Month: May 2019

I have a couple of ideas on what to look into for a “Little Odd Histories” post. I imagine that they need to be small and odd, and not well known, or known at all. One idea is to describe the players in the pardon of an attempted murderer in 1916 by a California Governor and Presidential candidate. Another is to present the evidence that a fort the Union Generals thought was built by the Union Army was really built by the Confederates—this misconception contributed to a Union defeat. Another might be the rise and fall of the memorialization of the Confederate James Jackson an example of how one gets written in and out of history. And last, for now, were the Confederates so out of ammunition on the third day at Gettysburg that they were reduced to using nails as ammunition. The difficulty with the task is that in the end, nothing is small. In The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb related the attempt of a novelist to describe everything that happened on one street corner in Paris at one point in time and failed. Too much to describe.

In the murderer example, the crime was committed in Santa Rosa California in 1910. The trial took all of 1911. The San Quentin prison term of ten years started in 1912. In the story, we have a gold mine, an illegitimate child, a flight to Japan and forcible return of a key witness, and a mysterious woman who attempts to bribe.  The conviction. The immediate appeal and its denial. A campaign for pardon starting with the collapse of the appeal. Around it all is the political life of the initial defense attorney who becomes the Progressive Republican Governor of California, a Presidential candidate, and to this day the state’s longest-serving senator. And his opponent, the Santa Rosa district attorney, who becomes to this day the longest-serving Democratic Congressman. The sources here are deep and wide. The question becomes how to focus, what to bring in, and what to leave out.

Alternatively, the fort that I claim was built by the Confederates as the result of a cavalry battle in June of 1864 has little direct source material. What was written about the fortification was written long after the battle. To support my claim requires an understanding of the battle, and the fort’s strategic, operational, and tactical situation. Reference is needed to contemporary maps. A lot to cover to get to support the “Odd” point.

Concerning “Odd”, the idea of tone and seriousness comes into play as does the need to make it readable by a general audience. If I did what happened with the attempted murder, I could take a somewhat playful tone and pursue a line of inquiry that goes: How to get rich? How to get rid of embarrassing claimants to one’s riches? How to blame the victim? How to bribe the victim? How to get rid of the witness? How to position the court battle for success? How to appeal? How to get your friends to get you a pardon? How to outlive them?  Each question answered with all. a short paragraph and with an accompanying artifact. The other ideas could be addressed with like questions. The challenge is how to keep it accurate, succinct and interesting.

On the broad problem of sustaining audio, video, and text forms stored on digital platforms, Cohen and Rosenzweig list durability and inaccessibility and state that digital materials are notoriously fragile and require special attention to withstand changing technologies and user demands. In other words, it costs money and constant attention to produce, and continue to deliver digital media over time. If an effort to maintain a digital site is not undertaken, technology or procedural change may easily make that site inaccessible. Accessibility can also be impacted by market forces. Commercial operators can gain ownership of data and place that data behind a paywall, or limit access to it entirely through the action of perceived market advantage.

Cohen and Rosenzweig also note that with the use of world wide web come problems of quality and authenticity and that one, “…can find plenty of inaccurate history on the web”. Further, they argue that the technical capabilities of digital media provide forgers or the unscrupulous with an easier and cheaper means of production and delivery.

Mat Honan learned the hard way about the durability, accessibility, quality, and authenticity of his digital media, he got hacked. His stored material was modified or destroyed, although he was able to save about 75% of it. He learned from the experience and advocates for online, off-line, and off-site backups of material, stronger access security methods, and an awareness that ultimately the security of a hosted platform is not fully in the owners’ control. Again, an argument that long-term maintenance of a digital site requires thought, effort, and cost.

Jennifer Howard argued those using digital media need to do so with an eye towards long term archival strategy. Without such a strategy, digital media will disappear into inaccessibility. For Ms. Howard, libraries and digital media centers need to play a role in the long-term storage of digital production, “if it is going to be around to be of use and influence”. In Augustine’s case, his autobiography would not be with us if many librarians of the ancient world and medieval worlds hadn’t preserved copies in libraries and archives. To survive in the long run, digital media may need similar care.

Safiya Noble is disturbed and offended by the lack of hierarchical control in digital media and networks. She argued that that the ability to produce and deliver unregulated speech helps to maintain and perpetuate racial and sexual stereotypes with uneducated or unsuspecting audiences. She advocates for government regulation of digital media content providers like Google. Ms. Noble’s concerns on group stereotyping and the licentiousness of some web content are valid. Whether the appropriate path is for the imposition of some form of censorship, controlled by the government as she advocates is not at all clear. The first question would be, which government? Ultimately, Ms. Noble’s concern, like the other authors is one of the quality and accuracy of the material. My thought is that in free market societies, the selections made by libraries or digital centers will determine the long-term survivability of historical materials on digital media. In societies not governed by the free market, political or ideological concerns will create the criteria, and funding, for preservation.

For me, digital history is a temporary label that seems to be needed as historians adjust to the implementation and evolution of modern information technology. One imagines that as historians began to move from oral histories to written ones that for a while history was called “papyrus” or “scroll” history, and then after a time as the new technology was adopted, just history again. Similarly, in the move from the written to the printed word—print or book histories, and then with adoption, just history again. In the end, the tool doesn’t necessarily change the ends of researching, compiling, and delivering a history, but the mechanisms, the economics, and what is possible to do with them change in a much more powerful way.

The audience reach of a scroll was superior to the reach of the individual relaying and oral history from memory. Today, we know about someone like Augustine of Hippo even though he perished in the Vandal’s siege of Hippo in 430 A.D. because his writings on scrolls had been disseminated throughout the Roman empire and were maintained and accessible to an educated elite. With the advent of the printed text, Augustine’s writings became more widely available. With digital technology, they are available globally 24/7 in video, audio, and text formats.

In the current transition of history from print to digital, a transition that has been underway for about 60 years now, digital history, to use the transitional term, is the application of the tools of information technology to the practice of history. So, what are the tools? The digital tools are computer and computer-based network hardware and software and the implementation standards that enable far more efficient production, manipulation, and dissemination of voice, video, and text used by historians for some historical project’s end. Historians include using Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig’s broad definition: “amateur enthusiasts, research scholars, museum curators, documentary filmmakers, historical society administrators, classroom teachers, and history students at all levels”. When compared to print media, digital media and networks provide historians and their audiences with more cost-effective methods. These include methods for storage, access to materials, flexible analysis and presentation, more diverse means of analysis and presentation, ease of manipulating data, audience interaction with the presentation, and freedom from hierarchical control.

Today, I am in transition to my next career as a researcher and writer of different aspects of history, biography, and, maybe political philosophy. I have had a few careers already: Marine during the Vietnam War, international communications satellite controller and engineer, information technology manager, transformational change consultant, small business executive, and US Army acquisition program manager. Through all of them, I was always reading and researching history and brought a historical understanding and context into my various jobs. 

In the humanities, I’ve studied European history, American history and historical geography, and American government with a foundation in political philosophy.  My current historical research interests include: the life and letters of Captain Edward Brownson USA (1843-1864), the role of the Orestes A. Brownson family in the American Civil War, some aspects of the first and second battle of Ream’s Station, Virginia in 1864, the 1968 Tet Offensive and the first digital computer casualty in a war, and an assessment of the Progressive Governor of California, Hiram Johnson’s pardon of convicted attempted murderer, Dr. Willard Buke, in 1913. On the political philosophy front, I am working to master the thought of Italian political philosopher, Augusto Del Noce, and his analysis of the post-World War Two evolution and intertwining of Marxist and nihilistic thought. Not to mention his suggestion that the thought of Simone Weil pointed a way out.

I became interested in history while playing with toy soldiers in the sandbox as a kid during the Centennial of the Civil War with, and my father’s encouragement to read his copy of Bruce Catton’s trilogy on the Army of the Potomac, and some of his historical novels. The interest in history was linked with an interest in politics by a visit to a Congressman’s office on Capitol Hill in the late1960s. Then furthered by an internship with the Virginia State Legislature, and by a college geography project where I studied the settlement patterns of former slaves in Montgomery County Virginia. As an intern, I heard senators refer to the, “War of Northern Aggression”, and I worked near the Home for Confederate Widows wherein five or so of them still lived. In the geography project, I interviewed children and grandchildren of slaves, and through that came into contact with Professor Richard Dickerson who studied the impact of the Freedman’s Bureau schools on the strength of the slave family. Which led to my discovery in the Montgomery County archives of one of the few remaining registers of slave marriages (slaves were not allowed to formally marry under Virginia law), and a related register of manumitted slaves. Both subsequently published by the National Genealogical Society. All of the foregoing immersed me in the Civil War and its aftermath, but as an avocation, my work life was in engineering and management.

Before this class, my online presence was found on my personal Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter sites, on Army Facebook and Twitter sites, and on various Army¸ trade association and news media websites. Because I had a government position, was part of an investment management company, or was consulting with clients with confidentiality expectations, I kept my personal opinions to myself and my communications in those forums were limited and of a technical nature. I used Facebook for family posts. On Twitter, I have a private account, and although I follow over 1000 people, I have posted or retweeted maybe 12 tweets in ten years.

Conversely, I do have a couple of Blogger websites and one WordPress site that I put up between 2009 and 2011 when I had some spare time, and before I went full time into intense Army work. Those sites have historical content related to the history and biography research interests listed above.

The class and the articles from week one’s readings make it clear to me that I need to make all the sites that I control consistent and interrelated. I am in a transition, post-Army retirement, to a new career as a researcher and writer of history and biography. After looking at myself online, it’s clear that my professional identity is anchored in my past career as a management consultant and as an Army acquisition program manager. The exception is the Blogger sites and the one WordPress site, but those do not easily come up in a Google search. My task with this class is to use the class website as the vehicle for working out my new online identity and transferring that identity to all of my other sites. I imagine I can also transition my pre-existing Blogger and WordPress sites into the site I am making for class. Ending the semester with online sites that are more consistent with a historical research and writing identity.