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Guttenberg

I’m a little old-fashioned now and then– it’s a result of my being a somewhat cynical pragmatist.  This week’s reading on the Gutenberg<e> project is one of those things that brings that out in me.

This goes sort of along the same lines as when I said in class that whether or not a project is "History" really depended on whether or not it got you tenure, or a teaching gig, or the approval of your department head, or whatever.  I’m pragmatical and careerist when it comes to where to invest my time… well, except for that giant leap in logic that told me that getting a PhD in History was a good idea in the first place.  ;P

And, yeah– that’s the exact problem you have with this project– is it gonna count as a book?  If you’ve just graduated, and you’re looking for a place to work, and get on the tenure track, do you want to risk it?  Personally, I don’t think I would.  I could definitely see some programs not looking at this as an actual monograph publication.  Which could mean, in some places, that you’re going to have to write and get accepted for publication ANOTHER monograph in those difficult first four years or so of teaching, or else risk not passing your tenure review.  Which means relocation at best, and professional death at the worst. 

Maybe this route appeals to some, the risk-takers out there, or the people who wouldn’t want to work somewhere that insisted on a physical book publication– but I’m neither.  Frankly, I’ll work anywhere.  (Thus my job working as a security guard in housing projects after college…)  And I’m pretty risk-adverse.  Not conservative, mind you, but seldom the first to stick his neck out.

And the fact that their subscription rate is so low–despite its being one of the cheapest e-subscriptions out there a university might consider– highlights this riskiness.  What if the project loses some of its philanthropic funding and can’t keep the sight afloat?  You’ll have already sold off your book to the publishing house, and there won’t be an extant, physical copy out there for anyone to look at.  There’s always the possibility that Columbia might try to publish a couple of these books if that happened, but I wouldn’t count on it, nor do I think I’d gamble on my monograph being one of the ones (or the one) that was good enough to warrant that treatment.

(Not to mention that from what I’ve heard, most academic houses these days are shooting for 200 pages plus footnotes– with fewer and fewer footnotes– while Gutenberg<e> books average 350 to 400 pages.  I’d personally use the electronic format to have more complete footnotes– one of the appealing things about the format– but that just means more even greater revisions if it were transfered to print, and less likelihood that such a transfer would happen.)

All that said, it seems like an interesting and exciting project.  I don’t want to be seen, 20 years from now when/if this is seen as the beginning of a revolution in scholarly history publication, as the guy who thought it was a bad idea.  I’m not being reactionary here, in fact I’m rooting for the project.  I think it’s a neat idea, the site looks well-done, the books sound interesting… it’s got a lot going for it.

I’m just not ready to bet my meager life savings on that long-shot horse quite yet.

________________________________________

And just because I can’t repress the urge to make a pop-culture reference at every turn, was I the only one who, when he heard the name of the project, thought of THIS GUY?  It sounds like an adjective used by an amateur film critic:

"What did you think of his acting?"

"Oh, it was alright, a little vanilla… A little to Guttenberg<y> for my taste…."

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I said I’d do this a week ago…

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The dreaded passive voice…

So.  I just got called out in class today for using the passive voice in a blog post.

I just looked back at the blog post.  I’m frequently guilty of indulging my desire to fall into the passive voice, so I wasn’t surprised when the professor said that I had done so.  However: the specific example in the post in question brings up an issue that I’ve often had when people say to avoid the passive voice: aren’t there some times when it is necessary? 

I looked at the sentence, and it’s pretty much what I wanted to say:  "In January of 1917, a pamphlet was published…" The thing had about 15 signators, if memory and my quickly-scrawled notes serve me right.  I can’t rightly say who wrote it– surely the entire committee did not.  In my experience with writing by committee, one or several people write something, and the rest sign off.  Or offer revisions.  But I doubt all 15 people sat in a room, passing around the pen.  Moreover, again, I’m working on memory and notes here, but I don’t recall a publisher being listed anywhere. 

How could I put this into the active voice?  I can’t say, "Someone wrote a pamphlet," or "Some dude published this broadside," can I?  That sounds worse than the passive voice, to my ear.  I guess I could say, "a pamphlet appeared," but that sounds like some sort of mystical process.

I know that "The passive voice should be avoided," (har, har…) but it seems as if sometimes it’s the right stylistic decision.  How do you not resort to it when you’re faced with holes in the historical record?  It seems that sometimes there are documents that are too important to be thrown out just to avoid an "incorrect" voice…  The English Language has a passive voice for a reason– it avoids direct agency, which can be significant, even important, to do at times.  Sometimes it’s best to agree that "mistakes were made."

Can’t it be acceptable in Historical writing to utilize this voice’s capacity to elide certain gaps in information?

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Google History

It’s like H-Bot, only different…

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…Post on Education and teh Intarwebz…

…This post is mostly in response to Dan Cohen’s No Computer Left Behind.

In my methodologies class, the professor gave us an assignment last week that she had given her undergrad class the week before.  We were to take an 1881 plantation map that she had pulled from a textbook, one that gave very little in the way of clues as to its location, and to find its current location.  She warned us, as she had warned them, that "the answers won’t be found on Google."

Well, being both a congenital contrarian and a vocal proponent of Google Nation, I looked at this as a challenge.  I was determined to find the site, and to use Google every step of the way.  And I did.  And in fact, I had the correct answer within a few hours of the assignment.  I used Google Scholar to find an article that had a map of the plantation and environs circa 1985.  This article gave me a citation to the first appearance of the map, which I then found via Google Scholar.  I used Google Maps to find a nearby city that was sizable enough to have be on a map, and then followed the appropriate roads up to the plantation’s site.   After finding out about USGS Eros from Fenwick’s Geographic Reference Librarian, (Joy Shu, I learned from a little Googling about…) I used Google to find the USGS Eros site, found a nearby stream, and confirmed what I had suspected.  I was also able to find out a bit about the family’s history, including photos of several family members, using Google.  I was able to do all of this in under 12 hours, and still had time for some TV, a few beers, and to watch some shows I’d Tivo’d that day.

In class this week, the professor described the difficulty the undergrads had experienced– looking for a different nearby town– a smaller one closer to the plantation– on Google yields an incorrect hit, in a city in a different county.  The professor explained that she had used the student’s inability to locate the map as what some might call a "teaching moment"– one of those perfect chances to communicate something to your students in terms that they can immediately relate to, based on personal experience.  She used this teaching moment to try to eliminate their belief that Google was the end-all, be-all in Internet knowledge-seeking.  She taught them about databases, how many aren’t crawled by Google, and how to use them.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a Google Cheerleader, but I still understand what she felt was the best lesson for the undergrads to pull from this– that "Not everything is on Google."  Of course it’s not.  But at the same time, everything that you needed to get this problem solved really WAS on Google, as long as you combined Google’s search capacity with a) a knowledge of which tool to use when, and how, and b) a little bit of logical reasoning and critical thinking.

So I have to admit that I got a little frustrated when she was describing the experience with the undergrads.  I think the lesson she taught was a valuable one– one that a lot of undergrads need, and don’t often get.  However, I don’t know if I agree that it’s the best teaching moment for that lesson, given that in this case, everything WAS on Google.  Personally, I might have used the same moment to give the students a very different lesson– "Sharpening your Google Skills." 

("Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills–nunchuck skills… bowhunting skills… computer hacking skills… " –Napoleon Dynamite)

In the past few years, I have talked with numerous librarians and academics who are aghast at what they see as the over reliance of students on the Internet in general, and Google and Wikipedia specifically.  I think that to some extent this is valid– you have to remind students to look at books, too.  But it’s also useful to point them over toward Google Books, which in my experience is a treasure-trove of valuable information– something that digs deep into books you wouldn’t have time to look through, that can shed light on your research even if they’re ostensibly about a different topic.  Even if these people are disturbed by students using the Internet as a primary or only source of information, they should at least do students the service of making sure that they are savvy users of the Internet.

I guess I’m kind of pushed toward this point of view as a person who studies popular culture.  I believe that media literacy is something that is unforgivably overlooked in primary, secondary, and college education.  There are skill sets and critical thinking skills that can allow students to find these new media– and even older media, like television– to be quite useful, absolute founts of knowledge.  Instead, many educators, possibly afraid of technology they aren’t so great at navigating themselves, settle into neo-Luddite platitudes of dismissal.

I was especially shocked to see Cohen’s quote from Leon Botstein, that "a Google search of the Web ‘overwhelms you with too much information, much of which is hopelessly unreliable or beside the point. It’s like looking for a lost ring in a vacuum bag. What you end up with mostly are bagel crumbs and dirt.’"  I’ve met Leon a few times.  He’s a pretty hep cat.  And anyone who’s even looked at his book Jefferson’s Children will tell you, the guy’s not exactly old school when it comes to education.   (If you haven’t read the book, check it out.  It’s fascinating.  Although as an alumnus of Simon’s Rock College I do have to agree with one Amazon Reviewer who called it "perplexing and offensive" that he fails to even mention that school.  I mean, it’s owned by Bard, so he’s the President of both colleges, and SRC provides kids with an alternative to the last two years of high school that Botstein proposes eliminating– by letting them just go to college instead.)

…But, being a big fan of Leon’s, I’m willing to overlook this statement, and assume that the real problem lies in a single word of the quote: "overwhelms."  It’s not hard to be overwhelmed by this massive surge of new access to information unless one has been properly educated in how to navigate, use, and master it.  This is not an educational opportunity Leon’s had.  Heck, in rushing to become the country’s youngest college president, he probably had less opportunity than most to take some college-sponsored computer skills sessions than most profs might.

Nevertheless, the fact remains: at this point, many undergrads lack the critical thinking and IT skills to use all the information the Internet gives them access to, and yet they are still more competent than many of their instructors.  This reality is not only highlighted by the number of neo-Luddite screeds and screams by educators, but by the constant influx of articles in educational journals about the newest evil in "cyber-cheating."

Some of this is changing, I’m sure, over time– the youngest staff at most colleges has only recently begun to represent the first generation of college students to have gone through post-secondary education with Internet access.  But by the time these postdocs, adjuncts, and nontenured associates have actually found enough of a place to find a voice in the creation of classes for their programs, how many more students will have gone through college without the benefit of Internet research training?

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should probably admit that I’m one of the people who’s benefited from the Internet.  I’m rubbish when it comes to coming up with names and dates… and here I am in a History PhD program.  Google is one of the things I can thank for this.  So that’s out there– that’s my bias.  I never would have made it this far into History if I had been studying even 50 or 100 years ago.  If I had to rely on rote learning and memorization, I doubt I would have even made it through college.  So I’m a beneficiary of this changing technology and progressive education.  I have had teachers who encouraged me, and understood that analysis, critical thinking, and argument are far more important than knowing 1066 or 1588.  Actually, I only really learned to write once my parents put me in front of a computer when I was in second grade or so– so there’s a chance I might not have even made it into college without the aid of technology.  It’s probably for these reasons that I’ve come to understand and emphasize the import of media literacy and technological skills.  When you can never remember names and dates, it’s important to be really fast and proficient at tracking ’em down.

…Oh yeah, and one other note on the article:  Standardized Tests are BAD.

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Maps

"Maps………..
Wait.
They don’t love you like I love you."

–"Maps," by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

The song never really made sense to me, but it’s incredibly catchy.

I don’t have anything particularly insightful to say about this week’s readings.  They were all solid, interesting, and exciting.  I have no criticisms.

Moreover, this topic has got me freshly re-excited about the whole concept of digital history– my last couple weeks have been rough, with APIs and Databases kicking me into frightened submissions. 

But maps?  Yeah, I get excited about maps anyway.  And the whole concept of doing historical geography on computers, making it interactive, WOW.  That’s really exciting to me.  It’s actually what made me warm up to the concept of this school’s technology requirement.  I love the idea of interactive maps, maps that are deep in their knowledge, multi-layered or multiform.  Interactive maps would refute Karen O’s assertion that "Maps……. wait."  (He said, weakly justifying the quote at the beginning of the article.)

Since I’ve gotten all geeky drooling fanboy about the subject, it’s a little hard to be objective about the articles.  Several of them were dull, but they really fun to think away from, if that makes sense…?  I got distracted by my own thoughts of what could be done.

So instead of trying to seriously tackle these articles, let me share a fantasy project.

I would love to see (or work on, if I someday develop the knowhow) a web companion to Boston: A Topographical History.  It’s a book I already love, and a fascinating topic. You see, a lot of what is now Boston was, at the time of first contact, under water.  Over time, damming and landfill changed that.  They chopped the tops off of several hills, and eliminated several others, to produce a larger, but flatter, Boston.  This is something that you can talk about in a book until you’re (metaphorically) blue in the face, but you can’t quite convey it as well as you could with an interactive map.

Imagine an interactive map, where you can adjust the time to actually watch the land being created, the topography flattening out, the changes in the population in different areas over time, as the new land allows for new class-based segregation.  Imagine being able to select points of interest on this map, and see a picture from that time of that place.

I know how these things go, one historian’s gold is another’s reason to take a nap, but in my mind, the results would be (to use another pop culture quote) "Freakin’ awesome," as Peter Griffin once put it.

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…looking at “The Quilting Frolic.”

John Lewis Krimmel's "The Quilting Party"

"The Quilting Frolic" is a work of art that is used frequently as a window into the material culture of the middle class of the Early Republic.  It was painted in 1813 by John Lewis Krimmel, a German-born American genre painter best known for his paintings of middle-class families in Pennsylvania.  Because of his interest in depicting the quotidian pleasures of middle class life in that time, his paintings of interiors are richly detailed, and illustrate well the booming consumer culture of the post-Revolutionary period.  As Krill and Eversman explain:

Pictures provide intriguing glimpses into the material life of Americans of a more modest means than the federal elite… [This painting] depicted the interior of a Pennsylvania German home, a scene fairly bursting with consumer goods: silhouettes and paintings hang above the fireplace while the cupboards are filled with ceramics.  Although sparse, the furniture includes a Windsor chair and a tall-case clock (a favorite status symbol of the Pennsylvania Germans.)

Even picking a single item in the picture can, with a little research, yield a great deal of historical information about the time.  Let’s look at the china cabinet.

The China Cabinet

I haven’t, in the last few days’ digging-around, been able to find much information about china cabinets per se.  They, and other kitchen furniture like the Hoosier cabinet and the pie safe, don’t seem to get quite as much attention in histories of material culture as do, say, chests, desks, or beds.  They do tend to be somewhat less ornate, as they were intended for the kitchen, which was not a place for guests, so this may be the reason.  Alternatively, one might argue that these objects are culturally gendered items, furniture that is associated with women’s work, and this might bring down their cultural capital. 

Whatever the case, a few things can be said about the china cabinet.  From its rectilinear lines and simplicity of design, it can be identified as belonging to the federal style of furniture– also known as early classical revival, Louis XVI, Adam, Sheraton, and Hepplewhite.  This style avoided the curved lines and ornate designs of the earlier Chippendale and rococo styles, or the the empire style of furniture that came after it.  It lacks, however, some of the characteristic ornament of that style: it has no gilt, no intricate carvings, no paintings or wood inlays.  I initially thought that perhaps this meant that it’s a cheaper piece of furniture.  However, when I started thinking about its sliding glass doors, I reconsidered. 

If you’ve ever taken a stroll around Beacon Hill in Boston, you likely noticed the purple window panes.  These panes were originally created by accident– the glass maker in England added too much magnesium to the glass, which resulted in the purple tint.  Most of Beacon Hill was developed in the period between 1800 and 1830 by a group of Boston Brahmins that included the celebrated architect, statesman, and real-estate speculator Charles Bulfinch, and the purple panes date back to the Bulfinch Era.  Or at least the originals do.  It has been a long-standing statute in Boston that if you have one of the famed purple panes on your house, and it breaks for any reason, you’re required to replace it with purple glass.

…At any rate, the point of this little digression into Boston History is that in 1813, flat glass panes were an expensive import item.  They were fragile– more fragile structurally than other glasswares, like bottles, and costs were driven up by the risk of damage while making their transatlantic journey.  Panes of glass were also smaller– the glass at the front of this china cabinet is much larger than any single pane on Beacon Hill.  Such large panes of glass would have gone for a pretty penny indeed.  For this reason, I would guess that this china cabinet must be at least a middle-price-point item, if not a relatively expensive one.  It could well be one of the most expensive items in the painting.

The other reason the glass front of the cabinet is interesting is that it reveals the piece of furniture’s dual purpose: the cabinet was not just a storage device, but it was also intended for displaying the china.

The china.  Here’s where the sources I was able to track down get a little more helpful.  Apparently, the early republic was a time of great change for porcelain, both in America and internationally.  In the colonial era, most ceramics were imported to America by the British, the Dutch, and from China by the British and the Dutch.  American-made tableware had been produced throughout the colonial era as well– in fact, the first soft-pour porcelain (proper porcelain, of the type that had previously only been produced in China) to be produced in America was made in 1770, only twenty years after the British first figured the process out.

The British considered the American colonies as something of a dumping ground for old and unpopular designs.  However, by 1800, tariffs on British ceramics had become prohibitively high on the continent, and  the US had become the primary target of British china exports.  Porcelain exports from China shifted dramatically in this period as well.  In the seventeenth century, European export from China was dominated by the Dutch East India company, but this near-monopoly was lost at the end of the 1600s with civil war in China.  In the next century, the British would come to dominate the shipping of goods from China.  This period of dominance came to an end soon after the American Revolution, when the US became the main supplier of Chinese goods to Europe, aided by their status as a halfway-point.  (In fact, one of the oldest museums in the country, the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, was founded in 1799 by the elite import/export men of that city– which was at that time one of the largest trading hubs in America.  It has an amazing collection of East Asian art from that time period.)

Styles in china patterns shifted quickly and radically in the early republic, enough so that we can glean a little bit about the pieces in the painting that one might not expect.  Look again at the porcelain in the china cabinet and on the table.

Teaware on the table...

The dinnerware and the teaware patterns don’t seem to match.  This would be in keeping with Miller et al.‘s assertion that it was likely more common for families to have mismatched tea- and dinner- wares, as they were manufactured by different processes and marketed differently.  Moreover, when one compares the patterns, as best they can be discerned from the painting, to a chart of popular china patterns from 1750-1840, something surprising emerges.

China Shards, 1750-1840

The china in the cabinet most resemble the the feather-edged bisque, which was popular between 1760 and 1790.  The tableware in the painting would probably be seen at the time as quite old-fashioned, and was most likely actually fairly old. The teaware, seen most clearly on the table, looks more like a combination of the blue shell edge pearlware and the brown-line creamware– having the lined and rounded edges of the latter and the white and blue coloration of the former.  The teaware was likely newer, and more stylish.

It seems logical that the teaware might be newer than the tableware: teaware was used in entertaining guests (as we see here in the painting,) and as such can be seen as occupying a nominal position between domestic and public, where the plateware was much more firmly part of the domestic sphere.  However, as Diana diZerega Wall has noted, the domestic sphere was a rapidly morphing beast itself at this time, and this affected china and table service. 

As the economy shifted away from households and more men began to work outside the house, dinner took on a whole new cultural meaning in America.  The meal hadn’t been thought of as particularly important in the days when most production was done within the house– the family saw each other all day long, and dinner was merely the largest meal that happened around midday.  As men began working outside the house, dinner was held after the end of the work-day, and took on a whole new set of rituals.  It became a symbol of the values embodied in the new "cult of domesticity."  Around this time, plateware fashions shifted to the more and more ornate, embodied in the complex patterns of chinoiserie.

…This is all getting quite long-winded, but I think I’ve definitely proved that with sufficient deep digging, (which this blog entry is not pretending to represent) there is a lot you can dig out of this painting.  Honestly, you could probably put together an edited volume, thematically linked by items in this book– it would probably be more interesting reading than one might initially think.

_______________________

Works Consulted:

"John Lewis Krimmel – An Artist in Federal America" by Milo M. Naeve

"Changing Cunsumption Paterns: English Ceramics and the American Market from 1770 to 1840" by George Miller et al. and "Family Dinners and Social Teas: Ceramics and Domestic Rituals" by Diana diZerega Wall, both from Everyday Life in the Early Republic, edited by Catherine E. Hutchins

Early American Decorative Arts, 1620-1860: A Handbook for Interpreters by Rosemary Troy Krill and Pauline K. Eversmann

In Praise of America : American Decorative Arts, Sixteen Fifty to Eighteen Thirty by Wendy A. Cooper

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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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Yeah, it’s probably weird of me…

…but I love to check out the visitors’ stats for my blog– see where people are clicking through from. I’ve noticed that there’s some really anal people using Google, who’ve found me on the 14th or 21st hit page.  That’s always interesting.  As is seeing what odd searches people end up finding you with.  I quoted Oliver Wendel Holmes, and when someone Googled about half of his first sentence in that paragraph, I came up pretty quick.  Found that funny.

But the point of this post is just to point out to the rest of the class something that you likely missed if you aren’t weird about such things, like I am.  Namely: several people in this class got link-throughs on this blog post.

If there was any doubt before, we’re officially in the blogosphere.

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I feel COMPLETELY overwhelmed…

I’ve been enjoying the class thus far– I haven’t felt too much in over my head until now.  But this week, a lot of the reading had me completely lost.

What’s an API?

Well, it’s an "application programming interface."  Honestly, I have no idea what that means– it’s about as clear as mud.  The impression I get from Wikipedia is that it’s something you embed into a site using XML or HTML or both or something, that lets things talk to each other independently? From Google’s list of their APIs, I get the sense that it’s a method of embedding one set of functions and data within another web page in order to allow users to… I’m not sure. Get information without going to outside sources?  It basically integrates one component of a search or data system into another page or system? 

It’s all just fuzzy to me.

It has something to do with interoperability, I can tell that.  But the interoperability article left me confused as well– it’s just a little too jargon-laden for me, using terminologies that muddle my brain trying to disambiguate concepts that ultimately remained quite ambiguous in my mind.

Maybe one answer to Dan Cohen’s question as to why there aren’t more APIs being produced in the humanities is that few people can do it– and I’m not even talking about code, here, I’m talking about the fact that in a class like this, that tries to bring us into the techie fold as historians, we have to constantly bounce back and forth between the highly difficult specialist languages of Information Theory, History and Historiography, and Nuts-and-Bolts computer-speak.  Personally, I think a lot of people find such constant code-shifting (and I’m using that in the semiotic sense of code, not the techie sense) quite jarring and difficult.  Or at least this geek-in-training is.

I feel like a bad grad student saying this, but my favorite sentence in all our readings for this week was, "To paraphrase Sarah Tyacke of the UK’s Public Records Office, this is the junk which enables the people (users) to get at the stuff (rich content) they want."  THAT made sense to me.  THAT explained something to me.  I like it when authors don’t feel bad about occasionally "talking down to" their audience and explaining things, if they sense some of their audience may be non-experts.  When I was a writing tutor, I always used to quote that line of Denzell Washington’s from Philadelphia: "Explain it to me like I’m a two-year-old."  Honestly, while I used to be about the biggest theory geek you could find, I’m starting to think that’s some of the best advice you can give anyone on scholarly writing.    It’s not patronizing to explain or define.

I know this post is coming off a bit negative, and that isn’t my intent, but I’m just sort of free-flowing it here, since I feel completely lost in the dust. 

The idea of Web 2.0 being all about the bricolage is something I’m a little more able to understand, and I have to agree– it makes sense as a model.  Before, web pages provided content.  Now they provide interactive context.  They have millions of points of articulation, and get shaped around user-provided content in a symbiotic relationship.  The pluses and minuses of this shift for scholarship, I don’t feel prepared to comment on.  I use lots of social-networking sites, lots of web sites that have user-provided content, but I don’t really draw from that fray in my research, nor do I toss my research out into it. 

Also, was I the only one who had some real trouble navigating Yee’s site?  I have the nagging suspicion that I missed a lot of the actual CONTENT there…

…Anyway, that’s my obligatory blog post for the week.  I’m confused.  I’m not sure what to say.  And I wish others were better at explaining these things to me.  I hope this post doesn’t come off as a negativity-bomb– I just wanted to put this stuff out there, and hopefully someone will be able to point me in the right direction as a result.

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