Blenheim Blog

This week we received the names and documents for our soldiers.   I am still in the process of indexing all my papers, but have compiled a short list of some important statistics about my soldier and am excited by the bit I have learned.  I was surprised by how exciting it was to see his handwriting and how little details–like the fact that he had grey eyes–make him feel more real to me.  I also have found it very interesting as I have given the papers a cursory glance to realize that I have a great deal of information about his wife.  She survived him by almost twenty years and my files contain many records of her Widow’s Pension claims, so I am looking forward to incorporating her into my work as an important part of Bolton’s life.  I was also very pleased to find census records from his childhood home, with a bit of info about his parents and siblings.

Another thing that stands out is the large number of medical files.  He appears to have suffered from his war injuries for many many years after the war.

On the technical side, I am still working out what machine is best for me to work on.  I couldn’t figure out how to rotate images on dropbox and quickly realized that reading photocopies of 19th Century handwriting while tilting my head was really not working.  And the ipad I originally was working on, while more tiltable than my desktop, was just too small to get a good view.  But I’ve downloaded all the images to my desktop so now, as long as I am at home, I can comfortably work on them.  This might cause issues during classroom work sessions, so I am still trying to decide if it would be worth investing in a laptop.

Speaking of difficulties with handwriting, I also noticed that while many of Bolton’s records have been transcribed none of the papers concerning Addie (Bolton’s wife) have been transcribed, so I’ll have to take some time and maybe make a few transcriptions myself.  I’m making a trip to the Library of Congress Archives in March in association with another course and I am tempted to try to pull up the originals of some of these papers.  Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

One bit of information I struggled to find was a birth date.  I noticed that his death certificate listed his age down to the day, and intend to calculate his birthdate using that information.  For now I’ve just listed the year of his birth.  I did find it interesting, though, that that piece of information didn’t seem to find its way into any of his official forms, unless I have somehow missed it.

An English professor of mine once said that in our field “you can say just about anything you like, as long as you say it well.”  As an English major, I am fairly comfortable with most aspects of “thinking like a Historian” as discussed in Wednesday night’s lecture and the online readings.  Bias is a given in literary work (and one of the things that makes it interesting.)  We frequently immerse ourselves in minutia (last semester I wrote a 2,000 word paper about a single word.)  Story-telling, context, close reading, incorporation of background knowledge, listening to silences, and a comfortable acceptance of the lack of “right answers” in the universe are all part of the work we do in my department and of the personality that drew me to it.

The thing I do struggle with somewhat is the nitty gritty sourcing and citing side of working with historical documents.  The idea of reading the Meta Data first, paying attention to the non-textual pieces of a document and sticking to the corroborated facts is, in part, what sets History apart from Literature.  I have little experience with putting together a good, solid bibliography and am concerned about building a story for my soldier without wandering far from the documented facts.  This project, particularly, is somewhat intimidating on that account because it seems our facts will be rather sparse.  I have had a little bit of experience with primary source documents through a Renaissance literature course I took last semester, so I think that skills I began to develop there will be useful as I dive into this project and I look forward to further developing that skill set.  I also feel like in Historical work there is more of a “right answer” that we are ultimately working to uncover.  While Literary Criticism does need to be backed up by the text in question, it seems like there is more at stake in being careful to stick to the facts in historical writing and I feel a little bit intimidated by that.

uniform resource locator/URL

web page

HyperText Markup Language (HTML)

server

client

web browser

HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

source code

streaming

downloading

database

XML

ISP

Internet Protocol address

Domain Name System (DNS)

top-level domain (TLD)

second-level domain (SLD)

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication

Mainframe

IMP

Interface

Subnet

Packet Switching

Packets

router