The Historical Webber

Getting my hands dirty

Me at the Archives

Last Friday was archival research day. I spent the whole day at the National Archives at College Park. Well, let me rephrase that, I spent half the day getting there and back, and half the day in the archives.

The only way for me to get there was to take public transportation. I took the Metro bus from my house to George Mason University. From there I took the CUE bus to the Metro Station. One change on the Metro in DC and then I was at University of Maryland. Then it was another bus to the Archives. That wasn’t so bad. It only took THREE HOURS!!! After getting my researchers card, I went to the fifth floor, got a quick tour on how to use the microfilm readers from the very helpful staff, and jumped right in to what I thought would provide the best sources.

After several hours of looking at microfilm I decided it was time to eat lunch, it was already 3PM. Everywhere I looked were reminders that the copy machines in all of the research rooms ONLY TAKE DEBIT CARDS, NO CASH! Well, I thought, I’ll just run down to their cafeteria and get some lunch. What? What’s that? The Archives are open until 9PM but the cafeteria closes at 2PM?!?!? Oh, they have some stuff to buy, still, like milk, and cake, and muffins, and one last bowl of fruit. Fine, I’ll get the fruit, milk, and chips. Yes, I’m ready to pay now. Oh, you only take CASH?!?!? You’ve got to be freakin’ kidding me! Fine! I’ll use my last two dollars in cash to buy a danish and grape soda from the vending machines! Can’t use cash anywhere else, and can’t figure out how to let the cafeteria use debit cards. Now that’s some fine government work for ya.

National Archives at night

So after that huge irritation, I went back to searching through the archives. I ended up spending 6 hours looking through 10 rolls of film. After reviewing the 150 pictures I took of the documents, only 2 of them apply to my topic.

So here are some things I learned while at the National Archives at College Park.

1. Leave much earlier in the morning. It takes forever to get there. Half the day was travel, which was good reading time. But remember to have paper and pencil handy or the reading goes to waste.
2. Take food. They have free lockers, and microwaves. If you need to eat their food, do it before 2 PM.
3. Figure out what rolls of film, and approximate frame numbers you need before you go. Fortunately, I had done that. It saved hours of time. I only got through half of the rolls I need to look at. Fortunately there were some good indexes for the film I need. You can find them at the Archive’s site to purchase copies of film. Type in a keyword in the index’s title. Then click on the index you want. Usually there is a PDF version of the index you want. And best of all… The PDF is SEARCHABLE!  Man, that saves a bunch of time.
4. Figure out how you want to make copies of the microfilm. The College Park location doesn’t have the ability to scan the documents to a computer yet. You can print them on paper, though. But what works the easiest is to just take a picture of the screen with your digital camera.
5. Figure out a plan for referencing where the copies came from. It does you no good to take a bunch of pictures or make a bunch of paper copies if you don’t know which roll of film and which frame the document came from. I thought I had a pretty decent system. Take a picture, make a note in a spreadsheet which roll, frame, and a bit about the document. Looking back, the notes I made were much too vague. A much better system is to write the Record number, roll number and frame number on a piece of paper and tape it to the screen next to the document. Taking a picture automatically records that info right next to the document. You have to get paper and pencil from the Archives, hopefully they have tape too.

My next trip is this Friday. I won’t have the whole day, but with one day of experience under the belt, I think the next trip will go more smoothly. Now I just need to get some sources!

One last thing. Make a note of all of the interesting things you see, but don’t need. You might want to come back to those later. I saw a decree from Heinrich Himmler, outlawing the word “Partisan”, and some sweet pics of a Nurflügel-Segelflugzeug Horton II (below).

Nurflügel-Segelflugzeug Horton II - 3

Nurflügel-Segelflugzeug Horton II - 2

Nurflügel-Segelflugzeug Horton II

I can’t wait for next time.

Tags: archival research, tips

Switching topics

I met with my Dissertation adviser last week, and we decided that the topic I had picked really had nothing to do with my dissertation. I don’t know why, but I had always been afraid to just bite off a chunk of the dissertation and give that a go. But after talking with Prof. Deshmukh, it should be quite doable.

Albert Speer at Nuremburg Trials. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

So the dissertation is the Nazi tunnels, and this paper will be an important part of that. One of the two organizations that looked into, and actually built some of the planned tunnels was the Reichsministerium für Rüstung und Kreigsproduktion (RMfRuK, Reich Ministry for Armaments and War Production). This group was headed by Albert Speer, who incidentally was a very interesting man. Anyhow, my paper will now look at the Reich Ministry for Armaments and War Production. It will kind of be an historical overview of the organization and several key players in the building of the tunnels.

As we were discussing each others papers in class last night, the question kept coming around to what is the so what question, or why is this important for us to know. I went last, so we were all ready to just get out of class, and we didn’t really get to that part of mine. Which I’m kind of glad for, since I don’t really have one. Why is this important for us to know? Because it helps us understand the tunnel? Does that work?

At any rate, such is my new topic, it applies directly to my dissertation, and will be part of a chapter that discusses the organizations involved in building the tunnels.

US National Archives at College Park. Image from Wikimedia Commons

This, of course, means that all of my sources and bibliography need to be redone. I was a bit worried about sources, which is probably why I didn’t want to do the topic. Well, it turns out that Prof. Deshmukh has copies of the indexes to the Guides to German Records Microfilmed at Alexandria, VA, which are the captures Nazi documents housed at the U.S. National Archives. It just so happens that there are over 1000 rolls of microfilm that reference the RMfRuk (with over 190 being the records of this organization directly)! What a find. Now my extra hours will be spent going over the hundreds of pages of the indexes looking for references to Speer, Himmler, Kammler and tunnels. And then it’s off to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland to look at the actual documents. I have a lot to do before the April 12 deadline of the first draft (which should be as complete as possible).

So, if you didn’t get it yet, here are the steps to doing such a research paper:

1. Find an interesting topic. It has to hold your attention, or you will be miserable.
2. Talk to your Professors. They’ll point you on the right track for all kinds of things (sources, topic focus, secondary literature, encouragement, etc).
3. Find the sources. Best is to find an index or something that describes the sources. For my example, before I even go to the National Archives, I will have a list of specific rolls of microfilm I need, with particular documents I want to look at on the films. Hopefully my bank account can sustain the copies needed, or better yet, I’ll be able to make digital copies.
4. Find secondary literature about any aspect of your topic. In my case I need books and articles about Albert Speer, the RMfRuk, Nazi organizations, industrial and economic studies of Nazi Germany, etc.
5. Look the the secondary material for insights, information, and most importantly, more sources. I’m now see how important footnotes are, and can see what resources are most often used, what works are most often cited, and who makes what arguments. Harvesting the footnotes for sources is integral in historical research.
6. Gather information from primary and secondary sources and make an outline of the argument.
7. Write, write, write, and then do some more writing.

So, I am back to step 3, finding the sources. I’m going to the Archives on Friday. Wish me luck!

Tags: archival research, Dissertation, german history, historical research, Methodology, nazis, RMfRuK, speer

Archival Research

Library of Congress - John Adams Building

So I finally went to the Library of Congress for actual archival research. They have about ten years worth of the ‘Kosmos’ magazine from 1919-1927 that I will look at for my paper. It was really fun. The whole family went down. Jess and I both got new LoC cards, then they went to a museum and I went to read old books.

Up until this point my big worry had been in finding some primary documents. Now that I have them, I don’t know what to do with them. I proposed this dilemma to the class last night and they had some great ideas on how to use the source. I also have a great article to use as a template, in that the historian, Nick Hopwood, looks at the ‘Urania’ magazine used by the socialists in Weimar Germany. (Nick Hopwood, “Producing a Socialist Popular Science in the Weimar Republic,” History Workshop Journal, no. 41 (Spring 1996): 117-153.)

Reading this article is my goal for tonight’s short two hour study session. I’m planning on going back to the LoC on Thursday to get some more data. But here are the ideas my classmates had:

• look at a particular author that continually prints
• look at one science/tech, follow how Nazi magazines and others treat the topic
• look at old and new to see if they deal with a subject
• what happened to the authors of the socialist papers
• study what kind of articles are being printed, what topics come up continually
• what happened to the authors/editors of the socialist papers, did they go to Dachau, were the scientists who published put to work in their fields?
• narrow down the so what question. What question are you trying to answer, that will help you know what to look for in the sources.

Library of Congress - John Adams Building - 5th floor

What the issue really boils down to is that I need to narrow my topic. I can’t have my topic be ’science and technology in Weimar Germany’. That’s way too broad. Too broad for a dissertation, even. I like the idea of focusing on one particular science or technology, and see how it is portrayed throughout the Weimar Republic, and even into post-Weimar Germany. Ideally, it aligns with my dissertation topic of Nazi tunnels.

Tags: archival research, Dissertation, german history, historical research, Methodology, nazis

The Mystery of Scholarly Articles Revealed

In class last night we discussed what makes up a historical scholarly paper. To jump start our thinking processes and enhance our observation skills, we were to compare two essays, one provided by the professor, and the other one applicable to our papers.

This was a great exercise to help me figure out the structure of a scholarly paper. As we discussed in class, here are the common conventions in a scholarly paper as written in an historical journal. A good historical scholarly paper usually:

• opens with a catchy anecdote, quote, narrative, etc. This livens up the essay, provides a good basis for framing the time period, etc.
• discusses the most relevant historiography
• discusses the “So What?” question. Addresses why the article is worth reading. Provides a clear statement of the problem.
• provides a clear statement of the thesis.
• lays out the the themes and structure of article in the beginning so it is easy to follow.
• discusses methodology. This includes a discussion of primary sources; organizing the sources, what to expect out of them, address the limits and strengths of primary sources (who wrote them, what was their purpose).
• uses footnotes. Footnotes can be an integral part of a historical paper. Footnotes can be used to discuss other arguments not directly related to the thesis. They establish credibility by showing that the author knows more than just their narrow topic. Footnotes are a way of establishing legitimacy and knowledge of the subject and other tangential subjects. They can be a means to deflect possible criticism by addressing issues other historians would most likely raise. Footnotes can also build bridges to understanding by referencing other areas, or providing examples. If there are a bunch of letters, newspaper articles, etc., quote a couple in the text, but then to show there is more than just the two, do a “see also”, or reference that you read many more sources, in a footnote.
• has a length of 20-25 pages of text.
• has a format consisting of an intro, a body divided into three sections and a conclusion.
• has reference to the most prevalent historians in the field, and includes their articles/books in the footnotes as a reference. They just might be the ones reviewing your essay, and if they see their works referenced, they  might be more likely to approve yours for publishing.

So there you have it. Some easy guidelines for writing a historical scholarly article for a journal.

Tags: archival research, Dissertation, german history, historical research, Methodology

The review of the historiographical essay

With 20+ inches of snow outside, and no sign of it letting up, and the kids busy playing and what not, there’s not much else to do but homework.

So I buckled down and wrote out the review to the essay this afternoon. It was actually a great exercise for learning what’s going on in the field, and will definitely benefit me on this paper. The article was about what makes Nazi science Nazi, or what’s the difference between the science done in Nazi Germany versus at other times in Germany, and even in other nations.

Volker Remmert describes three issues in the current (article was written in 2004, so pretty current) trends of writing about science in Nazi Germany. The first is that of organization. Historians like to discuss how the Nazis were or were not able to congeal a general policy and practice in regards to their science and technology. Current thinking, shows Remmert, is that the Nazis were very capable. He points to the many Allied agencies that swept into Germany post-WWII and took all of their scientists, engineers, research and projects. I’m most familiar with the United States’ Project Paperclip, and taking Wernher von Braun for their rocket development.

Second is about how Nazi science and technology practices, ideology, and policies were developed well before the National Socialists came to power. Some historians will contend even before World War I.

Lastly is the issue of Entgrenzung, or dealing with the issues of ethics and morality in scientific research, and whether scientists and researches knew their work was tested in inhumane conditions or not.

That’s my three pages in a nut shell.

I also found a few primary sources for the paper. Several books popped up on worldcat.org by doing a search for “wirtschaft AND tech*” and limiting the time frame to 1920-1940. What I really need is a bunch of popular magazines and newspaper articles that talk about science and technology in Weimar Germany. Particularly with some reader comments, would be nice.

Anywho, that’s were I stand on that.

Tags: Dissertation, historical research, historiography, Methodology