Author: mckenndy21

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In Sam Wineburg’s article “Why Historical Thinking is not about History” Wineburg tackled the idea that historical thinking is not about history. He claims that different generations got their information in different ways and have gone about trusting them in different ways. With the older generations he said that when they had to get research done they went the library and grabbed a book knowing that the information that was in it was reliable because it went through so many rounds of criticism from publishers before it was able to be available to the public. Young people these days find all their sources online; with this he questions how the youth determines if a source is reliable or not. In the study that Eszter Hargittai performed that the conclusion was many students believe that the first few links that come up when searching a question on Google were the most reliable sources to use. With these sorts of ideas, it is scary to think that these “young people” are coming up with ideas about historical events without questioning the sources they read. That is why Wineburg wrote Reading Like a Historian, so students and teachers can learn how to question the things they are reading on the web to make sure it can be trusted and reliable. REBEKAHBENNINGER1 describes how American Disasters was created and the different categories that articles fall under. After reading Wienburg’s article it is scary to think that research based books like this will come from sources that young people consider reliable because the internet said it was.

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In Cameron Blevins blog post, Digital History’s Perpetual Future Tense, he talks about a division that is happening between quantitative history and public history. He first explains the pros and cons of quantitative history saying that it “serves primarily as a cautionary tale” and has forced digital historians to stay away from making advanced scholarly claims. He moves on to discuss the public history and their main goal of overriding ideology to democratized access to the past. He goes on to say that public history had become one of the most influential sources of history reaching out to a much broader and diverse audience than any other sort of humanity topic or reading. What I found interesting was the writer’s inclusion of Franco Moretti’s ideology of “distant reading” and how in digital historian readings it is the complete opposite. I agree with JESSICABODE when she said, “an interesting point that Cameron Blevins makes is that digital history began with archival collections, and digitization of certain sources,” because it was really brought to light how digital history has went from being so limited to being this vast world of different articles because of the World Web. At the end of Blevins’s blog, he reassures his argument that “it is time to spend less time talking about digital history’s potential to generate new arguments about the past and more time actually making them. 

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Through the first half of the semester, we were given four chances to express our understand of articles we would later discuss in class. This gives us a chance to better our writing, make us really think about what we are learning, and propose an interesting point of views that we might have during that reading. From our first blog post to our most current ones you can see differences in our writing in a positive light. At the beginning of the blogs we summarized the readings we had like JESSICABODE did in her first post, but as we got more invested in our readings we began to add our own personal views that agreed or disagreed with the author just like JOHNKANE did in his post. As we got more organized about or posts and remembered to actually do them on our assigned day, we started making an outline of how we were going to write about an article or book. We unknowingly followed the pattern of summarizing the piece of writing, adding in a colleague’s post that we agreed with and related to our own point of view and then like PETERROSSI1 did, would start to answer the questions the author brought up.

Looking through my own blog posts through this first half of the semester, I noticed that I started following this unwritten outline like many of my classmates.  From my first article review on Disaster Tourism and the Melodrama of Authenticity: Revising the 1889 Johnstown Flood to my last article on A tempest around “Isaac’s Storm” I have seen my writing grow and my insight of these author’s historical questioning grow stronger. I made the goal of bringing in my own thoughts and then using those to decide if the author’s arguments are valid just like many of my colleagues.  Through this, my writings have gotten stronger and my analysis of articles have become more about finding an author’s historical arguments, answering their questions in the article, and finding if they are credible or not instead of just trying to understand what I am reading

 

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In Craig Offman’s article, “A tempest around “Isaac’s Storm”” Offman argues against Erik Larson’s book “Isaac’s Storm and how he portrays Isaac Cline in it. Offman claims that Larson makes Isaac seem like “an incompetent rather than a soothsayer,” making it seem like it was because of Isaac millions of people had died as paraphrased by, ZHEDRICK. Offman uses evidence such as, the New York Evening Sun, meteorologist Lew Fincher, and the book “The Story of the Galveston Flood” to prove that Isaac should be deemed a hero for his efforts during a time when meteorology was just becoming a practice and there was very technology available for him to successfully predict the magnitude of the storm. Offman also points out how Larson portrays Isaac and his brother Joseph’s relationship with one another. Larson makes a point to say that the brothers did not speak much to each other, but Offman counters this by using the brothers’ journals and “The Story of the Galveston Flood” to discover that the boys wrote many warm letters to one another after the storm. Offman’s conclusion from all of this evidence is that Larson over dramatised the brother’s realtionship, so it could be relatable to his readers. In all fairness, we see that in many movies made about real life stories today, so why should anyone be shocked that it was happening in writings back then? Readers and movie goers want to be entertained, if they wanted just plain facts they would have read through scholarly articles instead.

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Natural disasters are an occurrence that is part of living on this planet, they are powerful and uncontrollable, but that doesn’t mean people can not take precautions to make these natural disasters least devasting. For example, Johnstown tried to keep the flow of water controlled in their lake by creating a dam to block the water, but as CLUNA3 says in their article Johnstown Flood of 1889, “This flood occurred  because the dam had been poorly patched with straw and horse manure.” If the town would have built a well-developed dam and made sure it was patched up correctly thousands of lives would have been saved. In the next two chapters, Larson starts off by blaming more people than just the Cubans. He first blamed the Weather Bureau saying it was their fault for not predicting this storm was actually a hurricane and that they were trying to keep their status by covering up their mistake of not being able to predict like the Cubans. They then blame the newspaper and editors of Galvenstien and uses the newspaper of Saturday (the day the storm hit) as proof seeing that the weather reports were all scattered throughout the newspaper with the most important report of the storm located in the middle of the paper where many readers would not look to find it.

The rest of te section is about different people’s stories at the beginning parts of the storm as it reached Galvenstien. Through reading these sections Larson is pointing out that people had many warning signs to know to evacuate their homes and the city altogether, but people choose to wait until the last minute resulting in many people’s deaths. For example, the business men in downtown ignored the strong winds and continued to their favorite lunch spot, Ritter’s Cafe, the windows would shake every few moments, but no one questioned it until the roof flew off the restaurant and killing five people in the process. We were asked why this book was written during class and after reading this sections I believe Larson wrote this to bring people’s unpreparedness when it comes to natural disasters and their common sense when it comes to trying to survive them.

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Through Emily Godbey’s essay, she addresses how the Johnstown Flood went from being a natural disaster killing over 2,200 people to becoming a leisure event where rubbernecks could come to sight see and tour. Godbey first retells the story of how the flood happened and how it could have been prevented if people would have built the dam correctly the first time and then checked on it during the storm to make sure it hold it up it could have prevented a natural disaster. She actually goes as far as saying, ” the Johnstown Flood was clearly manmade” and after going over the story twice myself I believe she has the right to state that. She then goes into to discussing how sight seekers flocked to Johnstown several days after the disaster and how newspapers and railroads tried to keep them from coming to the town because they would get in the way of the workers trying to restore the city to working conditions; the city later became a mixture of a military base and a mining town. During this time there were rises of tourist economics in the city. Some locals opened up stores for people to buy from the wreckage while some tourists just took random objects they found while walking around Johnstown, photographs became a very popular trend as well and people would pay money to get these rare photos while some spots like John Schultz’s house became hot spots for people to take pictures in front of. Melodramas were created with the disaster being the setting for journalist’s characters. Just like in chriscobar post about the Chicago fire, Godbey points out that the flood did not pick its victims based on their social class, but destroyed everything and killed everyone in its pass. As she pointed out people came to look at all the deaths in the morgue as if it was a museum for them to go to on their day off, I couldn’t help but think about how many people actually got claimed by their loved ones and further thought about how many people on average get claimed after any disaster and the closure their loved ones get.