The Historical Webber

Aaarg – finding an historiographical essay

So the next assignment for the Research Seminar is to find a historiographical essay related to our topic, and then write a three page summary of the article. After a nice day of work and with only three hours for study tonight, I finally found one… after looking for an hour and a half!

I started out looking in JSTOR for ‘historiography German aviation’, and found a few possible leads on the historiography of aviation history in general (which means US aviation history). I could fit that in, comparing US and German aviation, or something like that, but I thought I should search elsewhere.

So then I went to Project Muse to see if they had anything better. They had the same stuff. But I did rethink an article that came up in both. I figured a historiographical essay on science in Nazi Germany was about as close as I can get. So I’ll be writing three pages on this article: Volker R. Remmert, “What’s Nazi about Nazi Science? Recent Trends in the History of Science in Nazi Germany,” Perspectives on Science 12, no. 4 (2004): 454-475.

Tags: Dissertation, historical research, historiography, Methodology

Changing plans already

I needed to rethink my proposal for my paper. The comments I got back were “too vague,” “too broad,” “need focus,” and “what aspect.” Yeah, I knew that already. But when you write the new proposal 30 minutes before you turn it in, and 10 minutes after you think it up… well, it don’t look pretty.

So I’ve had some more time to think about my topic, and have searched for sources, and I think I have a better grasp on what to do.

Reconstructed Horton 2-29

Now the paper will be on science and technology in the Weimar period. More specifically, I’ll look at how popular, political and scientific attitudes about science and technology influenced German leaders going into World War II. Germany had some pretty incredible technology in World War II. They had the first jet aircraft, the first ballistic missile, and this awesome airplane (I have posted about before)!

I also found an interesting quote from Hitler, where he supposedly said “Germany’s technology, industry, and morale were sufficient to fight an indefinite war.” So was there something in the Weimar period that lead Hitler to believe this. Certainly he did, as did the scientists and researchers who were so innovative.

So now I’ll come up with a better one paragraph proposal, and I might feel comfortable enough about it to post it. And now it’s on to find sources (primary and secondary) about popular, political, and from the field itself, attitudes about science and technology in Weimar Germany! I’ll start by looking in the field of aviation, since that is my passion, if I have such a thing.

Tags: Dissertation, german history, historical research, Methodology

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

Multiple PHP Instances With One Apache

Long-winded Introduction

It took me a couple of days to figure this out due to lack of decent tutorials and not enough confidence in my Linux skills to build programs from source. I think I have the hang of it now, and write this up with the intent on providing another, or the only, tutorial on setting up CentOS 5 with multiple instances of PHP using one Apache install. That being said, there are a number of good tutorials out there, just none of them explicitly for CentOS and some leave out some details that n00bs like me get confused about.

PHP4 and PHP5 on SuSE 10.1 – This was by far the most helpful of the tutorials. Even though it was written for SuSE, it works almost straight across for CentOS.

There is also a great list of instructions in the comments on the php.net site under installing PHP for Apache 2.0 on Unix systems (see http://www.php.net/manual/en/install.unix.apache2.php#90478).

I found this one after I wrote up this tutorial at http://cuadradevelopment.com. It’s a bit different, but should work as well.

There are basically two different ways I could have done this. 1- run a single instance of Apache, and run one instance of PHP as a module, and other installs as CGI. 2- run several instances of Apache, each with it’s own instance of PHP as a module. I chose to do the first method for no particular reason. Dreamhost has a post about the good and bad with running PHP as CGI.

So basically, the steps are: 1. Set up Apache and have PHP install as a module. 2. Configure and make another instance of PHP to run as CGI. 3. Add a virtual host to Apache running under a different port to access the PHP as CGI.
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Tags: apache, bash code, CentOS, httpd, LAMP, mysql, php, tutorial