Ultimate History Project

The Ultimate History Project calls itself  "a forum for academically trained historians to work alongside avid genealogists, independent historians, and collectors, enabling them all to collaborate and learn from one another." Clearly it grows in part from the increasing numbers of unemployed and underemployed historians.


The site is a partial-pay site, set up so that new articles are free for a time, then go behind a pay wall -- so if you keep up you can read it for free. Among my favorites in the current crop are

* an interview with National Park Service chief historian Robert Sutton about the history of Civil War anniversaries (Congress created a national Centennial Commission in 1961; no such animal today);

* a quick history of cheerleading by Allison E. Wright (women weren't allowed); and 

* a perfectly Midwestern account of ornate buildings decorated with corn murals by Kelly J. Sisson Lessens
("The goal for those who led the Corn Palace craze was to advertize their city as the next Chicago"). 

The articles are accessible, short enough to be easily read on screen, and well illustrated. They're thoughtful, but contain no reference notes (which apparently may be available on request).

I haven't seen any recognizably genealogical posts...yet. Will yours be the first?

{P. S. Next day: forgot to include a hat tip to AHA Today's "What We're Reading."}



"Remembering the Civil War: An Interview with Robert K. Sutton, PhD," The Ultimate History Project (http://www.ultimatehistoryproject.com/civil-war.html : accessed 15 July 2012).

Allison E. Wright, "Games People Played: The Elite, Masculine Origins of Cheerleading in America," The Ultimate History Project (http://www.ultimatehistoryproject.com/games-people-play-may.html : accessed 15 July 2012). 

Kelly J. Sisson Lessens, "Thoroughly Corned: Sioux City and the Making of the Nation's First Corn Palaces," The Ultimate History Project (http://www.ultimatehistoryproject.com/taste-of-history-may.html : accessed 15 July 2012).



Harold Henderson, "Ultimate History Project," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 17 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Don't confuse me with the facts!

Writing over at the American Historical Association's blog AHA Today, Allen Mikaelian considers the implications of Jonathan Gottschall's book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human for historians (including, IMO, genealogists):

Facts have little to do with being human, when compared to all that story has accomplished. The public’s inclination toward an engaging story over and above things that historians value, like contingency and complexity [not to mention evidence -- HH], isn’t just a matter of personal choice or intellectual laziness—it’s a successful, hard-wired evolutionary adaptation that allowed societies to be built and genes to be passed on.

That gulf separating the careful historian from a general reading public has deep and functional roots. Historical thinking, if Gottschall is right, is not just an “unnatural act,” it’s the kind of thinking that would have, in the wilds from which we emerged, gotten us killed (or at least kicked out of the gene pool).

By all means read the whole thing. Mikaelian goes on to discuss some new attempts in history teaching to get students acclimated to other important aspects of historical thinking in addition to good storytelling.

I'm perfectly happy to commit the unnatural act of trying to think about evidence as well as story. But as genealogists -- who in this context are also public-oriented historians -- we need to be sure we don't lose sight of the stories, and our audience.



Allen Mikaelian, "Historians vs. Evolution: New Book Explains Why Historians Might Have a Hard Time Reaching Wide Audiences, Getting a Date," AHA Today, posted 9 May 2012 (http://blog.historians.org/articles/1650/historians-vs-evolution-new-book-explains-why-historians-might-have-a-hard-time-reaching-wide-audiences-getting-a-date : accessed 16 May 2012).

Jonathan Gotschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).

Harold Henderson, "Don't confuse me with the facts!" Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 18 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]