Briefly Noted

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?

Vanished Rural Schools of Spokane County

As part of a research project I had my student James Dupey take a 1927 atlas of Spokane county and make a Google map of all the old rural schools. These would have been one-room schools. The map reminds of us of the pervasiveness of this vanished institution:


View Rural Schools of Eastern Washington in a larger map

Mapping these mostly vanished sites is just the first step in what I hope will become a larger historical project involving one room schools in eastern Washington. The next step is to gather information. Another student, Michelle Reid, compiled a bibliography for researching the schools. We are also building a database of organizations that have archival information about the schools. The Eastern Region Branch of the State Archives, for example, has attendance records for almost all of the schools in eastern Washington, along with some architectural drawings for Spokane County schools and some teacher employment documents for Adams County in the early 1900s. Many small local historical societies have important caches of historic records and photographs as well.

What next?
We recently submitted an application for an NEH grant to carry what we are calling the Rural Schools Project forward. If it is funded, we will work with rural heritage organizations to host some public events to build interest in the project. We will scan documents in both public and private hands and put them online. We will conduct oral history interviews with people who attended and taught at these schools (and there are quite a few--some of these schools survived into the 1950s). Ultimately, we would like to create podcast tours that vistors could take that would lead them to the sites of some of these schools, providing historic information along the way. In addition all the information we gather will be geotagged and appear on the above map, so by clicking on a school you will bring up historic documents, photographs, and oral interviews from that school.

If the NEH doesn't bite, there are some other grants for which we will apply. The project could even move forward as part of a class if I can find the time to teach it.


If you have any information or leads on the rural schools of eastern Washington, please post it here.

Mapping Seattle's Lost Landscapes

Founded on Indian ground by American settlers in 1851, Seattle is one of the most dramatically engineered cities in the United States. Its shorelines have been extended, lagoons filled, hills flattened and rivers re-routed. Built on an active geological fault near a large volcano, Seattle has also been jolted by huge earthquakes, washed by tsunammis, covered by volcanic mud and ash, fluted by glaciers and edged by rising seas. Enter here to glimpse this history through The Waterlines Project.

This attractive site from the Burke Museum takes a geographical approach to Seattle history.  At the core of the project are some neat GIS layers of traditional and historical shorelines, rivers, and other geographic features along with historic maps and place marks for significant sites. But GIS and the web are like oil and water, so the maps are rendered in flash (at least that is what I think is going on). I am not fond of flash but this site is really well-done, at least once you give up on trying to download anything and realize that the right click is no longer what you think. Fortunately a Maps and Images section provides downloadable copies of many (though not all) of the images used in the flash site.

The Duwamish River section (I would link, but it's Flash so I can't) has the richest collection of map overlays. On a modern map of Seattle you can click boxes to superimpose important native sites, maps of the shoreline at different eras, and maps showing how the rivers have been rerouted. Each layer brings up new interpretive paragraphs and a map key.

Waterlines is an ongoing project and will be more than a website: "In planning stages now are physical exhibits to be placed at sites in downtown Seattle and electronic broadcasts to handheld devices." Sounds great!

[Top Image: Plan of city during Battle of Seattle, 1856, Courtesy of University of Washington Libraries Image number: 2002.3.54.]

Mapping Historic Sounds at the British Library

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.

You can read more about the Archival Sound Recording Project here or on the project blog. This post comes via the JISC Digitisation blog.

London V2 Rocket Sites...Mapped in Google Maps

Here is a really neat history project on Google Maps, an interactive map of London showing where each V-2 rocket landed during the war. London V2 Rocket Sites...Mapped: "Autumn 1944, and London was under attack from space. Hitler's 'vengeance' rocket, the V-2, was the world's first ballistic missile, and the first man-made object to make a sub-orbital spaceflight. Over 1400 were launched at Britain, with more than 500 striking London. Each hit caused devastation. The 13 tonne rocket impacted at over 3000 miles per hour. There was no warning; the missile descended faster than the speed of sound and survivors would only hear the approach and sonic booms after the blast . . . ."

"These famous tragedies are well documented, but over 500 rocket strikes, many with significant death toll, remain obscure. We've mapped out some of the impact sites above, with more to follow when we can access further information. Make sure you zoom in and check satellite view. Commonly, an area hit by a V-2 is now covered with a car park or 1960s housing estate. These areas are usually devoid of mature trees, and still stand out over 60 years on."

Here is a direct link to the map. This sort of project is not that difficult to do. A teacher and students would create a Google Map of any sort of historical event that lends itself to a geographic presentation. Journeys of famous explorers, the locations of cemeteries and historic sites, battles in a particular war, the life journey of an individual, or historic photos of your own community can become a Google map!

Via Metafilter, as so often is the case here!

Marco! Polo!

Here is fun project at the blog Indulgence & Sin: A Historian's Craft.

Blogger and grad student Rachel Leow has a copy of Marco Polo's Travels, and an internet connection and she is not afraid to use them. The result is a fun use of Google Maps, an illustrated journey of Marco Polo with photographs and illustrations pulled off the web and links to relevant websites for many of the places mentioned by the explorer. Here is a direct link to her full scale Google map.

This approach has a lot of potential, especially for teachers. So many history topics could be explored geographically--exploration, famous journeys, wars and battles, historic trails, historic sites in a community. Google Maps offers a way to have students work on a collaborative project that is much greater than the sum of its parts.