I am moving my site over to Drupal, but the process is not without its difficulties. For new content, follow the link here.

Earnest digital historian Adam Crymble offers a defense of the recent decision that LAC will replace a student visitation program with digitized documents.

[Image]Library and Archives Canada (LAC) is cutting an on-site World War I workshop intended for high school history classes, and took some heat in the Globe and Mail for the decision (the article, “First World War workshops soon to be history” [Feb. 25, 2010] is behind a pay wall).

The workshops offered Ottawa-area students the opportunity to handle World War I era letters from soldiers and learn about the soldiers’ experiences from LAC archivists who had expert knowledge of the material.

The article paints Canada’s national archives as near-sighted for replacing face-time between students and expert archivists with online PDFs and lesson plans for teachers.

Nothing could be further from the truth, and Canadians should be applauding the decision. In the face of a huge Canadian deficit this year, it is important for cultural institutions to justify their spending and look for more efficient ways to offer Canadians their services. LAC has achieved this by placing the learning resources online, making them available to far more students, and reassigning the staff who offered the workshops to other tasks.
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Ruby Button

If you’re reading this, you’re probably quite excited at the prospect of research at what is likely the greatest archival repository in the country, and one of the best in the world, but somewhat bewildered about what the experience will be like. Here is a basic guide.

Archives II, or The Deuce, as I call it, has most of the post-WWII documents and record collections. It is in College Park, on land adjacent to the University of Maryland. It is big and sprawling in many ways and has always been a rewarding but difficult research experience.

GETTING THERE

The easiest way to get to The Deuce would seem to be to drive if you have your own car, but parking spaces can be in short supply. NARA recommends you use public transportation, but if you’ve got to drive, come into the entrance off of Adelphi Road (not Metzerott). A fairly easy way for those staying in DC is to take a NARA shuttle bus from Archives I, which departs on the hour from the east side of the building and puts you at the visitors entrance to The Deuce. No ID is required to get on the shuttle and it takes 35-45 minutes to get out to The Deuce, depending on traffic. Finally, there’s the Metro. You can take the C8 Metrobus from the College Park Metro train station. Beware, buses only take cash and the Metro SmarTrip card (a plastic electronic pass card recharged by your bank account), not the basic fare card (paper with a magnetic strip) that the train stations use (along with the SmarTrip).

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While I’m preparing a killer power point presentation, I thought I would provide you all with another transcript of my Florida Track Club interviews from way back in undergrad. This is Juris Luzins, a William and Mary alumnus with at 3:58.1 for the mile and 1:45.2 for the 800. Luzins also ran for the professional International Track Association for a season, sacrificing his amateur status in the days before pros could compete at the national and international level.

Recently I went to a Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibit on Timothy O’Sullivan, a photographer with several geological surveys of the west in the 1860s and 1870s. I was pretty excited about this because I have read about O’Sullivan’s work in Alan Trachtenberg’s Reading American Photographs (badly reproduced in the paperback) and the Oxford History of Art book on American Photography. His medium was mostly silver albumen prints, which discolor somewhat, but they really are quite visually striking with very deep and rich tones. There were dozens of these prints in the galleries. As a bonus, there were quite a few stereoptic images, and the Smithsonian had blessedly put up two stereoptic viewers (kind of like a big, wooden, 3-D viewmaster from back in the day), and some of these images were done quite well, with foreground elements just about jumping out of the photo. O’Sullivan worked with the wet collodion process on glass plates, which necessitated a traveling darkroom during the surveys, one of which you see here. A glass plate was evenly covered with chemicals, soaked in a tub of other chemicals to make it all light sensitive, encased and put in the camera until the exposure, then developed. (more here) The photographer also worked for a short period for Matthew Brady of Civil War and NY/Washington studio fame. He died at 42 of tuberculosis.

In the exhibit I think everything was a print. No negatives. I love the detail, the precision of collodion glass plate exposures and prints, and seeing some more of those negatives would have been great.

I’m happy to announce I have accepted a position as a visiting assistant professor at Temple University. I’ll be moving to Philadelphia in the middle of the summer and teaching in the history department and the public history program. I’m looking forward to drawing on the rich historical resources of the city and a really impressive set of media resources at the university.

The building depicted is Sullivan Hall, formerly the library at Temple, completed in February 1936. It was a PWA project, one of only three nationwide at private universities.

I thought it worth re-visiting this find from a while back at the request of Angus Johnston.

In my dissertation, “Building the Ivory Tower: Campus Planning, University Development, and the Politics of Urban Space,” I research the development of American universities over the course of the 20th century, using the built environment as a lens for examining urban politics, student life, and academic culture in the process of urbanization. In short, I argue that universities are integral to urbanization, in contrast to previous scholarship that characterizes them as inherently suburban or anti-urban.

In the process of researching one of my cases, the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, I came across an interesting student sit-in during January of 1962. Students in a chapter of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) realized that the university had bought up a large number of private apartment buildings in Hyde Park and hired a real estate management company to steer and segregate tenants as part of a larger neighborhood management process to insulate the university from the expanding Black Belt (Arnold Hirsch touches on this in a chapter of Making the Second Ghetto). After some paired applicant testing to establish discrimination, CORE arranged a sit-in (pdf) at the UofC administration building and the real estate management company offices that lasted for two weeks. I was surprised to find out how lines of support and opposition were drawn. It turns out one of the leaders of CORE was Bernie Sanders, an undergrad from New York who had transferred to Chicago for his degree (he mentions this in his political autobiography, Outsider in the House). Students were split on the issue. The faculty was largely opposed to the students’ action, preferring discussion and research on the topic of segregation and housing. And there were some other surprising discoveries I won’t go into here.

One of the items I found in the archive was this image of the sit-in, including Bernie Sanders (standing). Since I am a big supporter of the Senator, and am in DC on a research fellowship, I got two prints of the image and went down to his office on Capitol Hill. I left them with his staff with an explanatory note and a request for a signature on one (the other for him to keep in his papers if he wanted). Today I went and picked this up — his staff reported he was pleased with my gift.

Thanks for the signature, Senator Sanders. I defend my dissertation May 4th at the University of Michigan.

In the midst of a furious drive to finish my dissertation I thought it might be nice to revive this moribund blog.

Way back in the day my top priority used to be distance running and all things athletics. True story: when it was time to go to grad school, I applied to masters programs at Oregon and WMU. At WMU I would do public history and at Oregon, if I got in, I would do track and field history (I had in mind a research project on the development of amateur running clubs like the Florida Track Club, the Greater Boston Track Club, and the group around the University of Oregon). Long story short, Oregon admitted me but didn’t give me any money (my undergrad record was pretty middling and my research interests were not really in line with those of the broader historical profession, I don’t think), so I went to WMU.

However, I was a real go-getter, and even while I was an undergrad I started on a research project that I hoped would culminate in an undergrad thesis. It didn’t work out, but I did conduct several oral histories with prominent members of the Florida Track Club, including Jack Bacheler, Juris Luzins, Jerry Slavin, and a couple others. I thought I had lost the transcripts of those interviews I had done, but recently found them in the depths of the internet archive.

Check out the first, an interview with Jack Bacheler from January of 2000.

Sort of like you find at GapMinder. Need to find some income data going farther back, if possible; it is the limiting factor. This is state population, inflation-adjusted median family income, and % of 25yr-old+ population with a bachelor’s degree. Play around with this a little bit (the “play” button is in the lower left) and see how the blue midwest states’ incomes stagnate from 1980-90 while New Jersey, New York, [Maryland], Connecticut, and Massachusetts take off. Ideally, there would be an index of education factors rather than just these fairly simple measures. All data from U.S. Census (incl. ACS) with the intercensal [?] years interpolated.

UPDATE: You can track individual states by clicking on their name or their bubble. You can change what’s on the axes and whatnot, if you want — if you have a huge spreadsheet behind a chart like this, you could have dozens of factors to change and visualize, which is really what Gapminder does. I think the value of this is not really analytical, but it deals with the opacity of tables in a really effective way. Like me, you might not be able to look at anything more than a 10×10 table and visualize the changes over time. Now, you don’t have to. I think, like with mapping, seeing quantitative data like this allows you to make some qualitative judgments about it. This table took me a couple hours to find all the data for and clean up and tweak, but just looking at the resulting chart for a half hour is, for me, more useful and memorable than just poring over a table for an hour and trying to conclude or recall something concrete about it.

Longer (an hour), over some similar material, but really great.