and articles clipped from other newspapers, we do get some hints:

An 1894 article reported that some of the milk sold in Spokane "smelled like a stable" and was "full of dirt." Bad meat was often detected by its foul odor. A typical article was titled "It Didn't Smell Nice" and documented the discovery and destruction of a entire warehouse full of rotting bacon and hams in downtown Spokane.
Stories about alcohol often mention smell, usually as a means of detecting when someone had been drinking. In 1895 Spokane Fire Chief Winebrenner was being investigated for drinking on the job with testimony from various citizens who apparently were asked if they had smelled liquor on his breath. No wonder a 1909 advertisement for a patent medicine to cure drunkenness promised that users would "look better, fell better, and smell better" upon taking the cure.
Similarly, a teacher in Indian Prairie was fired when his students detected the smell of tobacco about him.
An 1896 Chinese New Year celebration was notable to the American reporter as much for its scents as its sights, including the large quantities of incense and the delicious smells of the exotic food. Yet a few weeks earlier the Chinese quarter or Spokane was described as "Vile Dens of Vice." The article continued: "In every place entered the air was reeking with the foul smell arising from the fumes of opium and the crowded condition of the ill-ventilated rooms."
On the other hand, two culinarily-challenged Spokane police officers in 1912 falsely arrested two black residents when the policemen mistook "the smell of garlic cooking with a roast in the oven" for opium smoke. The article dwells on one of the arrested pair, "Phil Chapman, colored dandy." In an apparent effort to justify his suspicions, Officer Edwards "declared that Chapman, a negro barber from Butte, had the finest trunk and array of clothing he had ever seen carried about by a black man."
One also finds a greater use of bad smells as a metaphor than is common today. Judges would "smell out evil" while the Italian government was "in bad odor." The greater use of such language suggest that smell was a more important part of the sensory landscape than it is today.
There were good smells as well. A 1916 article "Spring, Lovely, Smelly Spring" enumerated the intoxicating scents: "There is the pleasing smell of wet asphalt and damp earth after a shower or sprinkling. From the river comes air cooled by the spray from the falls. From Hangman Valley the south wind breathes a perfume that no laboratory but nature's could mix..."

Not a cookie jar, despite what the
tag at the antique store might say.

Since newspapers only publish items considered newsworthy, they are a very imperfect source for discovering the smells of early Spokane. Photographs of the early city show a steady stream of horses on most streets, we know that bathing and clothes washing were less common than today, and chamber pots were a common household appliance. These were typical smells, and have to be added to list of atypical smells that produced news stories. Newspapers are only the beginning of exploring the history of smells.

Briefly Noted

2011-09-27T18:56:00.000-07:00

These items seem worthy of further investigation. So get to it and report back here:

WhatWasThere (see below) is a website (and iPhone app) that allows users to put historical photos on a Google map. It is not all that different than HistoryPin or similar services, but has a superior interface that integrates Google Street View to give you instant "before and after" views. Play with the slider on the image below!

The Smithsonian lists the "Top Ten Works Lost to Time."

My local newspaper the Spokesman Review now has a good local history tag. Local history is a staple of many newspapers and the reporting is often quite good, but finding the articles can be a chore. Glad to see this.

This color promotional film of Berlin in 1936, produced for the Olympics of that year, is haunting. Combine it with this wartime newsreel, Bombing Berlin by Daylight and this post-war film of Berlin in ruins and you have a lesson plan. Or a lesson anyway!

A single piece of recently-discovered paper in Peru is all that remains of a lost language.

Big shot academic historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto says historians need to "start biting back" against bad pop history.

So, what are you reading?

Lessons in Reciprocity: The Return of a Clatsop Canoe

2011-09-26T10:56:00.000-07:00

It seems some descendants of the explorer William Clark have donated a replacement canoe for one their ancestor stole from the Clatsops in 1806. "Some of Clark’s descendants and a few donors stepped forward to pay for the canoe, which was custom built in Veneta, Ore. The five-hour ceremony on Saturday included songs, gift exchanges and the maiden voyage of the replica canoe. Ray Gardner, chairman of the Chinook Nation’s tribal council, said the return of the canoe is a 'good place to begin healing.'”

"Hopefully this will lift that family
curse I told you kids about."

The theft is rather a famous incident in stories of the Corps of Discovery, and is related by even the most shameless hagiographers as an example of something bad that the Captains did to the Indians along their path. The finest historian of the expedition, Jim Ronda, calls the incident "a blot on the expedition's honor." The theft was planned in advance, as related by Clark in the expedition's journal for March 17, 1806:

we have had our perogues prepared for our departer, and shal set out as soon as the weather will permit. the weather is so precarious that we fear by waiting untill the first of April that we might be detained several days longer before we could get from this to the Cathlahmahs as it must be calm or we cannot accomplish that part of our rout. Drewyer returned late this evening from the Cathlahmahs with our canoe which Sergt. Pryor had left some days since, and also a canoe which he had purchased from those people. for this canoe he gave my uniform laced coat and nearly half a carrot of tobacco. it seems that nothing excep this coat would induce them to dispose of a canoe which in their mode of traffic is an article of the greatest val[u]e except a wife, with whom it is equal, and is generally given in exchange to the father for his daughter. I think the U' States are indebted to me another Uniform coat, for that of which I have disposed on this occasion was but little woarn.— we yet want another canoe, and as the Clatsops will not sell us one at a price which we can afford to give we will take one from them in lue of the six Elk which they stole from us in the winter.

You can see the need for self-justification in Clark's writings: "in lue of the six Elk which they stole from us in the winter." Historians often point to the incident as a product of the troublesome and declining relationship the Corps had with the coastal peoples over the long winter, "part of a larger pattern of growing distrust of Indian relations" as William Lang describes it.

This is true but I would go a step farther to say that the theft of the canoe by the Americans might be read not as a rejection of native rights but rather an adoption of native trading patterns. Anthropologists describe native trade as taking place within rules that were determined by the level of reciprocity between the two parties. If you were on good terms with the other party (or wished to be on good terms) the exchange would often be framed in terms of gifts. One party might give another party something of value as a gift, but with the unspoken assumption that a gift of equal value would be forthcoming from the recipient. (Whites often missed this lat part.) This is called generalized reciprocity.

"This canoe? We, uh, we found it. Yeah, found it."

If you were on neutral terms with the other party, it was traditional to haggle over the exchange. This process is called balanced reciprocity and most closely resembles trade as understood by 19th century Americans. Under balanced reciprocity, each side drove the hardest bargain it could. Thus the explorers were forced to part with a "uniform laced coat and nearly half a carrot of tobacco" for one canoe.

Hardest for the modern reader (and Americans of the time) to understand is the exchange of goods that took place between peoples who were on bad or distrustful terms. This negativity reciprocity resembled stealing. Heck, it was stealing, but it was also more than that. If you were on bad terms with another tribe you might steal their horses or food caches or whatever. At the same time, you might want to keep the door open to future trade, and so you might leave something of value behind, or make good the theft with some items of value at some point in the future. The Clatsop had been introducing the Americans to the concept of negative reciprocity the entire winter by pilfering small goods from the explorers and hardly bothering to cover it up.

Equals six elk.

An example is the aforementioned Case of the Purloined Elk. In February some Clatsops took the freshly killed animals from an American cache. When the captains complained to Chief Coboway about the stolen ungulates, he sent the expedition three tasty live dogs. (It is to be noted that some members of the expedition particularly savored dog meat, and the the Corps consumed at least 200 dogs on their two-year journey.) This is a classic exampled of negative reciprocity in action.

Did the Clatsops interpret the theft of their canoe as an example of negative reciprocity? There is some suggestive evidence that they did. In 1814 the Clatsops were visited by a new set of imperialists, the British Northwest Company. When Chief Coboway met with expedition leader Alexander Henry (to return some British goods that Indian people had stolen), the Indian leader produced a certificate of good conduct that Lewis and Clark had left with him. That Cobaway apparently valued this certificate enough to have kept it all that time, and considered it worth producing to the British trader, may indicate that he considered the Americans not so much thieves as troublesome trading partners.

Henry, an experienced hand in the fur trade, gave the chief some clothes, and "gave him a writing in lieu of the American one, which I threw in the fire before him." Unlike Lewis and Clark, Alexander Henry understood the rules of reciprocity.

How many photos have ever been taken?

2011-09-20T11:06:00.000-07:00

How many photos have ever been taken? About 3.5 trillion according to Jonathan Good, in a fascinating piece. I particularly liked this graphic of the world's largest photo libraries:

Hacking the Academy, a Publishing Experiment

2011-09-13T11:50:00.000-07:00

A brief essay of mine has appeared in a new volume, Hacking the Academy. I am excited because this is not just a book but an experiment in digital publishing, backed by some of the most respected names and institutions in the field of digital humanities.

Hacking the Academy is edited by Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. In May of 2010 they used social media networks to put out a call for contributions to the volume, giving would-be contributors only a week to submit their essays, "the better to focus their attention and energy." They received "329 submissions from 177 authors, with nearly a hundred submissions written during the week-long event and the other two-thirds submitted by authors from their prior writing on the subject matter." One-sixth of the submissions were accepted for the volume, including my "How to Read a Book in One Hour."

Hacking the Academy is interesting for both its content and its approach to publication. The content focuses on "how the academy might be beneficially reformed using digital media and technology," particularly "writing that moved beyond mere complaints about the state of the academy into shrewd diagnoses and potential solutions." The essays are organized into three broad categories: "Hacking Scholarship," "Hacking Teaching," and "Hacking Institutions." The essays alternate between provocative big-picture, "this is how we ought to start doing things" pieces (such as David Parry's Burn the Boats/Books and Jo Gildi's terrific "Reinventing the Academic Journal") and more immediately practical pieces such as "Unconferences," a how-to guide by Ethan Watrall, James Calder, and Jeremy Boggs.

Hacking the Academy will be published in two ways--a free, digital publication available right now and a forthcoming print edition. The publisher is the University of Michigan Press, via their digitalculturebooks imprint. UM Press attracted a lot of attention when they announced a shift to predominantly digital publishing in 2009. The digitalculturebooks series now features over two dozen titles, available online and in print as either cloth of paper editions.

Hacking the Academy is something of a test case for a new model of producing a scholarly anthology. Coming out under the imprimatur of some of the most respected names and institutions in digital humanities, and with an timely topic and high-quality content, this book should have an impact. It will be interesting to see if the work is adopted in classrooms, cited in the literature, blogged and tweeted and run through the social networks. It will also be interesting to see if people will buy print editions of what they could read online for free.

If this is successful it could be a first step into a new publishing world.

A Brief Exploration of the History of Post Offices of Rural Washington

2011-09-08T10:22:00.000-07:00

Former PO in St. Andrews, WA (photo by Panoramio user Chris Metz)

The U.S. Postal Service is in crisis right now. The most frequent cost-cutting proposal is to close thousands of rural post offices. The proposal has led to a spate of stories from little towns across America who protest that in many cases the Post Office is the only thing keeping the town alive.

You can explore the rise and fall of rural post offices in the Northwest online. Maps of postal routes were common. For example, compare this 1897 map (at the Washington State Library) and this 1905 map (at Washington State University). Let's zoom in on a section of rural eastern Washington:

This 1897 map show the prevalence of POs in some of tiny hamlets of the Columbia Plateau.

Just 8 years later in 1905 some of the locations have changed.

A handful of 1897 post offices such as Buckingham and Ophir have disappeared by 1905, but many additional POs (Mansfield, Withrow, Mold) have been created as the countryside filled in. The Great Northern Railroad reached Douglas County in 1893, and the population boomed from 3,161 individuals in 1890 to 4,926 in 1900 and 9,227 by 1910. The very existence of such detailed maps of postal routes for this period shows how important the institution was thought to be for rural development. Oddly enough, I cannot find equivalent maps for the late-20th century.

By the mid-20th century the population of places like Withrow and Mansfield began to decline, and for the most part has declined ever since. Only a handful are open today--and soon there will be even fewer.

Bighorn, a Film about Custer and Football

2011-09-08T08:44:00.000-07:00

BIGHORN from Alfred Thomas Catalfo on Vimeo.

Bighorn "is a 15-minute, supernatural historical fantasy based on a true fact: that General Custer's bandmaster, Felix Vinatieri -- an Italian immigrant and the great-great-grandfather of Super Bowl-winning kicker Adam Vinatieri -- was ordered to stay behind at the 7th Cavalry's Powder River camp and missed the Battle of the Little Bighorn." It is a fun piece. A quick Google uncovers an archive of Vinatieri's compositions, where you can listen to General Custer, Last Indians Campagne March, a song Vinatieri wrote for Custer in April of 1876, months before the general's death at Little Big Horn.

Back from Summer

2011-09-06T21:44:00.000-07:00

My summer Google Latitude locations

I am back from the longest blogging hiatus since I began Northwest History in 2007. It was not a planned break--as you see from my Google Latitude locations, I got busy. The summer included working with teachers in Teaching American History projects, meeting with the other editors of the William F. Cody Papers Project, family reunion and a couple of road trips. Also a major grant proposal and supervising two MA thesis defense and three internships.

On the professional front, the Spokane Historical app should be available pretty soon and I will be in Oakland this fall for the Western History Association, and I am teaching two public history classes this fall--Research Methods in Local History and Historical Writing and Editing. And I will be blogging again. Nice to see you.

The Library of Congress - C-SPAN Video Library

2011-07-21T00:07:00.000-07:00

The Library of Congress - C-SPAN Video Library: "C-SPAN's original feature documentary, The Library of Congress, is a behind-the-scenes look at the national repository, providing the history of the institution, a tour of its iconic Jefferson Building, and glimpses of some of the library's rare book, photo, and map collections."

You have 90 minutes to spare, right?

Coming Soon: The Spokane History Mobile App

2011-07-13T13:58:00.000-07:00

We have an exciting new project here at the Public History program at Eastern Washington University. We will soon be unveiling a smartphone app--for both iPhone and Android--that will offer tours of historic sites around Spokane and the region.

The Spokane Historical app will be an adaptation of an existing app, Cleveland Historical. At a conference a couple of months ago I met Mark Tebeau, Director of the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University. He is doing a bunch of neat digital stuff with his students, including the Cleveland Historical app. He was looking for a few partners to expand the reach of his app. I had been looking for a mobile platform for which my students could develop local content. Perfect!

Here is a YouTube that demonstrates the app. I like that it can have text, photographs, audio and video for each site. There is a YouTube channel with all of the short history videos that they have developed. Here is the YouTube promo for Cleveland Historical:

My students last quarter created a series of historical tours of 5-8 stops each. They did the EWU campus, Spokane Falls, Manito Park, Greenwood Cemetery, Bing Crosby's Spokane, Peaceful Valley, Kirtland Cutter buildings, and the Spokane Downtown. The Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University will be providing some technical support including rebranding their apps and releasing them as "Spokane Historical," creating an Omeka database (here it is) for the content, and providing the training materials they have developed to my students.

Spokane Historical should be available in the iTunes store and Android marketplace this summer. I am very excited and have a lot to do, including raising some money, partnering with other Spokane institutions (interested? email me!), developing some logos and branding, and above all working with my students to develop some first-class mobile history tours. I will keep all of you informed!

In a few days I will post some of the content that my students created.

Black Interpreters at Colonial Williamsburg

2011-07-12T12:47:00.000-07:00

From Black Public Media, a fascinating short documentary about black interpreters at Colonial Williamsburg:

video platform video management video solutions video player

The Western History Association: A Scholarly Organization Charts a Future Course

2011-07-09T10:07:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I blogged about my mild frustration with voting for new leadership at the Western History Association without adequate knowledge of the candidate's positions. As I put the post together I was reminded of the WHA's Next Fifty Years Committee Report from last year and the response that I wrote at the time. I thought these would make a worthwhile post at a time when every professional academic organization is wrestling with questions of identity and relevance.

The Next Fifty Years Report was the beginning of an admirable planning process to determine the future of the organization. The committee made recommendations in six categories: “Identity,” “Membership,” “Rethinking Constituencies,” “Finances,” “Governance,” and “Publications.” The report is thoughtful and makes many good recommendations--the WHA recommends amending it mission statement and logo to be more inclusive, expanding membership among minorities and other traditionally excluded groups, raising more money, etc. Though exceedingly modest in its recommendations the report is certainly a step in the right direction.

With the issue of the report, the WHA asked its members to weigh in--and did they ever! The organization received over 80 replies, many quite lengthy, and published them at its website. The volume of replies is testimony to the attachment and enthusiasm of its members for the WHA. The report and responses make for an interesting read for anyone interested in the future of scholarly societies. Below (lightly edited) is mine--but I would be interested in reading some of your takes as well:
____________________________________

Friends:

As a western historian, a frequent attendee of the WHA conference, and a member of the WHA Technology Committee I am glad to see this report but disappointed with the contents. My overall reaction is that this is not a report about a historical organization, it is a report about a history conference and a journal. These are two methods of dispersing information that were developed in the 19th century and are of sharply decreasing relevance today. The conference and journal have become the tails that wag the dog. Possibly a mutant dog, what with two tails and all, but a dog nonetheless. The WHA should be about scholarship, teaching, advocacy and collaboration in all its forms. If the organization is simply a governing structure for a conference and a journal, the organization is not very interesting.

Some more specific reactions to individual recommendations:

More grad students is fine, but don't allow more than one per panel as they need to learn how to present from more seasoned historians.
I love the idea of appealing to members to bring along and sponsor their grad students.
The other most promising area for growth is to bring in more public historians--museums, historic preservationists, Forest Service and Park Service interpreters, and archivists.
The finances recommendations are largely unworkable, except for the idea of a speakers’ bureau. The prizes are so small it seems silly to work to develop endowments for each. The real benefit of a prize is that you get to put it on your vita and get a promotion, which is worth far more than any of our prizes.
The yearly themes are largely imaginary--we all propose to present whatever we are working on and tweak the title to echo whatever buzzwords are in the theme. And that is how it should be. (Heck, I cannot remember the theme from any year I have attended or even last fall--was it Many Wests? Western Stories? The Enduring Frontier? To Infinity and Beyond?)
The publications section of the report was far too timid! We live in an era with more historical discussions involving greater numbers of people than ever before. They are happening online and we have removed ourselves from them and hence the whole organization becomes steadily less relevant. We need to take the WHA publications online and make them free and open access.
Create a WHA community blog, titled Many Wests or something like that. Allow any member in good standing to make posts. Appoint a half-dozen moderators. It could quickly become the place to discuss western history online, and would be a huge advertisement for membership in the WHA.
Publish the journal online and open access under a Creative Commons copyright, and link it to the group blog. Each article would become a discussion node for the topic and a place where professional historians interact with teachers, students, and the general public. We can still mail out a paper copy to those who want one. The idea that people join the WHA to get the journal is wrong, I suspect that virtually no one joins to receive the journal, they join to attend the conference or to support the organization.
Do adopt Montana: the Magazine of Western History and make it the first journal to get the above treatment. Its more popular style would make for an easier transition.
Get past issues of both journals out from behind the pay walls of JSTOR and MUSE and to where Google can find them. Every one is a potential advertisement for our organization.
Leverage our online presence with a Facebook page and Twitter account.

Things that are not in the report but should be:

Be an advocate for history. The near-silence of the WHA (and every other historical professional organization) as the government is poised to eliminate the Teaching American History program (that has pumped $1 billion into history education) is maddening and inexplicable. Where are the action alerts, the lobbying, the advocacy?
The conference needs more and shorter sessions--add lightning rounds, poster sessions/cocktail hours (posters + booze = win), lunchtime digital show-and-tells. And for the love of God, please ban the reading of papers out loud.
Organize a THATCamp to run before or parallel to the conference.
Connectivity--free wireless is simply a necessity, no matter what it costs, particularly if we are looking for a younger demographic. Free wifi is how conference goers will tweet and blog the conference and get the word out to a larger world of potential attendees.
A huge need for those of us working as public historians, digital historians, and in other nonconventional areas but with an academic tie is to be able to offer peer review of our scholarship to skeptical tenure and promotion committees and deans. The WHA should offer this as a service.
Members could volunteer to serve as blind reviewers of digital projects, exhibits, etc., and the WHA would be the clearing house to put together the reviewers and the reviewed.

I am pleased that the WHA is on better financial footing these days and want to support it any way I can. At the same time I am skeptical about the future of all of our professional organizations. We need to adapt more quickly. Let me know what I can do to help.

Cordially,

Larry Cebula

The Western History Association: Who Should I Vote For?

2011-07-07T13:35:00.000-07:00

I love the Western History Association. Their journal is generally interesting, the conference is a lot of fun, and the associated H-Net listserv, H-WEST, is one of the more interesting and active H-NET lists. That said, the WHA like all of our other professional organizations is defined by the 19th-century model of academic societies--it is largely a conference, a journal, and a newsletter. (Tomorrow I will post a few thoughts on possible new directions for th WHA.)

I just received my ballot to vote for new members of the Council and Nominating Committee. And the positions actually seem to be contested, so the vote matters. The ballot helpfully pointed me towards the 2011 WHA Spring Newsletter as a source for more information about the candidates.

Alas, the candidate biographies are just that--prose versions of the professional vitae of the candidates, with no hint of why any of them want to hold WHA offices. We get their academic affiliations, their publications, the length of time they have been members of the WHA, and sometimes a bland statement of their desire to serve. The candidates truly are an impressive group of women and men. I am sure they have specific ideas for the future of the WHA. I wonder why the WHA did not ask them to include such information in their biographies? As is, I have no reason to vote for or against any of them. I probably won't send in the ballot at all.

This is particularly disappointing because the WHA is making a very serious attempt to explore the future of this scholarly organization. In 2010 a "Next Fifty Years Committee" issued a report [PDF] with recommendations. They invited member reaction and received many thoughtful comments, which they compiled and shared.

So where do these candidates stand on such issues as the shift to digital publication, expanding the WHA membership, lobbying, supporting graduate students and independent scholars, etc.? It would be nice to know.

Continuing the Fight for TAH - A Message from the NCHE

2011-07-06T12:15:00.000-07:00

What follows is a recent "Action Alert" email from Peter Seibert, Executive Director of the National Council for History Education. The NCHE has been by far the most active professional group in the fight to preserve the Teaching American History program (really you should join the organization). With Seibert's permission I am posting the email here. If you would like to receive these alerts, drop him an email at peter@nche.net.
__________________________________________________

Good Morning Advocacy Team,

I will be on vacation from the 6th to the 17th so I wanted to quickly touch base with everyone about key advocacy efforts both on-going as well as thinking strategically into the future.

As we noted in the last email, our focus is upon the 2012 budget as this is really where the battle needs to be fought. If we lose the budget battle and TAH is defunded then our consolidation concerns become a moot point, as the program will no longer exist. In the month of July, a couple of critical things will be occurring:

On July 26 will begin the House mark-up of the budget. Realistically speaking, we know that this is a tough one for us. Rep. Duncan Hunter’s bill eliminating TAH will probably pass (although I still think it is going nowhere in the Senate or with the White House). In support of that, budget cutters have eliminated all TAH funding from the proposed House budget. Thus, our energies (thinking strategically) need to be about targeting Democrats and moderate Republicans in the House to (a) encourage them to raise the flag of funding TAH as part of this mark-up (b) laying the groundwork for TAH to be put back into the budget when the House and Senate eventually meet in conference. Our target list is as follows:

Reps Andrews, Holt and Payne in New Jersey
Rep Rehberg in Montana
Rep. Kingston in Georgia
Rep. Simpson in Idaho

We have folks in all of these states working on these people right now.

The Senate will probably begin their budget considerations this fall, after their recess in August, so we are continuing to look at key members on both sides of the aisle as we lay the foundation for that discussion. Over the last two weeks, NCHE partisans and I have met with staffers in Senators Rockefeller, Wicker and Cochran’s offices to discuss this matter. Partisans have also met with other Senators on both the HELP and Appropriations committees. Particularly vital was the effort that secured a letter from Senator Mary Landrieu (LA) to Senator Harkin (Chair of the HELP Committee) asking for $46 million for TAH and new grants to be made in 2012.
Senator Harkin’s staff continues to announce that they will be bringing forward the Elementary and Secondary Education Act by the end of July. We believe that ESEA will contain Secty. Duncan’s recommendation on consolidation of TAH with other PD programs although this is not assured (particularly since a majority of the consolidated programs had their funding eliminated in the 2011CR). We also believe that Sen. Harkin is doing this without any Republican support thereby opening the door for some negotiation on all of this. The introduction of this will cause a big splash no doubt but remember that this is only the beginning. We do not know for sure what the House will be doing, how it all will end in conference and if anyone will have the will to proceed with this considering the debt ceiling, the budget and the forthcoming elections.
The House Education and the Workforce Committee is currently looking at a Teacher Accountability Act that will probably deal with PD issues. We understand that since they believe that TAH does not work that they will lump history in with other PD disciplines under Title 2. Further, there is some discussion about funding cuts to Title 2 that would cause additional issues. This may not come up before the fall.

We have a lot ahead of us and much to do! A few rays of sunshine in all of this:

The belief is that the budget cutting frenzy of the 2011CR will not be necessarily repeated insofar as the education budget is concerned. Both houses seem to be focused on much bigger issues than the Ed funding stream.
We have never run into anyone on the hill who dislikes history. Their issues with TAH are really about issues within the program that can, and probably should be, changed going forward.
We are working on providing you with data from our partisans showing accurate and graphic proof of the impact of the program. Stay tuned, as this will be an important tool for us in the fight.
We have heard that many House members are feeling the heat at home from their constituents because of the huge number of programs that were cut this year. In particular, the brutal clear-cutting of the forest on the earmark question has come home to roost. We continue to support our friends and colleagues at National History Day and We the People as they fight to get this decision reversed.

Finally, we have to keep fighting. If we lose any one of these fights…it is over. The folks who are receiving this email are working now in 26 states on this issue. Keep it going and lets save TAH. We did it once this year…we can do it again.

Peter S. Seibert
Executive Director
National Council for History Education
www.nche.net

Conserving the Declaration

2011-07-04T10:22:00.001-07:00

I am back from a month of travels and have much to post. But today, Happy Fourth, and take a moment to enjoy this National Archives video about preserving the Declaration:

TAH--Not Dead Yet!

2011-06-28T06:33:00.000-07:00

Contrary to what you might have heard, the Teaching American History program is not yet dead, and with the right amount of support, may survive and even thrive.

This update from the National Coalition for History describes the current state of TAH funding. The short version is that funding was reduced by 2/3rds in the current year to $46 million (it had been at $120 million the last few years) and might be eliminated entirely next year.

Or it might not. Some are already writing the epitaph for TAH, and it is easy to understand their pessimism. House Republicans have voted to eliminate the program. The Obama administration, and in particular Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, does not support the program. So how can it survive?

It can survive because, for the program to go away, the House and Senate will have to agree to eliminate it, and as the NCH observes, "Traditionally, there has been strong bi-partisan support in the Senate for the TAH program." Also, TAH has support from House Democrats, and many thousands of advocates across the country. Our professional historical organizations, which have in the past been largely ineffective or indifferent advocates of TAH, are beginning to wake up. If we can save TAH from being zeroed out in the current budget session, by next year we could be anticipating a new Congress that would be far more sympathetic to TAH. If we can hold the line--any line!--for another year or two, it could well become a permanent program.

The National Council for History Education has been the most useful professional organization for defending TAH, and this Call for Action [PDF] by the NCHE is still a good guide to contacting your congresswomen and men. See also this post.

Don't give up hope, and do contact your senators and representative. We can still win this one.

When Stupid Things Happen to Good Wikipedia Articles

2011-06-06T08:37:00.000-07:00

Every teacher who has ever called on a student who had not done the reading will recognize the agonizing pattern here:

Palin is ~~campaigning~~ on a family vacation along the east coast, visiting historic sites and waving the flag. Asked a direct question and with the cameras rolling, Palin suddenly suddenly realizes she has no idea what Paul Revere actually did to become an American hero. So she tries to fake her way through with the unprepared student's classic recipe of one-half facts that are wrong and one-half trumpeting what the student believes are the key themes of the course (or in this case the campaign). So we get "Revere warned the British . . . he rode a horse, yeah, horse . . . ummmm . . . the Second Amendment Rules!!!!" Up until Palin's gaffe, the classic film representation of the phenomena was from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure:

The clip of Palin stumbling through her answer went viral and has been on every political blog over the weekend. The interesting thing is how Palin supporters have fought back, trying to alter history to fit the statements of their candidate. Slate blogger Dave Weigel has a pretty good summary of the effort so far: Editing Wikipedia to Make Palin Right About Paul Revere. Apparently supporters of Palin have been busily editing the Wikipedia entry on Paul Revere to make it better fit Palin's version of events. You can scrape the article's revision history for examples if you are extremely patient but Weigel gives an example of the general approach of the pro-Palin edits with the following example, in which the (since deleted) pro-Palin changes are are underlined:

Via Boing Boing

Revere did not shout the phrase later attributed to him ("The British are coming!"), largely because the mission depended on secrecy and the countryside was filled with British army patrols; also, most colonial residents at the time considered themselves British as they were all legally British subjects.

Wikipedia is pretty hardy, and editors have been reverting (deleting) these politically-motivated changes as quickly as they are made. You can follow that process on the discussion page for the Revere article, where one weary editor posted "Sarah Palin's army needs to go away."

Geico Civil War Reenactment Ad

2011-06-03T16:30:00.000-07:00

In Which I am Filmed, and Confront a Ghost

2011-05-25T22:59:00.000-07:00

blah blah blah

So last Thursday I went down to Portland to be interviewed for a new interpretive film for Whitman Mission National Monument. My involvement with the project began back in January when I was contacted by a scriptwriter who was working up a treatment for the film. She had visited the monument and asked what to read and apparently someone handed her my book. We spoke on the phone two or three times. I was impressed by the thoughtfulness and research that were going into the production. So when they asked me to be one of the talking heads in the film I was happy to agree.

They sent me the questions in advance--seven pages of them! I discovered that there was a lot I had forgotten since my book came out in 2004. I wasn't sure how to prepare. For each question I tried to come up with a sound bite and a longer set of talking points. The filming was done at the Old Scots Church, a historic 1870s church outside of Portland. It is beautiful.

The filming was interesting and a new experience for me. In many ways it was like a conversation, except that periodically the interviewer would ask me to repeat something because a truck went by outside or because I looked at the camera. For the first couple of questions I gave my long answers, and was diplomatically asked if I couldn't be a bit more concise? So from there on I gave my sound bite answers and they seemed to like that. All in all it was probably a fairly standard interview--except for when it got strange.

Dear Reader, have I ever told you about the introduction of my book? My book is about religious change among Plateau Indians in the early contact period, ending with the deaths of missionaries Narcissa and Marcus Whitman in 1847. I open the book at the 1850 hanging of five Cayuse men who were convicted of the killings:

Joe Meek knew how to hang an Indian. The recently appointed Marshall of Oregon knew as much about the natives as any man in the territory. As a mountain man he had lived among Indians for most of his adult life. Meek traded with Indians, he played their games, shared their prayers, wintered in their lodges, and had taken not one but two native wives. He had killed Indians as well--sometimes as a member of a native war party, sometimes in self-defense, and sometimes for the fun and frivolity of killing. But as the fur trade faded in the 1840s, Meek abandoned the free life of the mountains and moved to the Willamette Valley to try his hand at farming. When the burgeoning American settlement there needed a law officer, Meek was only too glad to exchange his plow for a badge. As he climbed the gallows that day in 1850, Meek was turning his back on his old way of life and returning to the fold of American civilization.

It goes on from there and I am pretty hard on Meek. Anyway, during a break in the filming I went outside to take a walk in the little cemetery that was hard up against the church. It is very beautiful and full of Oregon pioneers:

I took only a few steps into the cemetery and who did I find? Joe Meek, in his resting place twenty-five feet from where I was interviewed:

How weird is that? What are the odds? A chill ran down my back. And I went back inside and did the rest of the interview--what else to do? That night I kept expecting a supernatural visitor, but apparently ghosts can't travel very far at night.

Briefly Noted

2011-05-24T21:03:00.000-07:00

A lot of almost-bloggable bits that together might constitute a post:

A Google Map of Lame City Slogans. Prairie du Chien, ""Where the bald eagle soars and the carp drops!"
In Richmond they are peeling the asphalt off a parking lot to restore a slave burial ground.
An exhibit at Halifax’s Maritime Museum explores gay life at sea after WW2.
I was interviewed for this story about Joplin, Missouri, where I used to teach. My friends there are all safe though some lost their homes.
"Without good metadata . . . archives are as good as closed to many students and scholars." But can a game really change that?

The Problem with Crowd Sourcing

2011-05-17T18:17:00.000-07:00

Over at the National Archive's Facebook page, a post about crowd sourcing led to this poignant exchange:

TAH Program Endangered Again - Please Act!

2011-05-16T15:39:00.000-07:00

It has been a roller coaster few weeks for the Teaching American History grant program. Last month, after a long fight, the House and Senate agreed to include the program in the compromise budget--though they reduced the program from $119 million in fiscal 2010 to $46 million in the current budget year.

It was an awful hit for the only federal program specifically devoted to history education., but TAH supporters drew comfort from the fact that we saved the program from simply being zeroed out. The hope was that if we can save a line item, no matter how small, we can work on increasing the amount when the economy recovers. We are not out of the woods yet, however. As they put together the 2012 budget, Congress is again on the verge of eliminating the program with House Bill 1891. An action alert from the National Council for Public History today tells the story:
_____________________________________________
Urge Your Member of Congress to Save Teaching American History Grants Take Action

Legislation has been introduced in the House of Representatives that would eliminate the Teaching American History (TAH) grants program at the U.S. Department of Education. NCPH and the National Coalition for History urge you to contact your Member of Congress immediately to oppose this bill. H.R. 1891, the "Setting New Priorities in Education Spending Act," would terminate forty-three K-12 federal education programs.

The President's fiscal year 2012 budget request for the Department of Education would eliminate Teaching American History grants (TAH) as a separately funded program. However, the Administration proposed consolidating history education into a new program called Effective Teaching and Learning for a Well-Rounded Education. This reflects the President's Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorization proposal, the Blueprint for Reform, which was released in March 2010.

Teaching American History grants is the only federal program that funds K-12 history education. Its elimination would exacerbate the problem of local school districts de-emphasizing history in their curriculum because it is not the focus of high-stakes testing.

The House Education and the Workforce Committee is expected to consider H.R. 1891 at any time. It is important that you contact your Member of the House of Representatives TODAY, to urge them to oppose this bill.

The National Coalition for History is working with the National Humanities Alliance, which has set up a template message for you to customize. We strongly encourage you to personalize this message by telling Congress why TAH programs are important to you, your institution, your field, your state, and/or district.

Contact Congress today: http://www.congressweb.com/cweb2/index.cfm/siteid/NHA/action/TakeAction.Background/LetterGroupID/14

FYI: Google Teacher Academy in Seattle this summer

2011-05-15T10:42:00.000-07:00

A heads-up to my readers in the public schools: Google For Educators: "The Google Teacher Academy is a FREE professional development experience designed to help primary and secondary educators from around the globe get the most from innovative technologies."

I wish I could apply to this event but it is for K-12 teachers only. The teacher academy is part of the larger Google for Educators initiative, which includes classroom tools, activities, and what looks to be a pretty active teacher discussion group.

The first thing I did in my digital history course this quarter was to make every student get a Gmail address so as to unlock the other free Google resources, and every week we use Google tools from Blogger to Google Earth to Picasa to a dozen other resources. It would be fun to attend a Google-run workshop to pick up some tips on bringing it all together.

Bricks of the Past - Rephotography at the Spokesman-Review

2011-05-09T16:33:00.000-07:00

Riverside Avenue in 1909 and Today--where did all the people go?

Our local newspaper has been dipping into its archives for content more and more lately. It is a welcome trend for local historians. The latest offering is Bricks of the Past - A Then & Now gallery. Readers of this blog now what a sucker I am for rephotography projects, and this one is very nicely presented, with a slider bar at the bottom of each image to shift between past and present.

Does anyone know what software they used to do this?

Using the Washington Digital Archives to dig behind old news stories

2011-05-06T15:09:00.000-07:00

My local paper the Spokesman Review has a nice column, "From our archives, 100 years ago." In it editor Jim Kershner highlights a story from the paper 100 years ago, sometimes with additional commentary. This piece last week (subscribers only) caught my eye:

A young Spokane woman was “slapped by Cupid,” as the Spokane Daily Chronicle put it – and it all worked out for the romantic best.

Miss Marjorie R. King, 23, a “hairdressing expert,” was visiting the niece of the wealthy John H. Starbird, 46, who had made a fortune in the Klondike gold fields. He was a widower who was “living the retired life of a capitalist.”

The young Miss King was invited to stay for dinner with Starbird and his niece. Afterward, he offered to drive her home in his automobile, with his housekeeper as chaperone.

At a railroad crossing, “Cupid got his chance,” said the Chronicle. Starbird failed to see the wooden crossing-guard arm descending. The arm fell across the open car and hit Miss King right in the head, knocking her out.

Starbird turned the car around, raced for home and called a physician and nurse. She recovered after a few days, but meanwhile, Starbird had fallen in love with her. She and Starbird went to the courthouse for a marriage license and on to the church where they were married.

Thus, said the Chronicle, Miss King ended up “with a husband, a happy home and a quarter of a million dollars.”

Kershner does a nice job selecting old stories, but never does the follow-up research to answer such natural questions as: Did the couple live happily ever after?

The Washington State Digital Archives (my employer) has the answers. A search for "Starbird" in the Spokane County marriage records produces the marriage certificate of the lucky couple:

The certificate confirms the particulars in the story but also gives us a new piece of information, that this was the third marriage for widower John H. Starbird. The surname is unusual enough to make it easy to look for other documents about Starbird in the digital archive. Here is the certificate for his first marriage, in 1891 to Tracie M Rush:

There is no record in the Washington Archives of Starbird's second marriage, perhaps it occurred when he was a miner on the Klondike? We also learn that in 1914 John Starbird sold some land to a mining company in Chelan County, and that he died in 1934 in Seattle, with his Minnesota bride Marjorie listed as his wife. There is no death record for Marjorie in our archives, she may have died out of state. I can find no record of any children born to the Starbirds. So to summarize: The couple that were "slapped by Cupid" in Spokane in 1911 enjoyed 23 years together until the husband's death. During at least a part of the marriage he remained an active speculator in mining and at some point they moved to Seattle. They never had any children. The end--except for this:

In 1925 John Starbird was married in Port Orchard for a fourth time to a Marie Starbird! I am stumped. Did Starbird divorce Marjorie, marry Marie, and sometime before his death divorce Marie and remarry Marjorie? Was he a bigamist, with a wife on either side of Puget Sound? Or are Marie and Marjorie the same woman, and at some point it became necessary to renew their vows? The latter seems the most simple explanation, except for the fact that a Marie Starbird was married two years earlier, in 1923, to Elton E. Morehouse. So they are different women. Any ideas?

I Switched to Android!

2011-04-28T23:40:00.001-07:00

HUMANCENTiPAD
Tags: SOUTH
PARK Kyle Broflovski,Eric Cartman,more...

TJ Stiles to Spokane

2011-04-25T23:37:00.000-07:00

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer T.J. Stiles to present April 28 Simpson-Duvall Lecture at Whitworth: "Whitworth is honored to host award-winning biographer T.J. Stiles as the 2011 Simpson-Duvall lecturer. Stiles will present Thursday, April 28, at 7 p.m. in the Robinson Teaching Theatre in Weyerhaeuser Hall. Admission is free. For more information, please call (509) 777-3270."

If you are in the Spokane area, don't miss this lecture. Stiles is the most talented biographer and one of the finest historians working today. His biography The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award last year. It is an amazing book, but I prefer his earlier work Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War which is the very best biography I have ever read. Stiles works combine deep research, original approaches, a constant eye on the big picture and breathtakingly beautiful historical writing.

As impressive as Stiles is on the printed page, he is even better in person. He rarely gives the same talk twice and is engaging in the question and answer period. His next biography will be about George Armstrong Custer--maybe we can ask about that.

Behold Again the Awesomeness of My Public History Students

2011-04-22T22:15:00.000-07:00

Last quarter I taught the graduate Introduction to Public History class. for the final course project I gave the students the option to do anything whatsoever that a public historian might do--from a walking tour to a museum collection plan to a historic register nomination to a digital project. Quite a few took me up on the last option and I thought I would share their work here.

Pippin Rubin had been having fun reading some of the diaries of the women missionaries who came west along the Oregon Trail in 1838--part of the research for her thesis. With her typical attention to detail she plotted every single campsite along the trail in a Google Map and entered a few lines from each diary into the place marks. She added other information as well. The result is this dramatic visualization of the long struggle of these women to bring their message to the Pacific Northwest:

View Missionary Trail 1838 in a larger map

Two students wanted to create mobile walking tours of historic sites in Spokane. They went about this in very different ways. Tracy Rebstock created a an audio tour of Manito Park. She did a wonderful job of distilling her research into short 1-2 minute guides to some of the most significant areas of this 100+ year-old urban park. She even got the tour onto iTunes--search for Manito or for Librarygirl70.

Clayton Hanson took a different tack to creating his walking tour of Spokane Falls. Clayton wanted to create a multi-media tour with text, historic photographs and video. The method he hit upon was to create the stops on his tour as place markers on a custom Google Map. The idea is that Google Maps is an existing platform that is available on all smartphone operating systems. Each place mark would hold HTML to take the user to a webpage with more information. But how to create a mobile-optimized webpage for each tour stop? Clayton's solution was to use Omeka to hold the content for his tour and to create an Omeka exhibit for each stop. It is an ingenious solution, but unfortunately Omeka does not display very well on mobile phones so the pages are crunched and the text tiny. They display just fine on a computer, however:

View Historic Tour of Spokane's Riverfront Park in a larger map

Tiffany Fulkerson did a project in Google Earth "Climate Change at the Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene A Comparison of Proxy Data Sets in Washington State" that also built on her thesis research and technology to bring her work to a broader public.

Finally, Nikolai Cherny used the final project to document a soon-to-be-dismantled museum exhibit at the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture. The Spokane Timeline uses the Blogger platform to present a tour of the exhibit, a slideshow of images from the exhibit, the exhibit script, and even an interview with exhibit designer and MAC curator Marsha Rooney:

Not everyone did a digital project, I also received a wonderful history of a local elementary school, a processing plan for an unsorted archival collection, a history of an aviation museum, and a career paper involving historic preservation. It was the finest set of final projects that I have received in my Intro to Public History class.

Native Vision Program @ EWU this Thursday

2011-04-12T12:24:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to walk in someone else's shoes? Come take a walk through history as Living Voices depicts a Navajo girl exploring her family's past while struggling to keep her culture in a government-run boarding school.   This story (1930's to 1940's) is brought to life through the performance of Lily Gladstone. Lily Gladstone (Blackfeet/Nez Perce) graduated with a BFA in Acting and a Minor in Native American Studies from the University of Montana in 2008. Born and raised on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in northwestern Montana, Lily is excited to be a part of an expanding presence of Native voices in the performing arts. She hopes that through Native Vision, she can in some way honor this story of extreme adversity, extraordinary resilience and, ultimately, of healing.

Native Vision is one of several Living Voices multi-media performances that combines theater, video and live interaction to impact its audience. The EWU Libraries is proud to host this event on the following date and times:

Thursday, April 14, 2011
9:00 - 10:00 am                                   JFK Library Lobby
Noon - 1:00 pm                                   JFK Auditorium
3:00 - 4:00 pm                                    JFK Auditorium
6:00 - 7:30 pm                                    Riverpoint SAC 20 Auditorium

EWU Libraries is celebrating the new Washington State curriculum Since Time Immemorial : Tribal Sovereignty freely available at http://indian-ed.org/ for all students native and non-Native. More information at http://k12.wa.gov/indianed.

Kudos to the Nixon Library

2011-04-02T09:41:00.000-07:00

I tend to be suspicious of the Presidential Libraries. Too often they are devoted to the presenting a biased version of history that presents a particular president from the point of view of his partisans. So I am delighted to learn the the Nixon Library has opened a new exhibit telling the full story of Watergate, complete with an interactive kiosk labeled "Dirty Tricks." Here is a good NY Times story, and you can also explore much of the exhibit at the library website. This is how public history is supposed to work!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Conserving Jefferson's Bible

2011-03-26T21:25:00.000-07:00

There is a nice post over at the Smithsonian Museum blog Oh Say Can You See?: A peek inside the conservation of the Jefferson Bible.

A national treasure, the Bible recently received microscopic-level examination by a team of conservators trained in both book and paper conservation and by conservation scientists who specialize in materials analysis. A University of Hawaii intern created a purpose-built database to capture all the data observed. How much data? The Jefferson Bible conservation survey database holds over 200 points of observation for each page, and over 20,000 for the entire book.

For those arriving late to the game, the "Jefferson Bible" was a project of Jefferson's to edit the Gospels to his taste. He took a sharp knife and cut up the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John into the individual verses. He discarded the verses with which he disagreed and then reassembled what was left in chronological order to create a single narrative of the life and teachings of Jesus. Jefferson was guided by his (more or less) deist principles and left out most of the miracles. There are no references to divine birth or resurrection. Jefferson considered the Apostles "unlettered and ignorant men" and sought to free the historical Jesus from what he considered their superstitions and falsehoods. Jefferson once described his own beliefs in a letter to Benjamin Rush: "To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed, but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished anyone to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others, ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other."

I really like the way the Smithsonian is blogging the conservation of the book. Jefferson, a fanatic letter-writer and a lover of technology, would surely approve. The museum has even made a video of the process. The video is silent (I think there is supposed to be sound and they screwed up) but gives us a wonderful look at the book:

Historian Buddy Levy at Aunties this Saturday

2011-03-24T12:58:00.000-07:00

Buddy Levy will be speaking this weekend at Spokane's favorite bookstore, Aunties, Saturday March 26, at 2:00 pm. Levy is a professor at WSU as well as co-host of the History Channel show Decoded. Levy presents his latest book, River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana's Legendary Voyage of Death and Discovery Down the Amazon.

If you live in the Spokane region, you need to support Aunties. We are lucky to have such an vibrant independent bookstore. Aunties is not just a place to buy books, it is a cultural venue where local, regional and national authors come to talk about their latest works. It is of huge benefit to our community. So buy a book already. Buy an eBook from their website, for that matter.

Grand Coulee Dam Roundup Post

2011-03-22T20:35:00.000-07:00

One of my employers, Eastern Washington University, is unveiling its Grand Coulee Dam Photographic Collection with a public reception on take place 2-3 p.m., Tuesday, March 29, at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library. Featured is the Hubert C. Blonk Collection. Blonk was "a journalist who covered the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam for the short-lived Grand Coulee Record and the Wenatchee Daily World."

A large portion of the collection is online here. Most of the photographs are the prosaic fare of a small-town mid-20th century newspaper photographer and the collection includes lots of images of meetings and ceremonies and events such as fires or store openings. There are some very striking images to be found, however. Some of my favorites include this driller at work on the dam, a 1950 visit by Harry Truman to the dam, a picture of the infamous B Street (subject of this fine book), and this image of the Grand Coulee before the dam was built.

If you are interested in the history of Grand Coulee Dam, the University of Washington has an excellent digital collection as well. So does Central Washington University. This privately maintained site has many Bureau of Reclamation photographs of the dam construction. And the University of Idaho has a broader collection about dams in the Pacific Northwest. For moving images, Archive.org has a number of period newsreels about the construction of the dam.

Finally, Woody Guthrie famously composed a series of songs about the dam in 1941, including my favorite, Roll on Columbia, hilariously performed here by the Japanese duo The Old Ridge Ramblers:

Northwest History Goes Mobile

2011-03-22T19:11:00.000-07:00

Did you know that Blogger has a mobile setting? It will automatically detect when someone reaches your blog via a mobile device and format your blog accordingly. Details here.

This discovery is a spin off of my spending that day at the Museums and Mobile virtual conference. It was my first virtual conference and it was very well-done. Much of the conversation was about apps--native versus web apps, iOS versus Android, developing them in-house versus hiring someone to develop your institution's virtual presence.

A lot of the technical models on display were big solutions for big museums. Form some committees, hire a developer or a firm, choose an OS, get the right voice talent (I kid you not), secure copyright, etc. Tens of thousands of dollars and year later, you have something spectacular. But I couldn't see where I or my students fit into the models. At one point I tweeted something like "Where is the Blogger for mobile?"

A quick Google search later and I found that Blogger had anticipated my need. One click and I was done. You can view this site in its mobile version here. I am excited about the possibilities. Perhaps we can use Blogger to create a mobile tour of a historic district? (You can now geotag posts as well, so it seems possible.) Use Blogger to generate the HTML to appear in the place marks on a Google Map or Google Earth?

The Appalachian Trail in Four Minutes

2011-03-20T16:46:00.000-07:00

In 1980 I put on a pack and walked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. It looks like this:

Green Tunnel from Kevin Gallagher on Vimeo.

This video is nether northwestern nor historical, but it is my blog and I wanted to share it. And these.

John C.H. Grabill's Photos of Western Frontier Life

2011-03-13T22:42:00.000-07:00

Enjoy these amazing photographs!
Between 1887 and 1892, John C.H. Grabill sent 188 photographs to the Library of Congress for copyright protection. Grabill is known as a western photographer, documenting many aspects of frontier life — hunting, mining, western town landscapes and white settlers’ relationships with Native Americans. Most of his work is centered on Deadwood in the late 1880s and 1890s. He is most often cited for his photographs in the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

For the complete collection with richer descriptions and metadata (and downloadable!) see the John C. H. Grabill Collection at Opening History.

Small Towns Getting Smaller--and Maybe That is OK

2011-03-06T22:33:00.000-08:00

My local paper, the Spokesman-Review, has an interesting article this morning: Small Towns Keep Getting Smaller:

Even as the state and its larger cities bustle with more people, more business – more everything, it seems – the small towns dotting Eastern Washington are emptying.

“It’s a shame,” said Whitman County Commissioner Patrick O’Neill. “My opinion is that the small towns of America are what made this country great.”

Small towns began dying about a century ago. They had sprouted to serve the influx of farmers, loggers, ranchers, miners, railroads and travelers. In Eastern Washington they sit about 25 miles apart, a reasonable distance for a horse and rider to cover in a day.

Saint Andrews, WA

Then tractors and new plows, bigger farms and the automobile ushered in change. The 1910 census was the last to count more rural Americans than city dwellers.

The article was inspired by the release of the 2010 Census figures and we can expect a similar set of stories from other parts of rural America, where the same forces are at work. Rural depopulation is a worldwide phenomena and more than a century old. Newspaper reports like that in the Spokesman usually focus on the "push" factors that cause people to leave rural communities--the rise of mechanized corporate farming, loss of opportunities and services in rural communities, improved transportation. I wonder though if the "pull" factors in the cities don't deserve more attention--not just jobs and education but infrastructure (Spokane got electricity more than a generation before most rural areas), culture and entertainment, and less pressure to conform than one finds in a small rural community.

One Room school west of Waverly, WA

A few years back our summer vacation was a camping journey along the Lewis and Clark Trail. Trying to follow the Missouri River across the northern plains took us off the beaten path and through Ground Zero of rural depopulation (see also this map). We went through so many ghost-towns-in-the-making, places where a small band of hanger-on lived within the decaying shell of a once-larger community. Often the office was the only public service that remained (since the post office doesn't have to make money), sometimes a tavern would sit next to the post office, there might even be a gas station. A story I read in a North Dakota newspaper on that trip told about the closing of another rural school. The previous year it had had one student, a sixth-grader. At recess he would climb the one tree in the playground and daydream, one supposes about moving.

Rural depopulation is always presented as a tragedy in these stories and I suppose it is. Yet the story can also be told as a triumph, a story of human adaptability and innovation and eagerness to improve. After all it is the same set of values--a willingness to embrace risk, the desire of a better life, wanting to provide opportunities for one's children--that both brought people to the rural areas and takes them away.

[St. Andrews photograph from Panoramio user Chris Metz. I took the school photo a few years ago.]

Panorama Photographs at the UW Digital Collections (also, I hate Content DM)

2011-03-04T09:26:00.000-08:00

The University of Washington Libraries Special Collections just released the Panorama Photographs Collection:

This database showcases over 90 panoramic photographs from the Special Collections Visual Materials Collection. Displayed with the ability to zoom into the smallest details of the photograph, this digital collection features such exemplary images such as Front St. in Dawson City around the time of the Klondike Gold Rush, sweeping city views of Seattle after the turn of the century and the memorable Mississippi flood of 1927.

Though it is a smallish collection at 90 images, it is worth highlighting for the unique quality of the photographs and for some of the special features of the exhibit. The collection includes an essay on the history of panoramic photography that explains not only how the pictures were taken (some special cameras produced images as long as 20 feet!) but also the categories of panoramic photos and the types of distortion that could be produced. There is also a link to a Library of Congress page about shooting a panoramic photograph with antique equipment.

The images themselves are fun to explore, despite the Content DM software used to present them. I liked the Bird's-eye view of Seward, Alaska, this hand-colored image of the Seattle waterfront, and the picture of Tallulah, Louisiana in the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. There is a wonderful level of detail in many of these century-old images. Take for example this photograph, of a crowd gathered in Auburn in 1919 for a ceremony to dedicate a monument commemorating some soldiers killed in 1855 while fighting Indians:

There are so many things to focus on here--the clothing of the spectators, the inscription on the monument ("In memory of Lieutenant Wm. A. Slaughter, Corporals Barry and Clarendon who were killed by Indians 125 feet east of this, December 4, 1855"), the gaggle of children out front, and the stoic old pioneers (including professional pioneer Ezra Meeker) posing so seriously next to the stone:

This is not the ZZ Top reunion

Also admirable is the quality of the metadata that the University of Washington has provided with each image. Under the "Historical Notes" heading is the following:

Engraved on memorial: In memory of Lieutenant Wm. A. Slaughter, Corporals Barry and Clarendon who were killed by Indians 125 feet east of this, December 4, 1855. A crowd of 200 attended the dedication of the monument erected by the Washington State Historical Society at the site north of Auburn, Washington. W.L. Blackwell, president of the Historical Society presided over the event. Rev. C. L. Andrews read a paper on William Slaughter and Frank Cole of Tacoma gave a talk on the history of monuments. Acting Governor Louis F. Hart accepted the monument on behalf of the state and L.C. Smith, County Commissioner accepted it on behalf of King County. Ezra Meeker gave some reminiscences of those days and told of his personal acquaintance with Lt. Slaughter.

The original name of the town of Auburn was Slaughter, in honor of Lieut. William A. Slaughter, who was killed by Indians nearby on December 4, 1855. In 1893, local objection to this name caused the state legislature to substitute the present one. It was named for Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain, from Oliver Goldsmith's poem, The Deserted Village. (Meany, p. 19).

Few archives have the resources to do this level of research on individual images, but for such a significant photograph it is worthwhile.

As wonderful as the photographs are, Content DM remains an abomination. To get a stable URL for the images you have to launch a separate pop-up window. Though you can pan and zoom each photo the navigation is clunky and jerky and it is hard to center your zoom just where you want. Much worse you cannot save the pictures to your hard drive. When you attempt to do so you get some sort of executable file that does not open in standard photo editing software. I had to use screen captures to get the images in this post. These are public records and should be freely available.

Aside from the software, the Panorama Photo collection is a model of digitization best practice as well as a great historical resource.

"Save the MAC" PSA

2011-03-01T22:29:00.000-08:00

The fate of eastern Washington's premiere museum will be decided in the next few weeks. Contact your legislator now.

A Treasure-Trove of Ephemeral Indian Films

2011-02-25T20:28:00.000-08:00

The American Indian Film Gallery is an interesting project. The online collection includes hundreds of films about American Indians, the bulk of them "educational shorts used in American schools from the 1930s to the 1970s." The films are organized by tribe and you can view them online or download them.

These films are archival treasures long buried in obscure vaults, unused and forgotten. But, they are not in perfect. Some were educational shorts used in American schools from the 1930s to the 1970s. Several have abbreviated titles or missing endings. Some are spliced or scratched; others have faded color. But through the mistakes made long ago by schoolroom projectionists, and film stock programmed to lose its coloration, the historical importance of the movies remains compelling. These films are windows into the human past, stunning documents with much to tell us about our New World story.

The native peoples of the Pacific Northwest are well represented in these curious period pieces. Examples:

COEUR D’ALENE

m Coeur D’Alene 1: Cataldo Mission, Indian play drawn from tribal legend
m Coeur D’Alene 2: more of Indian play based on legend
m Coeur D’Alene 3: dancing, more scenes from Indian play

NEZ PERCE

● The Lord’s Prayer: Chief Shatka Bear-Step offers the sacred Christian prayer in Indian sign language

SKOKOMISH (TWANA)

m Skokomish Fish Processing: inside a tribal industry in Washington state

TLINGIT

w Nathan Jackson: interview in 1976 with world’s most famous totem carver

TSIMSHIAN

● People of the Potlatch: Haida and Tsimshian Indians of the Pacific coast of Canada (1936)

The films range from some fairly racist and exploitive "educational" films from the '30s and '40s to films made by the tribes themselves in the '70s. All are the sort of rare ephemera that can be so historically valuable and yet so hard to find. The site was created and is maintained by a retired history professor, J. Fred MacDonald. Thanks Fred!

Bing Crosby is A) a subject for genealogy, B) the first cool white guy, or C) a singing rooster

2011-02-16T12:29:00.000-08:00

The answer is, of course, D) all of the above.

The Heritage Center of the Office of the Washington Secretary of State is sponsoring a genealogy event here in Spokane in a few weeks. More information here. It looks to be an interesting day, with tours of the Gonzaga archives, films and artifacts from Crosby's career, and more.

Crosby was a major figure in American entertainment--perhaps the major figure for the 1940s and 50s, and often does not get his due. A recent Crosby biography described him as "Cool before it was cool to be cool" and "hip before it was hip to be hip," which is about right. And he was a generous humanitarian who never forgot where he came from. Today there is a statue of him in Spokane (with a special removable pipe).

I though I would plug the even here because I work for the Secretary of State, but also because it offers me the opportunity to share with you the most wonderfully weird old cartoon I know, 1944's Swooner Crooner, which features a sing-off between Crosby and a young Frank Sinatra, reimagined as roosters, as they compete for the adulation of adulation of teenage bobby-soxers, reimagined as egg-laying hens:

Wrong Tea Party

2011-01-27T00:12:00.000-08:00

Where do Tea Party members go for vacation? I would have thought Vegas, but turns out is Colonial Williamsburg:

"Amid the history buffs and parents with young children wandering along the crushed shell paths of Virginia's restored colonial city, some noticeably angrier and more politically minded tourists can often be found.

They stand in the crowd listening closely as the costumed actors relive dramatic moments in the founding of our country. They clap loudly when an actor portraying Patrick Henry delivers his 'Give me liberty or give me death' speech. They cheer and hoot when Gen. George Washington surveys the troops behind the original 18th-century courthouse. And they shout out about the tyranny of our current government during scenes depicting the nation's struggle for freedom from Britain."

A short video report is here. This is a fascinating story. So much of the modern Tea Party movement is animated by a willfully distorted vision of the founding era, as Jill Lepore has demonstrated in a recent book and articles (1, 2). Colonial Williamsburg on the other hand tries to faithfully represent the past to the present, though with a lot of compromises. And at the same time, Colonial Williamsburg lives or dies by the number of tourists it attracts to pay the $22.95 q day (winter rate) to explore the recreated Colonial town. It is a classic public history dilemma--what do you do when your visitors don't want historical accuracy? So far the highly-trained interpreperters at Williamsburg seem to be holding firm:

Sometimes, the activists appear surprised when the Founding Fathers don't always provide the "give 'em hell" response they seem to be looking for.

When a tourist asked George Washington a question about what should be done to those colonists who remain loyal to the tyrannical British king, Washington interjected: "I hope that we're all loyal, sir" -- a reminder that Washington, far from being an early agitator against the throne, was among those who sought to avoid revolution until the very end.

When another audience member asked the general to reflect on the role of prayer and religion in politics, he said: "Prayers, sir, are a man's private concern. They are not a matter of public interest. And nor should they be. There is nothing so personal as a man's relationship with his creator."

I did my PhD at William and Mary and have been back to Williamsburg several times since with groups of teachers. I wonder if the influx of Tea-Partiers will change the place?

Historian Forges the Past, Perhaps Permanently

2011-01-24T17:59:00.000-08:00

A strange and sad story from the National Archives broke today: National Archives Discovers Date Change on Lincoln Record.

Washington, DC…Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero announced today that Thomas Lowry, a long-time Lincoln researcher from Woodbridge, VA, confessed on January 12, 2011, to altering an Abraham Lincoln Presidential pardon that is part of the permanent records of the U.S. National Archives. The pardon was for Patrick Murphy, a Civil War soldier in the Union Army who was court-martialed for desertion.

Lowry admitted to changing the date of Murphy’s pardon, written in Lincoln’s hand, from April 14, 1864, to April 14, 1865, the day John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC. Having changed the year from 1864 to 1865, Lowry was then able to claim that this pardon was of significant historical relevance because it could be considered one of, if not the final official act by President Lincoln before his assassination.

NARA made an excellent short video of the discovery:

I think that NARA is handling this potential scandal exactly right by getting it all out into the open and making it a teachable moment. Over at Civil War Memory (where I became aware of this story) in the comments section Kevin Levin wonders how many subsequent historians have used this falsified document in their description of Lincoln's last days. With Google Book Search we can begin to answer the question. Lowry published his research based on the faked document in a 1999 book Don’t Shoot That Boy: Abraham Lincoln and Military Justice. In Google Books I did a search for lincoln + pardon + "patrick murphy" restricted from 1999 to 2011.

As you see there were only three hits, and one of those is Lowry's book. One of the others is Joshua Wolf Shenk's respected Lincoln's Melancholy. Shenk actually uses the false anecdote that Lowry created to offer a poignant counterpoint to Lincoln's pending assassination on the last page of the last chapter:

It is a wonderful piece of historical writing and it is a shame (and no fault of Shenk) that it is not true. Edward Steers makes similar use of the story in his 2005 book Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. "Murphy's case travelled all the way from California through the tangled military bureaucracy to reach Lincoln's desk on April 14," Steers tells us. "Lincoln studied the file and picking up his pen wrote, 'This man is pardoned and hereby discharged from service. A. Lincoln April 14 1865.' Patrick Murphy would live."

This search through Google Books is not definitive--due to copyright most recent books are available only in snippets and sections from the service and others are not available at all. Probably other recent books use the story as well. The sad thing is that now this story--doomed president granting life to a condemned soldier, only to be himself assassinated hours later--will never go away. It is in print and online, and there is no mechanism for recalling or correcting the thousands of copies of the above books. Though training and peer review should keep it out of future academic biographies, other people will find the story and repeat it in History Day presentations and seminar papers and popular biographies. Long after the disgrace of Thomas Lowry is forgotten, his rewriting of our history will endure.

Historic Photographs from the Spokane Public Library

2011-01-22T15:12:00.000-08:00

Here is a great new resource for local history: Spokane Public Library - Northwest Room Digital Collections. "The Northwest Room of Spokane Public Library is pleased to introduce a digital collections page of photographs selected from collections in the Northwest Room. These collections emphasize the most frequently requested subjects in the Northwest Room – the homes, buildings, streets and activities in and around Spokane."

Remains of the Glover/Pioneer Block after the fire of 1889.

So far the collection contains about 350 items, and Northwest Room librarian Riva Dean says that the library plans to add "plenty more." The initial collection includes historic Spokane photographs in six categories: the Spokane Fire (1889), Spokane River, Spokane Views, Spokane Homes, Spokane Parks, Spokane Bridges, and Spokane Streets. Unfortunately the images are provided using ContentDM, which is the industry standard despite being a fairly stodgy piece of commercial software. It presents information adequately but does not allow users to interact with item to add data or offer corrections. (It would be nice, for example, to flag this item, which contains a picture of one Spokane park with a description of a different park, without having to go back to the library webpage and figure out who to email the correction.) It also does not allow users to easily save or export the images or to share them with friends via Facebook or other social media. (I extracted the image on this page using the Picnik extension on the Chrome browser.)

The first set of pictures are delightful, from scenes of the devastating 1889 fire to early street images to intriguing homes (anyone know where this one is?).

It is a shame the site is not more interactive because these are wonderful photographs and could easily become nodes of online discussion about Spokane history. Many have only partial information with them-the dates are unknown, the locations have been forgotten, etc. If there were a discussion area with each photo, patrons could probably help fill in a lot of the missing information.

The Spokane Public Library is doing a real service to its public by making these photographs so easily accessible. I look forward to watching them add to the collection. Of course if you are the impatient type you can just go to the Northwest Room of the Spokane Public Library, where they have a vast collection of primary resources for Spokane History.

Grassroots Campaign Launched To Save The MAC - News Story - KXLY Spokane

2011-01-06T08:12:00.000-08:00

Here is a story from KXLY: Grassroots Campaign Launched To Save The MAC. Have you contacted your legislators yet?

Have you contacted your legislators about the MAC?

2011-01-02T23:09:00.000-08:00

If you visit this blog you know that Washington governor Christine Gregoire has proposed closing the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture to help close the budget deficit. And you have seen the list of legislators and their contact information. Have you contacted your representatives and asked them to save the MAC?

Sculpture on the MAC grounds.

A few emails could really make the difference here. I wrote to everyone on the list and about half responded--and not with some mass email but with personalized responses. And most were positive, promising to fight for the MAC. Democracy works, if you make the effort.

Some c'mon, be a keyboard warrior for history and culture. Don't worry about crafting the perfect letter, just send something. This is a time where volume is more important than quantity. A few sentences are fine. Some points you could make:

The MAC has already laid off 40% of its staff, it has done its part.
The MAC attracts over 100,000 visitors annually including nearly 4,000 K‐12 students.
The MAC is an important contributor to the region’s economy.
The MAC is the only independent state agency east of the Cascades and eastern Washington's premiere cultural institution.

Here is the contact information for member of the Washington State Legislature. Click on an email address and send something off:

Lisa Brown, Ph.D.
3rd District Senator (D)
360-786-7604/509-456-2760
brown.lisa@leg.wa.gov

Kevin Parker
6th District Representative (R)
360-786-7922
parker.kevin@leg.wa.gov

Timm Ormsby
3rd District Representative (D)
360-786-7946/509-458-2122
ormsby.timm@leg.wa.gov

Bob Morton
7th District Senator (R)
360-786-7612/509-684-5132
morton.bob@leg.wa.gov

Andy Billig
3rd District Representative (D)
billig.andy@leg.wa.gov

Joel Kretz
7th District Representative (R)
360-786-7988/509-826-7203
kretz.joel@leg.wa.gov

Bob McCaslin
4th District Senator (R)
360-786-7606
mccaslin.bob@leg.wa.gov

Shelly Short
7th District Representative (R)
360-786-7908
short.shelly@leg.wa.gov

Larry Crouse
4th District Representative (R)
360-786-7820
crouse.larry@leg.wa.gov

Mark Schoesler
9th District Senator (R)
360-786-7620/509-659-1774
schoesler.mark@leg.wa.gov

Matt Shea
4th District Representative (R)
360-786-7984
shea.matt@leg.wa.gov

Susan Fagan
9th District Representative (R)
360) 786-7942
fagan.susan@leg.wa.gov

Michael Baumgartner
6th District Senator (R)
baumgartner.michael@leg.wa.gov

Joe Schmick
9th District Representative (R)
360-786-7844
schmick.joe@leg.wa.gov

John Ahern
6th District Representative (R)
ahern.john@leg.wa.gov

Christine Gregoire
Washington State Governor
PO Box 40002
Olympia, WA 98504-0002
360-902-4111/509-329-2882

"The Heritage Hatchet" in Washington State

2010-12-26T12:02:00.000-08:00

A useful and chilling post over at the Seattle blog Crosscut highlights another blow to history and heritage in the draconian state budget just proposed by Governor Gregoire. The Heritage Capitol Projects fund is to be eliminated, cutting $10 million from state heritage organizations and ending a program that since 1997 has helped fund historic preservation in the state. Crosscut lays out the impact of the decision:

So, the Seattle Theater Group will not get money for improvements to the historic Moore Theater ($531,259); the Museum of History and Industry will not get funds to fix plumbing and ventilation in its new museum space ($1 million), the Seattle Department of Transportation won't get additional funds for restoring King Street Station ($700,000), the Phinney Neighborhood Association won't receive a grant to renovate its historic community center ($994,950), SAM won't get help with new storage space for its collection ($30,890), the Center for Wooden Boats will miss out on money to build its new education center at South Lake Union park ($1,000,000), and Historic Seattle will lose restoration funds for the landmark Washington Hall in the Central District ($470,000).

And the list goes on for projects all over the state: the ship Lady Washington in Gray's Harbor, Tacoma's historic granary at Fort Nisqually, the Officer's Row housing at Ft. Vancouver, the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, the Blue Mountain Heritage Society's Smith Hollow School, the Maryhill Museum near Goldendale, Snoqualmie's railway museum, these and many more will lose out under the current plan.

The actual impact is greater than $10 million because the grants required $2 in matching funds for every state dollar.

As the details of this budget emerge it is clear that we are facing a disaster of historic proportions as the state walks away from maintaining its history and heritage and decides that these are no longer a function of government. Among the other monumental decisions in the budget:

Shut down both the Eastern and the Western Washington State Historical Societies.

Cut all state funding for the parks, many of which are historic parks. The parks will have to sink or swim with whatever recreational and camping fees they can generate (including $5 or $10 to visit a state park), and it is anticipated that many will simply close. Goodbye, Spokane House.

Slashing the budget of the Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation and merging the agency with the Department of Natural Resources.

Eliminate other statewide historic programs including Barn Again, which helps owners identify and maintain the historic barns that define many of our rural areas.

Eliminate the Washington State Arts Commission.

What remains for history and heritage in the state budget? Not much. Though the budget will be cut, the Secretary of State will continue to maintain public records (as required the state constitution) many of which are historic through the state archives. (Full disclosure: I have a half-time appointment with the Washington State Archives.) The Washington State Library will take big cuts but it seems likely it will remain open in some form. Although the Archives and Library preserve historic records, neither offers extensive historical interpretation and outreach like the state historic societies and parks.

We are at a crossroads in Washington State. If we travel down the road the governor has outlined we face a future without a past. Admittedly she has only poor choices--the state budget must be balanced, and voters overturned even a small tax increase on soda pop in the recent elections. And yet there are other places that could be cut in a budget that still includes money for golf courses, state prisons crowded with non-violent offenders, and various big-ticket roads and building projects that, while necessary, could be delayed until the economy improves. The governor's constant refrain, that her only choices are to cut history (or whichever cut she is defending) or eliminate vaccines for poor children is simply not the case.

Please take a moment, right now, to contact your state representatives and protest these cuts. This post on the proposed MAC closure has links and details on how to do so.

Debate Over Little Bighorn Battle Monument

2010-12-19T22:06:00.000-08:00

NY Times: Debate Over Little Bighorn Battle Monument: "A political tug of war has raged between the National Park Service, Custer buffs and Indian tribes over how best to fix a litany of problems with the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, in south central Montana."

"Custer's Last Stand" by Thomas Hart Benton, 1943.

The above is an interesting article about how a decaying infrastructure at the Little Big Horn is forcing interested parties to come up with a compromise solution. The Crow Nation in particular is flexing its political and moral authority over the issue and demanding a leadership role in interpreting and event which is a turning point in their history and happened right on what became their reservation.

The NY Times has an archive of Custer stories that provide background and snapshots of the man's declining historical reputation:

A review of Nathaniel Philbrick's new volume on Custer (Times Verdict: meh.)
A 1997 article about the controversy to build a monument at Little Big Horn dedicated to the Indians killed at that battle. The monument was eventually built.
A 1993 decision to rename George Custer Elementary School to Thurgood Marshall Elementary School. And in his home state of Michigan!
A 1991 article about how what had been Custer Battlefield National Monument had just been renamed Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, to much anger is some quarters.
A 1921 article by Custer's long-surviving widow Libby about how the battle should be remembered.
An 1880 article describing widow Libby Custer's complaints about a statue of her husband erected at West Point (she considered it insufficiently heroic and eventually succeeded in having it removed.)
... and so on, back to this 1876 "Sketch of Gen. Custer" written right after the battle, which informed Times readers that "Major Gen. George A. Custer, who was killed with his whole command while attacking an encampment of Sioux Indians, under command of Sitting Bull, was one of the bravest and most widely known officers in the United States Army." Oh hogwash.
And my absolute favorite, this article about John Martin, who fought with Garibaldi in Italy before immigrating to America, enlisting in the army and becoming one of Custer's buglers. Martin escaped the fate of his company when he was dispatched just before the battle with a message pleading for reinforcements. Later her served in the Spanish American war and eventually became a subway conductor in New York.

You might notice no articles between the late 1920 and the 1980s above. It seems that the Times has put articles from that era back behind a pay wall. I am not sure when this happened or why!

Save the MAC!

2010-12-16T15:03:00.000-08:00

Those of you in Spokane may already know that in her proposed 2011-2013 budget Governor Gregoire has proposed closing the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture. The doors would be closed and the staff would be reduced from 34.8 to 2.8 full-time equivalents--basically someone to mow the lawn. The museum exhibits and the Campbell House would close, the cultural events would end, and the public would lose access to the historic records and collections that the museum holds. The Washington State Historical Society in Tacoma is to get the same treatment. For the historical community in Washington State this is an unprecedented disaster in the making.

State Budget vs. the MAC

The attached statement and supporting documents from the MAC Museum board president relate to the Governor’s budget made public today. Her budget has plans to close the Museum to the public.
How can you help?

1. Contact your elected officials and tell them how important the MAC is to you and this community.

2. Contact five of your friends and ask them to do the same.

3. Become a member of the MAC!

Let your representatives know how important the MAC is to our region and, for the preservation of historical and cultural treasures that can be found nowhere else.

This is just the first step in the budget process. Our legislative delegation has been extremely supportive, and we are working closely with them. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to call.

We are moving full-steam ahead in anticipation of da Vinci exhibit opening on June 3, 2011. Best wishes for a happy holiday season.

Chris Schnug, Museum Board President

509-363-5336

Wanted: Founding Fathers

2010-12-14T14:30:00.000-08:00

Who says there aren't any public history jobs? A friend sent me this advertisement for "Founding Father Performers" at Historic Philadelphia. They don't require singing and dancing abilities but I think those are just assumed for this type of position:

Founding Father Performers, Historic Philadelphia, PA
Posted By HISTPRES On December 10, 2010 (7:06 am) In Other
Historic Philadelphia, Inc. seeks historical interpreters to portray Founding Fathers.

Thomas Jefferson: mid-late 20s/early 30s; at least 5’10”; Virginia accent; red hair preferred

John Adams: 40s/50s; no taller than 5’8”

Benjamin Franklin: 60s/70s

George Washington: 40s/50s; at least 6’; athletic build preferred

Alexander Hamilton: 20s/30s at least 5’8”

Part-time paid work, April through October, 2011; could be extended.
Rehearsals – $12/hour.
Performance – min. $50/show.
Housing/Transportation not included.
To Apply:
Auditions by invitation only; held in mid-January 2011. For more information visit www.historicphiladelphia.org.
HPI is an Equal Opportunity Employer.
Send picture (in .jpg or .jpeg form) and resume (in .pdf, .doc or .docx form) to auditions@historicphiladelphia.org – or via U.S. mail to
Historic Philadelphia, Inc.
Attn: Auditions
150 S. Independence Mall West Suite 550
Philadelphia, PA 19106
DO NOT CALL OR DROP IN WITHOUT AN APPOINTMENT
Deadline: 01/08/2011

A Digital Toolbox for Graduate Students in History

2010-12-07T09:48:00.000-08:00

Readers, help me out here. What does a 21st century graduate student need to know in the way of digital tools and resources? I am trying to develop a presentation for incoming students in our graduate program in history. Here is my list so far, what should I add? I am trying to identify both tools and the minimum skill set that students should try to master with each.

Students need to master the Google search engine. They should know how to search for phrases, exclude certain terms, filter by date range, search within a domain, use the cache to view expired pages, and how to frame a good query in the first place. I am surprised how many students who grew up with Google don't know these things.
Google Books is the historian's boon companion, offering access to millions of books, searchable and sometimes downloadable. Students should master the advanced search features, be able to set up their own libraries, and be able to share, save, and organize what they find. Students should also know the other big book/content projects, Archive.org, the Hathi Trust, and Open Library.
Zotero is a citation manager and so much more that helps tame the information overflow of the web. Students should be able to set up a Zotero account, sync their files, create Zotero items for items in multiple formats, create a library and share it with other Zotero users.
Students should use an RSS reader to simplify keeping track of blogs and other changing information. (I love this Common Craft video, RSS Readers in Plain English. I have been using Google for this but I suspect there are better solutions. Should I recommend Feedly? Help me out here.
Students need to be able to capture, edit, save and organize images. They should be able to use a digital camera to take notes in the archives, back up and share their photos online, and capture images from websites. My preferred tools are Picasa and Picnik.
Dropbox is the preferred online backup for your files. Did I ever tell you about the friend whose laptop with two year's worth of dissertation research was stolen? Fortunately she had backed up her files--on disks that she kept in her laptop case. Don't let this happen to you.
Twitter is an important source for finding sharing information and Tweetdeck seems to be the best management tool.
Finally, I want to have a section about managing your online presence. Students should have a professional email address that is a recognizable version of their first and last names (and really, it should be Gmail), should have accounts at LinkedIn and Academia.edu, and should consider blogging and Tweeting--or least claiming their real name on Twitter if it is not too late. More importantly students should learn how not to leave incriminating evidence online. Future employers are not going to be impressed with how wasted you got in Cancun or by those photos of your new tattoo.

Wow, the above list is already longer and more intimidating than I wanted it to be. And yet I don't want to leave anything out. Please post your comments and suggestions below.

Briefly Noted

2010-12-01T13:26:00.000-08:00

Some things that I wish I had more time to explore:

Memento is an experimental "time machine right in your web browser . . . [to] . . . explore content from a date in the past" according to the Library of Congress.
Google Earth 6 is turning heads (see above)with its scary-good integration of street view into the virtual world. But not all the street views available in Google Maps show up in Earth yet.
Building on Google Earth 6, HistoryPin allows you to "pin your history to the world" by inserting historic photographs into the street view. I am so going to do this with a class.
Did you see where the FCC came out today with a very strong statement of support for net neutrality? Change I can believe in.
...and I have been meaning to tell you all that my employer, the Washington State Archives, Digital Archives, is tweeting. I mostly write the tweets, and so far they have focused on exploring the 92 million digital objects in our collection. I may be a while. Follow us here.

History of USSR for children

2010-11-23T12:16:00.000-08:00

If I taught Russian history I would show this at the final exam, hand out blue books, and tell the students to analyze it:

Type your summary hereType rest of the post here

Briefly Noted: 1,800-Year-Old Roman Army Knife

2010-11-18T08:43:00.000-08:00

Did you know that the Romans invented the Swiss Army knife? I did not. This museum page has additional examples of what appears to have been a common Roman implement.

Guest Post: Two faces of public history in Seattle

2010-11-10T19:46:00.000-08:00

[My friend Katrina Gulliver came through the great Northwest last month. Being a hip digital type she blogged a few of her observations and has graciously allowed me to cross post this excellent piece from her blog Notes from the Field. The original post is here.]

During my recent visit to Seattle, I saw two sides of what many people experience as "public history". The first was Ye Olde Curiosity Shop. Located near the tourist destination of Pike Place Market, this century-old establish is an example of public history in a form that was once much more common. They have on display various items of the "freak show" variety (shrunken heads, deformed farm animals) as well as old-fashioned amusement machines (still operational!) such as an eighteenth-century animated diorama of a murder, and Stereoscope pictures.

Of course it is primarily a retail establishment more than a museum, and they sell quite a range of items, from scrimshaw to candy.

Most intriguing of their exhibits were the two "mummies" they had on display. They are both described as cases of natural environmental desiccation of a body. Their most famous, named "Sylvester" is as they describe it the body of a prospector, felled by a bullet, and found out West in the 1880s. He is naked but for some kind of cloth around his hips; judging from older photos it has been changed.

A card gives their explanation of his history. He bears a visible bullet hole, and the scars from older injuries involving buckshot, but little is known about him.

Interestingly, and contra the information on the wall beside him, some scientific analysis of Sylvester have suggested he is not what he seems. As this article details, there is evidence indicating that he was not a natural mummification at all, but was treated with an embalming technique involving arsenic. Intriguingly, the article says this was popular among late nineteenth-century sideshow exhibitors: perhaps he was created for public display?

The female mummy they name "Sylvia", and is a woman from Latin America who died in the early nineteenth-century - presumably from natural causes. She still wears the stockings and shoes in which she was buried. Is it wrong for this (presumably) Catholic woman's remains to be on display? If Sylvester and Sylvia were indigenous, it would be illegal now for them to be used as museum exhibits. But for European dead people, is it ok? I don't know. I'm white, and would I be disturbed and offended if a member of my family were displayed like that? Hell yes. But I was still gawping at these two like everyone else....

Next, to the more respectable end of public history, the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park.
Obviously not in the Klondike, but in Seattle which was the starting point for a vast number of prospectors heading North in the stampede following the discovery of gold in 1897.
In a downtown building, the former Cadillac Hotel, this museum is partly underground - suiting the mining theme.

We were given a knowledgeable introduction by the Ranger on duty, Gene Ritzinger. He was wonderfully well informed about the history of the gold rush and the region. One display is a recreation of a provisions store: regulations put in place by the Canadian authorities decreed that everyone arriving in the Klondike had to be carrying supplies for one year.

The museum is very well laid out, with something of interest for children and adults, with games like this "Strike it Rich". The informational chart, however, implies a gender parity of those heading for the goldfields, when in fact women were in the minority.

Other activities including pencil rubbing of seals - this is a nice touch, and a way of providing something hands-on without resorting to stupid games.

The information about particular miners includes artefacts like the diary and camera of William Shape (a wealthy New Yorker who seems to have gone for the adventure as much as the pursuit of gold).

I also learned that John Nordstrom used the money he made in the goldfields to establish his first store in Seattle, which later became the major department store chain bearing his name.

There is a documentary film about the gold rush from 1973 narrated by Hal Holbrook. It has colour photos (hand tinted, I assume) and also utilises the "Ken Burns" technique of moving focus across these images to tell the story. Engaging, and informative, without condescending to the viewer.
The Klondike rush is an interesting phenomenon in itself - and not one I knew a great deal about beyond Jack London-esque images. The fact that it was very much a result of modern communications (that thousands of people knew of the gold discovery almost immediately, and the transcontinental railroad allowed them to quickly make their way to the West Coast - a great contrast with the slow journeys of '49ers). It was an arduous and unsuccessful journey for most - only 1 in 5 even made it as far as prospecting.

Many of those who returned stayed in Seattle, and were able to memorialise the stampede by forming clubs, staying in touch - and becoming a civic force in their own right. Modern urban life and technology allowed them to make this event part of their public identity.

Submit a Cliopatria Award Nomination

2010-11-07T10:50:00.000-08:00

The History News Network seeks nominations for its 2010 Cliopatria awards for best history blogs. Each year the award is given in the categories of Best Group Blog, Best Individual Blog, Best New Blog, Best Post, Best Series of Posts, and Best Writer. If you are a supporter of history blogging, please take a minute and nominate a few of your favorites. Northwest History won Best Individual blog in 2008, it was very gratifying and made a real positive difference in my career.

I am still thinking about some of the categories but my nominations so far are as follows:

Best Individual Blog: Boston 1775. Billed as "History, analysis, and unabashed gossip about the start of the American Revolution in Massachusetts," the blog is really much more than that. Blogger J.L. Bell does primary source blogging, reporting his latest historical discovery as is it were today's news. Along the way he provides a master class in the use on online primary databases. And he frequently promotes local history gatherings (I should do more of that) and offers a scholarly perspective on current events such as the Tea Party movement. When I won the Cliopatria two years ago my first thought was "Dang, J.L. Bell has been robbed!"

Best Group Blog: Preservation Nation, the blog of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It shows how an "official" blog of a major organization can be relevant and compelling. Of course if someone wanted to nominate Off the Wall, the National Council on Public History blog to which I contribute, I would not object.

And by the way if you are looking for quality history blogs to add to your RSS feed you might take a look at past winners of the Cliopatria award.

Fake Patrick Henry Quote Found

2010-10-31T21:40:00.000-07:00

A followup to my recent post Patrick Henry Said What?, here is a good fact check of another spurious Henry quote: Fake Patrick Henry Quote Found : Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Know Your War, Part 2

2010-10-28T11:08:00.001-07:00

(Part 1 here.)