Author: William Thomas (page 8 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.

November 4, 2011

Waiting for Hell on Wheels: AMC’s new drama on 1865 and the building of the transcontinental

I have to admit that I have been eagerly anticipating Sunday night’s premier of AMC’s “Hell on Wheels.” What could be better than the unheralded Anson Mount, one of the best Southern actors of our day, playing an ex-Confederate guerrilla looking for his wife’s killer after the Civil War in Nebraska, in and around the building of the Union Pacific Railroad and its rolling town of “Hell on Wheels”?

Nearly ten years ago, Mount played an FBI undercover operator in ABC’s short-lived Line of Fire. That show was set in Richmond, Virginia, and featured a mix of Southern characters much as Justified has done recently. Mount was simply excellent in Line of Fire, and so were the others (especially Leslie Hope), but the slow pace of the show and perhaps its Southernness did not connect with the audience. The Wire was able to capture for Baltimore much more of that city’s quirky and tough street life than Line of Fire could Richmond’s.

Hell on Wheels has already generated some controversy over what exactly the scene of the building of the Union Pacific might have been like and over the plausibility of the show’s mix of Union and Confederate veterans, freed slaves, Native Americans, immigrants, company executives, and town boosters. The Los Angeles Times reviewed Hell on Wheels and mistakenly referred to Colm Meaney’s character as Thomas “Doc” Duncan–it was Thomas C. “Doc” Durant. The picture of so many freedmen in the scene has prompted questions.

One controversy has erupted over whether Chinese laborers worked on the Union Pacific. The answer is no, at least not according to the Union Pacific records. Jeff Yang’s Wall Street Journal piece, “Do Chinese Pioneers Get Railroaded in AMC’s ‘Hell on Wheels’?”, examines the problem of what one commenter called “Asian invisibility.” I have found no records of Chinese laborers on in the Union Pacific payrolls in the 1865-68 period. The U.S. Census, while not the most reliable in counting some populations, recorded no persons of Chinese birth in Nebraska in 1870, nor any Chinese persons living along the counties of the Union Pacific Railroad. Yet, the U.S. Census counted even small populations of individuals, listing sixteen Chinese in Mississippi, two in Michigan, and seven in Colorado Territory that year. In 1870 the census listed 49,310 Chinese persons in California.

On the other hand, there is evidence of freedmen working on the Union Pacific as early as 1863. The U.S. Secretary of the Interior, John P. Usher, reported that year that 300 “free colored laborers” had moved to Council Bluffs, Iowa, to begin working on the Union Pacific Railroad. His office had been “repeatedly urged to use its influence to cause as many colored laborers as can be procured to be employed on this work.” (see John P. Usher, Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1863, p. xix, in Annual Report of the Department of the Interior)

AMC’s promotional material includes photos from the premier, and we see the black freedmen prominently in them. It would help if we could gain a renewed sense of the vast displacement and movement that came from the Civil War and its immediate aftermath. Freedmen moved all over and even out of the South. Historian Leslie A. Schwalm has described the movement of freedmen into the Midwest during the war in detail (see Schwalm’s Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest). It should be no surprise that racial conflict simmered just below the surface and broke into the open at Memphis and other places, including in the North. One white former Confederate’s railroad trip in 1865, and his persistent racially bigoted views, can be found in Stephen Ash, A Year in the South: : 1865: The True Story of Four Ordinary People Who Lived Through the Most Tumultuous Twelve Months in American History (New York, N.Y.: Harper Collins, 2004). Ash traces the story of John Robertson out of Tennessee in 1865 on his way to Chicago and then to Iowa, who finds freedmen in the depots at Nashville and Louisville and stewed that they “had forgot to get out of the way of white people.” Robertson’s annoyance at the changes all around him were further confirmed by his racial prejudices.

Whatever AMC does with this series, the Confederate gunslinging guerrilla played by Anson Mount should prove complicated. Given the recent scholarship on guerrilla warfare in the Civil War–which places the guerrilla action more at the center of the conflict and at the center of the Confederate national commitment–we might expect Mount’s character to carry the resentments and repressed loyalties of his lost cause forward. T. J. Stiles’s biography of Jesse James, for example, indicates how much of the Confederate national project came out of Missouri and continued to burn in the hearts of these men. Mark Geiger’s terrific book on Financial Fraud and Guerrilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War shows just how the motivations of Confederate guerrillas worked. Whether AMC will deal with the complex motivations and histories of race, white supremacy, and Confederate nationalism remains unclear. We will have to watch to find out!

In the meantime our Railroads and the Making of Modern America project includes some useful documents to put some of the AMC’s Hell on Wheels premier in perspective:

November 3, 2011

Miami University Lecture on Railroads and the Civil War

This Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecture and question and answer session was a blast. The audience and the board of the Colligan History Project could not have been more enthusiastic and knowledgeable. I thoroughly enjoyed the visit to Miami University Hamilton and was pleased to be part of a series on the Civil War, including David S. Reynolds (Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America) and Merritt Roe Smith (upcoming).

Miami University Michael J. Colligan Lecture Series, October 18, 2011.

October 31, 2011

Writing History in the Digital Age

Last week our graduate class in digital humanities participated in the University of Michigan Press’s open review of Writing History in the Digital Age. I asked the students to post a 1,000 word overview comment on one of the essays in the collection (or alternatively a shorter comment on two essays), and to reflect on their experience. The most common initial response among the students to their participation in this open review was trepidation, intimidation even. After reflection, however, students expressed admiration for some aspects of this process. I will be quoting anonymously from students’s reflections on this experience.

One student noted that their assignment came during Open Access Week, an event he had been anticipating for weeks and promoting “its values without actually practicing it or contributing to it in any tangible way.” Writing History in the Digital Age allowed him to stop “talking OA and start doing OA.”

Students too were concerned at first about voicing their views in the open review and that they would be immediately visible. This was “both exciting and nerve-racking” but it also led to a sense of “pride and purpose.” What they said and wrote mattered to the profession, to the field, to one another, to colleagues in a way that it had not before.

It gradually became obvious to these students that their contributions were as meaningful as others, that their “fumbling through digital history” was no less worthy than others. One student wrote that “in reading through the essays, I realized that many people are asking the same questions I am and that perhaps that always feeling you are one step behind is just as aspect of the Digital Humanities since technology and methods are constantly changing.” Authors and editors might find that certain paragraphs generate “hot spots” in an open review, becoming highly influential or places where the argument is extended in important new direction. One could look through the whole collection, and instead of considering which essay might not be worthy of inclusion and cut, one could see the different “hot spots” and make connections more readily across them. Open review could lead to a more purposeful method of “reading” as well as different forms of writing and review.

Not all students appreciated the way this instance of open review seemed to work, however, and some had broad concerns about what exactly constituted “open peer review.” One student reviewed an essay “riddled with misspellings” that was centered “on a provocative but unsubstantiated claim.” But how to say so? Students were legitimately concerned about whether they could or should be so openly critical. And what did it say about a digital publication trying to gain “acceptance in a print culture” when there were so many errors? Another student questioned who really was a “peer” and whether this open review was less substantive than traditional peer review. “It was difficult to escape the feeling,” she wrote, “that I was writing a post rather than a review.” She pointed out that the Writing in the Digital Age uses the word “comment” to categorize these open contributions. What is a comment? and is it the same thing as a review written in double-blind peer review?

Still, the merits of open review inspired some of us. Students appreciated “the transparent process” and saw that the format prompted “more discussion.” Indeed, rather than a “mysterious black box” approach, the open review brought in a wide range of participants. One student reflected that “I’ve inserted myself into the broader process of writing and creating this volume of essays.”

One more thought. My own view of this process is very positive after listening to my students. I think we need more open review not less, more substantive engagement with scholarship before publication than after, and more willingness to allow experimental ideas and approaches not less. There is an additional benefit to open review–our students learn how to do peer review in an open rather than a closed environment. In fact, this was one of the most striking problems the class faced–they did not know how to do a review: should they make grammatical corrections, should they be critical, . . . When we close off the review process in pre-publication, we keep mysterious a central scholarly function. Students then learn how to peer review based largely on their experience with their own publications. Many others have written about these issues, most notably Kathleen Fitzpatrick in Planned Obsolescence. After the 2003 American Historical Review digital article I wrote with Ed Ayers, I tried to summarize some of the issues we faced with blind peer review in “Writing a Digital Journal Article from Scratch: An Account.”

There are numerous reasons open review makes sense, even if we still need to work on definitions and best practices. Our current model of pre-publication “behind the curtain” review and post-publication open review or criticism seems designed to limit, even punish, innovation and creativity. Our students have much to learn about the culture of review–let’s teach them in an open environment.

October 27, 2011

Page 99 Test of The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War and the Making of Modern America

The Page 99 Test site has posted a piece about my page 99 test of The Iron Way. Marshal Zeringue runs the Page 99 Test blog and asked me about this a few weeks ago when the book came out. He also runs the Campaign for the American Reader.

October 25, 2011

History Harvest in North Omaha: A Report on Digital Harvesting

On Saturday, October 22, eight undergraduate students and fifteen graduate students digitized dozens of documents at Love’s Jazz and Art Center in North Omaha as part of our third major History Harvest in Nebraska. Some remarkable stories, documents, and objects came forward as people from the community brought out their history to share with scholars, teachers, and students. The scene was celebratory but earnest, enthusiastic but expectant. And a sense of revival, renewal, purpose, community, and honesty greeted visitors.

KVNO aired a radio feature on Monday during drive time–“History Harvest Finds Treasures in North Omaha.”

Two stories, in particular, struck me personally and professionally as moving and significant. The first is about U.S.C.T. graves, one unmarked, in the Laurel Hill Cemetery in Omaha. Local researcher Creolla Woodall has been working to restore the graves, provide appropriate markers, and bring this history back to public recognition. One soldier, James Adams, was free in 1860, living in Harford County, Maryland, near Baltimore when he enlisted in the 4th U.S.C.T. The 4th U.S.C.T. Co. E was photographed at Fort Lincoln in northwestern Washington, D.C., at some point probably in early 1863 before taking the field in Virginia later that year. Fort Lincoln was located on the Washington Branch of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Adams was wounded in the war, losing his arm at the Battle of Chaffin’s Farm, Virginia. Later, sometime in the 1880s it appears, Adams moved to Omaha, Nebraska.

Digitizing history at the History Harvest, October 22, 2011 (Photo by William G. Thomas)

His U.S.C.T. counterpart buried at Laurel Hill, Edward Jones, was born in Virginia, most likely into slavery. At some point in 1864, he made his way to Marietta, Georgia, and enlisted in the 13th U.S.C.T., guarded railroads, and after the war made his way to Omaha, Nebraska. The graves of U.S.C.T. soldiers too often go unrecognized and the service and histories of these men unexamined. They tell us much about the wider patterns in the war–two black men, one enslaved, one free, both enlist, both fight, one is wounded, both migrate after the war, eventually to Omaha, Nebraska. They build businesses. They serve their communities. They have deep individual histories we are only able to glimpse though the broader national significance of their stories.

Warren Taylor brought two special, and astonishingly moving, items from his family’s history to the History Harvest. His 1841 U.S. penny was carried by his enslaved great grandmother as was a silver drinking cup. Holding these items, looking at them up close, brings slavery more clearly into focus, into real lived experiences. Both were digitized to be shared with students and teachers across Nebraska and the nation. The stories behind these objects and documents will be made available on the History Harvest web site in coming weeks and months.

There is no question that digitizing history at the community level raises matters of concern, especially about whether history is being expropriated and true partnership can exist. The students worked with churches, businesses, community organizations, and schools. They participated in the Making Invisible Histories Visible project with Omaha Public Schools, and worked with the Great Plains Black History Museum. Indeed, the Harvest is meant to be inclusive and open, as well as to enable a richer, more complete history for our communities.

On Saturday, as people came to talk about their community, their history, and their families, the conversations were rich with significance. Every family has its own history, but we often forget how much our family history is part of the national story. At this History Harvest we had the chance to see this connection and to talk and think about a more inclusive and public history.