Historical Spaghetti: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Many groups made their way to the American Plains during the wave of immigration that lasted from approximately 1880 to 1924. Many of these immigrants were not the traditional groups from the Northern or Western European regions. There were immigrants of all types, including Italians, Greeks, Irish, Polish, and Russians—as well as many others. Syrians from the Ottoman Empire made the journey to the United States, too. These immigrants have received little attention historically, especially those who settled on the American Plains. Source: Wikipedia Commons The Syrian immigrants who came to Kearney, Nebraska, at the turn of the twentieth century were a very determined group that eventually became successful entrepreneurs and farmers in Nebraska. As they settled down, Syrian immigrants educated their children, learned the English language, bought their own homes and businesses, and established themselves in their new community. Pressure to assimilate to their new community was...

Michel Foucault, Michel-Rolph Trouillot , and James C. Scott are connected in theory by the issues of power, silence, and that which is hidden in discourse between “unequal” participants. Put them all together, and Edward Said’s Orientalism is the postmodernist result—and Clifford Geertz may be the solution to many of the challenges historians face in the twenty-first century when it comes to dissecting the past in an “objective” fashion. source: Wikipedia Foucault informed us all about power and its influence, while Trouillot observed the silences created by the struggles over power. Scott took those silences and examined what was hidden within them, while Said argued the perception of the “other”—based on assumed power and unrecognized ethnocentrism—actually was deeply inherent racism in Western intellectualism. Enter Geertz: By immersing in a culture (past or present) to the point of assimilation, then and only then can historians approach their goal of telling stories ...

Pulitzer Prize winner James Michener commented on a major cultural shift in sports within his 1976 book Sports in America , but the decision of the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) in April 1989 to allow professional athletes to compete in the Olympics was the true flashpoint of the transition of sports in America from the late twentieth century to the present day, in terms of the explosive popularity of athletes as pop-culture icons in the daily lives of society combined with the declining integrity and values displayed by competition itself. As the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics approached, for example, the impact of the 1992 Barcelona Games on modern society could not be denied. Media coverage of those Olympics set a precedent for today’s ubiquitous presence of the professional athlete in daily societal news that the 1996 Atlanta Games took to new heights with the dawning of the Internet age. Today, sports and professional athletes are everywhere, and that is not alwa...

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...