Author: Dr. Shrout (Page 7 of 18)

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By admin

At first glance, it appears to be a very positive thing that William Chambers (and soon his brother Robert) wanted to provide information to educate the illiterate lower classes. This perspective is supported by information about Chambers: that he was impressed by the democratic education of the United States citizenry, and that he apparently wanted to raise up the British public to the same level of literacy and learning. Additionally, his view that “Newspapers, in a word are not a casual luxury, but a necessary of life,”[1] paints him as a champion of education who values it as a true American.

However, I was troubled by the fact that starting in 1832 and lasting, as I gathered, for a couple of decades, Chambers had an unprecedented level of control in the education of the British people. Fyfe writes that the publications produced by Chambers’s firm W. & R. Chambers “sought to provide solid information, written in a suitable style” for the British lower classes. This was meant to act in place of the poor public education the Brits did—or in many cases didn’t—receive. However, intention is very different from action; simply because Chambers sought to provide accurate information does not mean that he succeeded. Fyfe does not mention the source of information the firm included in their material. I would want to know if they engaged in fact-checking, or consulted with experts in the fields before producing textbooks.

Cordelia notes in her blog post that textbooks and other educational publications were the most popular among the literature Chambers spread to the public. She notes the burgeoning sales that transmitted information to people at lightning speed mirrors the way railroads connected people. However, the rapidity of its spread makes it even more alarming, as only one person or a few people had a monopoly on much of this information disseminated to the public. Though Chambers advocated the “democratic” education of the American people, his system of education is far from democratic.

[1] Aileen Fyfe. “Business and Reading Across the Atlantic: W. & R. Chambers and the United States Market, 1840-1860” in Books Between Europe and the Americas.

      

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By Cordelia

The Aileen Fyfe article, “Business and Reading Across the Atlantic: W. & R. Chambers and the United States Market, 1840-60″ discusses how Chambers, the publishing giants of the UK spread their services into the United States. Specifically, she notes how steam printing was used exclusively for periodicals and high-circulation newspapers but Chambers changed that precedent by applying the technique to books. This allowed for books to be made quickly and cheaply and to therefore be sold as such – even more so considering that the new technology of the steam engine allowed transportation across the Atlantic to be expedited. This led, however, to what really caught my attention in this article which was Fyfe’s statement that Chambers effectively had a business plan to spread as many of their publications as widely as possible throughout the United States. Though this was not the original intent of the passage, this reminded me of the railroads and how, around the same time as the advent of steam-based publishing, a new steam-based transport was being spread across the United States at a high rate of speed and, really, as widely as possible. In this sense, the publishing industry and the railroad industry were quite similar and Fyfe connects the two even more when discussing textbooks. In fact, textbooks and other educational publications appear to have been the most in-demand pieces of literature sold by Chambers and reminded me a lot of the ways in which the railroads connected people, thereby spreading education. I found a further connection in the way that the American companies to which Chambers sold were able to sell copies of books to customers in the amount and time that they wished if it were serial – a democratic capitalistic ideal seen further in the rail industry in regards to times and the selection of such.

As Sherwood states in his earlier post regarding The Last of the Mohicans, the new technology of steam caused a new need for precise measurements of time – something further seen in the publishing industry in regards to selling to companies as well as potentially timing reprinting issues.

      

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By Kurt Vidmer

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While at home for easter break, my friend and I decided that we wanted to have a fire, so obviously, we needed wood. In order to gather this wood, I grabbed an old saw that my dad has always had laying around our garage. It is an old wood cutting saw with huge teeth in a unique pattern, and a old worn out wooden handle. I have used this saw many times, but this time a noticed an interesting faint symbol on the handle. When I asked my dad what the symbol was, he said that he wasn’t sure, and that I should call my grandpa and ask him, because it was his saw before. When I called my grandpa, he told me that the symbol on the saw as a symbol for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and that he got this saw after working for the railroad during the summer of 1941.

While speaking on the phone with him, he told me about this memorable summer he had when he was 12 years old. His main responsibility while working for the Railroad was the bring a large ladle of water around to work too hydrate the workers. Although this sounds mundane, he said that it allowed him to observe all the different facets of the railroad production. From the engineers to the labor workers, the entire process fascinated him. He also told me that the saw that he acquired was used to cut and trim railroad ties for the tracks to be places on. He said that he was able to help with this one time, and they told him that he could keep the saw as a memorable piece.

As Sherwood speaks about in his most recent post, advancements such as railroads and steamboats were a major advancement in transportation technology, and having my Grandpa play a small role in the production of these advancements is very fun and intriguing.

      

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By admin

I watched the pilot episode of the TV show Sleepy Hollow, which is a reinterpretation of Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The episode sets up the concept of the show, in which a Revolutionary War-era Ichabod Crane is thrown into the modern day town of Sleepy Hollow, NY with the purpose of killing the reanimated Headless Horseman (one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse described in the book of Revelations).

As I was watching the episode, I noted the show’s use of icons and objects. As Ichabod explores the 21st century, he is fascinated with modern inventions, particularly instruments of communication such as a video camera and a polygraph machine (which communicates information about a subject’s internal experience to an outside observer). However, the story revolves around an object that transcends the years between the Revolution and 2013: George Washington’s Bible. The Bible physically travels time in that when it is opened and read in 2013, it is in the same condition as when buried in 1781. The elaborate binding of the book, and the images we see of George Washington in his General’s regalia, serve as what Sorlin calls “historical capital.” These are characters and icons that allow the audience “to know that it is watching an historical film and to place it, at least approximately.”[1]

In regards to the Sorlin article, I noticed a central subject of the filmmaker’s connection to–or separation from–his work. Avery mentions in her blog post that Sorlin “spends the rest of the article illustrating the ways that films reveal the morality of the filmmakers.” If we assume that this to be true, it follows that the content of Sorlin’s discussion is incongruous with one of his arguments–that the director’s purposes in creating a film should be analyzed separately from the film itself.

I would argue that Sorlin does not intend to discuss how morality of filmmakers reflected in their work. For example, he approaches the topic of bias in newsreels (which one may rightly demand be, by nature, unbiased) without assigning any moral judgements to the filmmakers. He chooses to view the “slants” or agendas that influenced the creation of newsreels as valuable information, because it can inform historians of the makers’ opinion of an event, or the opinions they wanted the public to have. To use a specific example, Sorlin writes, “Knowing that newsreels are composed entirely of shots chosen to produce a desired effect . . . we should not conclude that the British were more satisfied with the results of the Munich Conference than the French were” (33). Without discussing the historical event in question, we can see here Sorlin acknowledging the bias of a newsreel, but using it to support a conclusion about the dominant public opinion of an event.

[1] Sorlin, Pierre. “How to Look at an ‘Historical’ Film.” In The Film in History: Restaging the Past. Basil Blackwell, 2001. p. 37.

      

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By Cordelia

Sleepy Hollow the TV show, in regards to its historical accuracy and historical relevance was, frankly, pretty awful. As Sorlin notes in his essay, “The historical film: history and memory in media,” “the most original source [for historians] is the fictional film.” If this be so, and the fictional work of Sleepy Hollow is more authentic than say, a documentary about George Washington, then I give up. Sleepy Hollow finds Ichabod Crane, a soldier on the Rebel side of the American Revolution, dying in 1781 and waking up more than 230 years later in the modern day. What bothered me the most about this premise was the idea that of all the millions of things that have changed in the United States (including, you know, the fact that it’s the United States) Ichabod seems the most fascinated by a car window, a Polygraph test, and Starbucks. Perhaps these three items are symbolic of the materialistic entitlement for which the director or producer believes our generation will be remembered but somehow, I doubt it.

What was interesting, however, was the idea of communication and transfer of information depicted in the show. Ichabod’s wife was burned at the stake for being a witch, and it is later revealed that she was indeed one. However, even though she has the ability to communicate with her husband through his dreams, the answers to Ichabod’s problems with the Headless Horseman lie in the Bible of George Washington: a piece of writing that was influential during the Revolution and continues to be extremely influential today. For me, this is symbolic of an American tradition of communication through religious texts and worship.

Sherwood touches on the idea that writers may have to take liberties in adapting history to screens by using language that modern viewers will comprehend and perhaps this transcends in Sleepy Hollow over into more than just verbal communication. Viewers may not find entertainment in Ichabod marveling at a telephone pole or a water fountain, but stick in a joke about slavery or a Seattle coffee company, and you’ve got prime tv. In this sense, maybe Sleepy Hollow tells us less about the culture of the Revolution and more about the culture of today and what mainstream society wishes to remember about the Revolution. In this case, I agree with Sorlin that sometimes, fictional, rather than strictly informational media may be superior.

      

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By Alec

Before I was old enough to watch The Patriot, I got my American pseudohistory fix from Liberty’s Kids. It’s a PBS animated series that offers a 40-part narrative of the American Revolution aimed at a younger audience. I think I’m better for it, because if anything can get kids excited about history, it’s a rap-infused theme song by Aaron Carter, not Mel Gibson tossing hatchets.

The show’s four main characters are all fictional, and all in their tweens – except of course for Moses, the requisite freed slave. Oh, and they all work for Ben Franklin at the Pennsylvania Gazette. Duh.

Apart from these four, all of the characters are real historical figures, and the cast of voice actors on board is actually nothing short of amazing. You’ve got Walter Cronkite as Ben Franklin, Ben Stiller as Thomas Jefferson (yeah…), Sylvester Stallone as Paul Revere (yeah!!!), Arnold Schwarzenegger as Baron von Steuben, Dustin Hoffman as Benedict Arnold, Liam Neeson as John Paul Jones, and Whoopi Goldberg as Deborah Sampson. Whew.

In the first episode, titled (spoilers) “The Boston Tea Party”, we’re first introduced to Sarah Phillips, a bright British girl en route to America to search for her father. The show spares no time in establishing the importance of communication and communication technology during the Revolution, as the opening scene depicts Sarah scribbling a letter to her father below the ship’s deck.

In fact, the show (or at least this episode) does an impressive job showcasing various modes of communication in use at the time, as well as the groups that used them. The second scene of the pilot takes place at Ben Franklin’s printing press, where we meet Moses and James (another of the fictional four) as they print the latest issue of the Gazette. After some expository banter, the two are interrupted by the final main character, a little French dude named Henri, who brings a letter from Ben Franklin that sends the three of them to to Boston to meet up with Sarah. The next scene has Sam Adams rallying a group of colonists in a tavern with the aid of a drawing of the Boston Massacre, and copies of the Sugar and Stamp Acts. Another shows James interviewing Sarah for the newspaper, and later on we meet Phillis Wheatley (a historical figure: the first published African-American woman) who talks of the challenges of circulating her poetry as an enslaved black woman. And so on. Nearly every scene has at least one character either interacting with or talking about communication.

For all its value, Liberty’s Kids‘ effort to make communication technology such a pervasive part of the show does lead it into some historical inaccuracies that could be misleading to the show’s target audience. In reality, Ben Franklin probably didn’t write letters to twelve year olds, and said twelve year olds probably didn’t run the Pennsylvania Gazette or get to attend the Boston Tea Party. I know, it’s a cartoon, not a documentary – but as Agresto writes in his reflection on public understandings of the Boston Massacre, the “’distortion’ and the enchantment of art may often penetrate to the essence of an event more keenly than either ‘factual’ accounts or rational discourse.” (174). This idea ties in nicely to Avery’s blog post from last week, where she writes, “technology is animated by us.” I would expand on her point by offering that narratives of technology (and more generally, narratives of history) are animated by the people we place at their centers – where The Patriot has Mel at its focal point, this show has a bunch of meddling kids.

Works Cited

Agresto, John. ‘Art And Historical Truth: The Boston Massacre’. J Communication 29.4 (1979): 170-174. Web.

      

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By Avery

In general, I enjoyed the movie I watched for class, The Journey of August King. The movie’s protagonist is not a perfect self-sacrificing hero; August King, though noble, is very much a product of the biases and prejudices of his time. The movie is set in the mountains of North Carolina in 1815. The story mostly takes place on the trail back from the market to the farmland; farmers are constantly weaving in and out of one another’s path on their journey home.

In terms of communication, the characters’ on-screen communication is almost solely oral. However, property deeds factor in as one of the movie’s most important plot devices. I think property deeds, or property lines, can be considered a form of communication because farmers use them to indicate to each other the boundaries of acceptability and interaction. For example, once across the line onto his property, after a harrowing journey rescuing a woman who has escaped her slaver, August King mocks the dogs that have terrorized them. The implication is that King’s property line protects him from his neighbors. The protection only goes so far, however, in the face of the powerful villain, Olaf Singletary. In retaliation for King’s harboring of Singletary’s slave Singletary burns King’s house down, destroying “property” for property. Singletary uses the destruction of property and the crossing of the property line communicate his contempt for King.

In his article, Sorlin makes a distinction between “informational films” and “fictional films” (29), basically documentaries versus feature films. Sorlin described the differences between the categories in several different ways. He seemed to be agreeing with the categories, but taking issue with the idea that informational films are more helpful to historians than fictional films. He argues that fictional films may be a more authentic source depending on which time period the historian is studying. Sorlin abandons discussion of the categories, which left me, as a reader, wondering why he brought them up in the first place. I would have liked to see Sorlin explicitly reject categorizing some films as more “informational” than others, as he spends the rest of the article illustrating the ways that films reveal the morality of the filmmakers (remember, he says, that “most [of] the films we see have been edited” (28).) If every historical film represents the current culture’s understanding of the past (38), then why separate documentaries and feature films at all? From an analytical perspective, all films are informational.

Certainly, the film I watched for class reflected a particular understanding of integrity that maps very well with sentiments in 1990s America. Like Sherwood found in the Last of the Mohicans, sometimes the scene on screen is more recognizable to a modern audience than an historical one. I’m not saying there can’t be morals that stand the test of time, but August King’s sudden confession even as he was about to make a clean getaway indicated an ideal that telling the truth is more important than economic stability or communal ties. In economically stable 1995, yeah, it makes sense to stand up for what you believe in—there’ll be another job around the corner. In 1815, on barely settled Appalachian land, I’m not sure the do-gooders would have been so loud.

Sorlin, Pierre. “How to Look at an ‘Historical’ Film.” In The Film in History: Restaging the Past. Basil Blackwell, 2001.

      

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By Kurt Vidmer

I chose to watch the movie Lincoln, which stars Daniel Day Lewis as Abraham Lincoln. The plot of this movie is largely based on Lincoln’s efforts to both pass the 13th amendment and end the Civil War. Throughout Lincoln, there are many examples of technological advancements, and information exchange between people that largely relate to our class.

Although there is no actual time cinema movies available from the Civil War, as said in the Sorlin article, “Newsreels were born with the cinema: sometime in 1896 or 1897″ (Sorlin, 30). However, with information known to us about the time period, the director and producers were able to make a very realistic representation of the time period.

During the movie, it showed the use of telegraphs as a means for communication. Particularly, these telegraphs depicted how military leaders were able to communicate to their army’s from long distances. An example of this is when Lincoln, along with many others were keeping in close contact with people engaged in the battle of Wilmington, in Wilmington, NC from Washington, DC. As Avery speaks about in her post when she says, “Together, their stories create a picture of telegraphy that acknowledges the significance of both the wires that transmit information and the people whose culture decides what information is transmitted”, telegraphy was a revolutionary breakthrough in communication technology, enabling people to communicate on a much larger scale.

Also, Lincoln recognizes the the roles that trains and railroads played in communication exchange. Railroads were mentioned many times in reference to transportation, specifically when Lincoln asks a man working for him to take a train to Harrisburg to speak with the Governor of Pennsylvania. This leads in to the point that even though there were many technological advancements in technology that enabled communication on a much larger scale, personal interactions were still by far the preferred means of communication. Lincoln makes an effort to have his allies, as well as himself work to speak to people face-to-face in an effort to best persuade them into voting for the 13th Amendment.

The movie Lincoln serves as a great example of a movie accurately depicting historic events in American History, and how information exchange played a role in them.

Work Cited

Lincoln. Performed by Daniel Day Lewis. USA: Dreamworks, 2012. DVD.

Scorlin, Pierre. “How to Look at an “Historical” Film.” The Historical Film: History and Memory in the Media, 2001.

      

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By Sherwood

In the 1992 classic, Last of the Mohicans, A ranking officer of the British army commands his Mohawk guide: “Dawn. At the encampment. 6 A.M. sharp.”

Overshadowed by the steam engine, telegraph and other dramatic technological innovations, the most important invention of the late 18th and early 19th century receives less attention from historians than it deserves. During these two centuries, throughout the western world, people began to perceive time in terms other than the motion of the sun. Clocks, schedules and timetables made precision and punctuality indispensable characteristics of both economic and social spheres.

The order delivered in Last of the Mohicans represents one of the movie’s few (relatively speaking) historical inaccuracies. It’s a subtle mistake, but one that offers the opportunity to describe a really interesting and significant phenomenon.

For one, the statement is contradictory in that it provides two separate times at which the guide should arrive, one vague (“dawn”) and the other specific (“6 A.M. sharp”). Individuals during this period likely operated according to either the former or the latter, depending on their occupation, since ship captains needed precise departure times while farmers operated in accordance with the seasons. It’s unrealistic to imagine a scenario in which someone would have needed both systems.

For another, the events of The Last of the Mohicans mostly predated this shift in perception. Although sundials, pendulums, hour glasses and even mechanical clocks had existed for almost a millenium by the mid-18th century, the forces that made them not only necessary but indispensable had yet to come. Most significantly, innovations in transportation technology, like railroads and steamboats, demanded more precise measurements of time.

Sorlin describes the primary purpose of history, called “positive history”, as “an attempt to clarify – to sort out what is probable from what is false, to establish the chronology of events, to show the relationships between them, and to detect periods of strong social or political tension and define their characteristics” (34). He distinguishes this from the more qualitative purpose of history, which is to convey the ways in which past events are remembered. In the former capacity, The Last of the Mohicans fails, at least in this particular case, by misrepresenting chronology and ignoring the relationship between the temporal revolution and the forces that brought it about.

It’s worth mentioning that the writers may have just been trying to use language that modern-day viewers would be accustomed to. 6 A.M. makes sense to me. In truth, I’m not really upset about such a small mistake. Rather, I’m excited by and interested in the phenomenon it allowed me to describe. Finally, in reference to Alec’s blog post about how technology reflects the user, how did mechanical clocks represent individuals in the 19th century differently than sundials represented their predecessors? The tools we use to measure time demonstrate the extent to which it consumes us. As Faulkner once wrote about a watch: “I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it.