The Historical Webber

Graduate Research Paper

Not that I really have time to blog as I do it, but… I feel like I need to do something historical here… So why not.

Tunnel at Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines (German: Markirch), in Alsace, France

So this is my last class before embarking on my dissertation. The Graduate Research Seminar should hopefully tie up any loose knots in our historical writing abilities. It’s a course on honing our skills. The syllabus looks great, and I’m excited for the class. One initial question I had was, why are we learning how to write like historians until the very end? Why don’t we learn how to write at the beginning or even in the middle? Well, there is a course or two on that, but nothing like this one proposes to be. We’re apparently going to learn all the behind-the-scene techniques and tricks to the trade. I’m actually really excited for it. Our Professor is great.

So for this class we’re supposed to write a 25-30 page paper that will hopefully become a chapter (or at least a bulk of one) of the dissertation. If nothing else, it can be a publishable paper. On the very low end, it will at least teach us something we don’t want to do for a dissertation.

Map of tunnel locations

My dissertation, as it stands now, is on Nazi Tunnels. The Nazis, towards the middle of the war, decided that they needed to move much of their war manufacturing underground. So they designed and built huge underground bunkers and tunnel systems for factories and depots. Go ahead, google it. There’s not much out there. Add the keywords, ‘melk ebensee’ and you’ll get a few more responses. The only scholarly works that I know of on this topic are two German books. One is an excellent work by Hans Walter Wichert, Decknamenverzeichnis deutscher unterirdischer Bauten(at Amazon, already have one), which lists practically all of the underground building sites during Nazi Germany. The second work is a dissertation by Bertrand Perz, Projekt Quarz: Steyr-Daimler-Puch Und Das Konzentrationslager Melk, Industrie, Zwangsarbeit und Konzentrationslager in O?sterreich (at Amazon if anyone wants to buy it for me), which is an in-depth look at one of these underground projects in Melk, Australia.

Anyhow, there are totally no sources available, to my knowledge, that I can use for the current project. That’s part of my dissertation work, is to dig up all of those sources. It should be fun. It’s also not manageable in a semester’s time. So for this semester’s project I had several ideas.

Projekt Quarz

First, I thought about doing a micro-study on just one of the tunnels. Unfortunately, in the two or three hours of looking for sources, I couldn’t find any. I haven’t checked with the library, yet, but I’m not hopeful. So my second idea is to look at a more broad topic that touches the issue of the tunnels. One obvious one is, why did they build them in the first place (the answer is to protect them from Allied bombings). But a deeper question begs, why did they think they could do that in the first place. It was a huge undertaking to move so many factories underground. They must have though they could do it. So a deeper question would be, why did the Nazi’s think they could undertake such a big job. Now let’s step back a bit, say, 30-50 years, and apply this question to Germany as a whole in the form of, what did German’s think of their technical and scientific abilities? So that will be my basis of inquiry for this semester’s project. I will look at what German citizens, German scientists, and German politicians thought about German science and technology from 1900 until the end of World War II. I post more on this as I think it through and find sources.

So, basically, I’m hoping to keep up the blog as I write the paper and take the class. I’ll post the methodology that I learn, and the troubles and trials, the triumphs and tackles about writing a historical paper.

First off, I feel completely unprepared because I have no sources. That’s the first thing to tackle.

Tags: german history, historical research, Methodology

Poster Session at the History of Ed

At the beginning of the year I was asked to participate in a poster session for the History of Education Society’s Annual Meeting. I have done a few things with maps, so I was asked to share resources and ideas for using maps with teaching history.

Not too many people came by, so I only spoke with two people. I had this list of resources for working with and teaching with maps:

And this Keynote playing on my laptop:

Tags: conferences, digital maps, digital tools, geography, humanities, maps, presentation

40th anniversary of the moon landing

What space junky, almost historian, geek would I be without posting a little bit about some of the best type of history in existence. I refer, of course, to the history of man’s endeavors to explore space. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to step on a celestial body other than Earth. Michael Collins waited in the Command capsule as the two American astronauts made human history.

So here are a number of resources and articles describing some cool things about space flight.

Historic Spacecraft is an archive of space vehicles and other things space related. They have a lot of photos of vehicles, suits, and such. They also have posters and such for sell, if you’re inclined to have something on your wall. They also have stats and dates for all of the rockets and vehicles listed. A great source for photos for all your space history needs. Also really cool is a list of all completed Space Shuttle missions. Space Shuttle Discovery has flown the most missions, 36, so far (June 2009) with a total of 126 missions. The Space Shuttle Enterprise never made it to space, but you can see it at the Udvar-Hazy National Air and Space Museum in Dulles, VA. I’ve been there a couple of times, and it is extremely awesome.

Next up from Flightglobal is an interactive timeline of sorts, with lots of information about the missions, flights, computers, physics and people who made it possible to put man on the moon. Most amazing about the whole flight, is that everything was based on theory. There was no way to test the actual theoretical physics without flying to the moon and back. “Although the theoretical physics of travelling to the Moon had been laid down before the advent of the Apollo missions, this was the first time a series of manned missions had put the theory into practice.”

Speaking of computers, Linux.com has a neat write up about the software used to guide the Apollo 11 spacecraft to the moon and back. It’s incredible to think that they were able to do such an amazing thing with technology comparable to today’s calculators. All of the code used punch cards and took hours to see if it was written properly. Jerry Bostick described the process in the Linux.com article:

“We would give instructions to the programs by punching cards,” Bostick said. “You had to wait at least 12 hours to see if it would work right.” The early programming was done in the real-time computing complex in Houston using IBM 7094 computers with 64K of memory. There were no hard disks. All the data was stored on magnetic tape, with each computer having about eight tape drives. Most programs used for the mission were written in Fortran, Bostick said. “After Apollo 1, we upgraded to the biggest and the best equipment that government money could buy, the IBM 360 with an unheard of 1MB of memory. We went all the way from 64K to 1MB.”

Moving from space computers to space computer games, the Technologizer has a great piece about a well loved space game, Lunar Lander. This game started out as a text-based game written by a high school student. It became popular and was later turned into countless graphical spin offs. I’m playing one on the iPod Touch a bit too much at the moment. You can see I made the top 20 players for a while!

Finally, New Scientist has a number of interesting articles relating to the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. One article addresses with the ethics and issues with the moon being a historic spot. Wherever there is a piece of human debris or footstep, it’s historically valuable. Should all of these sites and artifacts and footprints be protected? What happens when/if tourists are able to visit the moon? Who’s going to be the museum curator and the tourist guides? I’ll take that job!

Another New Scientist article lists several reasons why the moon is still relevant to science, for government, commercial enterprise and the normal guy.

Lastly, New Scientist has a neat interactive map showing the many multi-national places on the moon where humans have left their mark and made exploration.

Tags: computer history, digital archives, digital maps, games, historical artifacts, maps, space, Technology, timelines

Nazis in the news

Nazi history is always a good way to sell news, and get people to read.

A few Nazi related items came up in the news lately.

Never before seen photo of Hitler

From the Telegraph.co.uk we have some never before seen photographs of Hitler. From the article:

“The colour pictures come from the collection of Hugo Jaeger, Hitler’s personal photographer, who captured him on camera him from 1936 to the final days of his rule in 1945.

They include a glimpse inside Berghof, his mountaintop estate in Bavaria, and his private apartments in Berlin.”

This will shed some more light on Hitler and life of top Nazis. It goes well with a find from a fellow PhD student at GMU who found similar photos at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/ssalbum/). The photos are of Hitler’s apartment at Berghof, Hitler mingling with the people and at parades, and other rooms and belongings of Hitler’s.

WWII German E-boat

Also in the news is a recently uncovered German E-Boat, the S130, which interrupted an allied D-Day training and killed over 700 American servicemen. It is being reconstructed and will be used as a memorial of those who fought in World War II. From the article:

“As owner the world’s largest privately held collection of military vehicles, Wheatcroft said he envisions the restored vessel as being a “living memorial to all sailors who died during World War Two.”

“It’s the only example of its type left in the world,” he said. “I want it to become like something brought back from the past.”"

And, finally, another World War II vessel making the news is the Horten 2-29. This was a stealth jet developed by a couple of brothers. It has the uncanny resemblance to our B-2 stealth bomber. Here is a site with a number of cool pictures. National Geographic has a cool documentary about a team of engineers at Northrop Grumman who reconstructed the airplane to test it’s stealth abilities. Most amazing of all, I think, is that the plane was made from wood! That and several layers of paint, aparently, are what make it nearly invisible to radar. I’ll have to do some research into this machine and write up a history of it.

Reconstructed Horton 2-29

Tags: airplanes, boats, hitler, nazis

Blast from the past

What I have for you this week are just a few websites that give us access to the past, an historical artifact that uncovers a mystery, and some new ways to do timelines.

World Digital Library

A great resource, hopefully, for scholars. From their website….

“The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.

The principal objectives of the WDL are to:

• Promote international and intercultural understanding;
• Expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet;
• Provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences;
• Build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries.”

cuneform digital library initiative

Related to the WDL, is the CDLI. From their website….

“The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) represents the efforts of an international group of Assyriologists, museum curators and historians of science to make available through the internet the form and content of cuneiform tablets dating from the beginning of writing, ca. 3350 BC, until the end of the pre-Christian era. We estimate the number of these documents currently kept in public and private collections to exceed 500,000 exemplars, of which now nearly 225,000 have been catalogued in electronic form by the CDLI.”

John Harrison sea clock

And here’s a short read on an interesting historical topic. It seems the history of the longitude will need a small rewrite. What’s most amazing, though, is the skill and craftsmanship of the compass at the heart of this historical debate.  Created over 270 years ago, the original parts show no sign of wear and tear, while replacement parts broke down after 80 years. A remarkable piece of history.

The controversy surrounding this clock comes from recent work to replace broken parts from the initial attempt at restoration. It was originally believed that John Harrison created this clock all by himself. He being originally a carpenter, some scholars are a bit skeptic that he could create the intricate brass work needed to create the piece.  The most recent repairs have lead people to believe Harrison had help, and probably commissioned out certain pieces. Comprising over 2000 pieces, this sea clock is a marvel of itself, regardless of who made it.

Now it’s time for some timelines!

It was a shameless publicity post to slashdot, but the timelines got me thinking of other timelines, especially as I’m creating one of my own using MIT’s Exhibit builder, and have created one for a course. So, here are a few timeline tools mentioned in the article.

SIMILE’s Timeline: easy to use, just point it to a data file (which is the most dificult part)

TimeGlider: Looks like a flashed based version of SIMILE’s product. A few different features. Here’s one in action, Rosenberg Cold War trials.

Google’s News timeline: you can do searches on other things as well. Kind of like a modern timeline.

TimeRime: They’re in this for the money, and it doesn’t look all that great, but I didn’t spend but more than a couple seconds looking around.

Tags: digital archives, historical artifacts, timelines