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Communications History, Part 2

This Monday, over Twitter, I received an unexpected bit of feedback to last week’s post on Communications History from the Henry Ford Museum‘s Suzanne Fischer:

@retius Just read your comm history call to arms--I'm a little confused why you don't situate your work/interests/methods w/i hist of tech.

In writing the post, doing some pre-writing for a field statement I’m working on for school. I wanted to try to express in words why I choose to privilege communications, and to define what I meant when I said I was doing so. While I had hoped the post would be read and that feedback would be offered, it was a pleasant surprise to have it come days later over Twitter. I had several initial reactions to Dr. Fischer’s feedback:

  • First, I was a bit embarrassed that I had so underplayed the importance of the  history of technology to my thinking on the topic. A very large number of the books on my bookshelves fall under the history of tech rubric. The exhibit that I recently helped curate, on postal systems technology, is very much informed by a history of technology viewpoint– I was interviewing engineers and even had machine schematics hanging over my desk. And I would very much also argue the story that it tells is part of communications history. I think I had thought that the connections between the kind of communications history I’m advocating and the field of history of technology were more implicitly obvious than they actually are, upon re-reading the post.
  • I also felt that, in my experience, historians of technology tend to privilege the science community, business concerns, and legal issues that shape technological development– sometimes to the expense of users. I recalled going to several telecommunications-related panels at a SHOT conference where I heard a lot about Bell Labs, packet switching, and the like, but almost nothing on customers or users.
  • Finally, I just felt there was an ineffable difference between the two. Certainly communications technology deserve to be part of the literature of a history of technology, but to me there just seemed some hard-to-identify difference, something special about communications that made it somehow a little unique, a special case within technology. This was the hardest reaction to express and impossible to defend, but it was also the deepest-felt.

As is often the case on Twitter, the question quickly sparked a lively and very helpful conversation. Dr. Fischer and myself were quickly joined by Shiela Brennan of RRCHNM and Trevor Owens of NDIIPP.

I had expressed concern that people might not consider things like early nineteenth century mail systems “technology” per se, and that much of postal history is written by postal historians (something I regretted while researching for the above-mentioned exhibit.) But I was actually told that there had been several postal presentations at the most recent SHOT conference— something I was encouraged and excited to hear.

It was also pointed out to me that there is much more of a literature on users than I had been aware of within the history of technology community, and I was recommended several very interesting books on the topic that I look forward to reading. And yet that feeling that there was an ineffable difference persisted– while historians of technology may indeed deal with users, surely there must be a significant qualitative difference between, say, users of electric razors or polio vaccines, and participants in the republic of letters? Of course, it was then pointed out to me that the written word itself is a technology, and must be thought of as such, and not falsely naturalized.

As the conversation wound down, I was still not satisfied that communications history should be seen as necessarily a subset of the history of technology– there was that can’t-put-my-finger-on-it feeling still there. But I did have a lot of new ideas to explore about the intersection of the two, lots to read, and lots to mull over. (When Twitter is collegial and helpful it’s truly an amazing thing.)

Ultimately, I ended up simply asserting that, to my mind, it was an issue of tent size, so to speak.  The history of communications is a very large topic, even if it fits within the auspices of the history of technology. While it is imperative that communications history draws from history of technology, and while there is certainly a place for communications media within the history of technology, it is a large enough and important enough topic to warrant discussion as a discrete thing. Similarly, the advent of gender studies didn’t obviate the need for women’s studies. Every square is a rectangle, but not every rectangle is a square.

And yet, even that answer didn’t fully satisfy me. I still felt there was some fundamental difference. I still suspected that ultimately, it wasn’t like women’s studies. It was intersectional. Historians who study African-American women can’t be satisfied to draw just from women’s history, or from black history. They have to draw from both, because their subjects lived within both experiences. African-American women aren’t off-limits to historians who focus on women’s history or black history– they just have to be mindful of that intersectionality and not be reductionist.

I’ve been trying to figure out why I felt that way, trying to justify this suspicion, ever since. And after a few day’s thought, I think I’ve figured it out.

The issue, as I’m coming to see it, is that there are a whole host of comunicative cultural practices that are difficult to shoehorn into the category of “technology” that are nonetheless very much a part of communications history as I’m conceiving it. (It is also important to remember that the point of these posts is not to prescriptively assert subdisciplines as discrete items, but for me as a PhD student to better articulate the scope and shape of my own specialization. Communications history as I conceive it is essentially all that matters, ’cause I’m trying to hone my own conception, here.)

To give some examples of such phenomena from works that engage with what I think of as having a place in the historiography of communications history:

  • Parades, toasts, and parties. David Waldstreicher’s In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes discusses the use of parades, toasts, and parties as communicative acts that helped to reinforce national unity and identity in the early republic. Of course, the utility of doing so is deeply contingent upon use of these events to shape discourse within the emerging news media, which was growing precipitously at this time, but while communications technologies were used to broadcast the events and reinforce their import, I would feel uncomfortable describing a toast or a parade as a “technology.” They are social practices with deeply communicative intent.
  • Blackface and racial melodrama. Beyond the “technology” of using burnt cork as make-up, blackface is not a technology. It’s a mode of cultural expression– a deeply problematic and revealing one, and one that WT Lhamon Jr. argues ably in his Raising Cain has proven quite good at bridging genre, media, and time. Likewise, Linda Williams’s Playing the Race Card demonstrates that racial melodrama– an understanding of racial relations and identity deeply entrenched in the narrative conventions of melodrama– is a “wonderful, ‘jumping’ fish,” one that has bridged media and been a dominant narrative in American entertainment since Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This is a coupling of a dramatic/narrative mode with a set of cultural constructions– not a technology. While both blackface and racial melodrama play through media, they are not in and of themselves technology or media.
  • Stand-up comedy. In Revel with a Cause, Stephen Kercher provides a challenging, fascinating history of liberal satire during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. While the book is almost encyclopedic in its scope, two figures who definitely stand out are (unsurprisingly) Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce. Both men’s careers must be framed in terms of communications technology– Bruce’s career was largely built on records, at a time when censorship of “blue” recordings had only recently decreased, and he dealt with the media ecosystem of his time– from the news media and contemporary politics to jazz. Sahl, even moreso, was a product of mass media, in that he was a direct and vocal critic of it. He read the paper as part of his routine, and gave commentary. Stand up itself was forever changed by the advent of electric amplification. But a man joking and telling stories on a stage? Decidedly low-tech stuff. But due to cultural impact, these comedians are important to understanding the media environment of their times.

…I’m sure there are debates, quibbles, and questions one could bring up with these examples and others. But ultimately, I think they demonstrate the reason for my discomfort with seeing communications history as simply a subset of the history of technology. To me, communications history is– or should be– history at the intersection of cultural and media studies on one side, and the history of technology on another. 

Of course, this is still a dramatic simplification. The history of communications also intersects with aspects of legal history, social history, economic history, and countless other subdisciplines. Every breed of historian borrows liberally from others. But I see the intersection of communicative cultural acts and the technology that mediates communication as key.

We’re also all the products of our experiences, and I’ll be the first to admit that this conviction may be the result of my education– my concentration on drama and cinema in college, my intense interest in media studies and cultural theory while getting my MA in American Studies, and finally, coming to George Mason, with the prevalence of technology in its History department.

That said, I think what I’m identifying here is a fertile little niche for historical scholarship. And my dissertation, still in the early stages of research, definitely fits within it. At the core of what I’ve been saying in these two blog posts is something I think is pretty uncontroversial– Communications is a very important aspect of the modern world. And I would like to see even more scholarship on it.

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Why I Do Communications History

“Markets are conversations.“

When the writers of the Cluetrain Manifesto wrote this over a decade ago, they were looking for something revolutionary. They were trying to express the impact of the astounding new power of electronic media on communications– the internet, we are told all the time, is the biggest thing since the printing press!

And a lot of people who drank the Cluetrain Kool-Aid have been somewhat discouraged by what they’ve seen in the last ten years. Where’s the big change? Online communications has allowed for the kinds of conversational brand advocacy that Cluetrain advocates, but in general, corporate communications and marketing are just business as usual. Certainly, a purist would argue that most companies haven’t taken the lessons of cluetrain to heart, they haven’t gotten into the real, human conversations, and haven’t reaped the benefits as a result. And that’s not an invalid assessment.

But a couple weeks ago, another reason dawned on me as I was reading on the subway. Something painfully obvious. Markets are communications in the information age, yes. But that was just as true in the nineteenth century as it is today. And likewise, communications in the nineteenth century was undergoing a set of dramatic transformations, much like today. The internet changes everything, to be sure. But that itself is business as usual.

The internet has revolutionized communications. But looking at the history of the United States, from 1788 to present, with an eye to communications technology, one witnesses a nation that is more often in the midst of a communications revolution than it is not. American History has in many ways been singularly defined by a long series of communications revolutions.

From the First Amendment and the Postal Road System to the telegraph to the birth of the Railway Mail Service to the rise of the mass media and the advent of the telephone to the television age to the internet, the United States has been a nation that has been constantly being reshaped by revolutionary shifts in communications. The way that people communicate has been shifting rapidly and radically for most of our nation’s history.

What makes communications history such an exciting lens into history is its ability to bring together the two most important historiographic trends of the last thirty years— the quantitative, materialist approach of the new social history, and the cultural theory and more literary analysis that constitutes the cultural turn. Communications technologies shape and drive markets. These networks are an essential engine of the economy. Simultaneously, it is within the content of communications media that we have our only window into the discursive forces that shape culture. It is for this reason that I think communications history is critically under-explored.

Certainly, ever since Marshall McLuhan became a public intellectual rock star, there has been an ever-growing community of people in media studies, and that [inter]discipline has influenced a good number of historians. There is a lot more work that should be done, however– and communications history needs to be allowed a more central role in our historiography. It’s time to let communications history have center stage.

There are many well-researched histories of particular media– there are books on the telephone, the telegraph, motion pictures, et cetera. These usually focus on the technological, business, and/or legislative-governmental aspects of the medium’s history. And there are books that analyze cultural phenomena within media (usually broadcast media), from issues of class in early silent films to performances of race on the internet. There are far fewer books that integrate both the medium and the message, unfortunately.

Historians have drawn extensively on letters throughout modern historiography. But rare is the author who positions those letters within both the cultural practice of letter writing as it changes over time and the postal networks that allow for such communication. Too often, the letter as an object itself is overlooked.

I think there is still a large body of potential work that foregrounds the history of communications and uses it as an inroads to other avenues of historical investigation.

There are at least three recent books that I have encountered that do an excellent job of foregrounding communications in the way I am discussing. I’m sure there are others, and would welcome suggestions, but these are three that have caught my attention for their broad scope and deep insight.

Paul Starr’s 2005 The Creation of the Media is impressive in its scope, taking a comparative approach to media and contrasting the development of the American media over the last 300 years with the parallel developments in France and Britain, arguing for the uniqueness of the US media environment. It’s an impressive read, and an amazing introductory text on the subject. While it’s still almost entirely on the media and very little on their messages, it is admirable for creating.

More recently, Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought is a work of synthetic history, bringing together much of the most important work in the historiography of the Age of Jackson. One of the primary arguments of the book– and one of its most fascinating– is a re-framing of the Market Revolution as a Communications Revolution, foregrounding the import of the rapid dissemination of information as the key change that allowed for the transformation of the American economy.

Unfortunately, by concluding in 1848, (a date which one guesses he chose for the death of his book’s hero, John Quincy Adams) he downplays the import of the postal rate reductions of 1845 and 1851. As David Henkin has demonstrated, the import of these rate reforms cannot be overstated, as they allowed for a major cultural shift toward a more egalitarian world of letters in the US. Despite this, the book is admirable for its foregrounding of the broader impact of communications, and makes what I feel is a convincing case on that point.

Finally, Henkin’s 2007 The Postal Age— while much more narrow in its scope than the above two books– does an amazing job of integrating information about the legislation, policy, and technologies that shape the postal system of the mid-nineteenth century with discussion of the system’s public, and how they used the post. While I would have loved to see even more analysis of everyday letter writers’ rhetoric and discourse, that would have fallen a bit out of the book’s scope, and even still, Henkin proves– as he did in City Reading— that he is a master at the difficult task of discussing the complex praxes of common literacy.

What attracts a historian to a particular topic, methodology, or theoretical approach is always highly subjective, and I’m not trying to pretend that this isn’t the case for me as well. My primary objective in writing this post has been to try to better put into words why I think that communications history is a worthwhile and interesting lens into American History, an inroad that has yet to be well-explored.

Of course, it would be wonderful to see the field bloom, to see “Communications Historian” listings in the AHA job listings, or to see curatorial positions open up in a new National Communications Museum (something some other nations have, from what I’ve been told.) I think communications history is just starting to prove itself as a worthy specialty for historians to explore. As I said, it does bring together threads from both social history and the cultural turn, and for those who are banking on digital humanities being the next big thing in the field, I think it could play quite nicely with DH, as well.

Even if none of that happens, however, it’s what I want to study and research. It fits quite nicely with my personal interests, and I’m confident that there’s many careers’ over worth of research left to be done.

 

ETA: There is now a second part to this blog post, which can be found here.

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What We Talk About When We Talk About History, Part II: Atheoretical History?

I know that the mere mention of the word "theory" makes some people’s eyes roll and their ears flap shut, but history needs theory.

I read Black’s Maps and History last year, and I have to say I rather liked it. But reading it again after reading The Landscape of History and James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State in the last few weeks, the lack of any underlying theoretical structure in Black’s book really stuck out like a sore thumb.

It’s probably not helping that last week I was required to read another book, David Stradling’s Smokestacks and Progressives, that had essentially the same problem. That book sensitized me to how annoyed I can get when there’s a lack of theoretical underpinning to a work of history, even one on an interesting topic.

So yeah, Stradling and Black fall into the same trap– they give very authoritative and in-depth accounts of activity over time, without any theory unifying their books. In one case, it’s the history of smoke abatement movements in the Progressive Era and into the Depression, and in the other, it’s the evolution of historical atlases. Both are fascinating topics. Both books seem quite well-researched. But neither author really puts much effort into demonstrating commonalities over time– whether they be commonalities in causes of change, effects, methods, forces that repeatedly influence the historical narrative, commonalities over time…

And that’s what I’m talking about when I say theory.

History needs theory. Not necessarily big-T Theory, you don’t need to include Foucault or Derrida or Althusser or something to write history… although I often get a kick out of it when historians do. But you need something to unite the events you describe. Otherwise, you have books like these two, interesting at times and even informative, but not fully doing the "work" of History, if you ask me. As Gaddis points out, building on Scott, Historians necessarily must simplify for the sake of legibility.

What this means is that we don’t compile a list of causes and effects– writing History is more than creating a timeline, although even that action is of course still a simplified cartography of the historical landscape for the sake of legibility. But historians, writers of Good History, go a step further– they seek unities, they create theories that express links, similarities, continuities, and even ruptures. Without this, history becomes a confusing mess of discontinuity and unrelated events.

I’m arguing that theory is necessary to the work of History, but but as I said before it need not be the kind of totalizing, absolute Theory that supersedes fact and lobs confusing jargon at the reader.

Gaddis seems to think that Hayden White is one such writer of Theory. While Gaddis acknowledges the utility of the concept of narratization and emplotment in Metahistory, he seems to feel that it falls under the weight of its own jargon. All this is stated in a couple throw-away sentences, and the footnote indicates another book rather than Metahistory… This was one of the few things in the book that really rubbed me the wrong way.

I’m digressing, here, and anyway, White himself has acknowledged in an interview with Ewa Domanska (published in her wonderful collection of interviews, Encounters: Philosophy of History after Postmodernism) that few people read the book in its entirety, and that it is "long and repetitive," and he seems fine with both. The reason I brought this up, though, is that in  the same interview, White argues that his theories in that book are not techniques to be applied, but a sort of contingent, contextually-based structure set up to explain what was going on in a particular set of texts. He seems almost put off at the concept of younger authors trying to continue with his theories laid out in that book in other works. "It is not meant to be applied. It is analytical. It does not tell you how to do something."

White also repeatedly praises Roland Barthes as a diverse and inventive thinker in that interview. The next interviewee, Hans Kellner, seems to put his finger on what it is about Barthes that might be so appealing to White:

From Mythologies to the last essay, he was always changing… in each work… you get this enormous structural framework poised in order to do a quite small job… Then Barthes goes on to his next work and says in effect: "Oh, I’m all done with that. I am never going to use that system again."

So even among these people who are associated with arch-structuralism are nevertheless proposing the primacy in Historical work of theories over Theory.

You don’t need to get married to a single theory and apply it to every event– you don’t have to be a Marx or even a Derrida. You don’t even need your theory to be applicable in any other historical context. But you need theory to really make sense of history.

I liked, on a certain level, both Smokestacks and Maps and History. I’ll keep both for reference. I wouldn’t even be surprised if I ended up incorporating either of them in a bibliography or reading list one day. But the experience of reading both left me unsettled, full of questions.

I never got a clear sense of why Stradling thought that smoke abatement movements over those fifty years ultimately failed, only learning more about the periodic and seemingly unrelated interruptions, upsets, and setbacks that the movement suffered over that time. Likewise, I don’t have a clear answer to the "so what" question as far as Black’s treatment of historical atlases. I don’t have a clear concept of why he feels these atlases are important enough to merit the in-depth treatment he gives their changes over time.

I can propose answers on my own– both authors give their readers enough information to form theories of their own– but the lack of a theoretical base to their books leaves me unclear on how to read certain passages, and generally unsatisfied.

Theory, as well as making the reading more interesting, also gives a reader a map to reading the book, an easy "in" to understanding the authors biases and assumptions, and deepens the feeling of coherence in history.

And after all, coherence and symmetry are things that humankind seems hard-wired to seek out.

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What We Talk About When We Talk About History: (Hopefully) Part One in a Series…

I’m not an Historian.

At least, not yet.

I’ll tell people this proudly, because I think it means I’m not coming at this project with any artificially "naturalized" concepts– I like to think I don’t have as many assumptions about what history is or how one goes about it. This is because academically, I’m not from an historical background. And I honestly just don’t completely grok what people talk about when they talk about history. Since coming to George Mason, though, I’ve been trying to work through what it means.

But sometimes someone will say something that makes me realize that I have fairly definite beliefs, or at least suspicions, about what I think History is– or should be. These moments are wonderful, because sometimes my beliefs come crashing down, and other times they’re reaffirmed, but these moments are always times when I realize that I’m starting to become an historian– to become someone who cares deeply and holds strong opinions about the nature and methods of Historical work.

A couple of the students in my Historiography course last semester kept bringing up the idea of history as a science. This seemed, to me at the time, to be patently ridiculous. Science means reproducible results, controlled experimentation, objectivity (a term I’m so loath to use that I almost always write it bracketed or under erasure or in scare quotes)… History is simply not like that, I felt.

History is interpretive, it’s subjective. It’s narratizing. The way that it’s done in the academy today, History is something deeply intertextual– it takes place in the footnotes, dialogically.  When you look to the origins of historical writing, it doesn’t come out of the sciences, it comes out of the tradition of bards, chronicles,  and heraldry. It’s a poetic tradition.

Moreover, there’s the problem of sources. Sciences are, I thought, the product of direct observation. Most of History’s sources are just textual traces, documentary remnants from unreliable narrators. When we write history, we do so placing trust in those sources. We may have standards of critical skepticism, we may demand plausibility and require that sources support one anothers’ assertions, but we essentially are interpreting texts, and when we talk about History in terms of "reality," we’re really placing a lot of trust in our sources or our own critical faculties.

I’m starting to open up to the idea that there are strong similarities between History and certain scientific disciplines. One reason for that is a conversation with a friend from my old alma mater– who is, incidentally, also a Mason grad. In a conversation over the summer, talking about History over Thai food in DuPont, he presented a quite strong argument for History as a Science. I wasn’t converted, but it was the first time someone made the argument so convincingly to me. I’ll talk more about that conversation in a later post.

But the argument made by John Lewis Gaddis in The Landscape of History is what I want to talk about here. Gaddis’s book is one of the most incredibly clever books I’ve read in a long time. And I mean "clever" in both the complimentary and pejorative sense of the term.

Gaddis argues that History is much closer in its approaches to Physics or Evolutionary Biology than to the Social Sciences– History, like those "hard sciences," is deductive, multicausal, complex. It’s a strong argument.

But like Gaddis’s entire book, it’s also deeply metaphorical. The whole book is awash in strange metaphors– my favorite being the image of the SS Jaques Derrida bearing down on the British coastline. And this is part of the insight of the book– that scientific insight is often deeply metaphorical. It’s thought experiments, insights gained from suddenly recalling the image of the snake that eats its own tail.

So I would say that Gaddis influenced my oppinion insofar as he has helped convince me that History is like many sciences. I’m just not completely convinced that it falls into the category of science, that it IS Science.

Of course, I’m biased. I don’t want History to be a Science. I’m not interested in being a scientist. I came to History because I wanted a way to do the kind of textual interpretation and theory that I came to love in college… and make it Mean Something. Because I sort of stopped believing, after a certain point, that Joyce changed the world. But I can’t believe that William Randolf Hearst didn’t.

I love the idea of History as the Art of the Footnote. As a practice of navigating between texts, sailing through a sea of traces and scraps of the past. I know that Historians can’t throw out the concept of Historical Truth, but I don’t want to stop asking why. Many people seem to feel that microhistory represents the postmodernization of historical practices, but I don’t know if that project goes far enough. I want to see Derridian history– history that attacks the authority to make Historical Truth Statements. I know that this sort of project would quickly become tiresome and difficult and of questionable utility, as Derrida’s work itself did, but I think that it would only strengthen History as a discipline. I think Historians need to make the postmodern turn, if only to turn away from it.

And, as a final note, I do want to add that if there is one criticism I would have of Gaddis’s book, it would be that– I think he sets the social sciences up as a bit of a straw man, creating an unfair comparison between more contemporary Historical Theory and a fairly Modernist, mid-twentieth century view of what the social sciences "do." From some of the sociologists I’ve met, I get the feeling that they’re further along in making the postmodern turn than a lot of Historians. (Of course, the handful of Economists I’ve talked to have seemed to fit fairly well within his characterization of that discipline.)

I have a lot more to say, and I know that this is somewhat muddled. But I’m trying to tease out an argument, a way of explaining what I think, or at least suspect, when it comes to the theory of History, the philosophy of history, whatever you want to call it.

So… More thoughts on this later.

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Peter Novick, That Noble Dream

Novick breaks up the book into four periods: the 1880s through 1910s,
WWI and the interwar period, the mid-40s through the mid-60s, and
finally, the 60s into the 80s. The “narrative” is that of, in the
corresponding time periods, the rise of “scientific” objectivist
history, followed by the ascendancy of challengers to these claims of
objectivity, most famously with the speeches of Becker and Beard at the
AHA, the incorporation of some of this group’s criticisms during WWII
and the early years of the Cold War to remodel and reconfigure what
“objectivity” meant, while at the same time putting it back at the fore,
and finally, with the social unrest of the 60s, the loss of the goal of
objectivity to specialization. The sometimes rather passionate critical
responses to this book that I have found make me ask if the objectivity
question is as settled as he makes it out to be.

Novick’s periodization is rather essentializing, and I have to question
to what extent it creates a sort of “cherry picking” effect, not
allowing for the voices of historians who may have been out of step with
their historiographical period.

Likewise, his fourth section was somewhat difficult for me to grasp. I’m
not sure I agree with or even understand how historians no longer trying
to produce work that is catholic, all-inclusive, generalized actually
means that there is a breakdown of the myth of objectivity. Couldn’t one
be objective and still specialized? Are ichthyologists not being
objective by studying fish, instead of all of biology? Also, using the
brick metaphor from the first section, couldn’t the compartmentalism of
post-60s historians be looked at as just “making smaller bricks?”

In his introduction, Novick explains his view of history, and espouses
the view that historic events tend to be the effects of
“overdetermination.” The only time I’ve encountered this term used with
reference to historical events is usually in work drawing on the Marxist
theory of Louis Althusser. This leads me to believe that in certain
respects, Novick is essentially a structuralist. His quoting Emile
Durkheim in the same introduction would reinforce such a view.

Which makes me ask, where’s the Poststructuralist History? Shouldn’t
there be, couldn’t there be, a real movement challenging the myth of
objectivity by using Derridian techniques of deconstruction on the
truth-claims of history?  The closest I’ve heard of to this is the late
Jean Baudrillard’s work on the Gulf War, but I haven’t read it yet. Did
the book come out too early for Novick to witness Poststructuralist
History’s moment, or has it not materialized? It seems to me that it
would be a worthwhile project, if only because it might be a useful
technique to put aside the objectivity question once and for all.

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Jamestown 1907: the Annotated Bibliography

One of the really nice things about blogging is that you can edit your posts at any time.  This is just a start to what I’m sure will be a much longer list.

Primary Sources:

American Federation of Labor. American Federation of Labor Industrial and Social Economic Exhibit at the Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition. Washington, D.C.: American Federation of Labor, 1907.

An account of the AFL’s exhibit at the Fair.  An induction into Progressive-Era labor consciousness, the exhibit highlighted the quality products manufactured in unionized factories, even going to the lengths of having a "Model Union Store" stocked with union-made goods.

Glimpses of the Jamestown Exposition and Picturesque Virginia. Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1907.

A commemorative photo book of the Expo, its buildings, and exhibits.  Great source for photo reference.  The wording of the captions can be interesting as well, giving a good sense of the messages or lessons conveyed in individual exhibits.  The Philippines exhibit is quite interesting, talking about their uniquely high "potential to civilization."

Jamestown Ter-centennial Exposition Corporation. The Official Blue Book of the Jamestown Ter-centennial Exposition. 1907.

This book is the mother load. It’s actually a bit intimidating, as it’s probably a source of information overload.  It clocks in at 800 or so pages, and gives an official daily account of the goings-on at the Expo.  It lists full texts of most important speeches made there, accounts for what day was what– almost every day was in honor of some group, from Georgia Day to Negro Day to Women’s Day… It’s definitely the organ of the organizing committee, so it will not be the best source for dissenting voices, but it is quite exhaustive in its coverage of the Expo’s goings-on.  If you want to know what day Mark Twain or Booker T Washington came to the fair, what they saw and what they said, this is your book.

Jamestown Ter-centennial Exposition Corporation. Official Catalogue of the Jamestown Ter-centennial Exposition. 1907.

This volume makes for incredibly dull reading, but may be of some use.  It is a catalog of all groups exhibiting at the Exposition, from states to temperance groups to pen manufacturers.  It could probably yield some form of quantitative data as to the nature and character of the event.

Jamestown Ter-centennial Exposition Corporation. Official Guide of the Jamestown Ter-centennial Exposition. 1907.

This is the official guidebook to the exhibition.  Main attractions are outlined, descriptions of buildings, events, and exhibitions.

Laird & Lee’s Guide to Historic Virginia and the Jamestown Centennial. Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1907.

This is a rather thick but pocket-sized unofficial guide to the Exposition, much like the official guide except in format, and on a greater emphasis on the greater Norfolk area.

Library of Congress Photo Lot 2832.

This is a collection of fifty or more stereographic photos from the Exposition– great pictures of the buildings, some of the more celebrated visitors, exhibits, etc.  If you’re curious, a small selection of them have been scanned, and can be found here.

Library of Congress Photo Lot 7026.

This photo lot is a collection of postcards and photos from the Expo, many of the photos appearing to be, upon inspection, the images that were used for the creation of the postcards.  Again, a few of these have been scanned, and can be found here.

McCall, Samuel Walker. The American Constitution, a Speech Delivered by Hon. Samuel W. McCall of Massachusetts, at Jamestown, on September 17, 1907, on the Occasion of the One Hundred and Twentieth Anniversary of the Adoption of the National Constitution by the Convention of 1787. Boston: 1907.

I grabbed this because it was a highly patriotic theme, a patriotic speech at such an imperialist event seemed natural and interesting.  To be honest, I’ve only had the time to give it a quick scan-through.  But he focuses much time on the original intent of the framers of the Constitution– much as the protest pamphlet dedicates several pages to arguing the founding fathers were anti-imperialist.  Also interesting in that he does a little high-wire dance about federalism, as a Yankee in the South, at this event that seems to bear the thumb-prints of the Civil War all over it.

See! See! See! Guide to Jamestown Exposition, Historic Virginia, and Washington D.C. Washington, D.C.: B. S. Adams, 1907.

Yet another unofficial guide to the Exposition.  This one is interesting in that it is the version most obviously targeting people from outside the Virginia area– Eastern Virginia and D.C. attractions are given about as much page-space as the Expo itself.

Veloz-Goiticoa, N. Effect of the Jamestown Exposition on the Foreign Commerce of the United States and Incidental Remarks on the Subject. Washington, D.C.: W. F. Roberts Company, 1907.

A speech made the January before the Expo, on its intended economic effects, made before the National Convention for the Extension of the Foreign Commerce of the United States.  Essentially, the gist of it is, "we hope this will make a lot of money and encourage foreign trade."  As with McCall’s speech, I’ve only really given this a cursory look-through, but I was fascinated by the speaker’s conviction that this Expo will have a dramatic and positive effect on Latin American trade…  Are special invitations made to Latin American leaders to an Exposition celebrating America’s growing imperialism and military might less than a decade after the Spanish-American war really the best incentive to trade with those nations?

Wright, Carroll D, et al. International Justice Vs. The Splendors of War: Protest Against the Diversion of the Jamestown Exposition to the Service of Militarism. 1907.

This document, which I mentioned in an earlier post, is a protest against the growing militaristic character of the Expo, cosigned by (among others) Jane Addams, Edward Everett Hale, and Cardinal Gibbons.

Secondary Sources:

Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. "Meta Warrick’s 1907 ‘Negro Tableaux’ and (Re)Presenting African American Historical Memory." The Journal of American History Vol. 89, Issue 4. (2003), 1368-1400.

A look at the "Negro Tableaux" in the Negro Hall of the Exposition, and the politics of the Tuskegee Institute folks who coordinated the Negro Hall.  Uses a lot of resources that will be unavailable to me, as they’re in Alabama.

Gleach, Frederic W. "Pocahontas at the Fair: Crafting Identities at the 1907 Jamestown Exposition." Ethnohistory 50:3 (2003) 419-445.

An excellent analysis of the various constructions of Native American identity that competed at the Expo, looking to the agency of the Indians who participated in constructing alternative visions of themselves and their people.

Werry, Margaret. "’The Greatest Show on Earth’: Political Spectacle, Spectacular Politics, and the American Pacific." Theatre Journal 57 (2005) 355-382.

An article on militarism in turn-of-the-century expositions, looking at them as spectacles of empire.  While it mentions the Jamestown Exposition only a couple times, it’s a good article for contextualizing the event.

Winton, Ruth M. "Negro Participation in Southern Expositions, 1881-1915." The Journal of Negro Education Vol. 16, No 1. (1947) 34-43.

A more general overview of black participation and representation in the golden age of Expositions.

Items I haven’t had the pleasure of looking at that look promising:

  • The LC has at least three or four maps of the grounds of the event.
  • I’ve found COUNTLESS articles in newspapers from the time, but have yet to sort through them.
  • I’ve also found several more  pamphlets that were printed for other exhibits at the Expo that I haven’t yet looked at, and there are a few photo lots I haven’t pulled as of yet.
  • Representing the Nation: A Reader, eds. David Boswell and Jessica Evans.  London: Routledge, 1999.
  • David Blight’s work on the memory of the Civil War.
  • Manliness and Civilization, by Gail Bederman.  I don’t have my copy, but I wanna look over the chapter on TR again.
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…Really just spitballing, here…

…And before anyone accuses me of being grotesque or bringing bodily fluids into this, Answer Girl gives a good definition of the term here. I use the phrase a lot, but sometimes I get a funny look, so I thought I’d start with that caveat…

Before I even knew that this was the week we’re talking about wikis in the history and new media class, I thought of one possible idea for something I might like to do as a project related to that class– just because it occurred to me and seemed like a good idea.  And I guess I’m throwing this out to you all, in part, because I’m wanting to see if anyone else would be interested in working on this, because wikis are so inherently collaborative…

Would anyone else be interested in working on a historiography wiki? It seems like something that could potentially be a useful tool and a edifying thing to work on…

The way I’m picturing it is this: it would work like any other wiki, but specifically focus on the historical, linking history with historians.  You could have pages on historians, which might include major works, their academic/intellectual pedigree, who influenced them, who they influenced, topics and periods covered, etc.  These could then be linked to other entries, about specific books, periods, areas, etc.  The advantage of it would be that, once it took on some volume, you could go to one place to find out who to start with if you want to find out about a specific topic, say, or who some contemporary historians covering your time period are to a text you’re reading. 

I think it’d be useful, too.  It could be a great study tool for people trying to prep for comps– not just as a resource, giving information, but as a way of cataloging what you’ve read.  Writing pages about books you’ve read would help solidify them in your mind.  And the collaborative nature of wikis would mean that others could point you to other readings that might benefit you, via edits and hypertextual connections…

Any thoughts?  Anyone interested? Anyone think it’s a bad idea?  Why?

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At any rate, toward that end, I poked around on Wikipedia, trying to get a feel for how complex it was, etc.  I have to admit, it was intimidating looking at all that code!  I wasn’t sure what I was looking at…

Eventually, I figured out that part of the reason is that Wikipedia is coded in XHTML, which is apparently sort of like the bastard child of HTML and XML… And since you might say I have "small HTML and less XML," this hybrid was a bit confusing.  But then I got to thinking: how much of this is just stuff that’s on every page?  So I looked.  I tried to find two pages on two fairly unrelated topics– so they were likely to have few authors in common.  I picked the entries on The Germs and Rodolphe Töpffer. Two fairly unlike topics. Once I did that, I was actually impressed at how similar the two pages were, despite their different material.

The basic Wikipedia format is a standardized Cascading Style Sheet.  Most everything looked the same, when viewing the source code, for several, several lines.  There were some things that were in one entry, though that weren’t in the other.  I started looking at these.  The first thing that caught my eye was that on the entry on the Germs, this section:

The Germs
Origin Los Angeles, California
Country United States of America
Years active 1977 – 1980, 2005 – present
Genres Punk rock
Labels Slash Records
Past members Darby Crash
Pat Smear
Michelle Baer
Dinky
Lorna Doom
Dottie Danger
Donna Rhia
Nicky Beat
Don Bolles

Is done through a series of tables– though the code that controls a lot of how tables look, their color, things like that– can be found in the CSS.  That makes sense, as you’d want something like Wikipedia to have a fairly uniform appearance… (As an aside, check out who "Dottie Danger" really is– it might surprise you!)

((As a further aside, ’cause I know a lot of you are novice geeks like me, and might not know such things, and be learning by trial and error– I had to edit the above table just slightly… when I just cut and pasted it out of the source code from Wikipedia, it wasn’t redirecting.  I looked at the source code, and figured out what it was: the href tags were redirecting as if you’re already in Wikipedia.  So to make it work, I just had to change this:

<a title="Record label" href="/wiki/Record_label">Labels</a>

to this:

<a title="Record label" href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_label>Labels</a>

which makes sense– without the http bit, it was trying to transfer it WITHIN the site, and didn’t know it was referring to an outside one…))

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Well, I could keep on talking, but I’m probably only proving my ignorance, so I’ll quit with that now– enough "under the hood" talk from the guy who doesn’t know a crankshaft from a carburetor.

However, before I close out this entry, for anyone else who’s interested in getting deeper into this coding and web design stuff, but maybe not the most familiar with the ins and outs of it, you’ve probably found, like I have, that just Googling for unfamiliar terms and tags tends to just give you a lot more unfamiliar terms and tags…  I’ve found HTMLdog.com’s HTML for Beginners and their CSS for Beginners pages to be pretty simple to read and informative. Once I finish both of them, I’ll check out their intermediate pages, and report back on those. Anyone who knows of other similar sites, feel free to send ’em along.

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