Welcome to the 106th Roundup of History Blogging, a double-sized edition. Fortunately, being a blog, we never really run out of space.

First, the two biggest events of the annual calendar happen in January: The American Historical Association Meeting and the Cliopatria Awards. Both, fortunately, have nice, tidy round-up posts I can link to! The Cliopatria awards for 2011 included

• Best Individual Blog: The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice
• Best Group Blog: Wonders and Marvels
• Best New Blog: Demography and the Imperial Public Sphere Before Victoria
• Best Post: Karen Abbott’s “If There’s a Man Among Ye: The Tale of Pirate Queens Anne Bonny and Mary Read,” Past Imperfect, 9 August 2011
• Best Series of Posts: Erik Loomis, “This Day in Labor History,” Lawyers, Guns & Money.
• Best Writer: Corey Robin
• Best Twitter Feed: @KatrinaGulliver. #Twitterstorian Doyenne
• Best Podcast Episode: Marshall Poe’s New Books In History episode from 14 January 2011: “Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People, W.W. Norton & Company, 2010.“

There was a LOT of blogging and tweeting at this year’s AHA, much of it centered on the groundbreaking #THATCamp — the first held in conjunction with a national organizational conference — which brought a lot of heavyweight and beginning digital history folks together. There were even some interesting historical papers delivered, I’m told. Check out the collection: it covers just about everything I read on the conference, and then some. Next Year In New Orleans!

A public service announcement: Sharon Howard has updated the Early Modern Commons blog aggregator, http://commons.earlymodernweb.org/, and the general history aggregator, http://thebroadside.org/. If you’re not getting enough history in your media diet, this is the one-stop shop. OK, two stop shop.

For the remainder of the carnival, I’m mostly going to be posting titles and what I hope are intriguing quotations: nothing fancy, but there’s some really neat stuff here.

Historiography and Method

Jeremy Bangs: Always More Pilgrim Books – What’s Next? – A Bibliographical Survey

This evening I’d like to lead us on a quick browse in the library, curious about when it was that we first thought we knew everything there was to know about the Pilgrims already.

The Award-Winning Wonders and Marvels: Impotence in the Archives: or, a Research Trip Failed

much of my work in archives is tied to physical memory. Looking back at my notes over the years, I can remember the way in which documents looked or smelled at the time. More importantly, I can remember where to find specific points in my notes.

Peter Rowlett: Apparently Gauss got in this bar fight with Hilbert…

Principle A tells me nothing should be produced with errors, but Principle B suggests work with minor errors should be taken in good faith. Both cannot hold.

Also, Einstein was a straight-A math student.

Jane Stevenson, Texts and Textiles: Self-Presentation among the Elite in Renaissance England is Not so much a blog post, as a full-fledged, open access journal article. How do we feel about that? I feel pretty damned good: open access journals, like blogs, make it easier to see what historians do and engage their work. Not sure we’ll make it a regular feature: host’s option?

Textiles and fashion were central to court life, and even, in themselves, a means of communication. They attracted what seems to us a completely disproportionate amount of available resources, infinitely more than the paintings and other more permanent artefacts which are now more familiar to us.

Award Winning Demography and the Imperial Public Sphere Before Victoria: Scottish Solidarity and the Historiography of the Tobacco Trade

Will Thomas at Ether Wave Propaganda has been doing a fascinating series on Tactile History, about recreating experiments and methods to study them directly.

What the Sumerians can teach us about data:

Gathering data is not a neutral act, it will alter the power balance, usually in favor of the people collecting the information.

Pedagogy And Public History

Open Plaques blog: Finding Flann O’Brien: plaques, places, tongues and names

Next in our investigation of the plaques we come to the matter of his three names (four if you include the Irish spelling of his first), possibly confusing for the Open Plaques naming system (we currently list two of them). Brian O’Nolan, the civil servant. Flann O’Brien, the pseudonym of the literary author. And Myles na cGopaleen – his pen-name as the famous satirical ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ columnist for The Irish Times newspaper, a column that brought him more notoriety in his lifetime than his books and made him unpopular with the grandees of the Irish state.

Joseph Adelman: Behind every good historian is someone who read an awful early draft and patiently explained what he/she was actually saying.

Andrew D. Devenney, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Follow-up on Playful Historical Thinking Class Experiment”

In the end, I am glad I conducted the experiment and have already adopted small elements of it into a couple of my courses this semester (namely the modular topic format and a greater focus on non-lecture activities in class to stimulate playful historical thinking). However, in its current form, the class needs more polish to buff out the dents, smudges, and scratches.

Jonathan Rees, Why is there no history department at the University of Phoenix?

History departments die by efficiency because sitting around contemplating the answers to ageless questions doesn’t really do all that much for the gross national product. Therefore, I think we in history and many closely-related fields will disappear in the coming wave of technology-induced efficiency unless we offer a different set of values through which to justify our existence. I happen to be rather fond of joy. Sitting around contemplating the answers to ageless questions may not be efficient, but it is lots of fun.

Brandon Watson, “Correction in the Classroom”

there is a form of critical thinking most students engage in a lot….the assessment of whether a professor is worth learning from at all.

Historical Sources

In Pursuit of History: The Complaint of Christmas: A Serialised Christmas Tale

a story written in 1631 that … recounts the adventures of Christmas, who visits earth on the 25th December as an old man (a precursor to Father Christmas no doubt) along with his companions, the 12 days of Christmas. His adventures take him around Europe and then to England where he discovers what has become of Christmas charity and hospitality.

Mercurius Politicus, Seventeenth Century Crowd Funding

Taylor segmented his subscribers into seven categories:

1 Those that have paid.
2 Those that would pay if they could.
3 Those that walke invisible, and are not to be found.
4 Those that say they will pay, who knowes when.
5 Those that are dead.
6 Those that are fled.
7 Those Rorers that can pay, and wil not.

Ben Breen: American Monsters: Images of Brazilian Nature from Early Modern Europe

Although comparisons to the Garden of Eden were frequent, these images also reveal a profound anxiety about the abundance of nature in the Neotropics.

Historical Episodes

Interview with author Sarah Wise about her book on death and the illicit cadaver trade in early 19th century London

But Londoners loved these attractive, exotic-looking little Italian waifs, and would also defend other types of beggars if anyone appeared to be hassling them. Ordinary city-dwellers seemed to me, in reading the primary source material, to be a lot less withdrawn and in their own little world than we city-dwellers are today, and seemed to show more class, or social, solidarity.

Streets of Washington: The Prolific Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth and her Georgetown Cottage

Supposedly it was on his deathbed that Captain Nevitte persuaded a local priest to rechristen little Emma with two additional names so that here initials would spell out E.D.E.N., a melodramatic gesture particularly well-suited to the novelist-to-be.

Photo Essay: The History of Air Travel

Modern air travel’s safety and accessibility are greatly indebted to aviation’s long history of experiments, failures, accidents and deaths.

Romeo Vitelli: The Benjamin Rush Prescription (Part 1)

not only did Lewis and Clark set out on their expedition armed with microscopes, compasses, three mercury thermometers, and other scientific instruments, they also carried more than six hundred mercury laxatives, each four times the size of an aspirin

Natalie Bennett: Can we choose to descend to a less intensive, simpler level? Have we done it before? is reviewing Joseph A Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988)

Alan Flower, Napoleon’s Secret Navy

In October 1805, within days of the disaster at Trafalgar, the French minister of Marine and Colonies, Vice Admiral Denis Decres, started to lay the groundwork for the reconstruction of the French fleet.

Current Events and Echoes

What would New Years be without some Chinese astrological etymology and cultural appropriation? Also, in Asian connections, I had a short piece on Japanese food policy history in light of the Fukushima disaster.

A remarkable story of renegade historical preservationists:

UX’s most sensational caper (to be revealed so far, at least) was completed in 2006. A cadre spent months infiltrating the Pantheon, the grand structure in Paris that houses the remains of France’s most cherished citizens. Eight restorers built their own secret workshop in a storeroom, which they wired for electricity and Internet access and outfitted with armchairs, tools, a fridge, and a hot plate. During the course of a year, they painstakingly restored the Pantheon’s 19th- century clock, which had not chimed since the 1960s. Those in the neighborhood must have been shocked to hear the clock sound for the first time in decades: the hour, the half hour, the quarter hour.

The Lincoln-Douglas-Gingrich Debates

It’s already slightly creepy to challenge the first African American president to a debate modeled on debates over the legitimacy of slavery. It’s doubly disturbing if you look at the actual content and context of the original debates, which was circus like and full of racist demagoguery.

Ohio Woman Wants Whites Only Pool Sign Reinstated

A woman in Ohio continues to claim that having a ‘Whites Only’ sign hung at the public pool is not racist. … changing her argument to assert that the sign is an antique and therefore apart of her heritage.

That’s Not History: Equality and Fairness in Persia v. American Exceptionalism

So, freedom of religion and culture, civil liberties, property rights, freedom of movement, and the abolition of slavery. Not too shabby on the equality front. But wait! There’s more!

USIH on Charles Murray, inter alia: Post Civil Rights Intellectual Ferment and Race

Racial politics were persistently perplexing, despite the successes of the civil rights movement, largely because, as President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed in a Howard University speech on June 4, 1965, “equality as a right and a theory” was not the same thing as “equality as a fact and as a result.”

Moving Forward

The History Carnival is in good shape for upcoming hosts through June, but always looking for volunteers for later. Next month’s edition will be hosted at The View East by blogger and Twitterstorian Kelly Hignett. I hope this lives up to the “bumper edition” billing!

As an historian, I consider anniversaries irrelevant. However, as a social function, naturally, they matter a great deal, and the internet itself moves so quickly at times that it’s worth looking back regularly to maintain perspective. Twitter itself, for example, is less than five years old, and I’ve been using it for about two years. About a year two years¹ ago, our erstwhile colleague Katrina Gulliver began cataloging historians on twitter under the title Twitterstorians, and now has a list of a few hundred participants, ranging from personal accounts to institutional ones to historical recreation and quotation lists.

Like any social media, a lot of what happens on twitter appears to be fluff and nonsense, even a lot of what comes from the accounts of bona fide historians. I consider twitter to be a kind of semi-professional discussion: not a private, personal space,² nor a professional project,³ but a space for informal discussions on political, cultural, historical and educational matters (with the ocassional foray into fluff and nonsense, for fun). I do have some local colleagues on twitter, and there are a few other Japanese historians⁴ as well as a pretty good collection of non-historian Japan-interested folks.

The population of historians, and Japan people, on twitter has a very strong overlap with the blogging world, naturally. Six years ago I wrote a meditation on academic blogging in which I argued that the blog was capable of enhancing or extending most of the core functions of the academy, especially the social ones — teaching, seminars, colloquia, conferences, faculty lounge, writing groups⁵ — and that remains true. Twitter is less useful for some of these function, because of the 140 character limit, but even that doesn’t preclude serious and extended discussions: it just breaks it up.⁶ You can also use Storify to collect a discussion into a more coherent form. And twitter is, arguably, more conducive to the chatting-around-the-coffee-pot (or -over-beer) aspects of academic life, as well as being an excellent medium for quick updates and the “comment-and-link” which was the origin of “web-log.” Twitter doesn’t replace blogging as a medium or long form writing platform, but it has effectively displaced some of the shorter, lighter material that might otherwise have appeared on the blog. The immediacy of twitter is also a powerful tool in rapdily emerging situations, though the signal-noise problem is always real.

I’ve made connections that I might not have otherwise, and strengthened others. I’ve live-tweeted political events and pre-semester movie screenings, I’ve watched other people live-blog conferences⁷ and joined in conversations about the scholarship. I’ve traded syllabus tips and book recommendations. Nothing earthshatteringly new, mind you. But a lively medium, with a good mix of professional and unprofessional conversations, that helps me stay connected, up-to-date, part of the ongoing discussions.⁸ It combines the open platform of blogs, the deliberate creation of connections between people which makes facebook interesting, and the ability to have quiet discussions without the whole world following. On the whole, I’ve enjoyed twitter quite a bit.

I’ll link here to other Twitterstorian 2nd Anniversary Blog posts as they become available: Check it out!

1. What a shameful mistake for an historian!
2. I use facebook for that, where I limit my contacts to family, close friends and long-time acquaintances. No, I don’t assume it’s secret (which is what most people mean by ‘private’ but that it’s out of easy reach, and personal rather than professional)
3. Like this blog, or my course blogs
4. not a complete list. Morgan Pitelka has an account, though he doesn’t say much. I’m sure there are more, too. There always are.
5. I didn’t include that last time, but I’ve seen some great examples both on and off twitter
6. and since there’s overlap between the twitter and blogging world, it’s not at all uncommon for a discussion to move back and forth from twitter to a blog, and back again.
7. I’ve tweeted from conferences, but mostly didn’t want to take focus away from my note-taking, which was conspicuous enough
8. Like all social media, it can be a little addictive/overwhelming at times. I deliberately follow a relatively small number of feeds – and check a larger number irregularly through the ‘lists’ feature – to keep the flow of information manageable. Selection is key: ‘curation’ is the buzzword now, and it’s not a bad description, as I’m deliberately trying to maintain both personal connections, and add a small number of high-quality feeds (i.e., people who serve as information gatekeepers!) in areas that I want to know more about. It’s a learning process

While the discussions on the Asia lists have been a bit wooden for a while, other H-Net communities are lively and thriving, and the book reviews are a fantastic resource. Moreover, I know some of the current leadership of H-Net, and I have great confidence that they’ll take it in interesting directions with new technology and new paradigms. That said, though the leadership, editors, reviewers and participants are all volunteers, they still need money for technical support, infrastructure and other expenses, and we can’t rely on state institutions of higher learning for this sort of thing. Donate!

The 2010 Cliopatria Awards for History Blogging nominations are open through November, so there’s still two weeks to riffle through your archives and pick your best work, and your friends’ best work, and the best stuff off your RSS reader. The categories are, as in the past, Best Individual Blog, Best New Blog, Best Group Blog (which we won back in ’05), Best Series of Posts, Best Single Post, and Best Writer (which Alan Baumler won in ’06). I’m judging Best New and Group Blog, so we can’t win that again this year; otherwise, the field for Asianists is wide open! Nominate!

The 2011 ASPAC Conference will be a joint event with the WCAAS Conference, to be held at Pomona College, June 17-19, 2011. In a remarkable feat of organization, the Conference website is already live and accepting paper proposals, though the deadline isn’t until mid-March. The theme is “Asia Rising and the Rise of Asian America” but proposals on all topics in Asian studies are welcome. Submit! (and let me know if you’ll be there; we’ve never had a blogger meet-up at ASPAC before!)

Finally, a sad note: Harold Bolitho, one of my advisors and mentors at Harvard, has passed away. I had heard, through another of my advisors, that he’d retired due to health issues – a bit hard to believe for those of us who sometimes confuse volume with vigor. He was a substantial scholar, who didn’t write a lot by some standards, but who always had something interesting to say, and a depth of understanding that I will always envy.¹ One of the graduate papers I was proudest of, in some ways, was one that I wrote for him, on the Nagasaki visits of Rai San’yo and Shiba Kokan; I was a little surprised to discover a year later that he’d published an article on a similar theme.² I was pleased, because clearly I had picked a topic that really did have merit – a matter of immense anxiety for a first-year grad student – but I was also somewhat taken aback at how much more depth and substance Bolitho brought to a subject I felt, in my absurd youth, that I had covered pretty well. I’m very sorry to hear that he’s passed on, because he was a great teacher for a young, nerdy, not-yet-historian.

1. I didn’t realize until now that he’d written a survey text on Meiji Japan, something that I’ve always felt was lacking in the English language literature. It’s a short text, though, and now rather old.
2. H. Bolitho , Travelers’ Tales: Three Eighteenth-Century Travel Journals. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 50 (1990), pp. 485–504

I am in Portland, at ASPAC 2010, and having my usual conference fun. It’s a pretty full schedule, so I’m not going to try to blog during, but I’ll get some blogging in after, and mostly here because I’m mostly doing Japan panels this year. However, I am experimenting with using laptop and iPad as notetaking devices¹ — I’ve always used paper before — and PSU has good wireless service, so I’m also posting notes on twitter as time and attention allow. If you’re on twitter and have a question about anything I’ve tweeted, feel free to contact me that way.

Also, I’ll be hosting the July History Carnival at my World History teaching blog (have to give it something to do over the summer!), so send me history-related posts via comment here, via email (jonathan@froginawell.net), through the History Carnival submission page, or via twitter (through @jondresner or using the #hc89 tag).

1. I haven’t decided which one I like better. I’m more used to the laptop, of course, but the iPad has a huge advantage in portability and battery life. The fact that it’s slightly harder to use, both in terms of typing and multitasking, seems to make the iPad a bit better for concentrating on what’s happening, oddly enough. I’m going to keep switching between them as the conference goes on, to see if I come to any firmer conclusions, and also to get more practice on the iPad, which is a new tool/toy.

I’m very pleased to be hosting my 6th History Carnival, and I thought it would be fun to extend the carnival into a new medium this time: I’ve spent the whole day Tweeting the carnival at my twitter feed. Sharon Howard created a dynamic archive of the carnival, which can also be found by using the hashtag #HC84. I still haven’t entirely fallen in love with Twitter — 140 characters is very, very short — but I’m enjoying the flow of information it facilitates, and the way microblogging’s supplemented my regular history blog reading and writing. It exists in a very productive gray space between professional and informal communication.

Not all spam is content free: Fifty pretty good sites for ancient history by an online degree provider. Speaking of online education and spam, History of Economics blog found a neat visual history of online/distance learning.

Three from Holocaust Controversies:

• Auschwitz Blueprints: “ignorance and exaggerations from journalists are inexcusable, but… utterly unsurprising”
• Evidence of mobile gas extermination units in 1943 Minsk
• Critical reading of a survivor’s diamond-studded pastiche tale

In other war-related posts, Scandalous Women gave us an extensive summary of Mary Lovell’s biography of WW2 spy Elizabeth Thorpe. “America is in it now and forever if Germany chooses to look at it that way,” wrote 1st Sgt. Samuel E. Avery from a trench on 19 February 1918. Speaking of war correspondence, Letters of Note has great stuff, like President George HW Bush to his children before the first Gulf war. They also have Superman critiques directed at the creators. And if that’s not enough military history for you, there’s good news: the Military History Carnival Rises Again! Next month’s will be at Airminded. Speaking of next month, if you want to host a future History Carnival, check out http://historycarnival.org and contact Sharon Howard.

Comparison of the Haiti and Berlin Airlifts by Vintage Aeroplane Writer. Big History: The Origins of the Moon. Also at History Moments, The origins of (and fate of, in one case) the battleship in the American Navy

The Oklahoma History Center Blog shares a Smoking Jacket made of Cigar Ribbons. Classic recycling!

Manan Ahmed got visual this month: circa 1950 Adverts from a Pakistani anglophone pictorial weekly, including a bad history book of some interest. Also South Asian content in European Opera, with video!

In history of science, Brett Holman gave us WW2 Japanese Death Ray Experiments, and Ether Wave Propaganda gave us The Ray that Wasn’t wave OR particle, a fascinating discussion of a scientific blind alley.

Culture&Stuff’s inaugural blog post recounts painful relationship between George II and Frederick of Hanover.

Zunguzungu (aka Aaron Bady) looks for the maybe-African or maybe-Irish origins of TR’s “Speak Softly and Carry a Big Stick”

Tim Burke on the Scarlet Letter, canon, historical pedagogy and culture, as only Tim Burke can. Or should.

The Desi Knitter had a thoughtful discussion of the ambiguities of restoration and orientalism in Melghat.

MidtownG at Progressive Historians on small but telling clashes: Klan gets beat and Revolutionaries get beat.

Speaking of revolutionaries, Howard Zinn died. Many, many posts. My favorite, though, was Acephalous who shoehorned JD Salinger’s death in, too. Also at Scott’s place, sometimes the URL says it all: http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2010/01/class-canceled-on-account-of-black-death.html Life is stranger than fiction, most of the time.

There was some news out of the AHA conference this year, which I followed on twitter. The AHA’s own roundup covers a lot of ground, including Dan Cohen’s provocative Is Google Good For History? The Historical Society had it’s own roundup of AHA news items, especially the job market debates. As always, the AHA is the venue for announcing the 2009 Cliopatria Awards for Best Blog, New Blog, Group Blog, Post, Series, and Writer, a great crop this year.

All was not happy: LGBTQI historians were not mollified by the mini-conference (though the AHA is calling it a victory and doing one again next year). Speaking of gender history, the Tenured Radical looked at historians in the California Prop 8 trial.

That’s it for this edition of the History Carnival. My wife described it as a “Carnival Parade” approach, which I like.