Civil War – Page 4 – William G. Thomas III

May 31, 2011

Google Labs Ngram Viewer and the Coming of the Civil War

Google Lab’s Ngram viewer allows anyone to comb through over 5 million books for patterns and word trends in history. When Jean Baptiste Michel, et al., published their findings in “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” they used as an example the trend for the word “slavery” with its peak in the 1850s and again in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement. Last week, Robert K. Nelson in the New York Times Opinionator on “Of Monsters, Men — and Topic Modeling,” used the Richmond Daily Dispatch corpus from the Civil War to suggest the power of words to influence human ideas and events.

According to Nelson, “No historian has yet to display the patience and attention to detail to read through the more than 100,000 articles and nearly 24 million words of the wartime Dispatch, let alone conduct the sophisticated statistical analysis necessary to draw conclusions from the data.” Nelson proposes “an innovative text-mining technique called ‘topic modeling’ allows us to understand in far greater detail the arguments and appeals that were used throughout the war.”

Nelson is right, of course, that the scale of the problem for historians is significant and growing more so it seems with each passing day. Just taking the Richmond Daily Dispatch, my colleagues and I have discovered over 8,300 unique place names in the 4 years of the Civil War newspaper. These places names were mentioned over 292,000 times in that four-year span. Analyzing the geography of the war through even a single newspaper becomes impossible without computational tools. (We will release our geocoded Daily Dispatch next week at the National Endowment for the Humanities Digging into Data conference.)

Now, Google Labs Ngram viewer allows us to crawl through millions of printed books, journals, and materials. A simple search in Google on the following terms turned up some surprising results:

slavery, bank, battle, railroad, cotton, secession, and Nebraska.

“Secession” appeared like a comet, flaming out in the course of the Confederate States of America. “Battle,” surprisingly, became more prevalent but only marginally. “Bank,” the subject of intense controversy in American politics from the 1830s, appears to have been remarkably steady in its frequency. “Nebraska,” a proxy for western expansion into the territories, spiked in the 1850s, unsurprisingly.

“Railroad” as a concept in American culture, society, economy, and politics, however, clearly spiked in period between 1850 and 1865. Despite researching and writing about the relationship between railroads and the coming and fighting of the Civil War, I was surprised (and pleased) at the sharpness, the apparent clarity of this result. Another aspect of NGram Viewer, it should be pointed out, is the anticipation we experience in waiting for the graph, and how the precision of its interface affects researchers. When a scholar has worked in the archives for years and then types in “railroad” or “cotton” into the box, he or she naturally experiences a sort of “uber-search” rush of adrenaline.

It is difficult to be sure exactly what these terms mean in the larger corpus of works in Google Books, but “slavery” and “railroad” and the Civil War were perhaps more deeply interconnected than historians have previously considered.

NGram Views:

March 23, 2011

At the Library of Virginia: Looking for Mima Queen

After a coffee with Edward L. Ayers this morning (much excitement in Richmond with two teams in the NCAA final 16), I am at the Library of Virginia finishing the citations and edits for The Iron Way: Railroads, The Civil War, and the Making of Modern America.

But I can’t help looking ahead to my next project. I’m calling it “The Petition.” I’ve pulled the correspondence of John Randolph and Francis Scott Key in 1813. Key tried the Mima Queen case before the U. S. Supreme Court that year. There are nine letters in this file from him to Randolph. Will any of them mention the Queen case? Does her petition for freedom come up in their discussions? How can I reconstruct the case and its remarkable history? I’m looking forward to writing this early history of Washington, DC, slavery and freedom.

On a completely different subject, Ed Ayers and I agreed that we need to have a Valley Project team reunion and a session at the #AHA2011 in Chicago on the Valley of the Shadow and its progeny. Looking forward to that already.

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.

February 5, 2011

Dystopia Anew–Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion

In The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (Public Affairs, 2011), Evgeny Morozov looks at the Internet and our present technologies of Twitter, Google, iPads, iPhones, ad infinitum with a healthy dose of skepticism and irony. Has our technology enabled democracy, social equality, and progress? Most Americans might answer yes without hesitation. Not so fast. Morozov’s book reminds us that these technologies can be used to suppress as much as to liberate. And that human nature and will govern the power relations in society.

I’m very sympathetic to this view. Looking back in the nineteenth century, we see a similar kind of euphoria over the convergence of rail and telegraph in American society. And yet we also fought a Civil War in which over 600,000 Americans died. For generations we have carefully separated these two events–in large part because our faith in technological progress has been so embedded in our national culture ever since. We want to see both our first great technological transformation and the Civil War as similarly progressive. And of course they were in many important ways. Yet, if we look closely we see in the nineteenth century many of the same unintended consequences–most prominently, the ways technology could extend and enable slavery in the American South.

And the similarly powerful technological transformation underway now, as Morozov reminds us, should make us more alert, not less, to its varied consequences. For an excellent review, see The New York Times book review by Lee Seigel.

February 3, 2011

French Railroads, The Holocaust, and American Slavery Reparations

In 2010 France’s state-run railroad, SNCF (Societe Nationale des Chemins de fer Francais), apologized for its role in the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews during World War II. Expressing “sorrow and regret,” the company’s apology came only after it emerged as a leading bidder in a $2.6 billion high speed rail project in Florida. Jewish citizens in Florida, no doubt, might see the company’s apology as nothing more than self-serving, and too little too late. SNCF America is also a potential bidder in a similarly large project in California. At first, the company issued its apology only on its English-language web site.

Then, last week (late January 2011), SNCF announced that it would create a Holocaust memorial outside Paris at its long-abandoned Bobigny depot, from which over 76,000 Jews were transported to the concentration camps. The company has long maintained that it merely cooperated with the Nazis, that it did so under duress, and that many of its trainmen found in the French Resistance and were themselves deported and killed for their actions. The case brings up complicated histories of occupation, resistance, war, and the “banality of evil.” It raises questions about how one can assess the crime of deportation and the responsibility of a corporation for such violence.

Nevertheless, as Sarah Wildman’s Politics Daily report on “The Railroad to Hell” makes clear, numerous scholars have found reason to challenge the company’s view of its role in the Holocaust. Both Harriet Tamen, an American lawyer representing 600 survivors who filed suit against the company in 2006, and Jean-Marc Dreyfus, a historian at the University of Manchester, have compiled detailed evidence that the company’s officials were complicit in the deportation. Tamen has led the effort to claim reparations for the survivors.

The question that the French and SNCF are wrestling with is now focused, at least in part, on whether reparations should be paid to the survivors, and this is one that American historians of slavery should pay attention to. Ironically, Florida’s railroads were nearly all initially constructed with slave labor before 1865 when the Civil War ended slavery. Indeed, the major railroad companies in the U.S. today, including C.S.X., Norfolk Southern, and B.N.S.F., among many others, are the successors to the slave-built railroads of the Old South. Over 10,000 miles of southern railroad track was built with slave labor. Politics certainly has shaped the French case–as Florida’s representative Ron Klein sought to require potential high-speed rail contractors to disclose any participation in deportation (see New York Times, January 25, 2011). But in the U.S. the same questions could be raised about descendant companies which bought and sold slave labor to such a degree that they were some of the most heavily committed to the institution. In fact, they were the most exploitative in many ways as well.