Friend Pecay (of BibliOdyssey fame) tipped me off to a great resource: Wyoming Newspaper Project. "Available through this website are all the newspapers printed in Wyoming between 1849 and 1922, in an easily searchable format." All Wyoming newspapers through 1922! I mean, we know that Wyoming is sparsely populated but that is still an amazing feat. Half of the 900,000 images are online right now with the rest to follow over a few months.
This digital archive has a plain but useful user interface with strong search and browse features. You can search or browse, including browsing by city (and it is fun to see what little hamlets once had newspapers). In my experience the site is still a bit shaky, so if your search fails just come back later and try again.
All the newspapers for an entire state! What a resource this is for historians of Wyoming and the American West.
As the official numbers on the 2010 Obama budget request are released it is clear that history largely missed out on the stimulus. For most of the programs that benefit history, funding is flat or only slightly increased over previous years. The exceptions are the NEH and the National Park Service, but even there the increases are far short of the billions and billions of stimulus infrastructure being doled out around the country. Some examples from the National Coalition for History:
The National Archives & Records Administration will get a 1.5% increase from $460 million to $466.9 million.
History would have been a natural for stimulus funding, with so many worthy digital and oral history projects in need of funding. Some of us called for a new Federal Writer's Project just as Obama came into office. Unfortunately our national organizations remained on the sidelines as the stimulus bill was drafted. We missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!
An unanticipated effect of the digital turn in history is a resurgence of historical geography. Maps are a visual organization scheme that everyone understands instantly. And tools like Google Maps make it easy to display metadata in a geographic format.
A beautiful example of this trend is the Archival Sound Recordings page at the British Library has a neat feature--several series of sound recordings mapped on a Google map so you can explore the collections geographically, based on where each recording was made. "Explore selected collections of spoken word, and human and natural environments using our interactive maps," the library promises.
Pictured is a screen shot of the Accents and Dialects sound map, featuring "700 recordings from the Millennium Memory Bank and the Survey of English Dialects." Clicking on a balloon brings a popup with information about the interviews available from that location. Clicking on an interview description takes you to a new window with an audio player and metadata. Also available in this mapped format are wildlife and soundscape recordings from Britain, music from India and Uganda, and a whole mess of noisy frogs.
The latest upgrade to the Washington State Digital Archives (my employer, BTW) makes all the photographs and audio records browseable for the first time. Hooray! Here is a list of the photographic collections we currently have online. If you click on any collection you will be taken to a collection description and a search page. From the search page click on "Browse all records in the collection" to open a browsable page of the photographs. Though browsing also works in any results for a search for photographs.
The browsing interface--designed by WSDA employees Adam Miller and Bryan Smith--is slick. Click on any image and it pops up with a descriptive caption, a link to a page with all the meta data and a larger image, and arrows to browse forward or back in the collection. The old system produced only text results for image searches, and you would have to click through two screens to see the images, and two back to return to the search results.
Browsable photographs make the Digital Archives more usable to the citizens of Washington State. And to your humble blogger. As I explore the collections I will share additional photos such as the one above.
I was doing some research this week on Buffalo Bill and the Indians (more on that later) and came across a delightful story in the New York Times that I want to share.
In the summer of 1886 Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show set up camp at Erastina, Staten Island. (The picture on this page is some members of the Wild West show at the Erastina camp in an 1888 tour.) Cody was just back from a triumphant tour of Europe and announced the arrival of the Wild West show in New York with a Manhattan parade. "Everything is on a big scale," The New York Herald enthused, "The arena is like a monster circus ring. Around it the long rows of seats rise high one above another. Gleaming in a grove at one side are the white tents of the Indians, painted over with fantastic designs."
Among these fantastic Indians was a Pawnee man whom the New York Times identified as "Pushaluck." (The name might be comic invention--I can no other references to the man outside of these articles in the Times.) Pushaluck was described as "the best looking fellow in the camp, not excepting the Europeans and Americans." He spoke, the Times noted, "a little English and a great deal of Indian."
Enter romance. "A comely damsel of 19 summers," (and from New Jersey) began to hang around the camp. She seemed to be "riveted upon the fascinating person" of Pushaluck, who in turn "lingered as near the comely young damsel as duty and fences permitted." The other performers began to fear that their companion "had fallen a victim to New Jersey's charms." But before they could intervene, the unlikely couple slipped out of camp to elope!
Cody, it was reported, was in a "towering rage" when he heard of the elopement--not out of any 19th century opposition to interracial marriage, but because it might worsen his always contentious relationship with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Cody had a contract with the BIA to return his Indian performers to the reservation "in good order" at the end of the season. "To return Pushaluck as a Benedict would not be, in Buffalo Bill's opinion, to return him in good order," the Times noted.
["A Benedict" is 19th century slang for a confirmed bachelor newly married, taken from the character Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing.]
Cody hired detectives to hunt down the lovebirds. In the interlude a Times editorialist took the opportunity to draw a historical lesson from the event in a piece titled "A Modern Indian." "Day by day," the Times declared, "new and touching illustrations of the progress of civilization are made known, and each succeeding edition of the census shows a wider spread of sweetness and light among the people . . . . Already he [the Indian] is the rival of civilized man in his capacity for firewater, and his noble devotion to aged and decrepit silk hats." The writer also praised Indians for their "enterprise in the amusement business . . . digging up the hatchet and gliding through the dizzy mazes of the war dance for a reasonable share of the gross receipts at the box office."
Taking great liberties with the paper's own reporting of the event, the editorialist praised Pushaluck who went "alone to the wigwam of a Newark white chief, sang his song under the window, won the heart of the daughter of the house, and eloped with her after the manner of his good white brothers." After a long passage contrasting this modern development with "the old-time custom as set by trusty authors in graphic tales" the editorial concludes that Pushaluck "may further fit himself for the age and country in which he lives by deserting her and running away with some other gentleman's wife."
Cody's detectives caught up with the pair three days after they disappeared--the searchers finding that "an Indian in native costume, accompanied by a white girl, was not a hard object to trace." The two had been married "in regular orthodox English fashion" in Philadelphia, where they were found honeymooning "in a boarding house on Ninth Street that is much patronized by 'freaks.'"
Pushaluck was convinced to return to the show, and the young woman to her parent's Jersey home. Their separation was a "quite affecting" sight, according to the Times, and the two made plans to reunite at the end of the season and go together to live on the reservation. "Mrs. Pushaluck is reported to have a considerable sum of money, and Pushaluck is looking forward to great honor and many ponies on the reservation," according to the Times. Pushaluck and his bride refused to reveal her maiden name accoring to the Times, and Pushaluck in particular "is not at all inclined to converse about the matter."
And there the story ends--for now. I can find no reference to a Pawnee Indian named Pushaluck anywhere except in these three NY Times articles, and a few secondary sources in Google Books that cite the times articles. Tomorrow I will explore the meaning of the story a little more.
Note: This post was originally made on February 25, 2008. Then within a few days, the resource disappeared. Just today I noticed that the TimesMachine is back so I am reposting this. Enjoy!
Never mind that whole thinly-sourced-story-about-McCain- and-the-blond-lobbyist thing. The New York Times has just redeemed itself, by introducing the TimesMachine. "TimesMachine can take you back to any issue from Volume 1, Number 1 of The New-York Daily Times, on September 18, 1851, through The New York Times of December 30, 1922. Choose a date in history and flip electronically through the pages, displayed with their original look and feel."
The Times opened its archives a few months ago, apparently deciding that the potential revenue from click ads would outweigh the loss of access fees to the old Times Select system. The Times archives are a magnificent resource, but the search and navigation features left a lot to be desired. and the articles were served up one at a time. The reader never got the heady sense of exploring a historic newspaper that one gets from rolling the microfilm in the library. (Of course, microfilm is not key word searchable . . . ) TimesMachine presents the newspapers they way they were meant to be read, as a unified whole. It also makes it easier to put events in context.
(Oooops--TimesMachine seems to be down right now, I will post this anyway and perhaps return later to flesh out the post with some specific PNW content.)
UPDATE: It is gone! I can't find out what happened to TimesMachine, but I am guessing it was just overwhelmed by users and the Times took it off line. Here is hoping that the service will return soon.
I just wanted to point out this great roundup of materials relating to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic at the AHA Today blog. The post includes primary sources, pictures, video and lesson plans.
This crumbling WW2 era hanger at Wendover Air Force base is where a select group of B-29 pilots trained for a top secret mission--to drop atomic bombs on Japan. The base retains much of the original historic fabric of that era, not just the Enola Gay hanger but bomb storage facilities, barracks, a period control tower, and today a small museum dedicated to the atomic mission and the larger history of the base. Today, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named this hanger one of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places. (You can read a story and see a nice video about the hanger here.)
Should we care? There is tension in historic preservation between preserving places where historic events happened and preserving buildings that are themselves historic (it helps if they are architecturally impressive or quaint as well). Over the years preservation efforts have very much tended to preserve the later--the homes of presidents, historic sites of government, exemplary architecture, etc. Undistinguished-looking but important places have fared less well--the great exception being the historic battle fields that are preserved by both federal and state agencies. But there has to have been a battle! Something like the Fishkill Encampment and Supply Depot, "a sprawling military city that became the most important northern supply center during the Revolutionary War," becomes the site of a shopping mall. So where does this put the Enola Gay hanger? The Wendover site is the scene of historically important events, but is neither impressive nor pretty. Also working against its preservation is that it represents a chapter in American history about which we have at best ambivalent feelings. How would we interpret Wendover Atomic Historical Monument? The current interpretation at the small museum there tends to stay close to the facts and events that led up to and took place at the base, without asking too many uncomfortable questions about the bombing itself. In the post Enola Gay controversy public history world, that is probably the best we can do.
And if we are trying to memorialize the atomic effort, where do we put those memorials? The Manhattan Project and the bombing of Japan has many geographic focuses, and the story changes depending on where you choose to tell it. It is a different story at Wendover than it is at Hiroshima, and still a different story at the University of Chicago where Enrico Fermi worked or at Los Alamos. Add to these places Oak Ridge where the nuclear material was processed, Trinity where the first test bomb was detonated, Tinian Island where the pilots took off to drop the bombs on Japan, or any of the dozens of other sites relevant to the story. Which sites do we interpret? Most of these sites are interpreted right now, from a Henry Moore sculpture in Chicago to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial.
I could go either way on the Enola Gay hangar. The hangar is huge, and the rest of the site even larger, and it would take millions of dollars just to stabilize, never mind properly interpret, the site. And would anyone visit after all that investment? Located on the Arizona-Utah line, Wendover is far from modern population centers. On the other hand it is along a busy interstate highway, so if you used the hanger to house some of the cool objects that people like to see--some restored a period planes, uniforms and other military objects--it might be fairly popular. If history hadn't missed out on the stimulus money, I would say to go for it.
A Compendium of Digital Collections: "The goal of this project is to connect researchers with digital collections on topics of interest to them. The guide includes brief descriptions of and links to digital collections (digital projects, digital initiatives, digital libraries, etc.) created by libraries, archives, government agencies, and other institutions. Projects included cover a wide variety of subjects and digital formats, but collections that are search-able, easy to navigate, contain primary sources, and allow unrestricted use of materials are given first consideration..."
This highly useful and focused blog from the UNH Library Digital Collections Initiative is devoted to highlighting the latest digital collections. Every week sees a new historic digital collection launched somewhere, and no one can keep track of them. This blog began as my own attempt to keep abreast of digital history efforts that relate to the Pacific Northwest, but even with that narrow focus I don't feel that I am keeping up.
A Compendium of Digital Collections features a clean design and a simple formula. The title of each post is the name of the featured collection. This is followed by the URL and a one paragraph description of the collection. That is it--no commentary or editorializing, on to the next post. Right now the blog features Sheet Music from Indiana, the Mountain West Digital Library (from which the image of the petroglyphs here is borrowed), and the Digital Library of the Caribbean. The site makes limited use of tags, but they are tags across a variety of blogs--so for example clicking on the native-american-history tag brings you a results page with a lot of content from other blogs that is not very good. Fortunately you can also sort the Compendium of Digital Collections archive by clicking on the box on the left that reads "Select Category." Choosing Native American History from the drop down list gets you only the relevant posts on the Compendium of Digital Collections blog.
This is really a useful site--I've added it to my RSS reader and will exploring it at length.
This useful post over at the estimable AHA Today blog highlights a resource that sounds far more useful than it actually is: YouTube - EDU Directory. The EDU Directory brings together all of the programs and channels posted to YouTube from universities. Great, right? Well, maybe. The content is a mixed bag. A look through the thumbnails and titles of the videos on the EDU landing page tell the story. Most are either sporting events, promotional videos, or videos of public talks or round tables (few of them featuring historians).
And try finding anything. I went to the Brandeis University channel because I listened to a good podcasted lecture from David Hackett Fischer this morning. Brandeis has 67 videos online at YouTube, but their page offers no sorting or guide. Most of the video are not lectures at all but Brandeis promotional pieces and recordings of public talks and concerts around campus. All well and good, but disappointing for the history fan dreaming of finding a full semester of Fischer's lectures. You can search, but the YouTube search function is a blunt instrument, with no advanced search capabilities. So I searched for "history" and found 4 videos--all PR videos from Brandeis. A search for "Fischer" came up with nothing.
The whole EDU portal is like that--there may be some great content (and AHA Today found some) but it is buried beneath the near-random pile of stuff that is YouTube. YouTube would work a lot better if channel owners could provide some categorization, or if it allowed user tagging.
Bottom Line: No matter how good some of the content, YouTube is not currently a good archive for history materials.
My Introduction to Public History course finished up with student presentations of their final projects. I gave students the option of writing a traditional paper or doing a digital final project and most of them chose the latter. Digital history was brand new to all of them and yet they did some fine work. As I watched them present I thought to myself--Hey! I have a blog! I should share some of this stuff.
Three of my students became interested in rephotography and created websites to present their work. Amber Chapin used Blogger to create a website: Kirtland Cutter Architecture: Then and Now. Cutter, was Spokane's most prominent architect of the late 19th and early 20th century and designed homes for the city elites as well as commercial buildings and even bridges. I like the way that Chapin found not only historic photographs but also blueprints for many of the Cutter buildings, and how she explored a variety of his work, not just the grand residences for which he is so locally famous.
James Dupey too quite a different tack in his project Historic Hillyard. Built as a depot town for James J. Hill's Great Northern Railroad in the late 19th century, Hillyard hit hard times as the railroad pulled out in the early 20th century and is today one of the most depressed neighborhoods in the state. But sometimes economic depression is the friend of preservation, and 85% of the historic buildings of Hillyard still stand.
Chris Hendee did a rephotography project focused on Racine, Wisconsin. Racine, Hendee tells us, has always been a town of immigrants who brought an eclectic mix of architectural styles to the community. I was impressed by how much of the historic fabric is intact.
Michele Reid drew on her connections with Great Falls, Montana and her thesis research to create a fifteen-minute historical documentary film, Red Stars on the Horizon: The Seventh Ferrying Group in World War II. The Seventh Ferrying Group was composed on pilots, some of them women, who flew airplanes from American factories to the Soviet Union as part of the Lend-Lease program in World War Two.
Finally Meagan Yapp used Google Sites to create a simple website to host her interviews with women veterans. The website is a bit rough but the interviews are excellent.
It was fun watching the students stretch their abilities and practice history in new ways. They agreed that a digital project turned out to be more work than they had bargained for, but was very satisfying. At the same time I will make some changes next time around. Some of the projects presented history digitally but did very little analysis, as a teacher I need to emphasize the importance of interpretation. I wish I had pushed the geographic turn in digital history a bit more--most of the projects could have integrated a map function. And I need to emphasize more strongly the need for credits and attributions in student projects.
This quarter I am teaching Digital History for the first time and will be raising the bar for the students--stay tuned!
Well, this is a day that has been a long time in coming. The Library of Congress has been working for several months now so that we could “do YouTube right.” When you’re the stewards of the world’s largest collection of audiovisual materials (some 6 million films, broadcasts and sound recordings), nothing less would be expected of you, and our own YouTube channel has now gone public.
We are starting with more than 70 videos, arranged in the following playlists: 2008 National Book Festival author presentations, the Books and Beyond author series, Journeys and Crossings (a series of curator discussions), “Westinghouse” industrial films from 1904 (I defy you to watch some of them without thinking of the Carl Stalling song “Powerhouse”), scholar discussions from the John W. Kluge Center, and the earliest movies made by Thomas Edison, including the first moving image ever made (curiously enough, a sneeze by a man named Fred Ott).
There is not a ton of material there yet, let alone Northwest material, but I did find this wonderful snipped of some unidentified Plains Indians who worked for Buffalo Bill doing a buffalo dance:
I see that the LOC has disabled comments on the videos! I am a bit surprised--not very 2.0 of them!
Belfer Cylinders Digital Connection - Syracuse University Library: "The Belfer Cylinders Digital Connection provides online access to digital audio files of cylinders in the Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive. Belfer’s cylinder collection includes over 22,000 cylinders, 12,000 of which are unique titles. The goal of this digitization project is to provide 6,000 audio files by 2010."
This is a really nicely done site--clean and easy to search and navigate, with abundant metadata. And you may download the songs as MP3s! They should have a podcast or two of songs from the collection.
There is no northwest content that I could find at the site but there are a lot of songs on historical topics. A keyword search for "war" brings up fascinating WW1 nuggets such as the instrumental Battle of the Marne the rousing Are we downhearted - no! and the touching My Bugler boy. And don't miss the Scottish Wit and Humor category--which reminds me of Robert Darnton's oft-quoted point that "When you realize that you are not getting something—a joke, a proverb, a ceremony—that is particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it."
I am just back from the annual conference of the National Council on Public History. It was in Providence this year and though it was chill and rainy (see picture) it was a great and inspiring conference. There were many sessions on digital history projects and I will feature many of them on this blog over the next few weeks.
In 2010 the American Society for Environmental History and the National Council on Public History willmeet together at the Hilton Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Portland was recently named the nation's mostsustainable city by The SustainLane US City Rankings and our conference will be held in the heart ofdowntown, with cafes, restaurants, several historic districts, and a river trail within easy walkingdistance. While many conference events will be shared, the two organizations will offer separate but coordinated programs. Both organizations invite panel, roundtable, workshop, working group, paper,and poster proposals for the conference.
The University of Nebraska at Lincoln is angling to make a place for itself at the digital history table. Their website Digital History has some excellent resources. As UNL describes it:
Digital history is an emerging and rapidly changing academic field. The purpose of this site is to educate scholars and the public about the state of the discipline by providing access to:
Presentations about the field by noted scholars
Interviews with scholars about topics related to digital history
Information about many aspects of digital history, including reviews of major online projects and reviews of tools which may be of use to digital historians
A clearinghouse of current events and news items of interest
A selected bibliography of Digital History resources
And more!
Some of these sections have yet to be filled in. The review of tools for instance contains exactly two reviews, and none for Omeka or Zotero. But the essays are excellent, and I really love the video interviews with leading digital historians such as John Lutz, William Turkel, and Ed Ayers.
What jumps out at me here, more than the site itself, is who is built it. The University of Nebraska Lincoln graduate program in history has an excellent reputation as a training ground for scholars of the American West--but it was not much noted beyond that sub discipline. They seem to be using digital history non-traditional way of moving up the rankings. And good for them. When one thinks of the other emerging leaders in digital history one sees the same thing--George Mason University, which houses the incredible Center for History and New Media, was not on most people's radar screens before they started their digital programs.
The leaders in the traditional ways of training historians, the big graduate programs of the Ivies and R-1s, are not going to be the leaders in the new wave. This is a similar model to what happened in my other field, public history, where it was second tier institutions who saw the need and opportunities most clearly and were able to create the leading programs.
