Uncategorized – Page 6 – William G. Thomas III

May 7, 2011

On Open History

For the last fifteen years we have been building digital history projects, web sites, and archives, and as we take stock we can see that the change has been momentous in the practice of history. Back in the 1990s we talked about the digital movement as “democratizing history” and that idea still resonates and excites. The early Valley of the Shadow project aimed to open up history by providing access to sources and including more people in our story of the past. The work at George Mason’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media continues to inspire as it brings citizens into the making of history on a range of projects.

We still need to find more ways to open history. The digital technologies allow us to do this now more than ever, of course, but it remains unclear just how far historians will move in this direction. At the University of Nebraska our (HIST 970) graduate students in the digital history seminar have been forging ahead this term exploring how they can use digital tools either to explore the past in new ways or to represent the past in new forms. Their digital narratives integrate sources and analysis, and weave historiography, evidence, and data together. Their work inspires me that we will see younger scholars use digital tools in ways we could not have predicted a few years ago.

The idea of open history, however alluring, is not easy to achieve in our current mix of proprietary and public domain sources. We need only to consider what has happened to scholarly practice in an environment now dominated by Google Books.

The Google project has certainly enabled the discovery of new data, information, and links in the past. As an example, let us look into a little-known, but nonetheless important, Supreme Court case in 1873, Catherine or Kate Brown v. the Washington and Alexandria Railroad. Other than Kate Masur’s excellent 2010 book, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C., there are almost no monographs that cover this case. I am interested in the case because Brown was one of the first women to challenge segregation in the American South. She rode a railroad across the Potomac River in 1868 from D.C. to Virginia, and once in Alexandria, Virginia, she was forcibly thrown out of the white ladies car. What’s remarkable was that Brown’s experience was not unusual–thousands and thousands of African Americans began riding the railroads in the days, months, and years after emancipation. We have little sense of this movement, but Brown’s case included affidavits from black passengers, and we might use other sources to learn about how black freedmen and women moved, when, and under what conditions.

Using Google Books to search the lawyers names, we could quickly discover all sorts of information from obscure county and local historical society publications held by the various libraries in Google’s project–a sequence of research that would otherwise have been largely impossible just a few years ago. This sort of immediate and detailed access is unprecedented. The same is true for Ancestry.com (which libraries do not generally subscribe to). Searching across all individual census entries for the U.S. from 1790 to 1930, we could find the jurors in the case, where they lived in city directories, their occupations, their family relationships. This work takes about 1 hour. Both of these ventures–Google and Ancestry–have problems in metadata encoding, scanning quality, and data interpolation. But taken as they are now, they and the other large data aggregation projects that digital libraries are undertaking have led to a “revolution” in how we do scholarship.

The recently issued Council on Library Information Research (CLIR) report on “The Idea of Order” cautioned that monographic literature represents only one type of text scholars analyze: “Humanities scholars will increasingly want to do much more with text than use it simply as an alternate format to print. They will want to mine and recombine it, which is not possible with the current products of mass-digitization projects. Indeed, future reading will be done in part by machines in such a vast repository of information.” Robert Darnton in calling recently for a National Digital Library project is responding to these concerns. Clearly, scholars need access to “big data” texts for research, but we are a long way from having reliable, open-source, rights-free, and richly encoded texts.

So, how can we open history? First, we need more than ever to continue to build digital projects with integrated tools, and create open access archives of historical texts, sounds, maps, videos, and images. The American Council of Learned Societies report, “Our Cultural Commonwealth,” correctly pointed out that humanities scholars will have to build the tools they need, no one else will. We can create works that allow others–readers, scholars, colleagues, students–to examine the sources and “run the data” again. Perhaps to add materials and engage with history through associations that they build into our interpretation and materials.

Second, we need to open our projects to experts in a wide variety of fields who can contribute data. In the field of railroad or Civil War history, these individuals and groups are obvious and expert. Genealogists helped us with entering thousands of individual census records for the Valley project. But there are other experts equally well-positioned to support and work with scholars. Just take a look at the “Confederate Railroads” site by Dave Bright is an example of this work by non-academic experts–it is fabulously comprehensive and detailed, but it is also an example of a supremely herculean effort in the archives that might be difficult to preserve and access as technologies change.

Open history should also come with different pedagogy for history. Here, we could turn to ways to democratize the learning process in our college classrooms. There is much to be done in this area, but we might give our students a chance to create their history and take an active role in its interpretation.

March 4, 2011

Reflections on James Agee and “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”

It has been seventy years since James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and yet their work speaks across the decades, powerful, moving, poignant, gripping, exhausting, blazingly brilliant. I taught this book again last week for the first time in a long while in a graduate seminar. And I was struck by how much historians have to learn from Agee still. It may be at first glance that Agee’s obsession with being a “spy” is the stuff of drama, comical in its overreach or pathetic in its self-absorption. Certainly, some of my students saw it this way.

But Agee, “a spy traveling as a journalist,” brings us into the world of cotton tenancy in such vivid detail and with such excruciating emotion and with such fidelity and honor and care and love, that we have to pay attention. We have to sit still and listen, to every sentence, every colon, every comma, every gesture. What can we learn as historians from Agee now? Certainly, we can aspire to the hyper-awareness of power and the drama of power relations in his opening scenes “Late Sunday Morning,” “At the Forks,” and “Near a Church.” He was “sick in the knowledge that they felt they were here at our demand, mine and Walker’s, and that I could communicate nothing otherwise; and now, in a perversion of self-torture, I played my part through. I gave their leader fifty cents, trying at the same time through my eyes, to communicate much more.” (31) Agee tells us about his “impulse” to “throw myself flat on my face and embrace and kiss their feet” until he realizes that such a demonstration of love or allegiance or forgiveness or repentance would only terrify the black couple he was asking directions.

The book is in its way a hypertext–arranged in ways for the reader to move across and within it, shifting time, event, impression, and voice. But at the center of all of it is Agee’s struggle to tell about the past. “It seems likely at this stage,” he writes about in the middle of the book, “that the truest way to treat a piece of the past is as such: as if it were no longer the present.” Instead of “chronological progression,” Agee decides that the “‘truest’ thing about the experience” is “rather as it turns up in recall, in no such order, casting its lights and associations forward and backward upon the then past and the then future, across that expanse of experience.” (244)

More than anything, Agee was deeply aware of his own presence in the lives of his subjects, and he was ashamed of his complicity in their exploitation. It is a humbling lesson for any historian. We traffic in stories, in lives, and in histories, and we carry out our work often unaware of the potential for misperception, misjudgment, and mistake. Agee considered the camera “a weapon, a stealer of images and souls, a gun, an evil-eye.” (362) When he meets Annie Mae Gudger for the first time, Agee is painfully aware of her: “you, Annie Mae, whose name I do not yet know, and whom I have never yet seen, and who I gather, are George’s wife (though there has been no foolishness of ‘introductions,’ nor any word spoken, of any such kind): it is you I was first aware of from when I first came into this room, before you were yet a shadow out of the darkness, and you I have had on my mind while we have sat here, and so much cared toward.” (398)

Seventy years later we still need Agee: his precision, his language, his poetic rendering, his documentary methods, his passionate care for his subjects, and his soul searching introspection. We need his honesty. And we need his humility.

Source: all quotes from James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families, with an introduction to the new edition by John Hersey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988)

February 17, 2011

Des Moines Civil War Roundtable–Leading the way toward a new Civil War history

Last evening I met with the Civil War Roundtable in Des Moines, Iowa. Over fifty Civil War enthusiasts gathered at the Machine Shed Restaurant for dinner and a program. With the 150th anniversary of the Civil War underway, interest is high and growing. And it was great to see so many active participants in Des Moines. Their program has already included sessions on guerrillas in the war, as well as women’s history, the experience of soldiers, the activities of women spies, and the ways the home front dealt with the dislocation and trauma of the war. The range of these topics indicated to me just how vibrant the Civil War Roundtables are, and how much they are leading the way toward new social histories of the conflict. Members have read widely in Civil War scholarship and they routinely comb the blogs of the New York Times Opinionator, Civil War centers, and academics.

With John Liepa, at Des Moines Civil War Roundtable, February 16, 2011

The proceedings last night were led by John Liepa and Ronald Nurmi. They have created a terrific set of programs and cultivated interest in the community. They made me feel right at home, as did the other members. And we had a wonderful time talking about the Civil War, railroads, and how the war was a modern conflict. I’ve always enjoyed the Civil War Roundtables, but this one was exceptional.

December 11, 2010

The South and Secession: 150 years later

In April 2011 we will be 150 years from the secession of Virginia and the upper South from the United States to join the just formed Confederate States of America. Led by South Carolina in December 1860, seven “deep South” or “cotton” states formally withdrew from the Union in the winter of 1860-1861. But when the upper South states left in April 1861, the Civil War followed quickly as both the U.S. and the Confederate States battled over national supremacy. As we mark the anniversaries of these key events, secession and civil war, we should look more than ever at what the participants said and wrote.

Jon Stewart’s Daily Show on The South’s Secession Commemoration on Thursday of this week does just that in a satirical review of whether slavery had anything to do with secession.

Slavery was at the core of secession, of course–see also the Making of Modern America blog post on Why Did Virginia Secede? which takes up this question.

November 14, 2010

Finding the Blue Ridge Tunnel Ruins

I asked Jean Bauer at the University of Virginia to search out the ruins of the Blue Ridge Tunnel near Crozet, Virginia, and to photograph the tunnel if she could locate it. I plan to include one image in my forthcoming book and hope to include more images in the Railroads site. At the time of its construction in 1850-54 the tunnel was the longest in the U.S. at 4,273 feet, and one of the longest in the world (see below for questions about the length). It was built with slave and Irish labor, a story not well known.

She has posted her adventure and some of the photographs on her blog — see “A Walk in the Woods” and her photographs of the Blue Ridge Tunnel.

The Wikipedia lat/long is incorrect. And Jean’s great images will give us some other views than the spooky image from the Library of Congress’s Historic American Engineering collection–where is that fog coming from!

Many of the records concerning this construction can be found at: Railroads and the Making of Modern America in the collection of Claudius Crozet’s correspondence and the payrolls of the Blue Ridge Railroad.