Author: William Thomas (page 7 of 21)

William G. Thomas III is a professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities. He teaches digital humanities and digital history, 19th century U.S. history, the Civil War, and the history of slavery.

January 15, 2012

Valley of the Shadow Project retrospective on the Civil War

Last week at the American Historical Association meeting, my friends and colleagues from the Valley of the Shadow Project met for a panel discussion on the state of the field of digital history and a retrospective of the Valley’s Civil War project after 20 years. The gathering was a wonderful experience and the discussion exciting and interesting. One participant, a librarian at the Library of Congress, said about the Valley Project that “there may not be anything like it again.” I agree. The panel included: Edward L. Ayers, Anne S. Rubin, Amy Murrell Taylor, Andrew Torget, Scott Nesbit, and me.

Here are some of the highlights of that discussion. Amy Murrell Taylor’s advice to historians, “Think Big! the Valley taught me to to think big.” Marvelous and so true. She talked about how the project emphasized “connections” among individuals that we could not see otherwise and that are difficult to see, those of families and relationships among families. As Amy explained, in the project the life of the individual in history became more visible; despite the complexity of history and the scale of the Civil War, the Valley project approach managed to create an environment in which the individual always emerged somehow for its readers. She talked about we can see these individuals in multiple dimensions and “rebuild” or “reconstitute” their lives and experiences. This is powerful history, full of complexity, agency, and contingency not easily pulled off in narrative form.

Ed Ayers talked about how the “logic of the architecture” of the Valley project was “tied to the animating idea behind the project.” This in many ways made the Valley project look and behave like an “App.” It was, and is, self-contained, yet it draws its readers in because its design so neatly fits its animating idea.

Andrew Torget explained that when he came on as project manager, the Valley project was an “enterprise” with teams of students and historians working on different aspects of the project. To him the central lesson of the Valley project experience was that it demonstrated the “power of collaboration.” Students working with faculty and technologists and librarians created an intense and powerful model of scholarship in action. Dozens and dozens worked on the project over the years, with care, purpose, and dedication both remarkable and inspiring.

Scott Nesbit described how the Valley taught him “the virtue of openness” and at the same time “the virtue of parasitism.” Here, he explained how the Valley shared and freely disseminated its work and how it also borrowed heavily on technologies and data in the open source environment. Anne Rubin noted that the Valley taught her the value of audience, of opening history to a wider audience and how important it is for historians to connect with, understand, and talk to the public broadly. Again and again, these lessons shape our work in digital history.

Valley of the Shadow project reunion, January 7, 2012, Chicago.

December 26, 2011

1862-2012

This past week I had the opportunity to talk with Jerry Johnston (NET Radio) about the historic significance of the year 1862, now 150 years later. We talked about the Pacific Railroad Act, the Homestead Act, and the Morrill Land Grant Act, all passed in the summer of 1862 and significant to Nebraska.

But we also discussed probably the most important event in American history–Emancipation–which unfolded across the land in a series acts by individual enslaved men and women, members of Congress, military commanders, and President Lincoln. The interview will run on NET stations in the coming week, and is available online here.

1862 was the year of emancipation. One of the most interesting parts of our discussion centered on the new AMC drama “Hell on Wheels.” Set three years later in 1865, the show has become more and more interesting and arresting as historical fiction in large part because it deals so thoughtfully with the consequences of emancipation and the aftermath of the Civil War. I was particularly impressed with the quality and nuanced portrait of this period in last episode, which begins with African American railroad worker and freedman, Elam Ferguson (played by Common), nearly lynched by Irish railroad workers for consorting with one of the white prostitutes in town. One of the important premises of the show is that the transcontinental railroad building in Nebraska in 1865 became the crossroads for so many of the promises, causes, injustices, and experiences of the Civil War. They all seemed to find their way into Hell on Wheels. We see more clearly in this show than others that time did not stop in May 1865 when the war ended. Instead, we are thrust into the middle of an incomplete transition in race relations, labor relations, and capitalist and national expansion.

The conversation with Jerry Johnston went far beyond what is included in the NET broadcast, and we have much to look forward to in 2012 as we look back 150 years to one of the most important years in American history.

December 2, 2011

Doing Humanities in the Digital Age

Today our Digital Humanities graduate readings seminar met with Stefan Sinclair via Skype. This was the third guest visit in our class. We had an earlier session with Robert Nelson on topic modeling and another with Lisa Spiro on the the pedagogy of digital humanities. Sinclair raised an issue at the end of our meeting that we have been struggling with through the semester: whether and how digital humanists should make arguments.

Sinclair put the matter plainly for our students: we must not only build things but also make arguments. Then, he went a step further. The form of our arguments does not need to change. Scholarly journal articles, monographs, essays, and chapters, all are equally viable and should remain so. Even with born digital sources, Sinclair suggested, the scholar remains obligated to create, sustain, breathe life into his or her subject via argument and interpretation. This, he suggested, is what distinctly characterizes the humanities. Where the sciences and social sciences, on the other hand, proceed to “prove” a “finding,” the humanities by definition and by contrast ventures an argument.

This distinction is worth dwelling on. What does it mean to do humanities in the digital age?

Our class reading today was Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, and last week we read and discussed Tim Wu’s The Master Switch. Both indicate in quite different ways that the humanities’ modus operandi, privileging creative argument and interpretation, faces increasing pressures and obstacles.

Turkle makes the point that “the Internet is more than old wine in new bottles.” Our brains, she argues, are rewired every time we surf or search the Net, and she concludes, we need to reclaim our concentration, our attention, our capacity for argument, interpretation, intimacy, and authenticity. Some people find what she calls “refreshment on the Web” and are “replenished in its cool shade.” (275) The Web’s disparate information and links are a “jungle” and, according to Turkle, there is little about it that allows us to be “deliberate.” Moreover, our selves, she suggests, are becoming ever more calibrated to the pace of the Net, “on the basis of what technology proposes, by what it makes easy.” Turkle finds little comforting about this paradoxical state of affairs: “We insist that our world is increasingly complex, yet we have created a communications culture that has decreased the time available for us to sit and think uninterrupted.” (166) We are losing the capacity “to consider complicated problems.”

This state of affairs seems especially troubling for the humanities. But idea of the Web as alluringly untamed, as wild and attractive in its narrative, as not a place to be deliberate, might in fact be its greatest quality for doing humanities in the digital age. Tim Wu, in The Master Switch, characterizes the Internet as “deeply counterintuitive.” (266) He cites Joseph Schumpeter’s analogy of “knowledge and habit once acquired” as “firmly rooted in ourselves as a railway embankment in the earth.” The Internet, unlike previous communication mediums, “abdicates control to the individual: that is its special allure, its power to be endlessly surprising, as well as its founding principle.”

Humanities scholars take note! It may be that digital humanities projects–the best of them–suit this environment peculiarly well, as they make no attempt to make the digital space more “deliberate.” In attempting to graft interpretive text onto web sites, for example, we might mistake the nature of the Internet, miss its counterintuitive quality. No wonder some of our web sites take on the character of the jungle, freeing our readers to walk through the morass link by link as they see fit.

Finally, what of Stefan Sinclair’s point that scholars might want to pause before discarding traditional means of scholarly publication? Sinclair’s larger point was to encourage experimentation. But he takes seriously the place of interpretive argument for the humanities. We need now more than ever to walk the knife’s edge–on one side there is the abyss of scientific positivism and “verification” of results, as we miss the special quality of the humanities, on the other side there is the abyss of irrelevancy, as we miss the underlying structure of the Net. Sinclair has walked that edge and lived to tell the tale, so to speak, and he has sage advice from the experience.

November 26, 2011

Railroad Exhibition planning with the Sheldon Museum of Art

In 2012 the United States will mark several important anniversaries for the Great Plains region, including the passage of three pieces of landmark legislation–the 1862 Pacific Railroad Act, the Morrill Land Grant Act, and the Homestead Act. In addition, the Civil War Sesquicentennial is already underway, directing further attention to the importance of this period in American history.

We are currently planning an exhibition on “Railroads and the Making of Modern America” at the Sheldon Museum of Art from January 21, 2012 through April 2012. This exhibition will coincide with the Center for Great Plains symposium on “1862-2012: The Making of the Great Plains” and will feature works related to this theme in the Sheldon Museum of Art permanent collection. Railroads shaped the landscape of the Great Plains, and they were a central actor in the drama of American modernity.

In one of the most important treatments of the railroad in American art and literature, Leo Marx explained, “The sudden appearance of the machine in the garden is an arresting, endlessly evocative image. It causes the instantaneous clash of opposed states of mind: a strong urge to believe in the rural myth along with an awareness of industrialization as counterforce to the myth.” Machinery was associated with democracy, progress, a sense of history, and a step beyond natural limits. For Marx, Daniel Webster’s defense of the Northern Railroad’s opening in August 1847 captured the trade-off or reconciliation Americans made in adapting to the railroad–the losses (of peace and repose, ugly landscapes, noise, smoke) were more than offset by progressive force of the machinery, tied as it was to the republican progress, cosmic harmony, civilization, and history. No wonder then that Henry David Thoreau treated the machine as both an interruption and a vital, electric event. Henry Adams would consider the generation after 1865 “mortgaged to the railroads” and concluded “no one knew it better than the generation itself.” Adams thought that the railroads were “but one active interest, to which all others were subservient, and which absorbed the energies of some sixty million people to the exclusion of every other force, real or imaginary.” Indeed, the railroads contributed to “a steady remodelling [sic] of social and political habits.”

The railroads have a prominent place in American history textbooks, and yet the global, transnational modernity that railroads catalyzed remains difficult to convey. Art and visual images open up this issue in ways that can reach larger audiences, including elementary, secondary, and college students. Most often, the railroad as a subject in American art has been associated with the themes Leo Marx elucidated in his landmark The Machine in the Garden–the railroad as a subject of the pastoral ideal. But the Sheldon’s collection offers a strikingly different opportunity to examine the railroad as a principal actor in the making of modernity, and in the global consequences of American railroad development.

The Sheldon permanent collection offers the opportunity to unveil the global breadth of these processes and to explore the ways railroads became symbolic technologies, shaping the modern ideas and practices of this period. The Sheldon collection includes engravings and lithographs from the Great Plains, including works featuring the Union Pacific Railroad (U-222), the Platte Valley (U-4497.1), and the Black Hills (U-4498.1). But the collection also features strong work from the 1930s and 40s (such as “Slag Heaps,” “Railroad Crossing,” and “Railway Station”). Some of this work came out of the Works Progress Administration. Finally, the collection has excellent works from the 1960s and 1970s, including Roy Ahlgren “Great American Perspective,” the “Tubes” series, and Walter Blakelock Wilson “Prairie Boxcars.”

Roy Alghren, 1973

In addition, the International Center for Quilt Studies will lend one of its “railroad” pattern quilts and several local private collectors will lend several major contemporary works on the subject of the railroad.

In 2008-09 the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Kansas, opened an exhibit on “Art in the Age of Steam: Europe, America and the Railway, 1830-1960.” This exhibit attempted to focus on “how artists responded” to the railroad and featured the work of a wide range of artists–impressionists, photographers, modernists, and landscape painters. The works were arranged chronologically by period, although a few categories were broadly construed (such as “states of mind”).

This exhibition will take a somewhat different approach. We will examine the ways artists captured and shaped the modern ideas, practices, and experiences made possible with the railroads and why they were so important in American history. Rather than depicting the influences only from Europe, we intend to emphasize the broader cross-border movements of the railroads and to explore their global consequences. The audience will be presented with some familiar objects depicting for example the transcontinental, but they will also see and discover the ways that the Great Plains was part of a much larger set of modern processes.

November 7, 2011

AMC’s Hell on Wheels: a brief review

AMC’s premier of Hell on Wheels aired last night, and it included beautiful scenes of the Union Pacific railroad building and the Nebraska Territory. The close-up view of the steam locomotive–the behemoth–and its cowcatcher, the explosions blasting the cut through the prairie, the soot and steam pouring forth from the engines, the lines of spike drivers and graders pounding the rails, all gave a visceral sense of what it took to build a railroad. The series offers great promise. And it is admittedly taking on big issues: race, expansion, corruption, and the aftermath of civil war. We should applaud AMC, the cast is terrific, the scenes gorgeous.

But three scenes in particular struck me as ones that raise problems for history and how we remember and understand 1865. These were matters of concern not because such individual behaviors did not exist–there were people like this–but because they run against the broader historical record, so much so as to be questionable. In many ways AMC is creating complex characters against type, a positive move. I hope the complexity is less one-dimensional in the coming episodes, and we can see more nuanced characters. I am only going to sketch what I consider to be the matters of concern. These are not critiques as much as questions.

When the main character Cullen Bohannon (Anson Mount), the ex-Confederate guerrilla, admits that he was a slaveholder, he also declares that he freed his slaves one year before the Civil War broke out. And further that his “Yankee” spouse led him to this morally right decision. So, we have a man, our hero, who both freed his own slaves and fought for the Confederacy’s claim to protect slavery. The contradiction seems to make Bohannon more sympathetic, but it does so at the expense of larger questions. A braver move might have been to make him a slaveholder period, yet one searching through the aftermath of war and emancipation for away forward, one willing to take risks across the racial divide.
We’ve seen this before with Mel Gibson’s character in The Patriot, although in the Revolutionary age manumission was much more prevalent and therefore plausible, if strained and sappily rendered in that film. In 1860 the idea that Bohannon freed his slaves and employed them on his farm as wage-laborers is more fanciful–with slave prices at their highest in history, with slavery expanding across the South, and with pro-slavery opinion in the white South unopposed. This portrayal is a matter of concern.
Immediately before Bohannon’s revelation about manumitting his slaves, the former Union soldier, now paymaster for the Union Pacific construction crew, is the first man to utter the n-word. Here too, we are meant to understand that Northerners were equally or more racist than their Confederate counterparts. Their racism is blind, unthinking, and at a distance. He’s the one who acts like the slave driver and beats and whips a freedman from his high horse. Yet, here too the scene runs counter to the volumes of Union soldier letters and diaries which clearly indicate growing appreciation for black soldiers and workers and disdain for the slaveholder class. Men who fought with Sherman came away from the war with mixed emotions. It is true that few wanted freedmen to move north and some reacted violently, usually over labor. It is also true that employers in the railroad industry were particularly segregationist and repressive–most railroads in the North hired absolutely no black men. But, this scene does something more. It puts racism–the electrifying n-work–in the mouth of the North and seems to disregard the widespread white supremacy of the Confederacy.
When Bohannon, our heroic white ex-Confederate, tells the freedman Elam Ferguson (played by Common) to “let go of the past,” we have to pause and say, really? Just who had trouble letting go of the past? White former Confederates. This scene complicates our understanding–a good thing–but does so in a potentially damaging way. The ex-slave freedman is in his tent, sharpening the knife of vengeance, for all the past wrongs and now for the wrong perpetrated by the white Northern former Union solider paymaster. The feelings of frustration among some freedmen with the post war world of labor was plain–it looked like slavery. Yet we have few instances in the written records of history of former slaves acting with murderous vengeance, much less being talked out of it by former Confederates who tell them to “let go of the past.” Southern whites in December 1865 were, it should be pointed out, fearful of a massive plot by former slaves, one in a long line of nightmarish visions Southern whites had about slavery.

I’ve written in The Iron Way about a more typical scene of racial conflict in 1865. Here’s a selection that might put some of what Hell on Wheels portrayed in perspective:

“The riot at Aquia Creek on the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad. In Virginia at the end of the war, the volatile mix of black and white workers, former Confederates, and Union soldiers combined in August 1865 to produce one of the first post-war race riots. A simple altercation between a freedman and a white worker who was a former Confederate escalated quickly. Organized mobs of whites and blacks with shovels and clubs threatened one another. The Fifth Maryland, a Unionist but nonetheless Southern regiment, was called in to break up the conflict. Led by an overaggressive lieutenant, the Union soldiers turned first on the black railroad workers and, according to newspaper accounts, began to “break in the doors and windows, and drag the negroes from their beds.” One black man was killed, shot down by the white mob armed with shotguns. Later, after other army units intervened, forty white workers–all of them discharged Confederate soldiers–were arrested, tried, and sentenced to the chain gang for sixty days. According to The Chicago Tribune, a radical Republican paper, “the negroes have been sent back to their work, confident of protection in their rights, and encouragement in their industry.” But the Aquia Creek Riot was a sign of a less secure future. Even The Tribune a few days later repeated an overblown rumor about the Aquia Creek incident: that the freedmen were plotting to “assassinate all the white laborers employed on the railroad” and that they had gathered up “scythes” and “knives” to carry out a massacre. In the fall of 1865 rumors flew around the South among Confederate whites that blacks were preparing for a major uprising in the new year. When Christmas 1865 came and went without an insurrection, nervous whites found other bogeymen.”

I’m eager to see more of AMC’s Hell on Wheels. There are other questions the series raises about the portrayal of the railroad, its builders, and Native peoples. Of particular interest last night is Colm Meaney’s Thomas C. “Doc” Durant. We’ll take these up in a later post.