The Fact is in the Fiction?

I couldn't help but notice that one particular conversation in my WWI class kept swaying in and out of post-modernist thought, which I tend to be incredibly intrigued by. I was caught in a bit of a "deer-in-the-headlights" look when I was posed with the question of why we study WWI novels.

Now, of course, my cultural historian blinders led me down the path of using literature to examine the culture in which they were produced. It seemed a bit obvious to me at first, perhaps that's because I never fully questioned the value of a war novel, but as I sat there absorbing the conversation with a furrowed brow (as per usual), I began thinking of the implications that this particular class had for the field of public history.

I think a lot of the time, we forget about studying literature and texts - because that's what academic historians do (not that public historians are not academic historian, because we ARE) - but perhaps we examine these texts in a different way. These war novels, for example, are really just material culture, in a way. They're artifacts that can certainly be studied in the same way as a monument or a 19th century dress or an amputation kit from the civil war.

With topic of war fiction, the question becomes more one of how conflict inflences culture than it does of one trying to pull an accurate representation of the war out of the story. I believe this is why the issue of war novels has become a bit of a pain - because they become quite problematic once people start accepting them as factual history.

One of the major criticisms is that novels project one single opinion or perspective of the war onto all those involved. For example, the famous Canadian war novel, "Generals Die in Bed", (from what I understand, because I've not had the pleasure...),portrays a fairly negative opinion of the soldier experience during WWI, which is fine, but it also kind of implies that every single soldier had this similar experience, which is not fine. This is the criticism, anyway.

Part of me (I think it's the public historian part) wants to think that this generalization can be useful in a way. In the public history sphere, we do this sort of thing all the time. We can't possibly represent every single interpretation of every single topic - so we use the approach of the "typical scenario" to piece together parts of the "puzzle of the past." Think of the living history museums, or monuments that are built to encompass veterans of all conflicts. Really, unless this war novel was claiming to portray a specific and historically significant soldier that performed certain actions at a certain battle of WWI, does it really have an obligation to be completely and utterly historically accurate? Does such a thing even exist?

That's really what this discussion comes down to. That's really what most historical debate comes down to. Historical accuracy? Actual reality? Who knows? What do you believe?

I feel this is an appropriate time to quote an Indie songwriter, Conor Oberst:

"I had a lengthy discussion about the power of myth/ with a post-modern author
who didn't exist./ In this fictitious world, all reality twists"

See, this is the great thing about blogging - I can write about whatever I want to. If I want my strange and slightly pretentious music interests to overlap with my academic musings (which they often do, in my head), this is certainly the arena for that!

Anyway, I also believe one of the great criticisms of this war novel was that the author was claiming that it was the "true story" of WWI. I think that statement has heavy implications and it should not have been used in this circumstance - but really, who's to say it's not the true story? It could be the true story for someone - for the unidentifiable soldier, from Anytown, Canada.

Personally (as an historian who has had experience with the battlefield that is the high school history classroom), I don't see a huge problem in calling "Generals Die in Bed" the "Great Canadian War Novel" and forcing indifferent Grade 10s to read it. It may not be an accurate depiction of WWI that considers several interpretations, but let's face it, neither is the information in their textbooks - and in many cases, it'll be the only depiction of WWI that an individual will ever have. These novels paint a picture, spark interest in the past, and say a great deal about how we choose to remember our pasts.

A Short Intro to Public History (How Original...Yet Appropriate!)

To refer back to the "mission" of this blog, I really want these pages to inform whomever may be reading them about what it is my colleagues and I are doing here at Western. What I'll be doing in this post is pointing out some good resources that can be found on the internet if one wanted to look further into the topic of Public History - whether it be for academic purposes, curiosity's sake, or perhaps if you're flirting with the idea of becoming a public historian. In addition, it can never hurt for me to probe deeper into the contexts of my field and how society understands it.

I suppose the first place someone might start an internet search is the most trusted search engine: Google. Now, I'm not entirely sure I've got an answer as to WHY the world chooses to trust Google above all others - I think it has something to do with the fact that people think it's reliable because it returns what we are looking for, and in most cases, returns sources that are reliable. It's a kind of reliability cycle.

Already, I'm noticing that Google.ca and Google.com call up different results. Here in the States, if we were to throw the term "public history" into Google, our first site that it returns is for the National Council of Public History, which is dedicated to promoting professionalism among historians. It has a pretty decent section called "What is Public History?" which attempts to describe the field and thus the purpose of the council. This is the recent definition that the board gave for public history:

“a movement, methodology, and approach that promotes the collaborative study and practice of history; its practitioners embrace a mission to make their special insights accessible and useful to the public.”

The site also lists WHO can be considered public historians or public history practitioners: museum professionals, government and business historians, historical consultants, archivists, teachers, cultural resource managers, curators, film and media producers, policy advisers, oral historians, professors and students with public history interests, and many others.

This page also contains a full length article, surprisingly titled "What is Public History?", from the Council's official newsletter and a few personal definitions from public historians throughout the nation.

Browsing through this site has brought me to a section that contains more online resources to learn about what public history is. So this is where I'll go next - because I know that these are trusted sites.

The first option is called the Public History Resource Center. This sounds like it's exactly what I'm looking for: "this site provides descriptive and analytical annotations of resources in the field, as well as original essays. The site contains: a working definition of public history; a short essay detailing one aspect of public history's history"

A lot of discovery on the internet comes from following links wherever they may lead, so each of these links should be explored. The resources link is actually a search tool that lets you search the web for all kinds of public history resources - and you can search by resource type AND resource category! I may actually bookmark this page and come back to it later. What a gem! The original essays would probably be more useful once you have a deeper understanding of WHAT public history is. The essays are written on an assortment of applications of public history, like digitization projects and tombstone analysis. The working definition of public history provided by the resource center is what we want. It offers a plethora of definitions that are out there, rather than synthesizing them into one super-definition. Of course, there appears the popular quote, "public history is history, practically applied," which is both horribly vague and... wonderfully vague. I really like that this page is opened up to the public (quite capturing the spirit of public history) so that public historians may submit an application for a definition of what public history is, who public historians are, and what kind of training or study the field entails. While this may sound like it's entering the realm of Wikipedia, the site clearly labels where each definition comes from, whether it be from the Council itself, a University program, or an enthusiastic practitioner of public history.

Going back to our list of resources from the NCPH, another site that is listed under "Websites that address the meaning and uses of public history" is Beyond Academe. This website was mainly created to assist those historians thinking about leaving academia, but it also defines Public History as a wider field and gives less of a sense that it's a very small niche profession. There is definitely a hint of a bias to be aware of on this website because the creator has herself left academia to be a practitioner of public history. It does declare a "mission to change history" - which I, personally, find very important because there's always been this aura around history that it's only useful in the classroom. Historians should work in the public sphere - and the mission of this website sends out a call for change in our universities so that historians can be fully prepared to do so.

Finally, I will return to that resource searching tool in order to find a physical text resource - in case you find yourself walking through a bookstore with money burning a hole in your pocket. So the resource type would be "books" and we'll say that that resource category for our purposes is "General public history." The result list produces five or six books that have to do with the field of public history - but I think the first one sounds like it would really help a reader to more deeply understand the topic of inquiry:

“So, do you want to teach?” That is the standard question that is asked
when one expresses an interest in history as a profession. This book is
required reading for anyone who has ever answered, “Not necessarily.”

~Camenson, Blythe. Careers for History Buffs & Others Who Learn from
the Past. Illinois: VGM Career Horizons, 1994.

Again, this text supports the idea that history should not and can not be locked away in the ivory tower.

As this exercise comes to a close, I should point out that I haven't really done much to answer the question "WHAT IS PUBLIC HISTORY?" - HOWEVER, as the title implies, this is a short intro to the subject. If you want to know a definite definition for the term - well, I suppose you'll just have to follow the steps I've outlined in this post, keep searching far beyond that, and even then, if you happen to come up with something absolutely definitive, please let me know!

New Favorite Research Tool?!

I think I've made an emotional connection with something I've learned in my digital history class here at Western. I'm not the most tech-savy student, so most of what I've been learning is a constant struggle and frustration - but this past week, we have been discussing data-mining - and I think I GET IT. Well, maybe I don't quite understand how the whole thing works necessarily, but I understand how to use it and I'm starting to see windows for how it can be extremely useful for this field in the future.

My curiosity struck me whilst completing our last digital history assignment (my search for outdated books). I was skimming through the texts that I found onilne, of which the theme was issues of gender and domesticity, and some of what I was reading struck me as completely ridiculous. Of course, I had to avoid my presentist bias and think about what would have been acceptable during the 19th century rather than what I would consider acceptable as a woman living in 2009. So I thought again - what caused these types of attitudes toward gender roles at this point in history? My first inclination was religion.

The book The Physical Life of Women (1871) by George Henry Napheys struck me as particularly interesting because it was claiming to have absolute scientific authority on the physical beings of women (and also because it was written by a man). The marriage of science and God at this time in history is perhaps a bit odd due to the popularity of Darwin's Origin of Species just a few years prior - so I was curious to see just how big of a role God actually played in Napheys "advice to maidens, wives, and mothers."

Now this is where data mining comes in handy, to say the least. Using a digital tool such as the Canadian TAPoR Project, one can perform such tasks as exploring specific themes in a texts and even visualizing that text analysis results in Excel. In order to do what I needed to do, I first needed to generate a list of words for the theme I was trying to identify within the text (religion). I used a program from Notre Dame University called WordNet 3.0 Vocabulary Helper.

This is the list I came up with: faith, belief, spirit, holy, God, Creator, He, Him, divine, immortal, deity, moral.

The next step is making a Concordance, or a list of principle words used in a text and their immediate context. This is what will help us analyze our text. I used TAPoR Took Broker. I was rather impressed with the results it returned. It created a chart that measure how often my selected words appeared throughout the course of the text. In this case, references to religious were made quite evenly throughout the entire text, indicating that is was an underlying theme in Nephey's arguments.

I came to find that some words were much more effective than others. For example, the program couldn't discern between a capitalized He (as in a religious context) or the He that starts a sentence, or a he in the middle of a sentence - so I had to modify my word list a bit. I really liked that I could choose how many words of the sentence or context surrounding the religious words that the results would show me. I found that even ten words could cause some misinterpretation in terms of the author's religious references, so I eventually decided that twenty words of context would be more appropriate for my purposes.

Some of the phrases that the concordance returned were:

• "according to God's ordinance"
• "scientific value and moral"
• "this marvelous and holy mission"
• "safety amidst the moral pitfalls that environ us"
• "We have an immortal soul, but a body of clay."
• "as a religious step, pleasing to God"
• "Science never disagrees with God."
• "Neglect of physical laws leads to moral evil."

There was a shocking amount of references to biblical stories, namely Adam and Eve and the story of Creation. Other ideas that the concordance pointed out to me showed how religion affected not only science at the time, but society as a whole. Some of them that I found interesting were the belief that a couple's religious affiliation will affect the sex of their offspring, and the only way to ensure moral purity in one's children is to send them to boarding school.

The fantastic thing about this concordance tool is that it lets you save your results right to your computer. I thought perhaps it would be even more useful if it also returned the page number in the text that the results came from - that way, if further investigation was necessary, it would be right at one's fingertips.

This data mining process was interesting and very helpful in matters of research involving a primary source. It's kind of a more efficient way of using the index at the back of a book. I know that personally, I've been searching for sources in a research project and the indexes are just so incomplete and perhaps don't include a term I'm looking for, or broader themes and ideas and attitudes, and that's frustrating because I know I don't have time to read the whole book, but I really feel like it may be useful! This provides an answer. Perhaps I won't have to go on research rants (like the one that just escaped me) in the future. I shall remain positive.

Playtime with Google Sites

Not that I didn't love creating a website using HTML and CSS (a fine skill to have) - but I really DO appreciate the ease of website generators like Google Sites. I think I'm much more likely to actually create and maintain a purposeful website if I don't have to learn a new language in order to do so.

So here's what I've been working on. It's nothing fancy - yet. I do plan on using it for professional purposes in the future (after I remove the quasi-embarrassing photographs of myself, of course). I definitely need to do a LOT of revision work in terms of the information I'm putting out there (I apparently have a problem with using passive voice) (Me?) (Passive?) (Weird), but I think I've got a good set up so far.

...and like I said. This is my playtime with Sites. I think I've been turned on to something good here and I shall most definitely be revisiting it in the future.

Check it out! Your critiques are welcomed and appreciated!

My Quest for Outdated Books

Sometimes, I just love being a cultural historian (if I may even call myself that). Take a look at this copy of Eaton's Catalogue. It's from 1913-14 and it reflects all of the values of society during that time. What I find remarkable about the book section is the overwhelming concern to "keep up appearances." Just from looking at the assortment of texts advertised here, a mini-study could be conducted about gender and domesticity at the time.

To be fair, I should mention that my original assignment was to track down electronic copies of a handful of these books of my choosing. Not surprisingly, I originally chose books that were obscure and odd. These include items such as "Hands: How to Read Them" and "Toasts." After a ruthless search to find each of these gems individually (and after finding out that everyone else in my class found their choices within minutes), I decided that these books had apparently been wiped off the face of the earth (probably with good reason) and that I should change the tune of this assignment.

So... I devised a new approach. I figured it would be useful to go at this in a topical way - since I will probably never again be asked to arbitrarily locate random old books without a specific purpose - but I will probably have to call upon some electronic books for assistance whilst researching a particular theme.

So, I referred to Eaton's again and I created a list of 20 books that pertained to the central themes of gender and domesticity, and then I hit all kinds of free book resources to see what kinds of results each site came up with.

Yes, this shall be my method.

I'll start with Project Gutenburg, which is the oldest digital library and attempts to make books in the public domain as free as possible through the process of volunteer-based digitization. This is what I found:

The Care and Feeding of Children: A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children's Nurses by Emmett Holt. This book is highly entertaining and, if kept in mind that it was written in 1907, has some very useful information for new mothers. Of course, there are some very typical British biases that come through - like the advice that masterbation is the most dangerous habit an infant can possibly develop and it should be physically broken as quickly as possible.


Whitehouse Cook Book by F.L. Gillette and Hugo Zieman. This book has also got some fantastic and useful information. I would argue that it's more than just a cookbook. It's a kind of reference book for people who have no idea how to run a household. I think an adapted version of this text could be circulated and sent off with every college freshman, provided that all references to remedial opium were removed.



The Internet Archive is another not-for-profit digital library that acts just like a material research facility and includes different kinds of media. Here's what I could find:



The Physical Life of Women: Advice to the Maiden, Wife, and Mother by George Henry Napheys was written in 1871 and would strike most modern day women as terrifying. It literally said that more unmarried women die at a young age than married women. During its time, this book was widely praised for its ability to cover even the most lude topics without tarnishing even the purest women's innocent nature. It discusses in great detail how a woman should conduct herself during all stages of the courting process, especially her wedding night, with a very distinct flavor of how society viewed women at this time. It's quite obvious to me that this book was written by a man...



Maternity without Suffering by Emma Drake has more of a feminine touch in its pages, and comes with a disclaimer that makes sure the readers knows that reading the book will not actually make child labor free of pain - which is very honest and polite, I think (also implying that there is no such thing as "maternity without suffering). It also comes with a dedication at the beginning to "those wives who exalt motherhood."

Now, here's something that I didn't think I would find, or perhaps expected it to be something different: The Transmission of Life also by Mr. Napheys, the nice man who doesn't think that unmarried women have value of life. This work is subtitled "Counsels on the Nature and Hygiene of the Masculine Functions" I almost don't want to read on - but this is for educational purposes, so I shall! The authors support of marriage rings clear in this work as well, as he claims that the vices of single men are the worst of society. He also expresses a deep concern for tantric practices, claiming that they would severly damage a man's nervous system. There is also early evidence in this text against any form of birth control and abortion. It would be really interesting to compare these arguments to the arguments still present around these topics in the present.

I'm really getting into this now. It's amazing what's available right at my finger tips - in the comfort of my apartment, sipping my third cup of tea. I wish I had the time to read these books for fun. My, how times have changed. I was thinking that it's funny that there existed a time when these issues of domestic life didn't come naturally to people and they needed physical guides to help them - then I remembered the booming age of the self-help book and how I love to sit in Barnes and Noble to watch people circulate the self-help aisle until they think that no one is looking and then frantically try to commit their pages to memory. I wonder if people were that awkward about purchasing these books from the catalogue or if it was generally more acceptable. Cultural history...the examination of social awkwardness...I love it!

Let's see if I can't find one more... I'm thinking that archive.org may be my one-stop-shop for strange and obsolete books - batting 1000 so far.

Ah yes, here's one by "A Member of the Aristocracy" (Good old what's-his-face), Manners and Rules of Good Society: Or, Solecisms to be Avoided, published in 1913. This is clearly a text that is meant for the upper classes, as it covers how to bow properly and how to conduct oneself outside the country - although it seems to claim that etiquette should be instilled in all people, for it's not a mask to wear on certain occasions, but a necessity that should be carved into our character. Mr. Aristocracy says in the introduction that the manners of today should be the manners of tomorrow - I'm not sure he'd be pleased if he were around to see the charming nature of our popular culture.

Well, I can't remember when I've had more fun, but it's time to come to some conclusions here. First of all, I've become a fan of digitization projects. I think they're important - for accessibility, if for nothing else. When you throw copyright issues into the mix, things get a little more complicated...but just look at the treasure trove I've tapped into here! Secondly, the Internet Archive has proved to be an excellent resource for online books, and you can do a lot more with it that I've yet to discover. Sites like GoogleBooks and the Gutenburg Project are useful as well, but they are more likely to pull up classic results, like Uncle Tom's Cabin. I find it curious that my collegues said it was so easy to find the old fiction books out of the catalogue. I think that's a bit strange, since these non-fiction books clearly have such historical and cultural value. As a third conclusion - I have a new appreciation for the changes in our societal values. While I'm really glad I have the option (thanks to digitization) I think I'll leave What a Young Wife Ought to Know tucked away on its virtual shelf.

Encumbered Numbered Words

The introduction of material cultural studies into my web of knowledge has really got my ideas of history turned upside down. I had never previously questioned the authority of the written word in the study of the past. It seemed to be the most efficient and authentic means of communication. Now that I'm thinking about it, that might not necessarily be the case - and at the very least, we really mustn't let the messages of non-verbal aspects of the past fall on deaf ears.

If we look back to before there was language, human beings communicated with gestures or with the help of objects. This was the oldest means of cultural expression. There has to be something said for the diversity of language and how that surely implies a loss of meaning through translation and interpretation of word. Applying words almost reduces the human experience, in a sense, because it is limited to only one kind of interpretation that resembles a classification system and does not consider meaning we derive from our senses. Words are tools used to describe something - words don't really have inherent meaning, but the things they are defining do.

So, do artifacts really speak louder than words?

There's something about being in the presence of an artifact that takes us out of the present time and transports us somewhere else. As Schlereth has noted in his introduction to material culture, "artifacts are here in our time, but we're also there in their time." We are given more of an affective experience, in which we feel what the humans of the past felt by coming in contact with the materials that were part of their existence.

With that said, there are some things to be wary of while interpreting material culture. Sometimes, when the sensory experience is glorified and exaggerated in the field of history, via living history museums or experimental archaeology, it is possible to create a situation where actual history, heritage, and culture are lost in a cloud of emotion. This phenomenon has been referred to as "edutainment" or "Dineyfication." While having an emotional connection with the past is important, it should be experienced through material objects or places that are actually representative of that past rather than through fabricated tourist traps that takes the past out of context.

Part of me is also hesitant to go along with the argument that studying artifacts gives us a less biased account of the past. While it is true that texts have authors to manipulate their words according to a number of personal factors and objects from the past were not in this way directly affected by their owners - someone had to make it - and while this process of production can tell us a lot about the culture from which it was born, can it not also tell us about the biases of its maker? For example, a small jewelry box from the Victorian era can tell us a lot about the values of bourgeois women at that time, but the small thistle engraved on the bottom of the box can speak volumes about the biases of the Scottish nationalist who created it.

Perhaps that's not a sound example, but surely, the biases that come out in the creation of a written work also come out in creation of any kind, be it artwork, carpentry, or textile manufacturing....and let's be honest, in the world of material culture studies, where the culture and not the object should be the main interest of study, what exactly are we looking for if not the values and biases of humans in the past?

So - as I've been thinking about these issues over the last two days - it turns out that there's a lot more I could be studying than the literature of dead white guys.

Material culture - I think I like it.

Hey Haters, I'm Talking to You...

I personally find it a bit shocking and unfortunate that such a large portion of academia (including so many of my collegues at Western (!)) are still so quick to dismiss social networking tools, such as Twitter, as arrogant and frivilous.

This is not an attempt to argue that point - they are indeed arrogant and frivilous - but that's not all they are. Let's look a bit deeper here, put our social biases aside, and peek our heads out of our ivory tower.

Logic would hopefully tell us that it's not a tool itself that has inherent value, but how humans choose to utilize it...and any tool that is used incorrectly is of course, useless. Using a hammer to measure plywood is stupid-but does that make the hammer stupid? Does that mean that humankind should stop producing hammers all together and be left obstinately banging nails into our walls with soup cans, even though a hammer would have been much more efficient?!

Ok - so I got a bit carried away with the hammer analogy, but my point is: Twitter can be used for more than just letting the world know what you ate for breakfast or making fun of celebreties. There are great things that can come from active participation in the Twitter universe.

Many 2 Many is a group blogging network that discusses issues in social software and in 2007, one member of this community shared her Thoughts on Twitter:

"What Twitter does, in a simple and brilliant way, is to merge a number of
interesting trends in social software usage—personal blogging, lightweight
presence indicators, and IM status messages—into a fascinating blend of
ephemerality and permanence, public and private."

She mostly goes on about how great Twitter is for keeping in touch with those we care about - with which I agree whole-heartedly because the sad reality of the times is that we just don't have time to pick up the phone on some days - but the point that she makes that I find most important for professional purposes is her commentary on Twitter as an archiving tool. Everything that is tweeted enters into the online world of ephemerality. Think of the resources that could be compiled amongst thousands of Twitter users with the same research interests!

Not to mention...

The HASHTAG. What a fantastic markup tool. Hashtags allow us to apply a unique string of characters to a certain idea or subject. Theoretically, if we have thousands of quasi-intelligent people using Twitter intelligently, we'll be able to use it as a sort of search engine that brings up resources according to collectively intelligent group instead of a machine.

For example, if someone wanted to find out what people were saying about the Titanic, or recent research interests about the Titanic, or what kinds of resources to consult to learn more about the Titanic – all that person would have to do is search Twitter for “Titanic,” or better yet, “#Titanic,” and there, at this person’s fingertips, would be all the tweets that people with similar interests or expertise have tweeted with the intention of sharing it with a larger community (by tweeting with a hashtag, #Titanic).

The way Twitter is operating right now, this would produce pretty shotty results referring mostly to the characters Jack and Rose, however, that's not point. I think that this can be one powerful boat if we can get enough people on board - people with productive intentions.

I could go on about the benefits of Twitter, such as the SMS capabilities and real-time communication or the so-called multiplier effect that encourages interaction amongst very wide audiences that we learn from Dan Cohen's experiment with crowdsourcing, but it all kind of boils down to the fact that we need to learn HOW to use the vast webs of knowledge that are at our fingertips, and to not be afraid of or prejudiced against this learning process.