Erased from history -- but not quite

Back in the day (when there had been only thirty-four presidents), I memorized all the presidents and their dates when they were featured with pictures on a full page of my grandparents' Chicago Tribune. I may have known the vice-presidents too, but I don't recall Richard M. Johnson (1837-1841). Even if I had known all the "First Ladies" I would have had trouble finding his wife Julia Chinn.

Much more recently, a friend drew my attention to a blog post at the Association of Black Women Historians. "The Erasure and Resurrection of Julia Chinn, U.S. Vice President Richard M. Johnson's Black Wife" will be the subject of a forthcoming book by Indiana University Bloomington professor Amrita Chakrabarty Myers. The post also references her earlier book, Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston, 1790-1860. I look forward to reading both.

History as Quicksilver

From the fictional 98-year-old narrator of a novel:

"Wars  make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It isn't flat or linear. It has no outline It is slippery, like liquid; infinite and unknowable, like space. And it is changeable: just when you think you see a pattern, perspective shifts, an alternative version is proffered, a long-forgotten memory resurfaces."

Kate Morton, The House at Riverton (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006)

In the middle of the middle of the Middle West

Those of us with ties to the 44 or so Illinois counties lying between I-70 and I-80 have received a gift, but we don't all know it yet. Corn Kings & One-Horse Thieves: A Plain-Spoken History of Mid-Illinois, by my friend and onetime colleague James Krohe Jr., comes closer to unriddling the riddle of the Midwest than anything else I've seen. How is it that a place so bland has such a violent history and uncertain future? 

One way to begin to understand the past is not to blink at it. The author accurately compares the "removal" of Native Americans to recent episodes of "ethnic cleansing at its most ruthless." Similarly in agriculture: "Most of the prairie was  simply destroyed to get at the soils that lay beneath it"; what remains is appropriately preserved in tiny pioneer cemeteries.

The book's eleven chapters proceed both chronologically and thematically, keeping close to the ground. We learn that Decatur was the hub of railroad Illinois, selling more tickets than Chicago or St. Louis; that it took four days for Canton's abandoned International Harvester factory complex to burn down; that the Corn Belt Liberty League did not survive farm prosperity. (The attempted academic renaissance of midwestern studies should do this well.)

There is no slack water here; the author is always thinking. "On a memorable night in 1895, the Fulton County courthouse in Lewistown was burned to the ground as the last act in a bitter county seat war between that town and Canton. The incident provided material for several of Edgar Lee Masters's poems, making it one of the few times county government has inspired readable verse."

And he earns the epilogue, a reflection on the barely casual interest in the region's past that allowed Galesburg's first settlers' "Log City" and the massive World War II Camp Ellis in Fulton County to be obliterated. "The mid-Illinois landscape is peopled with spirits of these forgotten people and places and things . . . Old interurban and streetcar tracks still run through many a Main Street, buried beneath newer paving; where streets are worn, the rails sometimes are exposed, like the bones sticking out of a grave."

For those with roots south of the Quad Cities and north of Alton, this is a must-have. Others may find it a model for the kind of detailed and honest history other states and regions could use.

Krohe writes weekly in Springfield's Illinois Times and there provides a better biographical background than his publisher. His roots in mid-Illinois go back two centuries. "How does one find oneself turned around, looking backwards rather than forwards the way a real American should? I can say honestly that it was not my fault. My ancestors lured me into it."

Quick hits: August, finishing, choosing, researching, and genealogy management

* Early August: the absolute best time to visit a university library.

* As genealogists, we don't finish enough things. It's as if we run from framing one house to framing another. But the finish work takes longer than anything, and sometimes it reveals the quality of the framing. That's one reason I'm in favor of trying for a credential -- or just writing thorough articles. Finishing teaches lessons that don't come any other way.

* On the Genealib list, Barbara J. Hill recently recalled one of her top priorities when buying for the California Genealogical Society's library: a book of local newspaper abstracts ("worth its weight in gold"). Not only are many small newspapers not digitized, even that may not help. Often the result of worn type on cheap newsprint may be such that only humans, not OCR, can decipher it.

* Not so many years ago, I would raid a library by way of the copy machine, then carry and sort and label the paper. Now I scan the pages with a smart phone app and try to email them to myself and then sort and label them from one program into another. I think I'm saving money -- not so sure about saving time, at least until I can refine the process. (It's also often an improvement on just taking notes.)

* Genealogy management and administration is almost a missing specialty (even with FGS in the vanguard). And I'm pretty sure one tenet of it would be not to try to do at the last minute tasks that in their nature require considerable preparation. Another tenet would be that its best practitioners deserves the same respect that DNA specialists and high-end editors and tech wizards receive. It's getting to be too important to be a sacrificial sideline.

* Don't miss Jill Morelli's new blog post, "What Kind of an Historian Are You?"



Harold Henderson, "Quick hits," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 11 August 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Perspectives from history: Shakespeare enthusiasts and naval life under sail

Sometimes we can benefit from stepping back from the daily grind.

Close reasoning about history belongs to other disciplines than genealogy. In a recent New Yorker (paywall or in any decent library) by the excellent Adam Gopnik, we learn of two long-running disputes about Shakespeare. See what you think. My take was that these people were not paying attention in the class where they were encouraged to try to disprove their own favorite hypothesis.

Sometimes we need a different kind of reminder -- about how different the past was. Good historical fiction can help us get a feel for that. My current recommendation would be a sampling (or more) of Patrick O'Brian's series of 20 novels of Napoleonic-era naval adventures, known as the Aubrey-Maturin series and listed in order on his Wikipedia page. Even as a non-aficionado of sailing, I was fascinated to see an entire tightly knit social world with highly developed expertise and hierarchical divisions of labor -- and of course now completely gone. Two hundred years ago might as well be two thousand. Maturin's medical practice alone should also cure readers of nostalgia for the "good old days."




Adam Gopnik, Life and Letters, “The Poet’s Hand,” The New Yorker, April 28, 2014, p. 40.

"Aubrey-Maturin Series," Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey-Maturin_series : viewed 1 May 2014).

Harold Henderson, "Perspectives from history: Shakespeare enthusiasts and life under sail," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted    2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Evidence is not easy

Historians have issues with evidence evaluation, too. Here's the nautical metaphor that China scholar Jonathan D. Spence used to introduce his collection of Western "sightings" of China over the past 800 years:

We must imagine our pilots and navigators . . . holding rather simple instruments in their hands as they make their sightings. Furthermore, the hands that hold the instruments are often chapped with cold or sleek with sweat. Our guides are standing on sloping decks that shift angle without warning, and are often blinded by a burst of spray or dazzled by an unexpected dart from the previously beclouded sun. (xviii)

His subsequent discussion of the endlessly receding mystery of Marco Polo's account of China forced me to reconsider the idea that historians deal only in generalities and so don't have to worry about particular facts the way genealogists do.



Jonathan D, Spence, The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York: W. W. Knopf, 1999).


Harold Henderson, "Evidence is not easy," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 25 September 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

New History Books

It's always fun when a new issue of the American Historical Review comes around and I pick out books published a year or more ago that I never heard of but now want to see (quotations from reviewers in the February 2013 issue):

James Joseph Buss, Winning the West with Words: Language and Conquest in the Lower Great Lakes (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011). This sounds like a much more sophisticated version of my usual rant about how many mug books may have genealogical value while being just bad history. Reviewer John P. Bowes: "In the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, white Americans worked over the course of a century and more to write Wyandots, Potawatomis, and others out of the landscape while crafting a narrative that 'portrayed the erasure of indigenous communities as a passive and inevitable consequence of settlement.'"

Kenneth E. Marshall, Manhood Enslaved: Bondmen in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century New Jersey (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011). The author focuses on three individuals and "finds complex men who struggled to assert their manhood in a world determined to render them as boys."

Mazie Hough, Rural Unwed Mothers: An American Experience, 1870-1950 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010). Focus on Maine and Tennessee.

Hendrik Hartog, Someday This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Focus on New Jersey court cases: "When an individual died and did not leave the caregiver the inheritance seemingly promised . . .the courts became the stage for the most personal of family dramas."

Joanna L. Grossman and Lawrence M. Friedman, Inside the Castle: Law and the Family in Twentieth Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). "A highly readable and informative overview [with] . . . endnotes that can be mined for additional information."




Harold Henderson, "New History Books," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 25 February 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Tidbits from the History Table

Book reviews lead to expenditures, of time or money or both. In this case I found potential goodies dealing with the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The current American Historical Review has an interesting review of Cathleen D. Cahill's Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933. Several levels of interest here. One has to do with unintended consequences: "Federal lawmakers assumed after the Civil War that the Indian Service would eventually work itself out of existence as native assimilation occurred." The other has to do with bureaucracy in general, and has relevance to almost any genealogy work: "It is this lower level of bureaucracy that literally determines what the actual policy of the government will be and rarely does it coincide with what the policy initiators envisioned."

Over at the blog US Intellectual History, Tim Lacy posted some reflections on Jackson Lears's Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920. Short version: "The book is worth at least half of a graduate education in the fields of social, cultural, and intellectual history.  . . . should be on the shelf of every single historian who proclaims to study or teach post-Civil War history." (So far I'm wishing that Lears could have been a little less judgmental, but not sure how that would have worked.)

Meanwhile, William Cronon's outgoing address as president of the American Historical Association called attention to the facts that new students have no experience of off-line research, do little reading for pleasure and less of full-length books. His conclusion for historians: remember to tell stories, and the past is the greatest story of all: "Our core business is RESURRECTION: to make the dead past live again. ... Other professionals can afford to be boring. We cannot."




David E. Wilkins, review of Federal Fathers and Mothers, American Historical Review, vol. 117, no. 5 (December 2012):1598-99.


Cathleen D. Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

Tim Lacy, "Rebirth of a Nation: Reflections, Ruminations, and Reactions," US Intellectual History, 27 December 2012, http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/2012/12/rebirth-of-nation-reflections.html : accessed 31 December 2012.

Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). 

David Austin Walsh, "Highlights from the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association: Dispatches, Day 2," History News Network (http://hnn.us/articles/highlights-2013-annual-meeting-american-historical-association#Day2 : accessed 4 January 2012).
 

Harold Henderson, "Tidbits from the History Table," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 9 January 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

History for Non-Readers

Colorado State University Pueblo historian Jonathan Rees writes over at The Historical Society:

 . . . humanities professors faced with non-reading students have to teach their recalcitrant readers the kinds of reading skills that they’ve never learned.

. . . In their classic How to Read a Book Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren speak of Elementary Reading, Inspectional Reading, and Analytical Reading.  To get students to that third level, you have to read with them.  Open the book during class.  Make them read aloud to the class.  Discuss the implications of those ideas.

Rees is also the author of the recently published Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life, covering the US 1877-1929 (and available as an e-book). His list of "case studies" makes me suspect that even those of us who think we know some history may benefit from reading it . . . out loud or otherwise. (If it's as good as it could be, I might agitate for a prequel covering 1845-1877.)



Jonathan Rees, "Bend, Don't Break," The Historical Society, posted 26 November 2012 (http://histsociety.blogspot.com/2012/11/bend-dont-break.html : accessed 26 November 2012).


Jonathan Rees, Industrialization and the Transformation of American Life: A Brief Introduction (Armonk NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2012).


Harold Henderson, "History for Non-Readers," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

The Downside of Search and Scroll

University of Wisconsin historian and AHA president William Cronon dives deep into the meaning of technology -- from physical scrolls to printed books to Google and Amazon -- in an amazing and unsettling essay in the new issue of Perspectives on History. He is no armchair critic hiding in a moldy library, and we will be hearing more about his "20-year effort to build digital libraries on handheld devices, and how frequently I've had to reformat public-domain e-books from .txt to .lit to .html to .doc to .pdf to .mobi to .epub, with no hope of retaining my own annotations in the process."

Another angle:

Can physical books come close to competing with computers when it comes to search? Of course not. But when one wants to relocate a piece of information in a particular context, and when one remembers that context better than the information itself, then it can be surprisingly difficult for search alone to recover what one wants.

How do disciplines the depend not just on details but on context reap the advantages of new hardware and software while minimizing the problems they create? Cronon doesn't have the answer but he knows there's a question.



William Cronon, "Recollecting My Library...and My Self," Perspectives on History, vol. 50, no. 8 (November 2012), http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2012/1211/Recollecting-My-Library-and-My-Self.cfm : accessed 19 November 2012.


Harold Henderson, "The Downside of Search and Scroll," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 20 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Not All History Is Created Equal

World War II brought 20,000 jobs to rural La Porte County, where the county seat had a total population of only 16,000. Workers commuted up to 90 miles round trip per day to assemble explosive shells. The Kingsbury ordnance plant did hire black workers, largely from Gary, but it segregated them in lowly jobs (and separate bomb shelters!) and discriminated against them in workplace discipline. Nor were they allowed to live in the "new town" of Kingsford Heights near the plant.

Historian Katherine Turk has documented the situation in the new issue of the Indiana Magazine of History, drawing among other sources on files of employee letters to President and Mrs. Roosevelt and the Fair Employment Practices Commission, held at the National Archives in Chicago. It's not a pretty picture, and not one you'll hear much about in La Porte County today.

Turk's research interest is in documenting that the African American women's logic involved both equality and fairness, whereas later anti-discrimination laws tended to leave out the fairness part. My interest is in the power of local forgetting: how little is remembered of the virulent white racism that led the government bureaucrats and the contracting company alike to discriminate against black workers and lie to them about it. (Most responses to complaints were pro forma; one woman was turned away because the company doctor said she had high blood pressure, which her own doctor documented was not the case.) The plant would recruit as far away as North Dakota and Georgia rather than allow a black person to work in a job designated for whites.

Placing our ancestors in historical context involves being aware of uncomfortable issues and situations that now go unmentioned. Sometimes it takes an outside historian to pay attention to a part of the picture that local historians turn away from.



Katherine Turk, "'A Fair Chance To Do My Part of Work': Black Women, War Work, and Rights Claims at the Kingsbury Ordnance Plant," Indiana Magazine of Hisotry, vol. 108, no. 3 (September 2012): 209-44.

Harold Henderson, "Not All History Is Created Equal," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 27 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Does History Comfort Us?

If history is comforting, writes an anonymous historian, it's probably not very good history.

History is meant to make you uncomfortable. Clio, the muse of history, is like Jesus: she brings not peace but a sword. She will make you rethink everything you think you know; everything you think you hold dear; she will make you question everything. Everything you were brought up with; everything you thought natural. She’s not here to wrap you in cotton wool and say ‘there, there’ everything is just how it’s supposed to be. She’s not there to bring succour to your view of your country, or smooth over the bad stuff that it did, or to soothe your conscience about the massacres perpetuated in the name of your religion, or the slaughter committed by people who at least claimed to share your political beliefs. She’s there to make you uneasy. She’s there to stop you from falling victim to her evil twin, Myth. In a sense I want to free you from feeling like the past controls us; that we have to base our identities in the present upon myths. That means we don’t have to feel guilty or apologise, either – just to be aware; to understand.

This historian teaches medieval history; an example from WW2 Indiana tomorrow.



"Professor Grumpy's Historical Manifesto," Historian on the Edge, posted 12 October 2012 (http://600transformer.blogspot.in/2012/10/professor-grumpys-historical-manifesto.html : accessed 25 October 2012).

Harold Henderson, "Does History Comfort Us?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 26 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Fun with Gazetteers

Meldon J. Wolfgang has a nice article in the current New York Researcher on gazetteers in general and New York's six 19th-century ones in particular, all now visible on line: 1813, 1824, 1836, 1842, 1860, and 1872.
(The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society is planning to issue its own New York Family History Handbook: Research Guide and Gazetteer later this year.)

The old gazetteers are something like a cross between the best parts of a newspaper, an almanac, and a history book. (They're a bit like an encyclopedia annual edition, if you remember those.) Every little place in the state gets its mention -- not as it seemed to a historian or sentimental genealogist a century and a half later, but as it seemed to them right then. I can't think of a better source, pre-photography, for seeing the country as our ancestors saw it.

Closer to home, the 1849 Indiana Gazetteer has four detailed paragraphs on the Indiana Medical College in La Porte (a long-since-faded memory); the names of all the Methodist preachers in every district; and a brutally honest dollar-by-dollar account of the 1830s internal improvements fiascos, from a point in time when it was not quite clear whether canals or railroads were going to save the state. And now, they're almost sinfully easy for us to find and read. Which one is your favorite?



Meldon J. Wolfgang, "Exploring New York State's Nineteenth Century Gazetteers," The New York Researcher, vol. 23, no. 3(Fall 2012): 54-55.

The Indiana Gazetteer, or Topographical Dictionary of the State of Indiana, 3rd edition (Indianapolis: E. Chamberlain, 1849), illustration at 167; digital image, GoogleBooks (http://books.google.com : accessed 16 October 2012).



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

Genealogy: At the Intersection of History and Memory

Not long ago at a meeting of northwest Indiana County Genealogists the conversation turned to those people who insist that their old family story must be true, no matter how conclusive the evidence against it. I thought at the time, "Well, some folks just are knuckleheads."

But maybe there's more going on than that. It's the difference between memory (personal and collective remembrance) and history (what can be rethought and documented publicly).

People get into genealogy because they want to preserve and extend their family memories. But genealogy is not scrapbooking, it's history. It deals with what actually happened. Often genealogists encounter facts that show their cherished memories were false. Some can deal with that, others can't.

There's a nice discussion of memory and history -- so often joined, so often at odds -- in the book Thinking the Twentieth Century, pages 275-78, a conversation between two 20th-century historians. But since this is a genealogy blog, I'll substitute a personal example of how the two can collide:

In the mid-1950s our family was driving through downtown Peoria, and one of my young sisters for the first time saw Catholic nuns in their traditional black-and-white habits. In great excitement, she yelled through the open window, "MOMMY, LOOK! WITCHES! REAL LIVE WITCHES!" My mother was mortified; we drove away; and the episode entered the family memory. For years afterward in retrospect we attributed the yell to Mischievous Middle Sister. That was our memory, confirmed and reconfirmed with every repetition.

But it was false. Decades later we were sorting through the near-daily postcards our mother had sent to her mother in those days -- just about the length and tenor of a quick email or Facebook post would be today. One of them told the story of that day, except that, contrary to our memory, it had been Sweet Quiet Sister who had yelled those words that day.

Genealogy stands or falls on our ability to recognize that a contemporary earwitness account (history, from a document) trumps years or generations of false repetitious memory.



Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin, 2012).


Harold Henderson, "Genealogy: At the Intersection of History and Memory," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 12 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.

Are We Reading Too Fast? And a Chicago Antidote

University of Wisconsin historian William Cronon worries about some aspects of today:

I embrace and celebrate the digital age. I believe historians should use blogs and tweets, Wikipedia entries and YouTube videos, web pages and Facebook postings, and any number of other new media tools to share our knowledge with the wider world. But I also celebrate complicated arguments that need space to develop and patience to understand. And I love long stories that can only unfold across hundreds of pages or screens. What I most fear about this new age is its impatience and its distractedness. If history as we know it is to survive, it is these we most need to resist as we practice and defend long, slow, thoughtful reading.

Perhaps there will be room to maneuver a bit even within those confines. Cronon asserts that "the most effective blogs are typically one to three paragraphs in length," but the most popular post by far in the last month on this blog was a full six paragraphs long.

Meanwhile, anyone with the slightest interest in Chicago or Midwestern history can dig into Cronon's masterpiece, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. In another life, I had the privilege of reviewing it: "Cronon's research is so thorough, his explanations so deep, his sprinkling of evocative details so apt that the reader sees the 'obvious' with new eyes." Cronon's colleague Kenneth Jackson put it more straightforwardly: "No one has ever written a better book about a city."



William Cronon, "How Long Will People Read History Books?," Perspectives on History, vol. 50, no. 7 (October 2012), http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2012/1210/index.cfm : accessed 5 October 2012.

William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).


Harold Henderson, "Past Prophecies," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

The Top Five MWM Posts for August 2012

Once again it's time for the monthly popularity contest, listing the most-viewed blog posts made during August. Once again, #1 was far in the lead. I'll report on September in early November when the dust of that month will have settled.

1. Eight Tips for Those Considering Certification (August 15)

2. Is an Obituary an Original Source? Does It Matter? (August 2)

3. Writing: The Ten Suggestions (August 7)

4. Book Review: How History and Genealogy Fit -- or Not (August 24)

5. Why Ambitious Genealogists Need Credentials (August 14)


Least viewed:

Halfway home: map of the 46 Indiana counties with marriages indexed on FamilySearch (August 25)


Harold Henderson, "Top Five MWM Posts for August 2012," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 30 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

From the blogs: 14-year-old fathers, on-line yearbooks, 1790 in western Massachusetts, and more

I can't read all the blogs or pick the best posts, but here are some recent items I enjoyed.

* The Plausibility Police! Dawne Slater-Putt at the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center was confronted with two different 14-year-old "fathers" in one day of work. Here's how she ascertained the facts in the first case and in the second.

* If you want a publishable research challenge but don't want to get into a lot of writing, check out your own and all your friends' and relations' trees for an under-documented resident of western Massachusetts in 1790 -- and then check out the New England Historic Genealogical Society's project.You will be edited, but that's a good thing!

* On-line yearbooks are getting common, but here's a bouquet from Loyola University (Chicago).

* Get thee to a law library for a legal-history closeup on black people in court in South after the Civil War. "This article draws on more than 600 higher court cases in eight southern states to show that African Americans succeeded in litigating certain kinds of civil cases against white southerners in southern appellate courts between 1865 and 1920." Hat tip to the Legal History Blog.

* Do you worship history? Debunk it? Or use it as a tool to "fluff out" your trees? Here's Diane Haddad's take at Family Tree magazine's blog.



Harold Henderson, "From the blogs: 14-year-old fathers, on-line yearbooks . . .," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 19 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

No Wonder He's a Distinguished Professor

James Oakes, distinguished professor of history at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, was writing about history, and Civil War history, in this passage. But the words work for genealogists too, or at least the kind of genealogist I'd like to be:

. . . there's always something new to learn. The more documents I read the more nuances I'm likely to notice in the next one I read. It's like learning a language I didn't even know existed. It's hard to figure it out, but it's also fun; serious, but joyful. It's why I love what I do. Because every day the past seems just a little bit different to me than it seemed the day before.

His new book is due out in December: Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States.



James Oakes, "On Changing My Mind," Perspectives on History, vol. 50, no. 6 (September 2012), http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/issues/2012/1209/On-Changing-My-Mind.cfm : accessed 7 September 2012.


Harold Henderson, "No Wonder He's a Distinguished Professor," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 9 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]
 

Jenny Lind, Elvis Presley, and the Evolution of Property in the US

UCLA law professor Stuart Banner has written American Property, a lively, smart history of how some things have quit being property (human beings, public office, and commons, for instance) and others have become property over the past 300+ years. New forms of property include fame/privacy (your picture), news, certain pollution rights, the electromagnetic spectrum, and many living things.

I think its main value for genealogists lies in seeing how property changes historically, and not in the way we might think. Non-physical property was well understood long ago; physical items like transplantable organs have only recently become in some cases quasi-property. And the changes are usually driven by technology, wealth, politics, and popularity, not legal theory or idealism. And if you want up-to-date, in the final chapter, Banner debunks the idea that information wants to be free.

So I view this as kind of a back-door history that tells us once again, from another angle, how much the past is another country. "Jenny Lind had toured the country in the 1850s without profiting from the sale of Jenny Lind merchandise, but when Elvis Presley toured the country in the 1950s, he likely earned more from licensing fees than from ticket sales." Lind's agent, P. T. Barnum, was fine with unauthorized Lind merchandise, which was just as well since there was no way for him to stop it. Elvis's agent, on the other hand, took unauthorized Elvis purveyors to court and never lost a case. {155} About the same time (mid-19th century), "goodwill" as a business asset and a form of property also came into its own. {38-39}



Stuart Banner, American Property: A History of How, Why, and What We Own (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)


Harold Henderson, "Jenny Lind, Elvis Presley, and the Evolution of Property in the US," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 30 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Mything the Point of the Past

Louis Menand of Harvard corrects a bit of TV-journalism mythmaking in the New Yorker and reflects:

People in any profession like to create an imaginary past, populated by the Ones Who Came Before. Sometimes, we figure these people to be narrow-minded fools and feel motivated to demonstrate our own superior tolerance and sophistication. More honorably, if not necessarily more accurately, we imagine our predecessors as nobler and braver than our small and anxious selves -- as men and women who stood up for principle . . . 

I have seen this happen in some literature in the fields of urban planning and education. I reckon this commentary could apply to genealogy as well, and often to our use of history in general, not just the history of a profession.

Was some part of our past a Golden Age? Or an Age of Dunces and Midgets? Any history that fits either plot may make a riveting story, but it has probably (at best) omitted a lot of interesting information. Like our own lives, the real past is usually more mixed and confusing than makes us comfortable.



Louis Menand, "Seeing It Now: Walter Cronkite and the legend of CBS News," The New Yorker, 9 & 16 July 2012, 88-94.


Harold Henderson, "Mything the Point of the Past," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 13 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]