Historical Spaghetti: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Shakespearean critic Philip C. McGuire once deconstructed some of the Bard’s plays in terms of the “open silences” on the stage: characters with no lines or blocking directions specifically noted in the playtext that nevertheless impact the plot depending on how a director (or an actor) interpretatively chooses to portray the character in the scene during these open silences. As McGuire stated, depending on the actor/director, “meanings and effects that differ, sometimes profoundly, yet remain compatible with the words that Shakespeare did pen” [1] suddenly present significantly different performances—and different audience conclusions and impressions, changing some of the details in the narrative without altering the broad framework of the plot itself. source: University of Chicago Ten years later, Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot applied a similar principle to the art of the historical narrative in his book, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of H...

A view of Hudson, New York illustrates the importance of river access to the prosperity of the city. Credit: Public Domain. Despite the global reach of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American whalers, they operated from a small number of ports. As historian Lisa Norling writes, “nearly all of them hailed from southeastern New England.” [1] The dominance of the American whaling industry by a handful of large New England whaling ports is treated as a given by many historians, but exploring the local histories of communities in New York suggests that smaller whaling outposts outside the New England region also contributed to the early commercial development of the United States. These smaller outposts have for the most part been neglected by maritime historians, but as with the case of Hudson, New York, a closer look reveals many of the same characteristics shared with the major whaling centers in places like Massachusetts. The Dutch settled Claverack Landing in present-day Hud...

A good source is hard to find. Sometimes researchers have to think outside the box of archival material and search beyond the academy for the information they need. Ryan Booth did just that when he looked to local media to help fill in some blanks in his source base. Booth, a Ph.D. candidate in history working with Dr. Peter Boag, is completing a dissertation focused on the U.S. Indian Scouts from 1866-1942. When his research took him to Fort Keogh in Miles City, Montana, he reached out not only to archivists but reporters and editors to raise awareness of his work and cast a line to anyone who might be in possession of previously unseen primary sources. The result was an article published January 7, 2019 in the Billings Gazette , but working with the writers of the first draft of history is different than approaching professional academics. Booth's efforts yielded some unexpected lessons and leads well worth repeating for other scholars. Below is an email exchange between Bo...

Perhaps if the color images captured on the Moon by astronaut Alan Bean had been broadcast on television as planned, the general public would have a better memory of the Apollo 12 mission. Source: Wikipedia Commons As the New Year progresses deeper into the calendar, voracious readers across the globe will be treated to seemingly endless nostalgia for the Apollo 11 space mission, which first put human footprints on the Moon in July 1969. United States astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin made history fifty years ago when they accomplished this feat, thanks to the tireless work of hundreds of thousands of Americans throughout the aerospace industry. What many people often forget is there was a second Moon landing in 1969, almost four months to the day after Armstrong and Aldrin touched down on the lunar surface: Apollo 12. On November 19, 1969, Charles “Pete” Conrad and Alan Bean reached the Moon and doubled down on President John F. Kennedy’s promise to achieve h...

From  Working on Wife Abuse , a directory of services  for survivors of domestic violence, compiled by Betsy Warrior, 1978. Courtesy: National Library of Medicine. On July 5, 2018, five people were fatally shot in the state of Idaho. Three of the victims were female, allegedly killed by their male partner or spouse. Two of the deceased were suspected suicides; men who shot themselves after killing the women. In an article published in the Idaho State Journal on July 9, 2018, reporter Madeleine Coles spoke with Bannock County Sheriff Lorin Nielsen, who noted that domestic violence was a common occurrence in southeast Idaho and that his deputies had “arrested more people lately for domestic violence incidents than they have for drunk driving,” reversing a previous trend. [1] Bannock County Prosecutor Steve Herzog pointed out that in many domestic violence cases, victims were unable to sustain themselves financially due to lack of education and/or employment, and th...

Babe Ruth, aka, the great Bambino. (Credit: Wikipedia Commons:CC0 ) The 114th edition of Major League Baseball’s World Series starts on Tuesday, October 23, and the history of this event runs deep and wide through the American consciousness. Even though it may not be as popular as the Super Bowl , the World Series brings with it more tradition and more emotional engagement. Rather than a one-day spectacle, the Series can take more than a week to finish, and that means it dominates our cultural consciousness for much more than a single, 60-minute football game on a Sunday afternoon in January. The New York Yankees have been the Kings of October baseball, although they will not be a part of this year’s contest. All told, the Bronx Bombers have won 27 Major League Baseball championships and lost in the Series a whopping 13 times. Those are more losses in the World Series for New York than the next-best team has won (St. Louis Cardinals, 11). No one defines the Yankees in the ...