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To experiment with ThingLink, one of the new tools we were introduced to in our second day of Doing Digital History, I used an 1888 engraving of Mission Santa Barbara’s “sacred garden” as a base image. I then tagged it with a label and a note, and added links to images that similarly used the visual convention of the posed padre in front of the fountain.

I make a more in-depth argument about the interplay of the marketing of the missions and the reception of the growing body of mission visual culture at the turn of the 20th century in my forthcoming book, California Mission Landscapes: Race, Memory, and the Politics of Heritage (U. Minnesota Press). This simple exercise in annotating images raised similar challenges as the monograph. The similarities of the visual compositions of the images are fairly obvious. But the significance of those posed figures is far more complex and nuanced than simple tags can convey. The conventions of posed “exotic” figures mirrors similar practices at the Alhambra and other iconic monuments on tourist routes around the Mediterranean. The presentation of the missions as monastic sites with landscapes reminiscent of centuries’ old European garden traditions helped to elide the Catholic parishes with the enthusiasts of both romanticizing California’s colonial origins and promoting tourism in the increasingly Anglo-dominated social and political elite of the state.

The constructed gaze of the mission gardens is evident in the assembled montage of  ThingLink tags, but the historical context is less evident. I am left intrigued but not yet convinced of the potential of annotating images as a tool for engaging with visual culture. And I look forward to learning more about how others are mobilizing these tools in productive ways.

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For the better part of a decade and a half, I have let others define me on the Internet.  I have had some role as I crafted my various academic department profile pages to be as direct but also as oblique as possible.  I always felt a great desire to be the person that I was hired to be (or hoped to be hired to be), namely an early American historian with an even more constricted research specialization in the history of technology, work and environments.  This helped hide my darkest professional secret.  In a world of ever more specialized academics, I am a promiscuous generalist.  I will skulk no longer.

I never considered myself strictly an early Americanist or an environmental historian, I am simply a historian.  I range broadly across thematic fields and even disciplines, if their methods and tools can help illuminate the past better for my audiences.  I work with printed texts, manuscript financial records, portraits and long buried shipwrecks, if the sources can help me answer an interpretative question in an intriguing way.  I will write for academics, undergraduate students, the informed public and uninformed public.  I am uncomfortable with boundaries and I cross them at will – wall or no wall, paywall or no paywall.

Thus, what you will find here will not be the normally tightly defined categories of the academic but a hodge-podge. Topically, you will find research gleanings on New England shipbuilding, Worcester sewers, Captain John Smith, visual cultures of accounting, and urban farming across centuries.  Pedagogically, you will find efforts to teach information literacy as both information and literacy are rapidly changing.   Connecting what to some will seem a mess but to me is the beautiful chaos of a promiscuous generalist will be a central line on the potential and limitations of real and imagined digital tools to advance history, civic engagement and social understanding.

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“So far, so good.”  That’s how I described the first day of Doing DH 2016 to my husband last night.  I enjoyed meeting the other members of the group and hearing of their varied research, teaching, and professional interests.  I was also able to follow what we did quite easily.  Some of the tools we were introduced to I was familiar with already (Reclaim hosting, WordPress), but other tools were new to me (Twitter, installing WordPress [which turned out to be so easy–a relief] and building my own site from scratch).  I will admit to being a bit skeptical about the value of Twitter, but after listening to the conversation, I’m mostly convinced that it’s likely to be a worthwhile tool, even if I don’t use it immediately.

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As I think about our discussions and  the material we covered, the thing that sticks out to me is how much in Day One has already pushed me to step out of my comfort zone.  Setting up a personal domain and a twitter account were things that I had thought about doing for a quite a while but had never actually done them for a variety of reasons. I’ve enjoyed playing around with WordPress (tweaking my theme and adding some content), although I’m still a bit apprehensive about Twitter ( I am definitely borrowing the idea of having students use twitter for their thesis statement in the fall though).  But Sheila, Sharon, and everyone else has done a great job presenting these ideas and concepts and I’m very excited to take the next step tomorrow.

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“Women are the backbone of the Republican Party,” Lee Ague wrote in 1966.  She should know.  Ague organized women to Bake for Barry Goldwater, Barbecue for Bo Callaway, and register new Republican voters in Georgia and other southern states.  As the backbone, women held up the Republican Party with voter registration drives, education campaigns, phone banks, bake sales, county fair booths, letter writing, candidate shuttling, and the other unpaid, unseen labor of campaigns.

Now the most recent Pew Research poll shows Hillary Clinton up an astounding 24 points among women.

The GOP is spineless.  They have lost the women that held up the party for so long.

In February, then-candidate John Kasich boasted that in his first campaign, women “left their kitchens” to work for him.  He rightly received criticism for assuming women had been in the kitchen in the first place.  However, he also neglected to recognize the kitchen as a powerful political organizing space. In doing so, Kasich disparaged the political work of conservative women who, for generations, have baked brownies for fundraisers and baked cakes to leave for legislators.  A popular anti-ERA tactic was the Valentine’s Day luncheon of home-cooking, prepared by women in their kitchens.

In 1978, Emma Hinesley finally got tired of seeing her Georgia 3rd district GOP candidate dressing like a clown.  She went out and bought a navy blue sport coat and black socks, explaining that no one would take a man in white socks as a serious congressman.  After two unsuccessful runs, Newt Gingrich finally won.

Hinesley and Ague, like countless other GOP women, were housewives who used carpools as opportunities to register voters.  PTA meetings provided opportunities to lobby for education reform.  Doctors appointments became exercises in health care policy.  Ague argued that the weekly grocery shopping kept women more in touch with economic trends.  Bringing home the bacon paled next to buying the bacon and stretching it to feed all the family.

In a 1994 interview, Donald Trump said that “putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing.”  He’s missing that women put themselves to work putting men into office.

With a 24 point gender gap, the Republicans should be trying to figure out where the women are and how to get them back.  The trouble is that the women who have always done the work of registering and educating voters have moved away from the GOP this year.  The GOP is slumping.  They have lost their backbone.

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In “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era,” an article published in 2003, Roy Rosenzweig argued that historians should participate in the decision-making process to determine which materials archival institutions prioritize for preservation. Historians, he advised, should not leave these important decisions to archivists and librarians, presumably because historians have a better sense than those in the other groups of the ways that historical documents can best serve those in the future who would try to make sense of the past based on what was saved. Yet, in discussions with librarians, he points out, historians couldn’t make the difficult decisions. They advised preserving everything without taking into account the limited financial and staff resources of archives and libraries. “They could not make choices,” he quoted Deanna Marcum as saying.

Recently, for a project to preserve public broadcasting programs, I put together a collection development plan relying on principles derived from archivists and librarians (and my own common sense) because I couldn’t find anything written by historians that would help. I’ve asked media historians who participate in a radio preservation task force to help, and there is interest in seeing that materials they would use in their own research and teaching are preserved. It’s a start, perhaps. We’ll see how it goes.

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