Presidential elections website

Very quick update with some linky goodness before I absolutely must, without a doubt, start doing some work:

The Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections was recommended to me yesterday by one of my lecturers, although the recommendation was prefaced with the statement "the guy's obviously a bit of a nutter", a statement which was seconded by another lecturer today. Having had a look, this Dave Leip is clearly a little bit OCD, but in a good way, because his obsession has resulted in such an insanely useful website (if you're into U.S. elections...which I am!). The data goes back all the way to 1789, and the notes that accompany each year are really interesting and helpful. I had been wondering about the election of 1864 (how do you run an election during a Civil War?), and not only did this website answer my questions about that, I've learned quite a few other cool things too.

Well, cool for me anyway. I realise that this blog is quickly turning into a continual (one-sided) discussion about American history, but I'm enjoying writing about it, so I don't really care that much if people are not enjoying reading about it!

I'd like to thank...

I have a rather strange obsession with the acknowledgements pages in non-fiction books. Usually they're just your standard list of helpful librarians, colleagues, and critics, with a heartfelt thank you to family members at the end. Which is, you know, fine. I still find them a rather fascinating insight into how a book gets written, and occasionally you'll come across some real gems. Like this story:

Writing the history of African America from outside, indeed from halfway around the world, has many pleasures, and not the least of them in recent years has been trying to explain to the immigration officials at LAX or SFO, hypervigilantly guarding the United States, exactly what it is that an historian on a research trip does. Shane White has been the recipient of much gratuitous advice at American airports about how to write history. One immigration official, on being told that the Australian academic was flying on to New York, barked back, "There's history out there," pointing in the general direction of downtown Los Angeles or conceivably New York in the far distance. "Go and do it!" Shane White still occasionally wakes up in the middle of the night wondering about that little exchange.

-- The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History Through Songs, Sermons, and Speech, by Shane White and Graham White, p.231.

Also in The Sounds of Slavery is this rather strange little thank-you:

In particular, we would like to thank...Stephen Garton, a fine golfing companion until he became dean.

I also quite liked this brief digression into a discussion of endnotes vs. footnotes:

Generations of Captivity grows out of generations of scholarship which have made the historiography of slavery one of unrivalled richness. I have acknowledged my debt to that long tradition - and the men and women who made it - in the footnotes, which for reasons that confound logic no longer reside at the foot of the page.

-- Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves, by Ira Berlin, p.363.

In older books, you'll often read quite effusive praise of the ladies (never men) in the university typing-pool who turned handwritten chapters into proper manuscripts. Here's an example:

Mrs. Anne Granger, Mrs. Janet Villastrigo, and Mrs. Rebecca Davis, who had the unenviable task of deciphering my script, cheerfully typed several drafts of the manuscript.

-- The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, by John W. Blassingame, p.ix.

Authors often use the acknowledgements section to thank those who read drafts of the book. Not usually very interesting, which is why I found the following intriguing, especially as Kenneth M. Stampp wrote one of the most influential books on slavery, The Peculiar Institution... well, at least until Fogel and Engerman wrote Time on the Cross, probably one of the most controversial books ever written on slavery, if not all of American history.

We wish particularly to acknowledge our debt to Kenneth M. Stampp, who provided us with forty-one single-spaced pages of commentary.

-- Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, by Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, p.267.

After Time on the Cross was published in 1974, Fogel went on to write Without Consent or Contract, published in 1989. In that book's acknowledgement section, there was this lengthy testimonial to a particular colleague:

Marilyn Coopersmith, the administrator for our slavery project from 1966 until the present, not only efficiently coordinated the many aspects of data collection and analysis, sometimes personally searching distant archives for useful data, but provided a drive and enthusiasm for the work that infected everybody associated with the project. Perhaps the best assessment of her contribution was the one made by Albert Fishlow in April 1973, when he and Robert Gallman spent a day providing me with their detailed criticisms of a draft of Time on the Cross. At the conclusion of our session, deeply appreciative of all that I had learned from their many points, I offered to supply them with copies of our computer tapes, adding that Engerman and I wanted to compete, not by hoarding the data, but by trying to be more thorough in the analysis of them. Fishlow cocked back his head for a moment and said: "Who are you trying to kid, Bob? You know that unless you also give us Marilyn Coopersmith it won't be a fair contest."

-- Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery, Robert W. Fogel, p.418.

Marilyn Coopersmith got a mention in Robert Fogel's Nobel Prize biography (he won for Economics in 1993), which I guess is one of the ultimate acknowledgements possible.

So yeah, acknowledgements. Fascinating! All of these are just taken from books I read for my most recent essay, but I've seen some other fantastic ones as well. Anyone got some favourites of their own?

(Yes, this is a nerdy obsession to have. But you know what? I really don't care...)

Things in the life of me

Neck still sore, but it is getting better. I went back to the physio today, which will make that the second time this week, and the ninth time this year. And I'm going again on Monday. My normal physio is on holiday at the moment, and I swear I paid for at least a few nights accommodation of his trip all on my own. Because he's away, it does mean that I'm currently seeing another guy, who I'm not terribly crazy about, and not just because he put me in this traction machine today. Not a particularly comfortable experience, but I survived.

So yeah, not a lot of work has been done this week (read: none), so I'm starting to freak out just a little about how I'm going to get everything done before exams, especially considering that I've only been on the computer for about half an hour this evening, and already I can feel the start of that wearily familiar creeping stiffness. Thank god for my absolutely fabulous politics lecturer, who has pretty much given me an indefinite extension on my essay, which was due on Tuesday. Now I just have to somehow find a way of doing a 2,500 word history essay, an enormous IT assignment, and a group-work project management assignment without once again collapsing in a heap of very undignified pain. *Sigh* I guess it'll get done... somehow....

But! It's not all doom and gloom in my neck (ha!) of the woods. I just found out that Natalie and I have just secured the third and final housemate of the House of Fun (tm) for next year, which is tops. Now we just need to find a house, which I'm sure will be the easiest part of the entire enterprise.

How about some linky goodness?

Here's a McSweeney's List for all the nerds out there: St. James Parish Sewing Club Members Whose First Names Sound Like Programming Languages - "Fortrannah."

Recently I've been enjoying Ferule & Fescue.

Aaron Sorkin and Thomas Schlamme (kinda) live-blogged the premiere of their new show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

Some more links for the nerds: Google has launched Google Code Search, but from my cursory examination, I still think codefetch is one of the greatest things ever invented if you want to search for code examples. (Pretty cool aside: my previous comments about codefetch are still up on the codefetch blog, right below a testimonial from Matt Haughey of metafilter fame.)


Jason Kottke's got a list of books on the Civil Rights movement to go along with the documentary Eyes on the Prize which I mentioned earlier this week. I would heartily second Taylor Branch's trilogy on America in the King Years, an incredile set of books, as well as Diane McWhorter's Carry Me Home. I'd also suggest An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America by Andrew Young, and Allen Matusow's The Unraveling of America, which although isn't just about Civil Rights, has several good chapters on the topic (I've mentioned the book twice before, here and here).

Alrighty. That should do for tonight - Natalie's coming up for tea, and there is not a single clean mug in my entire room.

Eyes on the Prize

PBS in the US is currently showing the 14-hour documentary Eyes on the Prize, a history of the American civil rights movement. I tried desperately to find a copy of this earlier in the year, to no avail, so I'm insanely jealous of those people in the States who can watch it over the next few weeks. The transcripts are available on the website, which I guess is the next best thing, but I'd still love to see the actual thing.

I have more to talk about (including this week's Monday Madness questions), but I re-injured my neck yesterday, so writing this entry has pretty much used up all the time I can currently spend using a keyboard without collapsing in pain. Again. To say that I'm sick of this could possibly be the biggest understatement of the millennium.

Newspaper raptures

Newspapers often contain the best material for writing about history, but finding that material can be extremely difficult, particularly if you want anything from before, say, 1950. Which is why I am currently in raptures of excitement about Google News Archive.

Oh. My. God. Full-text search of newspapers! Newspapers dating back to the early 1800s! You have to pay to read a lot of the early stuff, but that's not such a huge issue, because once you've actually found an article there are always other (free) ways to read it, i.e. the in the newspaper reading room at the National Library. Anyone who has ever tried to use the handwritten index for the early years of the New York Times can appreciate how absolutely fabulous this website will be. The timeline feature is also pretty amazing - have a look, for example, at the evolving discussion about Bretton Woods.

So yeah, Google News Archive? Pretty darn exciting.

[Found via the ever wonderful Lifehacker - what exactly did we all do before that website existed?]

Little Rock student newspaper

Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, was the centre of one of the most important events of the American Civil Rights movement, when nine black students tried to enrol for the 1957 academic year. Initially the students were prevented from enrolling by a racist mob and the Arkansas National Guard, but eventually President Eisenhower ordered the deployment of the 101st Airborne Division to protect them, and the 'The Little Rock Nine' studied for a year at the High School, before it was closed in 1958 so as to avoid integration.

Images from the crisis are pretty famous - one in particular, of student Elizabeth Eckford, is extremely well-known (you can see it here). While looking for a copy of that photo, I came across the website of the 40th anniversary commemoration of the events of 1957, which leads (eventually) to the point of this post. I find the entire Civil Rights movement absolutely fascinating, but for obvious reasons you usually only hear the story of the African-Americans who were engaged in attempts to end segregation, not of those white Americans who lived in the South. Which is why the anniversary site is so interesting, because it includes articles from the Little Rock Central High School student newspaper, 'The Tiger', from the period of the segregation crisis.

If nothing else, the articles show that while there may have been racist mobs outside of the school, there were students who supported the process of integration. The Editor urged students to "prove that America's youth has not "gone to the dogs" that their moral, spiritual, and educational standards are not being lowered." Certainly the student-body as a whole was not overwhelmingly or completely welcoming to the nine new students, but it's interesting to read of the perspectives of white students who were intimately involved in the integration crisis, and important to remember that not all of the south at that time was racist.

My mind on freedom

On Monday I handed in an essay for my American Sixties history course, focusing on the impact of television. As much as I absolutely loathe writing essays, I really enjoyed doing the research for this one, perhaps because I got to focus on two pretty disparate topics: the civil rights protests in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, and the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968.

Anyway, as part of my research for the essay I watched all of the absolutely wonderful documentary Berkeley in the Sixties. Towards the beginning of the documentary there's a bit on how many students started out in the civil rights movement, before moving onto bigger and more radical things. The film has a fantastic soundtrack, but one song in this section got stuck in my head for days - 'I Woke Up This Morning With My Mind on Freedom', sung by the SNCC Freedom Singers. Desperate to hear it again, I did a bit of searching, and came across Sweet Chariot: the story of the spirituals, a project from the University of Denver, and the actual point of this post.

It's a really interesting site, with lots of information. Best of all, however, are the many many music samples you can listen to, including I Woke Up This Morning With My Mind on Freedom (the version of This Little Light of Mine on that page is also wonderful). Highly recommended: have a look around and a listen!

Canadian = communist

I'm currently doing research for an essay on the impact of television in America in the 1960s, focusing in part on the role it played in the Vietnam War. Which is how I came across the fantastic quote below, found in Chester J. Pach, Jr.'s chapter 'And that's the way it was: the Vietnam War on the network nightly news', from The Sixties: from memory to history, edited by David Farber.

Morley Safer was a CBS correspondent who, in 1965, filed a report about a US search-and-destroy mission in Cam Ne. In the report Safer questioned the way the mission, and the war as a whole, was conducted. Unsurprisingly, Safer immediately came under fire from several quarters, including the President, which is where the following bit of gold comes from.

Even more vehement than the official criticism of Safer's reporting was the attack on his integrity. Leading the assault was Lyndon B. Johnson. "Are you trying to fuck me?" Johnson asked caustically in a telephone conversation with CBS president Frank Stanton. "Your boys shat on the American flag." The president was convinced that Safer was a communist, but an investigation proved only that he was a Canadian.

Anti-Canadian, Anti-Communist gold! Take note, people: according to LBJ, Canadian = Communist. Watch out for your children. The fun continues, as officials try to argue that being Canadian means you can't provide a 'balanced' outlook on the war:

"Well, I knew he wasn't an American," Johnson sneered. "Why do you have to use foreigners to cover that war?" inquired Bill Moyers, an aide to Johnson, of another CBS correspondent. Canadian birth was reason enough for Arthur Sylvester, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, to demand Safer's relief. "I think that an American reporter," Sylvester wrote Friendly, "would be more sensitive" to the need for "balance" in reporting U.S. actions in Vietnam.

I'm sure you'll all be glad to know that Safer did keep his job with CBS and wasn't deported for being communist/Canadian, although Pach does provide evidence that Safer did moderate his tone after the incident, and actually started carrying a gun when in Vietnam out of fear that "an accident" might befall him.

In other less-entertaining news, my fucking tooth has started hurting again. I finally went to the specialist yesterday to have a root canal, but he must have agitated it or something because I'm in rather large amounts of pain right now. I'm supposed to go back in September so the root canal can be finished (he only did one out of the three roots on Tuesday), but I'm thinking I might give them a call tomorrow to see if they can't fit me in a little sooner! I'm so over this whole thing, and can certainly think of better ways I could be spending my days. Especially when the procedure on Tuesday cost me $857!! I can definitely think of better ways to spend that kind of money...