Category: Uncategorized
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Geography in the American Quasi-War with France
After an AHA in which I heard a lot about how digital history needs to be about results as well as methodology, I decided to write up a post about the results I gained from mapping the Quasi-War. Special h/t to Cameron Blevins and Yoni Appelbaum for inspiring me to write about my research. I’m also using Yoni’s…
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Happy Ada Lovelace Day!
Today is Ada Lovelace Day, honoring a woman who is often credited with being the first computer programmer because of her work programming for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine in the 1840s. The day honors Ada and all women who are involved in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. I am not a woman in a STEM…
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Boston Maps Project After One Semester
The major work on the Boston Maps Project for the semester is wrapping up this week. This semester, we ended up with 108 users (about 100 students) who contributed to 19 maps and over 400 annotations on our Omeka site. Review: The Process Throughout the semester, I attended an average of three full class periods…
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Harsh Words for a War (in 1812)
The War of 1812 had been going on for about six months when this list was published by the Federal Republican (reprinted in the Salem Gazette, December 29, 1812, which is where I found it). If this piece is no less vitriolic than some political rhetoric of the twenty-first century, at least it is much more…
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Concord Hymn Glosa
This Patriots’ Day week, we mourn for the victims of the explosions in Boston. I’m not a native Bostonian, but I’m a Bostonian now: my emotions have fluctuated between deep sorrow and deep anger that someone would do this to my city, to my fellow Bostonians. I’m so thankful for our police officers, firefighters, National…
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Historical Literacy and Public History, Part 2
My first experience doing public history was in third grade, when I dressed up as Miles Standish to do a book report of a biography I’d read about him (yes, I was the only girl in my class to read about and dress up as a male). Looking back, I know that what I was…
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Historical Literacy and Public History, Part 1
Historians and political pundits often lament the woeful historical ignorance of the public. They claim that the lack of historical knowledge causes people to make bad political choices or appreciate their country less than they should. But I wonder whether the ignorance of the American public about history (which I’m not disputing) has the profound political…
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Academic Hardcores and Academic Farbs
In the book Confederates in the Attic, Tony Horwitz encounters Civil War re-enactors of varying levels of seriousness about their craft. They divide into two main categories: hardcores and farbs. The hardcores get into their roles as accurately as possible, even starving themselves so they look like haggard Confederate soldiers. They eat, drink, and breathe the…
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Masks
Today is the second anniversary of my mom’s death from cancer. She fought it over the course of more than a decade using almost every weapon in the oncology arsenal.
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Omeka Development Plan
In their book Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web, Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig advocate that digital historians should have a well-defined plan for their websites before they start. So I thought I’d share my ideas about Preble’s Boys here, and perhaps get some feedback from others about the plan. …