History for Sale--Exclusively!

For much of American history, the private papers of historically significant individuals usually found a home in a publicly accessible archive--when they were preserved at all. Government archives, historical societies, university archives, and sometimes libraries preserved the papers of the movers and shakers. Some few historically significant collections have found their way into private hands, but this was the exception rather than the rule.

So it is distressing to see the Elizabeth Bacon Custer manuscript collection going up for auction. From the description provided by the auction house, this is a huge and historically important collection, and one that has "never been scanned, copied or cataloged" according to the brochure from the auction house Williams & Williams. The collection includes three dozen binders of material, including letters between Libby and George Custer, her research notes and manuscripts for her books, transcripts of Custer's Civil War letters, and "the Custer's personal collection of stereoviews from the 1874 Black Hills expedition." Who even knew the latter existed?  The brochure gives tantalizing hints that there is blockbuster material in this collection as well:

• A pull-out quote, "For the love of heaven, burn this as soon as you read it," is attributed to "a love letter sent to Custer from another woman."
• The collection include a "spiral bound notebook" of 74 pages of transcripts of Custer letters, most in "old Pittman shorthand."

Libby Custer spent the long decades of her widowhood building up the myth of her late husband George Armstrong Custer, who was in truth something between a questionable officer and a genocidal maniac. Libby lived until 1933--six decades after the Battle of Little Big Horn--and devoted much of that time to writing, giving talks, and promoting a view of her late husband as an almost Christ-like figure who had given his life so that (white) others might live.

Stereoviews of the Black Hills Expedition.

However, there have always been signs that they were a much better couple after the General died than they were when he was alive. Rumor has it that this collection includes letters where George Custer threatens Libby with divorce on account of her alleged infidelity, among other items. A friend made inquiries and the starting price for the Libby Custer Collection is a quarter-of-a-million dollars. To even look at the collection you need to put down a $25,000 deposit and sign a non-disclosure agreement. Williams & Williams is marketing the material as not merely a collection but as a scoop.

What will happen next to the collection? If the historical community is fortunate, the buyer will be a well-funded private but publicly-accessible archive, and the Libby Custer Collection will become available to researches. At these prices, it seems more likely the collection will end up in private hands.

"Human Skulls Hurled Into Air"

Today's post is a bit macabre but intensely interesting:

Spokesman-Review, June 16, 1912,  p. 1

Our local newspaper does an excellent job with local history, including a This Day in History column by Jim Kershner in which he explores old news stories usually from 100 years ago. The other day he made reference to the above article, which interested me enough to wrestle with the Google News Archive to find the full story:

This sort of casual disrespect of native remains was too typical of that time (and of our own) and the case of the exploded graves is a snapshot of an era when Indians were being forced out of Spokane and onto diminishing reservations. What jumps out at me, however, are some of the details:

• The workers, led by Otto Hansen, did rebury the disturbed remains somewhere "nearby." This is admirable, though I wonder if this newspaper article did not serve as a notice to grave robbers who might have disturbed the reburials. 
• The reference to "brass bands" indicates that the graves were likely from the historic period, as natives on the Columbia Plateau did not possess brass before contact (thought they did have some sheet copper, so there is a possibility the graves were precontact).
• It might be worth carefully reading through the Spokesman, and other Spokane newspapers, for a week or two after this story to find further references. 

It is tough to wrestle with the Google News Archives. They are difficult to navigate, hard to read, and have surprisingly limited search features. And yet they are an incredible resources for just this sort of illuminating historical nugget. 

Hope Yet For Jensen-Byrd

There is a happy story in this morning's Spokesman-Review: Nonprofit delays demolition:

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

A Texas company cannot move forward with plans to demolish the 103-year-old Jensen-Byrd building in downtown Spokane until after a public hearing next month . . . Spokane Preservation Advocates, a nonprofit group, filed an appeal that prevents the company from moving forward.

The appeal argues that Spokane city officials wrongly concluded this spring that tearing down the building has no significant impact on historic resources the city and WSU have said they’re committed to protecting, attorney David Bricklin said.

The Spokane Preservation Advocates have done a wonderful job of raising awareness of the value and importance of this historic building. The SPA is no tea-and-crumpets social club, they are fighting preservationists willing to cause a fuss to help our town. What can you do to help?

1. Print off and sign this letter and submit it to the SPA, they will share with it with WSU and the city of Spokane.
2. Fire off an email to WSU President Elson Floyd (presidentsoffice@wsu.edu) and to Chair of the Board of Regents Theodor Baseler (hoytc@wsu.edu) and let them know what you think. Be sure to CC the SPA at spa@spokanepreservation.org. 
3. Become a member of the Spokane Preservation Advocates. Membership starts at just $25, and every member gives the SPA more credibility when they speak out in favor of historic preservation. If you are looking for a job in public history this is sort of thing that looks good on your resume, it shows a personal commitment to historic preservation. I am looking at you, EWU students!

We might win this one yet. Keep up the pressure!

No More Confederate Preschool!

I love this lesson on Reconstruction with toddlers. Via Civil War Memory .

Spokane Motel Blues, Part Two

Did Tom T. Hall sleep here? Maybe, Maybe not.

So whatever happened with my attempt to enlist the aid of local journalist Doug Clark to crowd-source the motel of origin for the classic Tom. T. Hall song, Spokane Motel Blues?

We failed to answer the question definitively, but came up with a strong hint that the motel in question was the downtown Holiday Inn (now the Quality Inn Downtown) at 110 East 4th Avenue. Maybe.

Clark summarizes his reader responses in this column: No clear inspiration for ‘Spokane Motel Blues.’ There were a lot of reader suggestions, including the Ridpath, the Davenport, and others. Clarked searched through the Spokesman newspaper files and came up empty handed. "A couple of depraved readers wanted to put Hall in a certain seedy motel that is known as a popular 'bed by the hour' for women of negotiable virtue," Clark wrote. Help an out-of-towner here, Doug, exactly which motel is that?

But the strongest suggestion came from reader Marion Anderson who worked at the Holiday Inn:

“I was a chef at the Holiday Inn downtown which is now a Quality Inn,” said the 81-year-old. “And I remember very distinctly that that’s where he wrote his song and that’s where he stayed because of the weather.” True, Anderson never actually laid eyes on Hall. But this was a year or two before Expo, she said, and “all the waitresses were talking about that’s where he was.”


Clark seems to doubt Anderson's story, but in the absence of any contradictory evidence I tend to believe her.

And Clark did more than just crowd-source my historical question. In our conversation he asked if I could use the Tom T. Hall song in the Spokane Historical smartphone app and I told him no, because of copyright. Clark is a musician and singer. "So on a lark, my buddy Joe Brasch and I decided to go into the studio and record our own rendition of it," Clark wrote.

So I guess that there will be a Spokane Historical stop about Tom T. Hall in Spokane, located at the Quality Inn. And the soundtrack will be this wonderful cover of the song by Doug Clark.

Deciphering a Mysterious Headstone

A couple of weekends ago I went for a walk in Greenwood Cemetery with my wife and son. Greenwood is Spokane's Victorian-era park cemetery, a gorgeous place of stately headstones, rolling manicured lawns, and soaring Ponderosa pines. After convincing my son that he could not, in fact, stay in the car, we all enjoyed a perfect spring day among the dead.

One of the spots that has always fascinated me at Greenwood is the Japanese section of the cemetery. Spokane had a prominent and successful Japanese community from the late 1800s to the present. The early Japanese headstones are shaped differently than other markers of that time period, most are small obelisks with vertical Kanji lettering: 

Japanese headstones at Greenwood Cemetery

One headstone, however, was different from the rest. Shaped more like a western headstone, it had a lot of writing. Clearly there is more than a name and some dates here, it appeared to be some kind of story. But what does it say?

Headstone of Tadajiro Muramatsu

Michael, one of my coworkers at the Washington State Archives speaks some Japanese. I showed him this picture. He could not make it out,but thought his wife Jun might be able to read it. According to her, the Kanji lettering is of a type that has not been used for a hundred years in Japan. Fortunately she had studied this style of lettering in college. She did a literal translation of the headstone, which her husband then rendered into something more like American English. Here is her translation:

His name was Tadajiro Muramatsu. He was born on September 24, 1875 in Ueno village, Nishi-Yatsusiro county, Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan. For generations, his family engaged in farming. He was easy-going, enjoyed drinking, and had many friends. He loved ancient poems and would recite them when he was drunk. He came to the United States in 1905, moved to S city in 1906, and started the laundry business. He was a pioneer in the business. He set an example by working hard and by serving the public through his 20 some years of career. He received a special award from the business club for his work. Unfortunately, he lost his life in fire in UNKNOWN town passing the train bridge on April 7, 1918. He was 43 years old. He married a woman from the Aoki family, and they had a boy named Tadao. This tomb was built in his memory and on it, his over all life story was told. January 7, 1919 Tadao built this


 Jun also noted: "--- S city probably refers to Spokane from the usage of the character. The third sentence from the last goes as follows, word-by-word: 'He met passing gate mansion town UNKNOWN skin railed road metal bridge pass touch fire ring not happy UNKNOWN.' Probably lose- life 'passing gate mansion town' is probably one word, referring a name of the town."

 Here is Michael's Americanization of the text:

Tadajiro Muramatsu was born on September 24, 1875 in Ueno village, Nishi-Yatsusiro county, Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan. For generations, his family engaged in farming. He was easy-going, enjoyed drinking, and had many friends. He loved ancient poems and would recite them when he had been drinking. He came to the United States in 1905, moved to S city (Spokane?) in 1906, and started a laundry business. He was a pioneer in the business. He set an example by working hard and by serving the public through his career of 20 some years. He received a special award from the business club for his work. Unfortunately, he lost his life in a fire in UNKNOWN town passing the train bridge on April 7, 1918. He was 43 years old. He married a woman from the Aoki family, and they had a boy named Tadao. This tomb was built in his memory and on it, his overall life story was told. January 7, 1919 Tadao built this tomb.


A 1913 Guide to the Spokane Japanese Business Men and their Enterprises Photograph Album lists  Muramatsu under the alternate spelling of Chujiro Muramatsu and tells us the name of his business: Oriental Baths and Laundry. According to the Washington State Archives, Digital Archives, Muramatsu died on April 7, 1918 in Spokane. He was 42.

Having the date give us a starting point for doing newspaper research. How exactly was Muramatsu killed? A search through the Spokesman Review for April 8 reveals the grisly truth--and explains what the Muramatsu's son was trying to describe when he carved "skin railed road metal bridge pass touch fire ring not happy" on his father's headstone:

Article on page 6, col. 5 of the The Spokesman-Review - Apr 8, 1918

Muramatsu's son Tadao would have been in his teens or twenties when his father was killed. Eight month later the bereaved young man carved his father's headstone.

I would love to follow this story further. The Japanese business directory almost certainly has a photograph of Muramatsu. City directories should pinpoint his address and the location of his Oriental Baths and Laundry, And finally a quick Google reveals a number of Muramatsus in Spokane still, I wonder if there are family stories about this ancestor of theirs, so lovingly memorialized in Greenwood Cemetery.

1962 Oldsmobile Space Needle Commercial

If you are driving to Seattle to see the Space Needle this summer, do remember to take your Olds:

In Which a Local Journalist Helps Solve a Historical Mystery

Did Tom T. Hall write a song here?

Last week my Digital Storytelling class was playing around with making short films from animated still images. I threw a bunch of historic pictures of Spokane together and looked for a song to put in the background. The choice was obvious--Tom T. Hall's classic Spokane Motel Blues.

Hall wrote the song in 1973 when a blizzard left him stuck in Spokane. It is by far the best-known song ever to have Spokane in its title. Alas, it is no paean to our city:

I don't know what I'm doing here, I could be someplace else
Like in Atlanta drinkin' wine, wine, wine
I don't know what I'm doing here, I should be someplace else
Like in Kentucky drinkin' 'shine, 'shine, 'shine
The dogs are running down in Memphis
And them nags are running in LA
I'm stuck in Spokane in a motel room
And there ain't no way to get away

It is a great song, an early example of the outlaw country movement, funny and irreverent. Most of the students had never heard it, so I found a YouTube video. As we were listening it occurred to me--what a great stop for Spokane Historical! We just needed to figure out what motel Hall was staying in when he penned the song.

A quick Google revealed--nothing. As did a more thorough search. I was going to have to turn to that dependable resource of local historians--the town know-it-all. And I knew just who to ask.

I emailed my favorite reporter at our local paper, Doug Clark of the Spokesman Review. For decades Clark has penned a regular column in which he mocks local politicians, highlights our town's eccentrics. and chronicles his own misadventures. He is a local landmark on par with Riverfront Park--before it was cleaned up. If anyone in town would know the motel in question, it would be Clark.

Or not. Clark called the next morning and we had a terrific conversation that ranged from our mutual alma mater of EWU, to the mayor, to popular music. Doug Clark is lot of fun to talk to--but he did not know the motel in question. So he decided to write a column and appeal to his readers: Professor’s ‘Motel’ mystery needs you to solve it. Thanks, Doug!

I am confident that someone in Spokane knows the answer and I will let you know. In the meantime, enjoy this cover of Spokane Motel Blues by Jeff Cooper:

Jess Walters' Statistical Abstract of Spokane

This might be my very favorite piece of writing about my hometown! Statistical Abstract for My Home of Spokane, Washington by Jess Walter. Walter is our local writing hero (along with this guy). The author of five novels including The Financial Lives of Poets. This poem is by turns funny and heartbreaking, here is a sample:

1. The population of Spokane, Washington is 195,526. It is the 105th biggest city in the United States. 
2. Even before the recession, in 2008, 34,000 people in Spokane lived below the poverty line—a little more than 17 percent of the population. That’s about the same as it was in Washington D.C. at the time. The poverty rate was 11 percent in Seattle and Portland. 
3. Spokane is sometimes called the biggest city between Seattle and Minneapolis, but this is only true if you ignore everything below Wyoming, including Salt Lake City, Denver, Phoenix, and at least four cities in Texas. 
4. This is really just another way of saying nobody much lives in Montana or the Dakotas. 
5. My grandfather arrived in Spokane in the 1930s, on a freight train he’d jumped near Fargo. Even he didn’t want to live the Dakotas. 
6. On any given day in Spokane, Washington, there are more adult men per capita riding children’s BMX bikes than in any other city in the world . . .

Here is short video interview with Walters about The Financial Lives of Poets:

Laurie Arnold: Bartering with the Bones of Their Dead

The University of Washington Press is doing something innovative that I suspect will soon become standard practice. For their new books they are creating short, simple promotional videos. They even have a YouTube channel.

The most interesting of the current offerings is this book by Laurie Arnold, Bartering with the Bones of Their Dead. Arnold explores the contentious debate among Colville tribal members about whether to accept federal termination of the Colville Confederated Tribes. Termination in this case refers to negotiated end of federal recognition in the mid-twentieth century--tribal governments would disband, Indians would lose any special status, and would presumably assimilate and vanish into the population as a whole. Usually there was a promise of individual cash payments and allotments of land as compensation, along with federal assistance to relocate in an urban area and locate a job there. Termination went wrong almost immediately, and most tribes fiercely resisted the practice. The Colvilles were almost unique among tribes in soliciting federal termination--a stance that was controversial not only within the tribes but across Indian country. Arnold is herself a member of the Colville Tribes. Here she is describing her book:

 

Today's Downloads of Spokane Historical

I get regular reports from the Android market and from iTunes on how many folks have downloaded the Spokane Historical app for local history. Here is today's Android report. A big welcome to our fan in The Former Yugoslav Republic Of Macedonia !

With a Rebel Yell?

What did the "rebel yell" used by Confederate troops in the Civil War sound like? For years and years this question as been posed as mysterious and unanswerable. Historian Shelby Foote, appearing in Ken Burn's Civil War, said we could never be sure, going on to describe it as probably sounding like "a foxhunt yip mixed up with sort of a banshee squall." But it turns out we can know exactly what it sounded like, thanks to some early recordings at the Library of Congress:

JSTOR is Not Our Friend; or, What Should a New Public History Journal Look Like?

[Update 5/10/2012] : NCPH Executive Director John Dichtl stopped by to offer some corrections to this post in the comments. Thank you John for setting the record straight.]

The big news at this year's meeting of the National Council on Public History was that the organization has come to a parting of ways with UC-Santa Barbara, the publisher of the Public Historian. Those interested can trawl through the archives for H-Public for details, but the short version is that the two organizations could not come to terms, and that the copyright for the journal apparently belongs to the university and they intend to keep it. So the NCPH is looking to start a new journal for its members. The conference public forum discussion are summarized in this blog post by Cathy Stanton, The Elephant in the Room.

Scene from NCPH via Flickr user David Blackwell

The necessity of starting a new journal provides a fantastic opportunity to rethink what a scholarly journal can be in the 21st century. My thoughts:

• Whatever else we decide, it is vital that the new journal be open access. Currently the Public Historian is really only readable by members of the organization. Back issues are online but behind a JSTOR paywall and accessible only by folks with an academic affiliation. The NCPH gets some money from JSTOR for this arrangement (I don't know how much, but I guess in the low tens of thousands?). 
• Whatever the benefits we get from closed access and a partnership with JSTOR, the costs are both huge and largely unrecognized. Every year, JSTOR turns away 150 MILLION attempts to read journal articles! Imagine the lost relevance when our articles cannot be read, blogged, tweeted, sent over Facebook, assigned in public school classrooms, accessed by poor working and amateur public historians in the thousands of tiny museums, archives, and historical societies. JSTOR is not our friend.
• Also, refusing this opportunity to become open access will alienate many of the younger and more tech savvy members of the NCPH. A lot of us are increasingly uncomfortable with donating our labor in writing and reviewing articles for the benefit of a huge publishing industry that locks our knowledge away.
• The objections to open access are misguided. One concern I have heard from NCPH leadership is that people join the organization specifically to get the journal. I think this is unlikely. People join for the conference, the networking, and the affiliation. 
• At the same time, we must continue a print journal. We must not underestimate the attachment folks have to print. A university library of my acquaintance is pitching a bunch of never-read back issues of journals that are already on JSTOR to make space. Many of the professors there seem to think that this is the equivalent of the burning of the library at Alexandria. Whatever we do, a print journal for members has to come out of it.
•  The new journal should not be like the old one. As much as I have learned from the Public Historian over the years, the real elephant in the room is that the journal's content has always been uneven. The conventions of the academic article are simply alien to what many public historians actually do. There are not enough good public history articles in the academic style to support two journals.
• What I would like to see? A magazine-format journal that is open-access and publishes a range of items from semi-academic articles to interviews with public historians (I could use those in the classroom!), visits to institutions where public history happens ("behind the scenes" articles at Colonial Williamsburg, the Buffalo Bill Historic Center, the CHNM, the Smithsonian, Gettysburg, etc.), reviews, and who knows. Everything would be available online and for free, but a print version would go out to members unless they opted out. Could it also be distributed through bookstores, etc?
• Our model for new NCPH journal could be the Atlantic magazine. Four years ago the Atlantic retooled with an "internet first" strategy. It put all of its content, including back issues, online for free, added blogs, interviews, and other web-only features, and used all of these to promote subscriptions and newsstand purchases. The result: increased print sales and profitability in an era when all its competitors are declining. We can do this!

 I am also interested to hear your thoughts--what should a new NCPH journal look like? Please comment.

The Spokane Historical Smart Phone App is in the House!

Spokane Historical on the web. But that is not all...

Readers with long memories might recall that I have been working with my students to create smartphone walking tours of local history. I am pleased to announce that as of today our smartphone app, Spokane Historical, is available in both the Android market and the iTunes store.You can also explore our contents on the web. Yeeessssss!

Sample stop on the iPhone 

We are launching with about 60 historic sites in Spokane and Cheney, but more are being added every day and by summers end there should be over 200 sites. We are currently in what is called "soft release"--the app is available but I am publicizing it only a little bit at a time as we work out a few bugs. My students in Digital History last spring did a great job in researching and producing community stories and getting them into the database. But without the app in existence we did make some mistakes in things such as formatting and labeling. Email me if you find any errors.

Many more sites are under development. My excellent graduate students, Julie Russel and Tracy Rebstock, are developing rich tours of Spokane's cemeteries and parks, respectively. I am teaching a Digital Storytelling class right now where the students will be developing tours of the Centennial Trail, Indian War markers, Fort George Wright, and more.

Next steps on this project include looking for sponsorship and content partners, software updates that will include QR codes and better tour functionality, and perhaps expanding the project beyond Spokane. If you want to help, drop me line.

Navigating with the Android app

Spokane Historical was made possible by the generosity and support of my colleagues in the EWU History Department, who voted unanimously to support the project with department funds. So many public historians complain about how their colleagues demean or ignore what they do, I am lucky to work in a supportive department. Thanks friends. I also want to thank all of the local archivists, librarians, and historians who have helped my students create these stories. Spokane has friendly and sharing historical community, without whom this project would hardly be possible. A big thank you to Mark Tebeau, Director of the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University and his team for sharing with us the software platform for Spokane Historical, along with their hard-earned expertise. And my colleagues at the Washington State Archives, Digital Archives offered some technical advice along the way.

Last but not least, Spokane Historical is the product of many hundreds of hours of work by my awesome EWU students in public history. A year ago I walked into my Digital History class and announced that everyone should scrap their final project plans, we were going to create mobile historical walking tours instead. "How do we do that?" they asked. "I don't know," I answered, "Let's get started." It is a brave student who stays in a class after that.

Check out Spokane Historical and let me know what you think.

NCPH Day 2: A Lightning Post on Lightning Talks

I just left the Lightning Talks session at the NCPH. According to Wikipedia, are "lightning talks last only a few minutes and several will usually be delivered in a single period by different speakers. At the lightning talks session at the NCPH, presenters signed up the day of the presentation and each got three minutes to show off their digital project. At the end of three minutes speakers were cut off, even in mid sentence. (An innovation that should be widely adopted at history conferences.) Here is a quick rundown of the presentations:

Photo by Flickr
user veggiefrog.

• The indefatigable Cathy Stanton showed off History@Work, a "public history commons sponsored by the National Council on Public History." Launched just a few months ago, this is a group blog from the members of the NCPH. Every professional organization should be doing this!
• We enjoyed a demonstration of the Digital Innovation Lab at UNC-Chapel Hill. Particularly interesting was a tool they had developed that overlayed information from city directories onto a Sanborn map.
• Flat World Knowledge is a publisher of free, open-source textbooks. Professors can create an account and customize the textbooks with their own content. Students may access the materials fro free online of pay $35 for a physical copy of the book. Here is the book for the second half of of the US survey.
• From the Library of Congress, the Viewshare project, is a "free and open tool for creating interfaces for digital cultural heritage collections." For an example of how this exciting project can work, check out this LOC blog post about using Viewshare to explore Texas funeral records. 
• Laura Rosenthal showed us the excellent TeachingHistory.org, the "national history education clearing house." Particularly interesting is their Digital Classroom. “If you want to get your teaching materials into the hands of teachers, contact us," she said. 
• The History List is new site that aspires to be a universal calendar for history-related events. What a great idea! It is in beta but you can sign up now at this link.
• Museum Without Walls "is a new kind of interpretive program for Philadelphia’s public art. Each audio program is told by a variety of people from all walks of life who are connected to the sculpture by knowledge, experience or affiliation. Nearly 100 “voices” at 35 stops explore 51 sculptures along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and Kelly Drive."
• I presented Spokane Historical, the new mobile phone app for touring Spokane History. 
• Mark Tebeau presented Cleveland Historical and the underlying platform Curatescape, the platform that powers Spokane Historical and other mobile tours.
• The Ojibwe People's Dictionary is a multimedia dictionary and cultural resource. Funded with over $800,000 in grants, the dictionary includes 60,000 spoken items by native speakers of Ojibwe.
• The1968exhibit.org is the online companion to a museum exhibit. It has a neat cell phone version to provide added content to visitors to the exhibit. Check out the 1968 Timeline.

It was a tremendous and energetic session, packed with information and ideas. A good lightning talk is like a punk rock song--you get out there, deliver a few power chords and a hook, and get the hell off the stage while the audience is still wanting more.