Historical Spaghetti: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Many people do not notice the differences between “traditional” history and public history. This month we present a Q&A session with MJ Vega on how public projects get done and some of the challenges involved with bringing the past alive for a modern audience. Prior to starting graduate school at Washington State University, MJ created and now maintains a website dedicated to the public history of his high school football team. This is the brief story of how that project happened. Q: What got you interested in doing this kind of project? Why the history of this particular high school team?  A: I was born and raised in Monroe, WA, so it’s something I already have some familiarity with. When I was growing up in the 2000s, I would always hear about the team, so I just assumed we had always been bad, because no one had said anything to the contrary. But when I started going to Monroe High, the program started to turn around. I still didn’t follow the team much, but in my...

On March 17, 2017, an Oregon man named John Rideout received a sentence of more than sixteen years in prison for rape and sodomy. His two victims, a woman he knew from church and his ex-girlfriend, spoke before a judge at the Marion County courthouse before sentencing; one said she hoped Rideout received help, while the other declared, “I am a victim no longer.” [1] Addressing the court, Rideout maintained his innocence, and then stated he was proud of his accusers, because they “stood up to me.” [2] Nearly forty years earlier, another woman stood up to Rideout: his former wife, Greta. On October 10, 1978, Greta Rideout, then 23 years old, telephoned the Women’s Crisis Center in Salem, as well as the Salem Police Department, alleging that her 21-year-old husband beat and raped her. She underwent a medical examination at Salem Memorial Hospital, where the doctor who examined her later testified she suffered from bruising around the left eye and cheek; her lips appeared bitten; an...

Whether perusing high school history textbooks or viewing documentary films by Ken Burns, one is left impressed by the sheer magnitude of the American Civil War. In fact, few other phenomena can be said to have exerted so dramatic an influence on the United States as a nation. More than 150 years later the events during that period have become mythologized into a canon of oft-repeated tales about noble leaders and heroic battles. Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis ... Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee ... Gettysburg and Antietam. source: New York Public Library Myriad other names and locations have been immortalized in the historical memory of Americans as well. In many of these narratives the United States nation, both united and divided, remains the central player within this historical narrative. [1] In many respects this nation-centric focus is understandable. Although too diverse and far-reaching to sufficiently examine in this space, the Civil War helped to crea...

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 ...