Midnight in Paris - A meditation on the past

What is the past? How do we imagine and live in the past?

Woody Allen's 2010 movie Midnight in Paris has a few things to say about history, and I suppose digital history - or at least the way we imagine history on the screen - analog or digital. In the movie, the protagonist Gil Pender travels in time to the 1920s. Gil has romanized the '20s, and lives through his fantasy when he fall for a women from the era. However, she too is unsatisfied with her current condition and travels with Gil to the 1890s. It's here that Gil comes face to face with the nature of history.

As Gil puts is "If you stay here and this becomes your present then pretty soon you'll start imagining another time that was really the golden time. That's what the present is. It's a little un-satisfying, because life's a little un-satisfying."

The King Center Collection: A Dream and an archive

The King Center in Atlanta published today a beautiful presentation of an impressive collection of Martin Luther King's papers. The online archive includes over 1 million documents  -http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/about-the-archive 

The presentation does several things

A magnificent use of color

Creative and thought provoking navigation

Careful presentation by theme

Given my work with the Lincoln Telegrams project (http://lincolntelegrams.com), I was particularly interested in this presentation of telegrams sent and received by King.

Here is the introduction to the telegrams collection. I copied te formatting along with the text.

Telegrams

Since the 1800’s Telegrams have been responsible for relaying important and urgent information. Prior to telegrams, nearly all information was limited to traveling at the speed of a human or animal. The telegram freed communication from the constraints of space and time and truly affected how the world lived. In many ways telegrams can be thought of as an early form of Twitter. Similar to the restriction of 140 characters within a Tweet, writers of telegrams needed to be thoughtful in their message crafting and word selection. This was so both for economical reasons and the desire to speed the transmission of the telegram. For this reason, the messages within telegrams are often quite direct and strategic in their formation.

Here's a screen shot of the interface for accessing the telegrams. This screen shot illustrates the graphical interface. A more traditional list interface is also available.

See more of the telegrams here

http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/tile?field_term_genre_tid=5101&keys=telegrams

Pentagon Papers online

The National Archives and Records Administration released today a complete digital version of the United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by The Department of Defense, better know as the Pentagon Papers. (see http://www.archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers/) The document was produced in the later 1960s at the order of then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Commissioned in 1967 and completed in 1969, without the knowledge of President Johnson, the Pentagon Papers were meant to be a briefing document for internal use only in the Defense Department.

In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg, a staffer working for the Defense Department contractor Rand Corporation, made copies of the multi-volume publication. As an opponent of the war in Vietnam, Ellsberg copied the secret documents (only 15 print versions were in existence) to pressure the new president Richard Nixon. Ellsberg shopped his pirated copy to several government insiders before making a deal with the New York Times and reporter Neil Sheehan to publish excerpts of the document. The first publication appeared 40 years ago July 13, 1961. Publication was halted briefly by a court in junction obtained by the U.S. government, only to resume June 30 when the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to allow the Times to resume its publication.

The original 1969 print publication of the Pentagon Papers (which has been published in several forms over the past 40 years) included over 7,000 pages. The new NARA publication is comprised of 48 Adobe PDF files ranging in size from a 13 page section on public statements (1 MB) to a section that includes internal documents from the Eisenhower Administration which is 495 pages long (89 MB). This PDF file structure preserves the original six part structure of the print publication (47 volumes and an index), but limits online users. There are no search or advance browse features. The documents are not hyperlinked or configured to be read or engaged in any way other than the way the original publication intended. Forty years later despite all that technology affords, and all the interest around the Pentagon Papers, we are reading the document just like Ellsburg did in the late 1960s.

Maybe that's appropriate. There’s a logical aesthetic to NARA’s presentation. After all, the Pentagon papers are what they are to us today because of Daniel Ellsburg’s original “digitization.” Of course, Elsburg made a series of analogy copies of the report. He xeroxed the documents. Ellsburg’s described of how he xeroxed the document in his 1972 book “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.” It's a fascinating description of the mechanics of copying. Spending hours at a time in the middle of the night stooped over a Xerox machine in a California advertising agency owned by a friend, Elsburg copied almost the entire 7000 page report. He described the process of making these copies in chapter 20 of his book.

Lynda showed us around and then showed me how to use the copy machine. It was a big one, advanced for its time, but very slow by today’s standards. It could do only one page at a time, and took several seconds to do each page. I tried pressing the book down on the glass to do two pages at a time, but the middle section was faint and uneven. Fortunately the books were bound with metal tape through holes so they could be taken apart. I tried to open them carefully as I could so it wouldn’t be obvious they’d been undone. I decided at first to make two copies, though it would take longer. The machine didn’t collate, and the bar had to come back and travel just as slowly for each copy (p. 301).

Later Ellsburg described the mechanics of his copying process.

I wanted to get as much done as I could. I worked all night. To speed up, I tried to program my motions. One hand picked up a page, the other fit it on the class, top down, push the button, wait…life, move the original to the right while picking another page from the pile…This is all very familiar now, but it was a new technology then. It took a little extra time to put the top down and up, and I didn’t know why it had to be done. Did it have to do with the copying quality, or was the light bad for the eyes? Was it dangerously bright? How did it work, anyway? I finally started to copy with the top up---the copies seemed to look all right---hoping that I wouldn’t get a headache or go blind. I tried not to look at the light, or I shut my eyes. But my vision seemed OK, so I stopped worrying (p. 302).

In 2003, James Spader depicted Elsburg in the made for TV movie, The Pentagon papers. This clip dramatizes the xeroxing process.

Additional copies of the Pentagon Papers are in numerous other locations.

Copies of the parts of the documents are available online from the National Security Archive - here in pdf form (589 pages) - Book 1

An online html version is available from the Vietnam Virtual Archive at Texas Tech -

http://www.clemson.edu/caah/history/facultypages/EdMoise/pentagon.html

In print, The Pentagon Papers as Published by the New York Times. edited by Neil Sheehan, Hedrick Smith, E. W. Kenworthy and Fox Butterfield. Gerald Gold, Allan M. Siegal and Samuel Abt. is available from Quadrangle Books, 1971.

And, the first complete version - The Senator Gravel Edition. The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam. Five Volumes Beacon Press, 1971. For more see this story from Democracy Now on how the Becan Press came to publish the complete document in 1971 - http://www.democracynow.org/2007/7/2/how_the_pentagon_papers_came_to also http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon/pent1.html

Learning about Civil War recruitment with digital historical ephemera

This poster might be used to teach about the recruitment of Union soldiers during the Civil War. This piece of historical ephemera is available from the collection An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Printed Ephemera at the Library of Congress' American Memory online at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbpe.06901800. The poster is a call for recruits to the Union army in Reading, Massachusetts. The rhetorical language used on the poster can tell us a lot about how military and local officials recruited new soldiers.

Notice the rhetorical call to duty pitched as a challenge to manhood and as a subtle reminder of the sacrifice of others.

NOW OR NEVER

"Listen, young heroes! your country is calling!

Time strikes the hour for the brave and the true!

Now, while the foremost are fighting and falling,

Fill up the ranks that have opened for you!"

But in case this emotional appeal is not enough, each recruit is offered a cash incentive to sign up.

BOUNTY FROM THE TOWN,..........$100

" BY SUBSCRIPTION,..........10

" FROM UNITED STATES,..........25

ONE MONTH'S ADVANCE PAY FROM U. S.,..........13

Total Cash Advance,..........$148

This recruitment poster uses a very different approach.

Instead of the soaring rhetoric and appeal to civic duty, here we see an almost playful effort to draw out you men interested in the skills of riflery. This poster is also available in the American Time Capsule collection at American Memory online at http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbpe.12303000.

These two posters are part of a subset of 20 posters in the collection An American Time Capsule at American Memory that are classified with the note "Civil War Posters." Among these posters are 16 broadsides advertising local Union army recruiting efforts including public rallies, military demonstrations, information sessions, and draft notices. One of the posters advertises a meeting of women in support of the war effort. The three other posters are public editorials encouraging military enlistment. The 20 posters can be accessed by searching the Time Capsule collection (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/rbpehtml/) at American Memory using the exact phrase "Civil War Posters" in the "Search Descriptive Information: (Bibliographic Records):" search box at the top of the search page for his collection.

I have upload gif image versions of these 20 posters to Flickr, available at http://www.flickr.com//photos/12792050@N00/ as well as in the photstream below.

The past, today

This week, an avalanche of information, much of it visual, has flooded out out of Egypt. Historians, students, and just those interested in the past will access these resource. How will we manage the information in future? In an effort to think ahead about what images we should "archive" let's consider some questions about significance.

What messages does this image communicate?

religion?

How about this image?

this?

Chopping through my cotton

Chopping through my cotton.

Can’t keep my hands out of the house long enough.

Graf(t)s, the hard things on the side…

The help is sick. The crops are not, except the summer oats; they’re like the help. Hope to stay on track, cause the season is underway.

As for the help…
Salby has a daughter
Aggy has a son
Joe’s as you left him
So’s Henderson
Tony’s got a hurt foot
Juber’s trying to go home
Jim, he’s hurt too, a runaway horse’ to blame.

At the landing, do I have everything? the oil? lamp?
and, patent balances?

The corn you sent’s chasing the corn I put, close race indeed.


Using a collection of letters written in the mid 1840s by individuals involved in the plantation operations of the Cameron family in North Carolina, my students at NC State are building a collection of creative interpretations of individual letters in the collection.

Chopping through my cotton, is my offering in this project. In my work, I am interpreting a letter written May 11, 1845 by Charles Lewellyn to Paul Cameron. Lewellyn was the overseer on a Greene County Alabama plantation owned by Paul Cameron's father, Duncan Cameron. The letter is available here - http://plantationletters.com/lewellyn/Charles_Lewellyn_1845_5_11.swf

Belwo is a more conventional analysis of the letter. This letter is part of a larger collection of letters available at http://plantationletters.com

________________________________________

In this letter dated May 11, 1846, Charles Lewellyn wrote to Paul Cameron about conditions on the Cameron plantation in Green County, Alabama. Paul Cameron’s father Duncan Cameron owned the Alabama plantation. The younger Cameron was in charge of the daily operations. The Cameron’s lived in North Carolina, and as absentee landowners, relied on Lewellyn’s reports about the plantation operation.

Lewellyn offered Cameron information on number of topics, including the current status of the crops that were in the ground, the general conditions of his enslaved workforce, updates on individual slaves, and a brief accounting of materials received. The letter opened in an almost apologetic tone. After saying that he (or more accurately the salves) had been chopping the cotton, Lewellyn went on to complain that so many of the workers were sick or unavailable. Chopping cotton involves clearing weeds out from around young cotton plants to give them ample opportunities to grow. Too many weeds will choke the plants, denying them water and other nutrients, even sunlight. Lewellyn stated that they had been working in the cotton rows for nine days and should have been finished, but then complained he “can’t keep my hands out of the house long enough to do any work on the plantation.”

After his update on the crops, Lewellyn briefly updated Cameron on the physical conditions and some of the activities of specific slaves on the plantation. In all, he mentioned nine people. Lewellyn mentioned seven of these slaves by name. He reported that two women, Salby and Aggy both recently had children. Salby has a daughter, and Aggy a son. Lewellyn left us to wonder about these children, specifically their health and the fathers. Two of the other people mentioned by Lewellyn were nursing injuries, Tony who hurt his foot and Jim who had an accident and cut himself.

Simple Digital History II

Here's a follow-up on an early post about simple digital history

Everyman the archivist, and yes that includes Benjamin Franklin Gates!

Simple digital history enables us all to be archivist. Just point, click and use.

Simple digital history makes use of ubiquitous digital devices (cell phone, digital camera, laptop, etc) to capture pictures or video of historical artifacts or historical resource (e.g. photographs, letters, and records). Images have been uploaded along with an annotation to a public online digital history website such as our Teaching Digital History ning, Flickr, or Footnote.

There is no minimum requirement with regard to the number of items in a simple digital archive, but the work should be focused on something plural. This might include multiple pages from a book or multiple correspondences. The work might also focus on artifacts or possibly even historical structures. Another important aspect of the work is to be creative and personal in the work.

A collection of 6 soda bottles found buried in the floor of the backyard shed, posted by Erin Klein.

Simple digital history should be scalable on a number of levels. For one thing, we should be able to pick up the process and apply it in different context with a different collection of materials. We should also be able to do the work with people who have a range skills and access to a range of technologies.

A simple digital history discussion forum on the Teaching Digital History community Ning (http://teachingdigitalhistory.ning.com) offers some examples of simple digital history projects with annotations that summarize the content of the historical materials and set the context for their original use and use in developing a related historical understanding.

A collection of religious items from the Roman Catholic Church posted by Lindsey Dowling

• http://teachingdigitalhistory.ning.com/profiles/blogs/religious-items
• Additional collections include the following
• Historical US history textbooks at http://teachingdigitalhistory.ning.com/profiles/blogs/simple-digital-history
• Elizabethan Courier's Medallion at http://teachingdigitalhistory.ning.com/profiles/blogs/elizabethan-couriers-medallion
• US Camera Images of World War II at http://teachingdigitalhistory.ning.com/profiles/blogs/images-from-wwii
• Personal religious relics at http://teachingdigitalhistory.ning.com/profiles/blogs/religious-items