History
Events in the past, not exactly oral history, but pretty close to it.
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,... 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... 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... Read More
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• 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... Read More
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• History
• 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... Read More
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• History
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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
• History
• 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... 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... Read More
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• Books
• History
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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
• History
• 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... Read More
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• 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... Read More
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• History
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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... Read More
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• Genealogy
• History
• Oral History Projects
• Veterans History Project
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NY Times to open up old archives
(upated) The news story as others see it: The paywall’s coming down. But this little tidbit about old, old archives caught my eye:
In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain.
Score!!! I’m reading letters from around this time. Stories about my grandmother appeared in the NYTimes. There’s gotta be other stuff that’s just plain interesting that’ll appear.
UPDATE: Here’s a press release that discusses the fate of stories between 1923 and 1986: “Archives for the years 1923 - 1986 are available to be purchased in single or 10-article packages.”
Posted by Susan A. Kitchens in
• History
• Memorabilia
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