History
Events in the past, not exactly oral history, but pretty close to it.
Katrina and The Flood, 5 years later: Floodwall
How can you possibly imagine the destruction of an entire city? How do you imagine an event so impossibly large? How do you get past “the mind boggles”? Floodwall is an art installation, a “Wailing Wall” with an oral history component. The brainchild of Jana Napoli of New Orleans, Floodwall is a way to wrap your mind around the destruction of New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina and the Flood.
Her art installation is a collection of household drawers, scrounged from the post-flood detritus from cleaned out houses. When Napoli returned back to New Orleans after the flood, she was stunned by the silence of the empty city. “I saw these emptied out drawers and thought, ‘Each one of these is a household.’ I began to collect them.” On the back of each drawer, she wrote the address where she picked it up. She couldn’t stop collecting them.
Napoli: “The problem is, where do you save—the first 50 were easy; they went out in the garage—where do you save 700 dresser drawers while they dry out and fall apart?”
How can a person imagine the immensity of the destruction? By taking this regular, everyday household object—a drawer (kitchen drawer, dresser drawer, desk drawer). Put hundreds of them together in one place, place a map on the wall showing... Read More
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• History
• Oral History Projects
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Thoughts about Faces of America
Just watched the first episode of Faces of America American Lives, the annual February PBS documentary by Henry Louis Gates Jr. He looks at the immigrant experience, and the family history that brought certain people to the United States — the parents and grandparents of Americans of note— Kristi Yamaguchi, Yo Yo Ma, Mike Nichols, Louise Edrich, Mehmet Oz, Elizabeth Alexander, Malcolm Gladwell, Eva Longoria and Mario Batali (I guess we hear more next time from Stephen Colbert, Meryl Streep, and Queen Noor). The heart of this episode dwelled in the events of World War II, and the way that great event shaped the lives of ancestors of Yamaguchi, Ma, Nichols and Edrich.
One trademark about these Gates productions is the revelation about an ancestor. You watch Gates direct the person to turn the page of the book and take in the surprise fact about the Ancestor To The Celebrity. What did figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi’s grandfather do when he served in WW2? Surprise! What became of the other family members of Mike Nichols who stayed in the old country? Surprise!
Some surprises are affirming and uplifting, others are revelation of unknown tragedy, examples of prejudice and injustice. Still others exemplify the torn loyalties of new Americans who support their adopted country that is now at war with The Old Country.
“Faces of America” illuminates the variegated tapestry of American history. That subject we studied in school—history—is far deeper and more complex than we thought when teacher so-and-so told us about this event or that war or the other. (History? Are we bored yet?... Read More
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• History
• Personal History
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Census 2010: A family history perspective
Pia Lopez of the SacBee opines that the census is much more than How Many People, What Ages are they? She describes all her family history that’s contained in census past. She recounts everything she knows of her family history that’d be lost if a proposed law that asks Just Four Questions Only (name, age, date of response, number of people living in one household) had been in force at the time her ancestors filled out the census. enacted.
From my family’s oral history, I knew that my mother’s grandfather had left Ireland for New York in 1893 and that he worked for James Butler’s Irish neighborhood grocery store chain.
But the June 6, 1900, census snapshot fills in a whole lot more fascinating detail. Martin E. Roache lived at 551 W. 152nd St., near Broadway (one block from the Hudson River) in Washington Heights, Manhattan. He was boarding with the Schmidt family.
The husband, age 42, had arrived from Germany in 1875 and was a baker. The wife, age 39, was born in New York, the daughter of a German immigrant and a native-born New Yorker. They had two children, ages 10 and 5. The older child was attending school. A 21-year-old German, non-English-speaking, non-literate immigrant man, who had arrived only two years before, was a servant. My great-grandfather, age 27, was a “tea buyer” by occupation.
The block... Read More
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• Genealogy
• History
• Personal History
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Great Grandma’s 1918 Flu letter mentioning Vicks VapoRub makes it into the News-Record
Greensboro News-Record recounts the history of Vicks VapoRub in the 1918 flu epidemic, and I and my great-grandmother get a mention. Vick’s VapoRub was invented in Greensboro, North Carolina.
A coupla years I came across a letter my Great Grandma Fannie wrote to her daughters Florence and Doris during the 1918 flu epidemic. I was captivated both by mentions of the flu (the letter was written during December, 1918) and tickled by the description of Vick’s VapoRub. You can read the whole thing here and see a page of the letter, and the clippings from the newspaper article, which I transcribed.
Last week, I was contacted by Donald W Patterson from the News-Record, and we spoke briefly about the Billings Gazette article and the letter and my thoughts. I told him more of what I knew, that Great Grandma Fannie wrote her daughters weekly. No, I didn’t know if there were more letters concerning the flu (the letters are not all in order, so there may be more). Yes, I thought the 1918 piece was a puff-piece for Vick’s, the... Read More
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• History
• Letters in the Attic
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Flying Thuds into North Vietnam
Thuds, the Ridge, and 100 Missions North. Air & Space Magazine, Smithsonian. On the weekend of April 4 & 5th, I was in Arizona to attend a wedding and to interview my uncle for the Veterans History Project. Among the many things my uncle did in his Air Force career was to fly F105s as a fighter pilot, flying 5 more missions than the required 100 missions into North Vietnam that completed a tour of duty.
My uncle mentioned that the latest Air & Space magazine had an article on the F105s. I found the article online; hence this link and post.
Other things my uncle mentioned that the article does not:
The tires would last for two flights. Takeoff, land, takeoff, land, change tires. That plane was so heavy on takeoff—what with fuel, external fuel tanks, and the ordinance they had on board, the plane was heavy at takeoff—50,000 pounds. Sometimes they had to rolling at 300 mph before the plane got airborne. Landing, the plane was 25,000 or 30,000 pounds. (I’m reciting the weights from memory; I’d have to go back and listen to get exact figures, but the point is takeoff weight was close to double the landing weight).
He lost half the pilots in his squadron—killed or missing in action (held as POWs). Many’s the time he’d attend a memorial service in the... Read More
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
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• Personal History
• Veterans History Project
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Photography changes what we remember
This 3.5 minute video (direct YouTube link; embedded below) is an interview with Hugh Talman, a photographer with the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. He muses on his act of photographing the aftermath of Katrina. The curator who was planning to visit the area asked him, “What would you photograph?” His reply: “you’d photograph the evidence of the power of Katrina. I don’t style myself as photojournalist, but it turned into having photojournalistic aspects to it.” The video shows some of his photos. Most striking: photographs of an object where it was found (in its full post-Katrina context), versus the object photographed the way Talman normally works with objects, shot in the sanitized setting of a photo studio. What a contrast.
Before I watched the video (and saw just its name—“changes what we remember”), I thought, “Oh, this might relate to photos and memories and how to use photos to nudge or direct memories.” Not so pointed as that. It’s more that a collection of photographs is a kind of memory artifact of how it was. The contrast between an object’s plain (studio) background versus that object in its environment so powerfully conveys the power of Katrina. The two photos of the same object may as well be two different objects. I’m inspired to hunt more carefully when I look at old photographs for objects and their contexts, and the clues they might provide about a person or a time. I’m thinking primarily about old family albums, but the same approach can be applied to any historical photograph collection.
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• History
• Interviewing
• Photographs
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Random Find: How Railroads made the West
[Seattle Times] Book and Tacoma Exhibit describe how the “transportation revolution configured not just the landscape, but the very mindset of the American West.” The book is The West the Railroads Made
The article provideds some examples of The Change We Heed—as it reshaped life in that time:
Henry David Thoreau was one of the earliest observers to note the changes in the rhythms of American life triggered by the shift from stagecoach to rail transportation: “Do they not talk and think faster in the depot than they did in the stage-office?”
Rail travel didn’t just speed things up; it codified time and industrial standards in unprecedented ways. Early in the railroad age, each town and city had its own time zone — a system that might work in the age of stagecoach transportation, but became untenable in the rail era.
The United States established four standard time zones. After all, if you wonder whether those trains run on time, you need to know what the time is.
Standardization didn’t just apply to time zones. “The railroad, with its standard track gauge, required... Read More
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LIFE magazine photo archive now searchable on Google
LIFE photo archive hosted on the web by Google. Photos go back to the 1860s, and sketches & etchings go back to the 1750s. Wow! Here’s the Google blog post about it. There goes the afternoon. I’ve already found an interesting railroad set. There goes the afternoon! [via Lifehacker]
Not only is this cool, but it’s a good thing to poke through if you’re going to sit down and interview someone. It’s better to get some research in about the time and place where your interviewee lived. What was it like in 1950s? What about such-n-such events? Spending time in collections such as this helps to take you, the questioner, there, and ask better questions of your interviewee.. I’ve been thinking about online repositories of supporting information
P.S. Southern Pacific Rail Road. Dispatcher, perhaps? That was my grandfather’s job and employer
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
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• Interviewing
• Photographs
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Towers of Gold: History of the man indistinguishable from history of the State of California
I first learned of Frances Dinkelspiel and her Great Great Grandfather during Southern California’s record rainy season in 2005. Kevin Roderick, of LA Observed, published her rejected op ed about the rainiest season ever. I was blogging the wet season, so I linked to it in my research of writings about the wettest year on record (1861) in CA. From that time, I intermittently followed Ghost Word, the blog of Berkeley-based Frances Dinkelspiel, which covered writing, journalism, and her work researching and writing about Isaias Hellman.
The story of Isaias Hellman in California begins the decade after statehood (1850) and ends just after WWI. In 1859, Hellman emigrated to Los Angeles from Central Europe—modern day Germany. After working 6 years in his cousins’ dry goods store, he became a merchant himself, opening up a store in the small town of Los Angeles. The safe in the back of his store served... Read More
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• Books
• History
• Personal History
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Orange County Historical
O.C. History Roundup. I’m in Orange County (CA) right now, where I grew up and where my parents live. I came across this site a few days ago, and it definitely merits a link and a mention. Blogger Chris Jepson has lived in OC for 30 years, and works in local history in some fashion. The most recent post features vintage movies of Disneyland.
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• History
• Links
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Hope Dies Last
I’m not quite done with the book, but today—the day after Super Tuesday, which is also Ash Wednesday—is a good day to write about it. (I’m giving up reading political blogs for lent, a hard thing to do today, especially, since my state held an election yesterday. The upside is that posting here ought to increase accordingly. 
)
On this site, I veer away from politics and religion. Still, hope runs through both of those topics. And today, a little of politics and a little of religion, and a lot of oral history find common ground in Terkel’s book. Hope Dies Last offers a fascinating glimpse into contemporary history. These are the stories that aren’t “before my time” but during my time. They focus on events that have been on the periphery of my awareness, filling out details of things I’d learned through the news. It also offers a reflection on... Read More
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
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Collective Intelligence
Library of Congress uploads 3000 photos from its archives to Flickr for all the world to tag.
I whiled away a bit of time last night adding tags to photos. At first, I thought, Oh, there’s nothing to add. But then I discovered that there were tags I could add. (in the process, I discovered that there are two ways to spell bandolier/bandoleer, the criss-cross belt worn on the torso that holds ammunition. Who knew?)
I’d love to see more tags added by those who know fashions and can name the style of jacket, or hat. I mean sombrero and bowler I know, but what about the type of caps worn by boys in 1910, or the style of jacket lapels or decorations on a woman’s dress? And tho I found much to admire in outfits worn by people, I certainly didn’t want to add stylin’ as a tag.
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
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• Photographs
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The Last WW1 Veteran
Over there and Gone forever is a story about Frank Buckles, born 1901, the last surviving veteran of World War 1, found by writer Richard Rubin.
A few years ago, I set out to see if I could find any living American World War I veterans. No one — not the Department of Veterans Affairs, or the Veterans of Foreign Wars, or the American Legion — knew how many there were or where they might be. As far as I could tell, no one much seemed to care, either.
Eventually, I did find some, including Frank Buckles, who was 102 when we first met. Eighty-six years earlier, he’d lied about his age to enlist. The Army sent him to England but, itching to be near the action, he managed to get himself sent on to France, though never to the trenches.
After the armistice, he was assigned to guard German prisoners waiting to be repatriated. Seeing that he was still just a boy, the prisoners adopted him, taught him their language, gave him food from their Red... Read More
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• History
• Veterans History Project
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Watching ‘The War’ Open Thread
Are you watching The War? What do you think? Consider this an open thread to discuss anything about The War.
The weekend before it began, I wanted to do a Ken Burns roundup post. That was when the number of stories about the show was still reasonable. The Carnival took precedence, though. Since then, every news outlet imaginable has produced a story about Ken Burns and WW2 and The War. Stories of the making of. About the companion Book. Reviews.
I wanted to “live-blog” the documentary, you know, saying, “He’s just dissolved to a new black and white photograph. He zooms in, slowly, slowly, and There! he pauses on the face! Fade to another photograph; this one is a horizontal pan.” That kind of snark—Ken Burns is parodying his own style!—was better before-the-fact. We’re watching it in high-def on my boyfriend’s cool new Samsung HDTV
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Carnival of Genealogy: Family Wartime Stories
Welcome to the 32nd Carnival of Genealogy. The theme: Family Stories of Wartime. The entries span the Revolutionary War to the Korean Conflict.
On the same day I was reading through the submitted entries, I asked my SO to set the TiVo to record all seven episodes of Ken Burns’s The War (begins Sunday, 23 September on PBS), a 14+ hour documentary that tells the story of World War 2 through the eyes of ordinary people from four American communities. “In extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives.” We also watched a documentary that the TiVo recorded earlier this year: The Perilous Fight: WW2 in color. Color motion picture was accompanied by excerpts from diaries and letters written by those who lived it. It was a (mostly) sober couple of hours of non-Glenn Miller getting In The Mood (er, not that mood) for the Carnival, and for the upcoming Ken Burns documentary.
Ken Burns and PBS are promoting the The Veteran’s History Project (VHP), a nationwide oral history project to record and preserve the stories of Americans in wartime at the Library of Congress.
Pearl Harbor
The common theme of the documentaries, the VHP, and this carnival: Great historical events do not belong to the Kings and Queens, Presidents and Prime Ministers, War Secretaries and Generals, decision makers and strategists. When one nation fights another, the war is experienced from family to family, household to household. Whether victim, refugee, prisoner, laborer, soldier, the events of that war seep into every corner of a nation.
So here are some stories of war from the households of family (and neighbors) of the carnival partipants.
Revolutionary War
Revolutionary War-era maps and charts
Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings tells us the story of Patriot Soldier, Isaac Buck, one of his favorite ancestors and his service and war pension. Good for Isaac Buck that he received a pension, and good for Randy that the records are there to tell him of his ancestor.
Randy’s story mentions Ticonderoga; Here’s a map of Ticonderoga with authentick informations, 1777, from Library of Congress Memory Project. (My grandfather’s 100th birthday party was in the Village of Ticonderoga, or “Ti” as we call it)
The Revolutionary War is also known as “the First Civil War,” according to Tim Abbot of Walking the Berkshires. His account about the Curries at the time of the American Revolution, A House Divided: The Tory in the Family. It’s the story of another relative in the Currie family, a story that he received thanks to his blog. “There was... Read More
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• Genealogy
• History
• Oral History Projects
• Veterans History Project
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