A new episode of the Nature’s Past environmental history podcast is now online.
I look forward to listening to this tonight on the train.
Digital Accessibility of Canadian History
27 01 2011ActiveHistory.ca has a great new blog post about digital accessibility of primary sources. The sources discussed include the The Canadiana Discovery Portal, Our Ontario, Artefacts Canada, and Canada’s Historic Places Index.
The author of this post is Krista McCracken, a former student.
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Tags: Digital Accessibility of Canadian History
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New York Times Displays Appalling Insularity and Parochialism in Roundtable on Arizona Shootings
24 01 2011Since Jared Loughner shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others at a Safeway in Tucson, there has been a vigorous debate in the US over whether the use of violent metaphors and images in political speech played a role in encouraging a mentally unbalanced young man to kill. What does American history tell us about the relationship between violent acts and the political acrimony of the day?
The New York Times asked seven historians what they thought of this question. The historians, many of whom are specialists in the more violent periods of US history, had some interesting things to say. However, I think the roundtable discussion could have been better had some historians of other countries been invited to comment. The seven historians are citizens of the US who study the US. An international perspective would have been valuable. The whole roundtable struck me as far too parochial and inward-looking. My reading of the situation is that the NYT reporter who organized this article was a bit lazy and decided only to contact historians with US phone numbers. Fair enough, but it might have been helpful to speak to historians in US universities who were born abroad or who study other countries.
Possible questions to ask include: Why were there so many assassinations/kidnappings/terrorism in western Europe in the 1970s (Red Brigades)? Why has that region become much more peaceful recently? Did the use of violent metaphors in political speech in the Weimar Republic contribute to the endemic political violence of Germany in that period? Why does Canada, a country with widespread ownership of hunting rifles have a much lower murder rate than the US? Why are political assassinations so infrequent in Canadian history and much more common on the other side of the border?
Here are some questions the lazy-ass NYT reporter should have tried to have answered. It is disappointing that the NYT a newspaper read by the cosmopolitan elite of the US and which has an international edition on its website would be so parochial in this regard.
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Tags: Arizona Shootings, Assassins in American History, New York Times
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The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century
24 01 2011I saw this notice on The Exchange, the blog of the Business History Conference.
The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (Knopf, 2010), by Alan Brinkley, Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University, will be the focus of a roundtable discussion at the upcoming BHC meeting. The book, which is not only a biography, but an examination of Luce’s impact on the magazine publishing industry and on America’s self-image, has received widespread media attention. It has been reviewed extensively, including in the New York Times Sunday Book Review (accompanied by a podcast interview with Brinkley) and by Janet Maslin in “Books of the Times“; in The Economist, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and by NPR’s “Fresh Air.”
Alan Brinkley
Alas, I am not going to be at the BHC this year– I’ve had to pull out for a number of reasons, not least my relocation to a university a bit more distant from St. Louis, Missouri, the venue for this year’s conference. However, I’m really going to miss BHC this year and when I see that Brinkley is going to be there talking about his book, I really wish I could go. Luce published a family of magazines that dominated American culture in the middle of the twentieth century: Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated.
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Tags: Alan Brinkley, Business History Conference, Henry Luce
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New App from US National Archives
22 01 2011The US National Archives has released a new app that shares a scanned image of historical document with you each day. It is available on both Android and iPhone smartphones.
The National Archives has released our first mobile application called “Today’s Document,” based on the popular feature on Archives.gov.
This new mobile app is an interactive gallery that allows you to explore the holdings of the US National Archives through a collection of 365 fascinating documents and photographs from throughout history. Learn what significant event happened on your birthday, search the documents by keyword, or browse the collection at your leisure.
Zoom in on the high resolution images to get a closer look at the featured documents and photographs, use the calendar feature to select a specific date, or select “Surprise Me” to show a document at random. Want to learn more? Tap the “info” icon to read background information on the document and link to related websites. You can even share documents via email, Facebook and Twitter, and add documents to your list of favorites by tapping the “star” icon.
Today’s Document mobile app is currently available in the Android marketplace and the Apple iTunes Store.
For the full press release, see here.
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Use of Historypin Images in Lectures
21 01 2011I sometimes use images from Historypin in lectures. For example, I was lecturing on the First World War this week. I was trying to convey to students the message that the First World War was truly a _global_ conflict rather than just a European one.
I sent the students a link to a particular image in the Historypin website. Historypin takes images from historic databases and associates them with a particular modern address in Google Maps. The image I asked the students to look at is from an Australian archive, which subtly reinforces my point about the global nature of this conflict.
The caption of the image is this:
“Two Australians assist a prisoner, who was severely wounded in the leg, near Anzac Ridge, whilst making his way into our lines, after being passed by the attacking Australian troops in the battle of 4 October 1917, at Broodseinde Ridge, in the Ypres Sector.
The Australian soldiers are (left to right) :
* 28401 Gunner C S Mathias
* 22124 Bombardier T R Lennox
both are members of the 111th Horse Battery, 11th Field Artillery Brigade.”
Comment : the Australians were with the 4th Division Artillery.”
This picture was taken near Passchendaele, which is the name the British gave to a town today known in Flemish as Passendale. The location where the photo was taken has been identified on a modern map and appears to be a residential street nowadays, judging from Google Street View.
Someone has created an online database of the Australian soldiers who fought in the Great War. By clicking the names of the soldiers above, you can see their personal details (religion, home address, etc).
I think that Historypin is a great technology for conveying the personal or human side of history.
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Tags: First World War, Historypin, Historypin images
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UK scholars assess U.S. presidents: FDR tops list
21 01 2011
The United States Presidency Centre [USPC] of the Institute for the Study of the Americas (part of the University of London’s School of Advanced Study) has made good this omission by conducting the first ever UK scholarly survey of US presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush, with an interim assessment of Barack Obama.
Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945) was placed first overall in the poll, with Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865) second and George Washington (1789-1797) third. Roosevelt came first in three categories: vision/agenda-setting; domestic leadership; and foreign policy leadership; Washington came first for moral authority; and Lincoln did so for the positive significance of his legacy.
See more here.
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New Book Blog
20 01 2011
A former student who is now starting a career as a librarian has established a blog about young adult books. Stephanie was kind enough to describe me as her “mentor” on her blog.
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Tags: book blogs
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Historypin Explained
20 01 2011Historypin combines Google Street View and databanks of historical photographs to allow you to see what a given point looked like in the past. (Say in 1914). Historypin invites ordinary people to share their old photos and the stories behind them by “pinning” the pictures to the locations they were taken in Google Street View. The overlaid photos are geo-tagged and dated to provide the time machine effect. Historypin already has thousands of pictures from public archives and companies as well as amateur photographers.
This video explains how Historypin works.
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Tags: Historypin
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Laptops in Lecture Theatres
20 01 2011
Do laptops have a place in the lecture hall? An ongoing debate has raged over whether they do. Ian Milligan reviews the debate here.
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The Past Speaks 