Category: Digital History (page 5 of 6)

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:

May 14, 2011

On “Cyberargument” in Digital Humanities

We need a new genre of argument in digital form, one that I’ll name “cyberargument” or “cyberscholarship.” And here’s why. The Digital Humanities field has grown over the last decade and, indeed, prospered. The National Endowment for the Humanities created a new office dedicated to Digital Humanities and began awarding “start up” grants for dozens and dozens of projects. Scholars from a range of disciplines have jumped into the field, seeing in it new ways of reaching an audience, conducting research, teaching, and creating new knowledge. They have formed a new journal, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and a re-formulated a scholarly organization (the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations). The movement, and it is a scholarly movement, has every reason to be confident.

But there is a unsettling concern, a nagging “who are we?” question among ourselves and a skeptical “why digital humanities?” challenge from our peers. Melissa Terras at Digital Humanities 2011 explained, “If we think that no-one is watching us and making value judgements about our community, our research, our relevance, and our output, then we are misguided.” She’s right. Terras encouraged digital humanities scholars among other things to start paying attention to publication, research results, and outputs. “We need to learn to play the academic game with regard to publications.” She’s right again.

More recently, Wendell Piez in “Impractical Applications” wisely observes that digital humanities does need to stop, look, and listen. “Our dilemma is that, on the one hand, we have sometimes felt unwelcome even in institutions where the humanities are studied, facing persistent questions, often from those we respect most, about what we are for and whether we belong. Yet on the other hand — this is some kind of irony — in society at large, and even from academic administrations on occasion, we have heard the same questions regarding the humanities in general.” He recognizes that department chairs and deans are waiting, actually with eager anticipation, for the digital humanities movement to bring itself forward, to explain itself more fully. “We do not help matters when we respond only with a counter-critique, seeking to deconstruct the terms in which questions are asked, only to discover again the old lesson that at least when unbalanced by any compensating affirmation, critique tends to be demoralizing,” Piez writes, “Yet we also cannot justify ourselves entirely in the terms presented to us.” Piez encourages us to defend the “practical” in our work, and to make “common cause, indeed, between the ‘digital humanities’, the humanities writ large, and the economy and culture that sustain them.”

So, how do we “justify ourselves”? This seems an important moment in Digital Humanities to take stock and, indeed, a number of leaders in the field are. Rafael Alvarado in a smart post on his blog has attempted to sketch who we are as digital humanists by focusing on our “on-going, playful encounter with digital representation itself.” He is surely right in observing that “without this play—to the extent that the scholar has a stand-off, do-this-for-me attitude toward the medium—then, no, she is not a digital humanist.” And Stephen Ramsay has also explained in a polemical piece that digital humanists code by definition, and they engage a priori in “building.” Both offer useful and important justifications in this regard. But the wider debate on whether to code or not, whether play unites digital humanities as a discipline or not, misses an important practical question that Terras (and Piez) confronted.

We in digital humanities are embedded in particular disciplines, universities, humanities associations and professional societies. We can hardly go forward for tenure and promotion on the basis of “playful encounter” or “code” (although I know that an argument for this could be made) without interpretation or the development of new knowledge. But there is a skepticism about the digital humanities we need to address more directly. And a reason for the anxiety of the current moment. And I think our “undertheorizing” is not as important in this regard as what I will call our “underinterpretation.”

We may be so busy building things, so drawn in by the praxis of what I have elsewhere called “assemblages”–and understandably–that we have not constructed arguments our colleagues understand. More to the point, that they must engage with, that they simply cannot ignore.

I propose that we need interpretative arguments as a genre more fully integrated into the digital humanities. We need to recover the rhetoric of interpretation and weave it into the digital form more intentionally and more publicly. This is perhaps particularly true of history where the division between “digital archive” projects and “code” projects has prompted few interpretative revolutions. This may explain why Alvarado is right to observe “To a disconcertingly large number of outsiders, the digital humanities qua humanities remains interesting but irrelevant.” Historians, perhaps more than others, judge relevance in the discipline by interpretative value, by an argument’s architecture, relevance, and longevity. In this regard we need to answer Terras’ call to publish, to produce, and to engage our colleagues. Can we use our “play” and our “building” to create new knowledge and then to intervene in the broader humanistic scholarship of argument and interpretation? I think so. And we might consider what constitutes “cyberscholarship,” what are its qualities, its structures, and how can it be assessed. For that another post.

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.

May 3, 2011

Railroads and the Shaping of the Great Plains: a “Digging into Data” talk at the Center for Great Plains Studies

Center for Great Plains Studies, Paul Olson Seminar
“Railroads, the Making of Modern America, and the Shaping of the Great Plains”
April 13, 2011
Podcast

[The research, data, and visualizations for this talk have been made possible with a National Endowment for the Humanities Digging into Data Competition Grant, and with the collaborative work of Richard Healey, Ian Cottingham, Michael Johns, and Leslie Working. I will be posting the full visualizations later as we finalize them. The purpose here is to use “big data” to create new knowledge–whether about settlement patterns or worker mobility.]

On a day in mid June 1874 Andreas Mosser bought 80 acres of Nebraska land, near Crete, in Lancaster County. He paid $565.00, or about $7 per acre for the parcel. His purchase was on credit, and in that respect it was unremarkable, one of many thousands of purchases that the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad Land Office executed that year. But Mosser stands out, at least to me, and serves an example to get our bearings on how railroads made modern America and shaped the Great Plains. Mosser was from Hungary, Weiselburg according to his application, and when he walked into the Burlington Land Office in Lincoln, Nebraska, he had been in the United States for exactly 14 days. He had been in Nebraska 8 days when he signed his contract.

Such a journey would have been impossible a decade earlier–in 1864 the U.S. was at war, torn apart by sectional divisions. Mosser participated in the great compression of time and space of railroads inaugurated–but how did we get to this point? How was this able to happen and what did it mean for Americans?

I’m proposing here that the Great Plains as a region became the central place in the transformation of modern America (and that’s saying something–I’m a Southern historian by training and tend to think that everything important happened there; and I’m a Virginian by birth and tend to think that everything that ever happened at all happened there) for three reasons.

First, the Great Plains, particularly Kansas, became the site of displacement of Native peoples made possible with new forms of treaties–ones that were designed to enable specific railroad companies to profit from a process of severalty, indeed, experimenting with severalty long before the Dawes Act of 1887.

Second, workers came with the railroads and made the Great Plains a central region in the new industrial landscape taking shape in the U.S.

Third, the Plains became the site of a massive reconfiguration of landscape and the migration of millions, all structured around the expansion of the railroads.

The common experience in these years was a widely felt alteration that railroads, steamships, and telegraphs made possible in the relationship between space and time. This profound shift was something anyone experienced when traveling on the railroad as Andreas Mosser did, whether the individual was a company president, a general, a soldier, an emigrant, or a runaway slave. The 19th c. phrase for this was “annihilating space and time.” Time and space were not actually obliterated, of course, but they were rearranged, compressed and lengthened and warped.

Nineteenth-century Americans, in short, experienced something similar to our circumstances today when we say that the world is getting flatter. They confronted a rapidly developing set of technologies that made their world smaller, faster, and more intricately complicated. But they also participated in and witnessed the vast expansion of the nation across space and through time. To use today’s terminology, the railroad was a hardware and software system with “interfaces”, such as the time table, and, like the Internet, these interfaces performed all sorts of tasks for Americans, slowly altering how people saw themselves, their futures, and their opportunities. In this respect the initial burst of the railroad and telegraph era, from about 1840 to 1880, was one of the first transformative technological periods in American history. Henry Adams described this years later, when in The Education of Henry Adams, he noted that his generation was “mortgaged” to the railroads and that the railroads “absorbed the energies” of 60 million Americans. The people in the Great Plains region stood at the center of this energetic absorption.

To understand this, let’s start with a time table. The time table was an astonishingly complex innovation and perhaps the best example we have of an “interface” to the railroad system. At first, time tables were printed on small cards because local railroads, such as the Boston & Worcester, made just one or two runs a day over a short distance. But the 1850s marked a major shift as hundreds of new junctions came on line in the Midwest and South. Railroads in this period operated primarily as passenger lines, and time tables for longer lines became increasingly intricate. The time table presented Americans with an abstract geography, a chart of time, cost, place, and distance. Andreas Mosser would have consulted something like this–and in his journey he navigated this abstract geography.

But the 19th c. time table has proven very difficult to represent, even with computer technology, and especially difficult to reconstitute. This is true because of two essential, but often overlooked, truths: the railroad network was always changing, never the same at any given time or place, though people acted as if it were–and because when people read the time table, they brought their own experience and information to the table. A new history of the railroads in the Great Plains would need to take full account of these. These transformations were not inevitable, nor were they determined by the technology; instead, we need to reconstruct how people used the railroads, and the social changes they experienced.

At this point I should say that seeing the railroads as the transformative technology of the 19th century seemed especially relevant to me in the context of the digital revolution we have been living through. As a scholar working in the digital humanities, I was experiencing not only the exuberance (19th c. writers used the word “mania”) but also the uncertainty and anxiety of the digital age.

The goal of our team’s digital project on Railroads and the Making of Modern America has been to use the digital platform–the web site–to open up the research process, to make visible evidence otherwise obscure, to create models and visualizations about historical questions, and to attempt to uncover patterns in data and sources not otherwise apparent. To be able to understand the world of Andreas Mosser. A large part of what I’ll be talking about today was made possible by a National Endowment for the Humanities Digging into Data grant. We have attempted to use computational techniques, GIS mapping, and visualization strategies to re-examine the world of the Great Plains and the changes that came with the railroads.

So, how did the Great Plains became the central place in the transformation of modern America, the region where the compression of time and space, control of nature, and personal mobility–all key elements of modernity–came together in surprising and dramatic ways?

In fact, the centrality of the Plains was clear early in the process of railroad transformation. First, the region was contested territory in the section struggle of the 1850s, largely because of the intensity of the railroad growth in this period [see maps]. When Asa Whitney presented his ambitious plan for a transcontinental railroad to the American public and the United States Congress in 1849, he placed a giant map in the front page of his treatise, “A Project for a Railroad to the Pacific.” At the center of the page, and of the world, stood the United States, strategically poised to link Asia with Europe, and at the center of the United States stood the Great Plains, the great blank crossroads on nearly every map of the period. “The entire commerce of the world must be tributary” to the United States, Whitney asserted in his typically grandiose prose. “Nature” aligned the United States as the great middle nation of the world.

Whitney tried to persuade Congress to pay attention to “the geographical division formed by nature” that favored the United States. The world’s economies flowed, he pointed out, through the mountain barriers, river corridors, and desert spaces on the continent. Nature guided commerce, he argued, and only a massive industrial reconfiguration of these forces could alter natural patterns. By “forcing the commerce” through a shorter route, railroads would redirect the natural flow of goods and capital. Whitney’s point was meant to impress his readers: nature determined commercial position, but human progress in the steam age would reconfigure the globe and, indeed, defy nature. So, Whitney’s plan for the transcontinental meant to account for the reconfiguration of time and space that came with steam power by superimposing a “second nature” system on the landscape. And the critical place in this reconfiguration would be The Great Plains. His conclusion: “If the plan succeeds, it would make the whole world tributary to us.”

It should be mentioned that Whitney had nothing to say about slavery, about the South’s potential expansion, nor anything to say about Native peoples. He proposed that the land 30 miles on either side of the transcontinental be sold–but nothing about how the land would be acquired, it was left to the House committee to say that the whole plan depended on “the extinguishment of the Indian title.” Whitney’s views–that nature could be directed–that free labor could prosper in the West–were part of a much larger vision for the region. He proposed after all, as he put it, “an entirely new system of settlement.” Of white immigrants as independent farmers.

Railroads had not yet reached Nebraska in 1860 despite theses visions, yet still in Nebraska the compression of time and space was widely experienced and imagined. In Omaha, in September 1860 John McConihe was running pack trains for emigrants to Denver, when the completion of the telegraph to Omaha linked the city to New York. He wrote his business partner there, “In ‘America’ now, we read the same despatches [sic] at the breakfast table in the morning paper that you do.” Less than a month later, he reported, “The wire is being stretched on the poles between Omaha and Kearney, and soon the electric fluid will flash from Kearney on the Platte to New York.”

Railroads too elicited this sort of eager anticipation–and served to connect the distant, making places dramatically nearer. Sarah Sim, a Connecticut woman who moved with her husband Francis, to settle near Nebraska City, explained to her relatives in 1860, “There is a Rail road building on the east side of the Missouri that will come within 3 or 4 miles of us so we shall be able to hear the whistle of the locomotive once more. Then we can take the cars at Neb. City and run all the way home.”

This idea is terribly significant: that that the Conn. relatives could be reached–that you could run all the way home–the idea that two business partners 2,000 miles apart from one another could read the same news at the same time in their morning papers.

So, we can see three parts of this process unfolding on the Great Plains:

1. Great Plains as a site of a modern process of displacement as Native peoples land titles were put in service to the railroads and, to use the 19th c. white phrase, “extinguished.”

Between 1853 and 1856, the U.S. government initiated and signed over fifty-two treaties with Native groups and each of these legal documents duly recorded vast cessions of lands. Then in 1861 some treaties were renegotiated on terms that gave railroads in the Plains special consideration. The language was strikingly similar about the value of railroads–here’s a sample from the 1861 treaty with the Pottawatomie:

“Article 5th: The Pottawatomies believing that the construction of the Leavenworth, Pawnee, and Western railroad from Leavenworth City to the western boundary of the former reserve of the Delawares is now rendered reasonably certain, and being desireous to have said railroad extended through their reserve, in the direction of Fort Riley, so that the value of the lands retained by them may be enhanced, . . . ” [the railroad gets the “privilege” of buying their lands that are not allotted at $1.25 per acre]

In each treaty there were massive irregularities and in many of them were little noticed provisions opening the lands for railroads. The railroads expropriated Native names and symbols, and the treaties orchestrated the transfer of hundreds of thousands of acres from Native groups directly to various Kansas railroad companies.

Kansas in this period, it seems, was a cauldron for fraudulent railroad schemes. Rumors flew that various railroad companies were consolidating large tracts of land, especially those with valuable timber, and swindling Indian nations into selling them. All of these deals took place in clear violation of the Intercourse Act restricting trade and limiting the purchase and sale of Indian lands to the U.S. government by treaty. Historian Don Fixico, a leading authority on Native American history, has indicated in the PBS American Experience film on the transcontinentals that “Although such treaties did not include railroad construction in their treaties in the West, the opening of more land to white interests certainly involved the route of the transcontinental railroads.” Fixico is no doubt correct. The railroad brought change “beyond comprehension” of both the whites and Native Americans.

The Kickapoo treaty in 1863 ceded 150,000 acres and used the same language: “The Kickapoo tribe of Indians, entertaining the opinion that it is the desire of the government and the people of the United States to extend railroad communication as far was as possible in the shortest possible time, and believing that it will greatly enhance the value of their lands reserved in severalty by having a railroad built, . . . ” The treaty went on to even include a clause that said the Kickapoo believed that the Atchison and Pike’s Peak Railroad Company “has advantages for travel and transportation over all other companies.”

A close look at these treaties suggests that the first efforts at “severalty” — the dividing up of Native lands — took place because of and in relation to railroad extension. Nebraska treaties did not contain these provisions regarding the railroads but they were broadly reservation treaties rather than severalty treaties.

Omaha, 1854–reserves right of way for railroad
Otoe, 1854–no mention of railroad
Pawnee, 1857–no mention of railroad
Ponca, 1858–no mention of railroad
Arapaho, 1861–no mention of railroad
Omaha, 1865–no mention of railroad

These treaties were not severalty treaties, but instead aimed at creating reservations. The eventual location of the Union Pacific, it seems, was greatly enhanced by these reservation treaties. The possible routes through Kansas, by contrast, were blocked, and after 1861 dependent on a new process of severalty and railroad expropriation of lands.

We need to change our mental map of the railroad land grant to include this displacement in Kansas, where lands were expropriated directly from Native peoples into several railroad companies well before the 1862 and 1864 Pacific Railroad Acts. The map of checkerboard lands granted to the Union Pacific and the Burlington, in other words, should be supplemented with a new map that represents the Kansas treaties and the taking of hundreds of thousands of acres through severalty.

2. The location of railroads brought new geography of work and mobility. And spatially shifted the center of the industry into the Great Plains West, as railroad workers concentrated in the region in a particularly significant way. Even in the Civil War–in 1864–there were 300 black freedmen, former slaves, and 1,200 Irish laborers working on the Union Pacific railroad in eastern Nebraska, the first laborers on the site.

Broadly we know that by 1880 there were over 419,000 railroad employees in the U.S.–by comparison there were some 17,000 U.S. Army soldiers, and 60,530 U.S. postal employees (1881 report of U.S. Postmaster). Railroad work as a class was substantial–other than “farmer” and “laborer” it was one of the largest occupational categories, the only industry for which all companies counted employees for the U.S. census records in 1880.

We know almost nothing about the spatial movements of the railroad workers, except in the broadest terms–the standard view is that railroad “boomers” worked their way west over the period, like a wave, receding in some places as others expanded. Few railroad payrolls and employment records remain for the mid-nineteenth century, and even fewer contain information about previous employment, birthplace, or ethnicity. U. S. census data on occupation has been imprecise and often failed to capture whether workers in generic trades, such as carpentry, were employed by railroad companies.

For shop men, such as machinists, tinners, and boilermakers, and probably for carpenters, blacksmiths, and helpers, the U.S. census coding breaks down, and individuals in these generic trades fail to show up as having railroad occupations in the 1880 census. Yet, our evidence shows that these trades comprised a huge proportion of the railroad work force in this period.

We decided to take a national view of places of highly concentrated railroad employment, using the records of 267,000 railroad employees in the census of 1880, for the first time we could map the numbers of railroad workers (railroad and shop men) in each county. Thirty-eight (38) counties can be determined as highly concentrated railroad centers or places.

And surprisingly, we see how quickly and substantially the railroads concentrated in parts of the Great Plains. The emergence of Omaha, Nebraska, and Council Bluffs, Iowa, as major railroad centers, along with Denver, Colorado, was part of a larger pattern of Western concentration and intensity, even as the overall weight of the railroad occupational structure remained located in the North East. By this measure five of the eleven most concentrated centers of railroad employment in the entire U.S. in 1880 were located in the Great Plains or West.

Railroad employment in the West differed from the East in several important ways. Railroads in the West were less densely interwoven and were separated by vast spaces. They could exert more control over where employment was offered and to whom. They possessed an unusually high degree of what we might call “spatial monopoly power.”

The Great Plains became the site of intensive concentration of railroad workers so much so that the region rivaled the East and Midwest, and it pulled workers from all over the world.

We have a snapshot of this process in the Burlington’s strike records of 188, which described how many men came on as replacements in 1888 and where they came from to replace strikers. Hundreds of men were recruited from the East, but many were hired locally, and some came from California and places farther west. The strike replacements possessed dozens of years of experience on over forty railroads. Several men worked on railroads in India, a few in London. The spatial histories of these workers indicate both the pull of workers into the Great Plains from all over the nation (and world) and the intensity of experience on the Great Plains.

3. Great Plains as the site of a massive reconfiguration of the landscape and the point of migration for millions, all structured around the railroads.

After the Civil War, railroads brought people into the Great Plains West in massive numbers. The population of Nebraska grew from 122,993 in 1870; to 452,402 in 1880; to 1,058,910 in 1890.

Let’s return to Andreas Mosser and his Burlington land purchase. Settlement patterns were remarkably diffuse within these areas, and migrants from all over the United States lived next to immigrants from numerous places in almost every 640 acre section of the land grant. This diversity was realized because the company had an opened-ended land-contract policy, and because settlers took up the technology the railroads made possible and used it to their own purposes. Indeed, the colonizers – wherever they started from — made a host of decisions and evaluations that shaped Nebraska and its landscape. At first glance, their purposes appear straightforward — to start a homestead, to own land, to speculate on lots. On closer inspection, however, a number of patterns become visible and reveal a more complex story.

[see map of Nebraska Land Sales of the Burlington Railroad, 1870-1880]

Ethnic clustering was spatially interwoven with modern market processes, and the pattern for movement was only possible to reconstruct with digital tools. These settlers were not lured to the Plains by duplicitous land agents or trapped in culturally restricted enclaves after arrival. Instead, those who purchased railroad lands took part in a modern process of mobility and movement, one that shaped the unique cultural pluralism of the Great Plains. Andreas Mosser of Hungary settled next to Caroline Kurz of Germany, and near sections bought by U.S., Bohemian, and German settlers. On the one hand, many individuals responded to recruitment literature that was distributed all over the eastern United States and most of Europe and purchased railroad acreage according to a “modern” settlement model. These immigrants primarily sought economic advantages in an increasingly commercialized agricultural society. They were informed of prospective business opportunities by “mass or public information.”

But as it turned out, agrarian entrepreneurs were joined by others that arrived using an older “community” pattern of settlement. These agriculturalists organized their movements around tried and true kinship networks, and they often moved as communities in a process that was relatively closed to outsiders. Their tendency during the 1870s and 1880s was to congregate in “ethnic islands” and migrant clusters. The confluence of these simultaneous and interrelated movements which the railroad made possible became one of the most surprising and defining characteristics of the land settlement process on the Great Plains.

The Great Plains, it turns out, was a central site in the global processes that the railroad inaugurated. The world of Andreas Mosser was a world of new Americans, made modern, for good and for ill. Mosser’s journey was enabled both by his own actions and the context of his times: of the great reconfiguration of time and space, the creation of a vast second nature system, and the interfaces that came with it. This was a transnational process–and modern Americans in the 19th c. found themselves dealing with a transformed world, and the consequences of this process.

April 9, 2011

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich on “Ink and Thread”

Last night at the University of Nebraska’s James A. Rawley graduate conference in the Humanities, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich presented the keynote address on “Ink and Thread,” an examination of the material objects at the center of early American Mormonism–personal diaries and quilts. Her talk was inspiring and eye-opening, especially in the way she reframed the early Mormon movement around family, community, and identity, and used the material objects to reveal her argument. So often, historians use objects and images merely as illustration, but not Ulrich. For her the object itself needs to be interpreted and examined as visual material. The digitization of rare historical sources has led scholars often to see and encounter these diaries and letters as computerized texts, stripped of their original form. But Ulrich reminds us that the form, the object, deserves scrutiny and analysis–and I think she does so, and does so exceedingly well, because of her experience with digitizing texts.

Ulrich, the award-winning author of A Midwifes’ Tale and the creator of DoHistory, is researching the lives and experiences of the Mormon founders in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s. Her “object-oriented” approach brings together the craft of diary keeping and quilt making, suggesting that the men and women of this period crossed and intersected genres in surprising and significant ways. Her presidential address in 2009 to the American Historical Association focused on one quilt–an 1857 object that dozens of Mormon women stitched and signed as a symbol of opposition to the American troops headed toward Utah to occupy the territory. That quilt–The Fourteenth Ward Album quilt–provided the main structure for her talk at Nebraska as well. And it is a beautiful object. Digitized images of it reveal the exquisite detail and signatures on its blocks. Ulrich also showed the diary of Wilford Woodruff, one of the leading figures in early Mormonism. His richly embroidered penmanship demonstrated a quilting effect in the diary, a level of detail, imagery, craft, and, indeed, art that drew on the genre of the quilt and the family album. Ulrich’s presentation argued that by understanding the relationship between family, community, and identity through these objects we can piece together the experience of these Americans, see them in more complete context, and understand their struggles and triumphs with more clarity.