Henry David Thoreau, Climatologist

A fasinating article from the New York Times about a group of researchers using Thoreau's journals to map climate change:

"On average, common species are flowering seven days earlier than they did in Thoreau’s day, Richard B. Primack, a conservation biologist at Boston University, and Abraham J. Miller-Rushing, then his graduate student, reported this year in the journal Ecology . . . 27 percent of the species documented by Thoreau have vanished from Concord and 36 percent are present in such small numbers that they probably will not survive for long. Those findings appear in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“It’s targeting certain branches in the tree of life,” Dr. Davis said. “They happen to be our most charismatic species — orchids, mints, gentians, lilies, iris.”

Of the 21 species of orchids Thoreau observed in Concord, “we could only find 7,” Dr. Primack said."

(Photograph of Walden Pond from the Walden Woods Project website.)

A Roundup of Very Early Films of Cities

Check this out--London, 1904:



This is a fragment of a film made by an American, Charles Urban, and was just recently discovered in an Australian archive. I learned about the film from this post on Metafilter. And the great thing about Metafilter is how when someone posts something cool, other members add their own related links in the comments. So courtesy of Metafilter let's take a tour of turn-of-the-last-century cities around the world, through film:


Here is another Charles Urban film, of the Indian holy city of Varanasi. The quality is much lower than that of the London footage:



These reminded me of this 1906 film of San Francisco, taken soon after the earthquake:

(You can also see a film of San Francisco made just months before the earthquake at the Library of Congress.)

If you like these old films the British Film Institute has a generous collection of British films posted at YouTube. The Library of Congress has several excellent collections of very early American films online.

I had hoped to finish off this post with a very early film from the Pacific Northwest, but I have come up blank. If you know of any email me.

History Talk: Quintard Taylor at Gonzaga

(I just received this interesting announcement. Dr. Taylor is a major historian of the American West so this should be good!)

"The Other Black Northwest: Beyond Portland and Seattle"

Presented by Dr. Quintard Taylor, University of Washington, professor of American history

Gonzaga University Wolfe Auditorium, Spokane, November 6, 3:45 p.m.

This FREE public program, presented by the Center for Columbia River History (CCRH), provides a broader understanding of African American history in the region. Dr. Taylor will explore rural communities such as Walla Walla and Roslyn, Washington in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He will also examine the growth of black communities during World War II in places such as Vancouver, Bremerton, and Pasco, as well as the unique civil rights experience of Spokane. This illustrated lecture will remind all that African American history in the Pacific Northwest is not confined to its largest cities.

Sponsored by the Center for Columbia River History through the James B. Castles Endowment. For more information about this and other CCRH programs, visit www.ccrh.org

Indians and Law in Territorial Washington

As Americans established control of what was Washington Territory in the 1850s, what legal status was provided for the American Indians?

I was searching today to see if the laws of the State of Washington are online. What I found were bits and pieces, not a comprehensive legal record but some valuable information. One treasure is the Laws of Washington, Volume 1, 1854-1862. This is part of the Classics in Washington History online collection provided by the State Library. "This digital collection of full-text books brings together rare, out of print titles for easy access by students, teachers, genealogists and historians," and will be the subject of future posts here. Today, I did a keyword search for "Indians" through this collection of early laws and got some fascinating results.

This 1854 law lists persons "not competent to testify" in the civil actions:

Later on the laws specify who may testify in criminal matters, and here there is more leeway for Indians to speak: "Witnesses competent to testify in civil cases shall be competent in criminal prosecutions, but regular physicians or surgeons, clergymen or .priests, shall not be protected from testifying as to confessions, or information received from any defendant, by virtue of their profession and character; Indians shall be competent witnesses as hereinbefore provided, or in any prosecutions in which an Indian may be a defendant. " (302)

On the other hand the laws specify that "the property of all Indians" is exempt from taxes (p. 526) and a law governing the construction of wharves and regulation of watercraft emphasizes that "No part of this act shall be construed as applying to Indians, or to the property of Indians." (p. 556)

An 1854 "Act to Regulate Marriage" declares "That all marriages hereafter solemnized in this Territory, where one of the parties to such marriage shall be a white person, and the other possessed of one-fourth or more of negro blood, or more than one-half Indian blood, are hereby declared void." Any official who married such a couple was subject to a fine of between 50 and 500 dollars, to be paid to the common schools. In an apparent afterthought, Section 3 of the law states that "nothing in this act shall be so construed as to prevent any parties from being united in marriage, who may be living together at the time of the passage of this act." (651-52) This seems designed to allow established mixed race couples, who had perhaps been married for years in the Indian fashion and had children together, to legalize their ties.

An act authorizing county assessors to take the census directs them to "make separate lists of all taxable half breed Indians, negroes, kanaka [Hawaiians -ed.], and mulatoes, and chinamen" in their counties. (704)

Overall the laws paint a picture of white Washingtonians as eager to define citizenship in racial terms with a limited place for American Indians.

Bruce Levine to Speak at EWU and Spokane

Heads up! Civil War historian Bruce Levine will be speaking at EWU this Thursday noon and at the MAC in Spokane Thursday evening. Levine's newest book is Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves During the War. (A review of the book is here.) Levine will deliver two lectures:

"The Myth of the Black Confederate"
Thursday Oct. 2 at 12 noon
Monroe Hall 205, Cheney WA

"The Confederacy's Plan to Emancipate (and Arm) Slaves"
Thursday Oct. 2 at 6 p.m.
Eric A. Johnston Memorial Audition - Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture
2316 W. First Avenue, Spokane WA

These are important lectures. In recent years neo-confederate "heritage" groups have worked hard to refashion the public narrative of the Civil War, downplaying or dismissing entirely the central importance of slavery and racism. One of their efforts has been to argue that there were large numbers of blacks who fought on the side of the South because they just loved their Massa Lee or something. It is nonsense of course and academic historians have mostly ignored the black confederate mythology even as the neoconfederates have created websites, educational programs, and shoddy publications based on the myth. Levine is among the few historians willing to tackle the topic head-on. (For more on the topic, check out The Myth of Black Confederates tag at the Civil War Memory blog.)

This opportunity to hear a top historian is thanks to a Teaching American History grant from the U.S. Department of Education to Spokane Educational Service District 101.

(If you can't make it here is an MP3 of Levine delivering the second lecture at UC Santa Cruz.)

First-Person Accounts #2: Many Pasts

Today's post continues the series looking at first-person historical accounts, with an eye to mining the websites for accounts of the Northwest.

Many Pasts "contains primary documents in text, image, and audio about the experiences of ordinary Americans throughout U.S. history. All of the documents have been screened by professional historians and are accompanied by annotations that address their larger historical significance and context." It is part of the terrific History Matters website from George Mason University's Center for History and New Media.

Many pasts contains over 1000 primary accounts and is searchable. A search for "Wobblies" produces an evocative anti-IWW cartoon (seen on on the right), a Wobbly poem titled “The Lumberjack’s Prayer ("I pray dear Lord for Jesus' sake, Give us this day a T-Bone Steak...), a description of the difficulties of rural work from an IWW organizer, and The Paterson Strike Pageant Program (a public page ant in support of an IWW strike, organized by John Reed and Bill Haywood).

Other northwest material include “For Oregon!” Settlers From Illinois Describe the New Territory, 1847; Executive Order 9066: The President Authorizes Japanese Relocation; Congress Investigates the 1934 San Francisco Strike; and the delightful “Nobody Would Eat Kraut”: Lola Gamble Clyde on Anti-German Sentiment in Idaho During World War I.

The advanced search option at Many Pasts is very sophisticated, allowing searches limited by topic and primary source type and across different History Matters collections.

New Job in a New Town

As of last month, I have a new job. I am now an Associate Professor of History at Eastern Washington University and an Assistant Digital Archivist at the Washington State Digital Archives.

This is a dream position for me and I could not be happier. The primary goal of this joint appointment is to build up the MA in Public History program at EWU and to give it a digital edge. My position brings together the amazing technical resources and expertise of the first and largest digital archive in the world and a first-rate history program. Add to that the cultural resources of nearby institutions such as the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, the Spokane Public Library's Northwest Room, the National Park Service, and the many Indian peoples in the region, and the possibilities are endless.

That my scholarship is about this region is an added bonus.

It is funny how life works out. When I began this blog I was living in Missouri and expected to remain there. I thought the blog would help maintain my profile as a northwest historian and force me to keep abreast of the latest developments in digital and northwest history. Now that I am back in my beloved inland northwest I expect to bring things up a notch, with more posts, more digital projects, and hopefully a wider readership.

Enough with the personal note, let us get back to the history.

History as an Advertisement

I quite like this ad from Hovis Bread, with one boy running through 122 years of English history:



(via)

Free Historic Pictures for Teachers

NEH Announces Second Picturing America Application Period: "The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced today that a second round of applications for Picturing America will be accepted online through October 31, 2008. Picturing America is a free educational resource that helps teach American history and culture by bringing some of our nation’s greatest works of art directly to classrooms and libraries. In June, the NEH awarded Picturing America to over 26,000 schools and public libraries nationwide."

You can learn more about Picturing America and view some of the pictures and teaching materials at their website. The images are both historically important and visually arresting, as with George Caleb Bingham's painting of antebellum electioneering above. And the website includes a wealth of teaching materials for each. These would be a fantastic addition to any history teacher's classroom.

It is not clear how the NEH is going to sort a few tens of thousands of applications, but if I were them it would be first-come-first-serve. Get cracking!

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.

Inlander Article on Indian Wars of the 1850s

A Beginning and an End: "Hangman Creek' received its name from an incident that took place 150 years ago this month in a little meadow 25 miles south of Spokane. The name, which the state Legislature has been trying to abolish (to be replaced by Latah Creek) by proclamation for more than a century, persists for a good reason. Like many pioneer names ('Leadville,' 'Tombstone,' 'Crazy Woman Creek' 'Dead Man's Gulch,' 'Death Valley'), it's an honest reminder of a gritty past."

This is a nice historical article by William Stimson in the Spokane weekly The Inlander. There is no new ground here but rather a solid and well-written summary of the White-Indian wars of the 1850s.

(The illustration is Sohon's painting of the Battle of Steptoe Butte.)

Google to Digitize Newspaper Archives - NYTimes.com

According to this article in the NY Times, Google is set to begin digitizing back issues of newspapers to add to its Google News Archives Search feature. "Google said it was working with more than 100 newspapers and with partners like Heritage Microfilm and ProQuest, which aggregate historical newspaper archives in microfilm. It has already scanned millions of articles," according to the Times. Google will handle the digitization for free and Google advertisements will appear alongside the search results.

It is not clear if the digitized articles will be available for free. Currently Google News Archives Search includes both free and pay-to-view articles. A quote from the editor of the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph--“We hope that will be a financial windfall for us.”--seems to indicate that the articles may not be free.

Frankly I was not even aware of Google News Archives Search until I spotted this article, though apparently it has been around for two years. There is not that much there yet--it indexes the New York Times archives, but those articles are already available from the newspaper website for free. And the Google News Archives Search links to the Times articles don't work--du'oh! Other links lead to paid archives at newspaper websites or to commercial services such as NewspaperArchive.com. In fact a search for "Spokane" limited to newspapers before 1880 turns up only New York Times and NewspaperArchive.com articles.

Google News Archives Search could eventually expand into something useful. It would be nice to go to one place to search across different digital newspaper collections, even if many of those searches led to walled subscription sites. You could still order microfilm of a newspaper once you identified it via Google News Archives Search, or go to a research library that held subscriptions to the digital database. Or even, God forbid, pay for the article you need!

But so far Google News Archives Search does not even access many existing digital newspaper sites. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the Chronicling America sites for example do not seem to be included. Google News Archives Search is a very beta project so far.

Local History from the Spokesman Review

The Spokesman Review today has a really excellent article, "Common Knowledge" about the 1921 murder of a Chinese miner in the Columbia River community of Daisy. The article, by reporter Bill Morlin, is not only an interesting story from our region's past, it is a model of how history journalism should be researched and presented.

The article details how Wong Fook Ah Nem was murdered for his gold and how nothing in particular was done about it, despite the eyewitness testimony of his brother and widespread knowledge of the identity of the killers. Of course this sort of event was far too common in the early Northwest--the most dramatic example being the murder of over 30 miners in Hell's Canyon in Idaho in 1887. That case too was never solved.

Morlin did a nice job in the article of combing through old newspaper accounts, hunting down the few primary source records that remain from the case, and interviewing residents of the area to pick up the fading oral history, which brought valuable new information. The Spokesman has even put some of the primary sources online, including the coroner's inquest (which includes riveting testimony from the victim's brother, Wong Fook Ah Tai), historical newspaper articles, and excerpts from secondary sources.

This rich story, along with the collection of online documents, would make a fine teaching unit for a school teacher, or a good added reading in a college history class.

Exploring Washington's Geographic Past

Interesting article this week in the Washington Post. The Beginning of the Road looks at a project to digitally recreate the topographic history of Washington DC. A (slightly) interactive map allows viewers to compare the outline of the city today with the geography of 1791. The most striking change is that the Potomac is half as wide today as it was in the time of Thomas Jefferson, and that the World War Two, Lincoln and Jefferson memorials are all located on land reclaimed from the river--as we see on the graphic above. The green rectangle represents the mall. (See also the little video embedded in the body of the first story.)

The effort to digitally explore the geographic history of Washington is similar to what the The Mannahatta Project is doing in in New York (see this post). As the digital tools become less expensive and awareness of the possibilities increases we can expect to see similar projects across the nation. In fact you can get similar results with digital image of an early city map and Google Earth by using the overlay function.

Searchable Eyewitness History

FIRP Home: "In the First Person is a free, high quality, professionally published, in-depth index of close to 4,000 collections of personal narratives in English from around the world."

An interesting (unfortunate?) twist to FIRP is that it indexes both free and subscription databases. A quick search for "Oregon Territory" brings us to 55 documents, every one of them part of the subscription only North American Women's Letters and Diaries database. Other searches for PNW topics also brought me to password walls more often than to freely accessible documents. Fortunately you can go to an advanced search screen and limit your search to free documents.

Digital history geeks will be impressed by the range of options on the advanced search page. You can search by the age of the person person writing or being interviewed, for example, or their year of birth, or for only unpublished sources. Setting up such a search is not great technical feat (I am told), the hard part is entering all the metadata.

There isn't a lot at this site yet for the Northwest historian, but it is worth keeping an eye on as its collection expands.

Next: Other Online Sources of First-Person Accounts