Archival Quality Communication
AQC for Today, for Tomorrow, and for ever . . . .
I was working at one of the library tables the other day and had a GIS map of Boone County on the table. One of our pages, Joseph Pace, remarked as he passed, "That looks like an island!" and I had to agree. I was reminded of a book on one of my shelves at home entitled An Island Called California, which is about the ecology of that state. But is any place (even California) really a complete entity within itself? This started a train of thought . . .
Many writers on local history treat their county as if it were an island. The county line is a true boundary only to the surveyor, constable, and tax collectors: The rest of us cross it with impunity. Even islands are connected with the rest of the world, for the Ocean, like the Ohio which is our major boundary, is a connection with what lies on the other side. If the historian only looks at what has happened within the boundaries of his county-island he will never really understand what has happened there, for many of the most important things influencing that history happened far away. Wars, for example, have enormous influence on county history — death toll, patriotism, returning heroes, just think about it — but never does a county start a war, not nowadays anyway. (Ronald Reagan said that governments start wars, not people!) You can talk about what people did here during the "Great War" (now called World War I), but you will not truly understand even that unless you look elsewhere.
Focus on the local can create too much distortion in trying to appreciate the contribution of a single area. How can we look at local history in the broader context? The focus on a county, town, or geographical area is a valid way to see the past. The county is a governmental unit that attracts history to itself. People in a town or area are a community, and though they do not all pursue idential aims, they think of themselves as bound together at least by affection (or occasionally hatred) of their home-town. The local area can be compared to the "cells" in a body; they are a structure, but are part of an even larger structure. You can say a lot about a cell and not understand how it functions in its larger context. The larger structure is, in many ways, not like the "cell" at all.
In Kentucky the county is a definite focus of history. Each county is part of Kentucky, just as Kentucky (for good or ill) is part of the greater United States of America. Kentuckians were noted early for their allegiance to the Commonwealth, and particularly to their home county. The county was a primary focus or center for a core of feelings that are sometimes designated by various terms, such as, loyalty, patriotism, esprit, and "home". There may be mixed feelings, of course. Within a community there may be competition, jealousy, competition, disappointment; and these tensions may become so great that people kill one another, or families move; or (as often happens) individuals, and their relations, continue to live in a state of opposition for long periods. This too is a community focus, and it is certainly a subject for the historian. Often such negative feelings are projected only on the opposing person or family, and the home area continues to inspire only feelings of love and reverence.
It is possible to study some aspects of county history apart from the history of the community as a whole. For example, business and economic relations are embedded within the functioning of the community's social relations. These people buy at this store because they are of a like political party, or these patronize this mill because people at that church don't like people like us. We can study these relations statistically, like the figures from the Bureau of the Census, that give average income, and the number of bushels of wheat ground per year, and so forth. But this is abstract. Everyone in the community knows that Mr. X had to shut down his mill because of incident Y, and "nobody" cared to trade there anymore. Economic theory will only reveal that there was a monetary contraction about that time, and by a certain date there were only two grocery stores in town instead of the four that had been there at the beginning of the recession. It should also be obvious that economic matters cannot be understood in the context of the insular county.
The historian should be aware of what is happening elsewhere to help him (or her) understand the ways in which this county is unique, and in which it is typical. In Boone County (Kentucky) history I find that one of our historians, Paul Tanner, who worked in the Revenue Office in Frankfort for many years, did a lot of statistical work on slavery in Boone County. He wrote the best work to date on the subject. He does not content himself with figures for Boone County. He makes many comparisons between Kentucky counties; but even more importantly, he compares these figures to counties in other states. Boone County, he finds, had a higher population of mulattoes than any other county in the entire South. What is the significance of this? You cannot begin to interpret this fact until you create the fact. Once this is known you can start to think about it, and perhaps find an answer. You will never find an answer, however much internal research you may do, so long as you treat the county like an island.
This is an Archival Quality Communication
James Duvall, M. A.
Big Bone, Kentucky
History and the Book
Archival Quality Communication
AQC for Today, for Tomorrow, and for ever . . . .
Poetry is that encounter of the reader with
the book, the discovery of the book.
Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights, p. 80.
With this I must disagree. Borges is such an interesting writer it is a great shame that so many people have discovered him. (Do they really understand him? Perhaps too well.) It is always good to have special books in your collection that no one else knows about, such as Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica, or Alice Hegan Rice's Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (I mean the book), C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces, or the mysterious Etidorhpa, published in 1895 by one of our local authors, or . . . but I will not give them all away, or everyone will be reading them. It is the discovery of such that may truly be called the encounter with the book, and so I must (respectfully) disagree with the idea expressed by Borges in this quotation.
Poetry is expression, language at its best, and so it is not just an encounter with a book, or even something written on paper. The essence of poetry is the frisson we experience in the encounter with a mind expressing itself with much greater ability than we are able. That is, expressing thoughts and feelings we have known only in a fugitive way. (If we had never experienced them at all we would not appreciate the achievement when we encountered it.) It is, as Owen Barfield says in Poetic Diction, a movement of the mind into strangeness. By this he does not mean weirdness (at least not the weird as such), but a journey into a realm or vista which allows us to look at things, especially common things and ideas, in a way that is new to us.
There is an encounter of the mind with the book, however, and it is primarily in the realm of history. It is much more true — I do not say Borges's statement is false, after all, in the coffin we call a book, poetic skeletons do (sometimes) reside — it is much more true to say that history is the encounter with the book. History is not only a science, and I would argue that it is the primary science, without which all the others are impossible, but a species of literature. As literature it is language, or art, and as such it must be judged on its literary merits. History, even more than poetry, or other species of literature, (which can always be told as a tale or ballad), depends upon books, both as documentary evidence and as a medium of publication. Books are the way history preserves its traditions of scholarship and interpretation. We can easily conceive of a novel that does not depend upon other novels (though the good ones all depend upon the novelistic tradition more than most people suspect), but it is hardly possible to even imagine serious history without access to other books.
History is a very strange book, certainly a palimpsest, such as Lanier sang of in "The Symphony":
This is an Archival Quality Communication
James Duvall, M. A.
Big Bone, Kentucky
Note: Online access for the entire text of Sidney Lanier's beautiful poem "The Symphony".
AQC for Today, for Tomorrow, and for ever . . . .
Poetry is that encounter of the reader with
the book, the discovery of the book.
Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights, p. 80.
With this I must disagree. Borges is such an interesting writer it is a great shame that so many people have discovered him. (Do they really understand him? Perhaps too well.) It is always good to have special books in your collection that no one else knows about, such as Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica, or Alice Hegan Rice's Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (I mean the book), C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces, or the mysterious Etidorhpa, published in 1895 by one of our local authors, or . . . but I will not give them all away, or everyone will be reading them. It is the discovery of such that may truly be called the encounter with the book, and so I must (respectfully) disagree with the idea expressed by Borges in this quotation.
Poetry is expression, language at its best, and so it is not just an encounter with a book, or even something written on paper. The essence of poetry is the frisson we experience in the encounter with a mind expressing itself with much greater ability than we are able. That is, expressing thoughts and feelings we have known only in a fugitive way. (If we had never experienced them at all we would not appreciate the achievement when we encountered it.) It is, as Owen Barfield says in Poetic Diction, a movement of the mind into strangeness. By this he does not mean weirdness (at least not the weird as such), but a journey into a realm or vista which allows us to look at things, especially common things and ideas, in a way that is new to us.
There is an encounter of the mind with the book, however, and it is primarily in the realm of history. It is much more true — I do not say Borges's statement is false, after all, in the coffin we call a book, poetic skeletons do (sometimes) reside — it is much more true to say that history is the encounter with the book. History is not only a science, and I would argue that it is the primary science, without which all the others are impossible, but a species of literature. As literature it is language, or art, and as such it must be judged on its literary merits. History, even more than poetry, or other species of literature, (which can always be told as a tale or ballad), depends upon books, both as documentary evidence and as a medium of publication. Books are the way history preserves its traditions of scholarship and interpretation. We can easily conceive of a novel that does not depend upon other novels (though the good ones all depend upon the novelistic tradition more than most people suspect), but it is hardly possible to even imagine serious history without access to other books.
History is a very strange book, certainly a palimpsest, such as Lanier sang of in "The Symphony":
Life! Life! thou sea-fugue, writ from east to west,Borges may have had something similar in mind in describing an encounter with the Book of Sand. As Heraclitus found it impossible to step twice into the same river, for there come waters, and then other waters, so it is impossible to read twice the identical page of history; it is, as in the epigraph by Donne, with with Borges begins his story, a rope of sand.
Love, Love alone can pore
On thy dissolving score
Of harsh half-phrasings,
Blotted ere writ,
And double erasings
Of chords most fit.
Yea, Love, sole music-master blest,
May read thy weltering palimpsest.
To follow Time's dying melodies through,
And never to lose
the old in the new,
And ever to solve the discords true —
Love alone can do.
This is an Archival Quality Communication
James Duvall, M. A.
Big Bone, Kentucky
Note: Online access for the entire text of Sidney Lanier's beautiful poem "The Symphony".
. . .often the voices we most want to hear are barely audible . . .
Archival Quality Communication
AQC for Today, for Tomorrow, and for ever . . . .
Professor Ulrich of Harvard says in a book of her essays published this year:
Those shouting the loudest are often those who have an agenda; but political and historical agendas have a way of swinging back and forth until they reach equilibrium. Then we can hear those still, small voices that are much more interesting.
This is an Archival Quality Communication.
James Duvall, M. A.
History Researcher
Boone County Public Library
Burlington, Kentucky
AQC for Today, for Tomorrow, and for ever . . . .
Professor Ulrich of Harvard says in a book of her essays published this year:
Some history-making is intentional; much of it is accidental. People make history when they scale a mountain, ignite a bomb, or refuse to move to the back of the bus. But they also make history by keeping diaries, writing letters, or embroidering intitials on linen sheets. History is a conversation and sometimes a shouting match between present and past, though often the voices we most want to hear are barely audible. People make history by passing on gossip, saving old records, and by naming rivers, mountains, and children. Some people leave only their bones, though bones too make history when someone notices.This comment that reminds us that history is not always about the big stuff. Like leaves dropping in the forest, that eventually become an entire geological layer of earth, the small acts of our lives may ultimately be more powerful than those wild acts that make the record books. Our bones may send a more powerful message than scaling mountain peaks.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History (New York: Knopf, 2007), p. xxxiii.
Those shouting the loudest are often those who have an agenda; but political and historical agendas have a way of swinging back and forth until they reach equilibrium. Then we can hear those still, small voices that are much more interesting.
This is an Archival Quality Communication.
James Duvall, M. A.
History Researcher
Boone County Public Library
Burlington, Kentucky
Teaching History to the Young
Archival Quality Communication
AQC for Today, for Tomorrow, and for ever . . . .
It was probably a frustrated history teacher who asked his class in an exasperated tone: "Are you all ignorant, or just apathetic?" A student answered: "I don't know and I don't care." If this was done with conscious irony it was a brilliant reply; but it is more likely that he really did not know or care.
No wonder there is so much apathy and ignorance about history. As it is usually taught it is very far from the concerns of ordinary people. Why should I, or anyone, get so excited about Manifest Destiny, or the mercantile system? Does anyone, who is not actually doing a Ph.D. on the topic, care to discuss the Wilmot Proviso? It could be interesting. But how do you connect with it? How can a student feel this is part of what makes this nation and himself what it is?
Most attempts to make history more exciting trivializes the whole thing. It will not do to make history a course in current events. That is not history, not yet; maybe not ever. The method of pretending the student is making original discoveries from (carefully selected) documents presenting conflicting views is little better. Who really shot McKinley, or blew up the Lusitania? Is the Kensington Rune Stone actually genuine? A semester of this and the student comes to think that everyone's opinion on an historical subject (including theirs) is equally valuable, that is, not valuable at all. The conclusion is usually that historical truth is nowhere to be found, or is submerged somewhere in a mass of conflicting opinion.
How do students come to realize that history is connected to us because it is really about the present? We cannot see the past. It does not exist. Even yesterday is real to us only in memory. We discover our own past through historical thinking. It is common to discover a note or letter and find that we are re-enacting a state of our own mind a number of years ago. We may have forgotten, or retain only a residual impression of what we were then thinking. All thinking of past thought, even our own, is historical, and we must reconstruct it through historical thinking simply because it is not now present to us. Someone who is an hundred years old is very little closer to the events of the American Revolution or the Codex Hammurapi than a teenager. It is not age that allows us to understand the past, but experience. Sage thinkers of earlier days used to say "History maketh a young man to be old." A young person may well be a better historian than an older one.
Young people must be taught to think historically. This can only be done by starting with what they know. I think this means starting with local history. It is the area in which a person lives that most impinges on their life. It is here that the first questions about the world, culture, and the social web arise. It has often been said that all politics is local politics. It is just as true to say all history is local history. It is at this level that students will come to know and feel, so that the teacher may find their interest has risen to the level that they will say "I know, and I care."
This is an Archival Quality Communication
James Duvall, M. A.
Annals of Boone County
Kentucky
Local History Research Specialist
AQC for Today, for Tomorrow, and for ever . . . .
It was probably a frustrated history teacher who asked his class in an exasperated tone: "Are you all ignorant, or just apathetic?" A student answered: "I don't know and I don't care." If this was done with conscious irony it was a brilliant reply; but it is more likely that he really did not know or care.
No wonder there is so much apathy and ignorance about history. As it is usually taught it is very far from the concerns of ordinary people. Why should I, or anyone, get so excited about Manifest Destiny, or the mercantile system? Does anyone, who is not actually doing a Ph.D. on the topic, care to discuss the Wilmot Proviso? It could be interesting. But how do you connect with it? How can a student feel this is part of what makes this nation and himself what it is?
Most attempts to make history more exciting trivializes the whole thing. It will not do to make history a course in current events. That is not history, not yet; maybe not ever. The method of pretending the student is making original discoveries from (carefully selected) documents presenting conflicting views is little better. Who really shot McKinley, or blew up the Lusitania? Is the Kensington Rune Stone actually genuine? A semester of this and the student comes to think that everyone's opinion on an historical subject (including theirs) is equally valuable, that is, not valuable at all. The conclusion is usually that historical truth is nowhere to be found, or is submerged somewhere in a mass of conflicting opinion.
How do students come to realize that history is connected to us because it is really about the present? We cannot see the past. It does not exist. Even yesterday is real to us only in memory. We discover our own past through historical thinking. It is common to discover a note or letter and find that we are re-enacting a state of our own mind a number of years ago. We may have forgotten, or retain only a residual impression of what we were then thinking. All thinking of past thought, even our own, is historical, and we must reconstruct it through historical thinking simply because it is not now present to us. Someone who is an hundred years old is very little closer to the events of the American Revolution or the Codex Hammurapi than a teenager. It is not age that allows us to understand the past, but experience. Sage thinkers of earlier days used to say "History maketh a young man to be old." A young person may well be a better historian than an older one.
Young people must be taught to think historically. This can only be done by starting with what they know. I think this means starting with local history. It is the area in which a person lives that most impinges on their life. It is here that the first questions about the world, culture, and the social web arise. It has often been said that all politics is local politics. It is just as true to say all history is local history. It is at this level that students will come to know and feel, so that the teacher may find their interest has risen to the level that they will say "I know, and I care."
This is an Archival Quality Communication
James Duvall, M. A.
Annals of Boone County
Kentucky
Local History Research Specialist
Mostly the Same
Archival Quality Communication
AQC for Today, for Tomorrow, and for ever . . . .
AQC for Today, for Tomorrow, and for ever . . . .
"To have a culture, mostly the same people have to live mostly in the same place for a long time."
Wendell Berry, The Way of Ignorance (2005)
The seeds of action are already there
Archival Quality Communication
AQC for Today, for Tomorrow, and for ever . . . .
Allan Nevins writes of the importance of history in his magisterial essay "In Defence of History":
It may be true, from a superficial point of view (as I have read), that history is the record of a series of bad guesses, and shocking surprises. But when we really examine the situation, the seeds of the action were already there, just waiting to bloom.
This is an Archival Quality Communication
James Duvall, M. A.
Local History Research Specialist
Annals of Boone County, Kentucky
Boone County Public Library
Burlington, Kentucky
AQC for Today, for Tomorrow, and for ever . . . .
Allan Nevins writes of the importance of history in his magisterial essay "In Defence of History":
Mankind is always more or less storm-driven; and history is the sextant and compass of states which, tossed by wind and current, would be lost in confusion if they could not fix their position. It enables communities to grasp their relationship with the past, and to chart on general lines their immediate forward course. It does more. By giving peoples a sense of continuity in all their efforts, and by chronicling immortal worth, it confers upon them both a consciousness of their unity, and a feeling of the importance of human achievement. History is more than a mere guide to nations. It is first a creator of nations, and after that, their inspirer. Without it this world, a brilliant arena of human action canopied by fretted fire, would indeed become stale, flat, and unprofitable, a congregation of pestilent vapors.History gives us insight into the present. It does not enable us to foretell the future; but it does keep us from being utterly surprised by it, for we know that the future, whenever it comes, will have grown out of the present.
It may be true, from a superficial point of view (as I have read), that history is the record of a series of bad guesses, and shocking surprises. But when we really examine the situation, the seeds of the action were already there, just waiting to bloom.
This is an Archival Quality Communication
James Duvall, M. A.
Local History Research Specialist
Annals of Boone County, Kentucky
Boone County Public Library
Burlington, Kentucky
Nec ossa solum, sed etiam sanguinem.
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