Category: U. S. South (page 2 of 4)

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 26, 2011

A Visit to “Menokin”

On Thursday, my family took a drive over to “Menokin,” the historic home of Francis Lightfoot Lee in Richmond County, Virginia. Lee was a signer of the Declaration of the Independence, a slaveholder, and a leading figure in the Virginia gentry at the time of the Revolution. Our tour was led by Sarah Pope, the Executive Director of the Menokin Foundation. The foundation aims to preserve the historic home and develop a teaching program around the site.

What’s remarkable is first, that we know so little about Francis Lightfoot Lee, and second that the home sat unoccupied for as long as it did. Martin Kirwan King has generously donated support to restore the home and begin conservation work. Any scholar working on the Revolutionary period looking for a dissertation topic or a Master’s thesis topic might consider writing about Francis Lee. The archaeological dig in and around the home have revealed important details of 18th century Virginia life. The slave quarters and other outbuildings have yet to be fully documented and uncovered.

Lee held 47 people in bondage and his will offers us a small window into the gentry world and into slavery. It provided that after his wife’s death, “all the said negroes, furniture and what my remain of the other articles mentioned in this clause to my nephew Ludwell Lee, second son of my Brother Richard Henry Lee, forever.” But Lee went further, holding that if Rebecca Lee removed herself from Menokin, then the sale of “the negroes” would follow. In other words, Lee contemplated without question or concern the breakup of slave families and lives–what Walter Johnson has called “the chattel principle.” He also mentioned only one slave by name: Cate, the maid of his wife Rebecca. But he did so, only because his will provided that Rebecca might choose to take her dower, rather than the 250 British pounds sterling a year his will provided for her, and if so, then Cate could be exempted from the estate and held in the dower. This was common, but it never ceases to amaze us on cold (re)reading–the clutch of the slavery system, the grip on the future lives of the enslaved through such legal documents. The Foundation will need more research to discover the material, social, and religious lives of all the people working at and around Menokin, and the history of this gentry world. The recent book by Melvyn Patrick Ely, Israel on the Appomattox , tells the story of a Virginia gentry Richard Randolph and his remarkable will which freed his slaves after the Revolution and set them up on a 400-acre piece of land. Comparing the will of Richard Randolph and Francis Lightfoot Lee, one wonders how we can reconcile them, the former inspired by the ideals of the Revolution freed the slaves he inherited, the latter a signer of the Declaration of Independence bound slaves even more tightly in enslavement to his kinsmen.

The house is a beautiful structure and a thoroughly pleasing architectural design. The original plans, amazingly, were discovered only recently. They included two buildings–an office and a kitchen–now utterly collapsed. The overall project is of unquestioned importance, and I expect we will be learning more about Lee in the coming years.

The Foundation has already developed an architectural conservation program and an environmental conservation program, as well as a solid set of web resources for further research.

To give a sense of the project and its scope:

Stone recovered from the Menokin foundation, 2011.

The view of the front entrance to Menokin, 2011.

In front of the main house, 2011.

For more photographs and materials visit the Foundation’s photographic collections.

March 19, 2011

#OAH2011

In Houston, TX at the Organization of American Historians Conference, I have enjoyed catching with with friends and colleagues. I had a wonderful talk with Elizabeth R. Varon and heard about my friends at the University of Virginia, where she is now teaching Southern history. And she gave me some helpful advice on my next book project. I’m going to write about slavery and freedom in early Washington, D.C., and in particular at the case and family history of Mima Queen. The main focus will be on the Queens, and the case, which Francis Scott Key tried in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1813, and John Marshall decided. This was a petition for freedom case, and among other things established the “hearsay rule” in American law. I’ve found new documents on the case, and Liz, not surprisingly, had great suggestions for how to begin to uncover this story. The book will tell the story of early Washington, black and white, and through the lives of three generations of Queen women–Mary Queen, Mima Queen, and Louisa Queen.

The OAH session on Quantitative History revealed how historians are using new techniques of Social Network Analysis, ones that I plan to use in my next work on early Washington. Karen Wilson’s work on networks of Jewish business men and families in Los Angeles opened my eyes to how these techniques might be applied to my project on the Queens.

Melinda Miller (U.S.N.A.) explained why forty acres and a mule would indeed have made a difference in the lives of freedmen after the Civil War. Her brilliant analysis compares Cherokee Freedmen with Southern black freedmen.

And we had a mini-reunion of Valley of the Shadow folks, including Anne S. Rubin, Andrew Torget, and Amy Murrell Taylor. Missing Ed Ayers, but he was probably watching University of Richmond Spiders advance in the NCAAs.

The meeting also allowed my research team for our Railroads Digging into Data project to meet with Richard White and his Spatial History team from Stanford, including Erik Steiner and Kathy Harris. We hoped going into the meeting to drive “the golden spike” between our respective railroad data projects. No champagne, no worker strikes, no Thomas C. Durant. But we made major progress on how we might join our data and tools and collaborate on a future project. Our Aurora Engine framework for spatio-temporal visualization and analysis might be at least a common gauge–to use a railroad term.

And Oxford University Press put out The Old South’s Modern Worlds, with an excellent essay by Michael O’Brien among others.

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.