Moonshine Still

This is a photograph from the Library of Congress showing an IRS agent and a recently confiscated moonshine still. The photograph is displayed here as a test to make sure I can post a photograph to blogger.

This Valentine's Day in History

Like any other day of the year, February 14^th is rich in major historic occurrences. Among the most famous are the beheading of St. Valentine around 278 AD, and the massacre of 7 henchmen of the Bugs Moran gang in 1929. But what else has happened on Valentine's Day? What do we obscure with chocolate boxes and singing cards that may be of memorable historic significance. February the 14^th is not all relationship breaking moments, depression, and gang warfare; a scouring of the internet can reveal a host of other major events.

Captain James Cook set off on his third major voyage in the Pacific in 1776. His previous excursions led to a much greater understanding of the region particularly in terms of geography, topography, and environment. Unfortunately, Cook, like most European explorers, was largely ignorant of native Polynesian culture. When Cook reached Hawaii in 1779, his arrival coincided with the festival of Makahiki; specifically, the stage of the festival in which the God Lono was to be worshipped. While he and his crew were deified at first as an incarnation of the God, their later return to fix their ships was upsetting as the a new season of worship had begun. The Hawaiians attacked the British marines as a result of these tensions as well as Cooks lack of diplomatic ability. Cook and 4 soldiers were killed in a St. Valentine's day massacre 150 years before the famous murders in Chicago; perhaps both the result of irreconcilable cultural differences and failed diplomacy.

On August, 18^th 1920, the 19^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified by all 48 states extending the vote to women. In anticipation of this historic event, Carrie Chapman Catt founded the League of Women Voters slightly over 6 months prior on February 14^th. The league was founded as a nonpartisan organization to assist women with their newfound responsibility as electors. The LWV still claims to support no specific party, but does champion a number of issues, notably social equality and economic justice for all Americans. Though certainly not the ultimate achievement of the women's suffrage movement, the foundation of the LWV was a major milestone. The event is tinged with ideas of camaraderie and mutual aid that support and are supported by the values traditionally associated with Valentine's Day.

Throughout the western world, people call one another to say “Happy Valentine's Day” on February 14^th. But in the months and years following Valentine's Day 1876, there was no love lost between the two nearly simultaneous inventors of the telephone Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell. Both Bell and Gray filed patents for their telephone designs on February 14, 1876, neither with the knowledge of the other's intentions. Bell was eventually awarded the patent for reasons that are still to this day unclear, but more controversy arose in the months that followed because Gray claimed that Bell's first successful test was with Gray's design. Perhaps we will never know who truly invented the telephone, but the patent controversy cannot obscure the major technological achievement. The ability to communicate electronically has continued to expand in the years since Gray and Bell raced to capitalized on their ingenuity, but on Valentine's Day nothing seems to beat cartoon characters on cardboard and messages of love on dry chalky candy.

Clearly none of these events are related in any direct way, and none reflect any new scholarship. On the other hand, the fact that these events are connected by a single strand of time flowing through 3^rd century Rome as well as 20^th century USA cannot help but conjure an almost spiritual importance. Certainly during the later events, all of the participating actors knew it was Valentine's Day. What similar connotations did this have for the gunmen of the massacre and the patent office agent who left Elisha Gray's form at the bottom of the basket? Was Captain Cook's crew celebrating the feast of St. Valentine at the same time as the native Hawaiians were celebrating the feast of Makahiki and worshiping the god Lono? Events involving people do not always need an explicit connection because people even those in disparate locations, times and cultures certainly must have some similar hopes dreams ideas and beliefs, and those bonds must be tighter on a widely celebrated holiday like Valentine's Day.

Introduction to and Review of Free Internet Source Experiment

The following post is an experiment in free technology resources (primarily Wikipedia). My attempt at writing this post using only the sources was problematic for several reasons. First, it is almost impossible to make a viable historical argument using largely factual sources. If there was an archive of letters written by people throughout the years on Valentine's Day to their significant others published online, perhaps some original work could have been accomplished. Perhaps a psychological history could be attempted about how holidays live Valentine's Day affect people in times of war, or how war affects the celebration of Valentine's Day.

Second, if a creative topic is struck upon, it is almost impossible not to plagiarize from a source like Wikipedia. All it does is offer facts. And so one finds themselves using these facts in their own work, because that's all there really is to go on. There is no hope of making side assumptions from the work in Wikipedia because all the assumptions are already made. In the end, the best that can be hoped for is to synthesize the material from Wikipedia in a way that makes it unique or to at least attempt to reword it.

Finally, essays written from free internet sources lack the personality of true research projects once again because of the trivial nature of the articles. It is hard to become passionate about a work in which one is simply synthesizing thoroughly researched material. Certainly Valentine's Day has the potential to be an interesting subject, and one can learn quite a bit about it from Wikipedia, but because the information gained will never become a part of their original research in a significant way it cannot be written about with the same personality and with the same drive to force an argument home.

Review of The Western Reserve Historical Society's Website

The Western Reserve Historical Society is an institution dedicated to preserving and disseminating the history of Northeast Ohio, specifically in the region formerly known as the Connecticut Western Reserve. The WRHS website features a wide variety of materials. Visitors will find in depth previews of all of their current exhibitions, searchable catalogs for the museums and library, educational materials, as well as the standard visitor information one would expect to find on the website of a public cultural institution. The rubric for this review is based on the Rating System for Evaluating Public History Websites established by Debra DeRuyver, Jennifer Evans, James Melzer, and Emma Wilmer and published by the National Council for Public History.

It is unfortunate that the first thing one notices when arriving at www.wrhs.org is the rather unprofessional visual theme and color selections. It seems that the site designers were attempting to give the site a 1950s modern feel, which does not mesh with the institution's academic and scholarly subject matter. On the other hand, the site is easy to navigate, and the navigation bars at the left and along the top cover nearly everything in the WRHS system. The top bar provides a link to all of the museums, libraries, and historic sites encompassed by the Western Reserve Historical Society, while the left bar leads to such things as the collections catalog, background information about the Western Reserve and the society, and educational materials for teachers and students. With little searching effort, one can find the institutional mission statement for the WRHS. It is clearly articulated and covers nearly all aspects of the institution; the website certainly seems to go a long way in fulfilling the statement as well. The website would certainly receive high marks in the first section of the NCPH rating system.

Apart from the color scheme issues, the technical aspects of the website appear to be quite sound. There are no broken links, and all of the multimedia works quickly. Each of the exhibits in the WRHS history museum have their own preview website, and several feature flash media. On a computer updated with the latest version of the Flash Player, the media all works flawlessly, but visitors are given the option of viewing versions without it. This is important when faced with the possibility that users may not have the same levels of technological skills or equipment. The left link bar also features contact information for the institutions offices and a list of individual staff members. This is an important feature for donors of visitors that might not have a lot of time to wait to get their questions answered. As one would expect, there is also plenty of assistance for those wishing to know when they can visit the institution and how to get there. Surprisingly, the left bar's link to the museum's online shop features only two items for sale; one is a museum donation, and the other is a necklace, the picture of which is broken. The “Gift Shop” link on the top bar offers a little more, but still cannot qualify as a true online shop. In fact, it does not appear that any of the items featured on the site can actually be bought online, but rather must be requested over the phone or by email. Certainly a history website's online shop cannot be considered one of its most important aspects, but it is important for a site to have high professional standards for anything that it puts on the web. Perhaps the WRHS would be better off taking down the shop portion of their site until it is more complete.

The WRHS website offers plenty of research opportunities for academic historians. It's library claims to be "the principal repository for histories, records, and papers relating to the growth and development of Cleveland and that portion of northeastern Ohio once known as the Connecticut Western Reserve.” Through what must have been an incredible effort, all of the library's collections are searchable online. A search for Carl Stokes, Cleveland mayor and first African-American mayor of a major city, returns a wide array of books, pamphlets, and reports. In fact, the WRHS library has the entire collection of Stokes' manuscripts including personal correspondence, meeting minutes, and newspaper clippings. Perhaps in the future the WRHS library will be able to make more of its material available online in the form of digitized documents and photographs, but the ability to search such a vast collection of primary source material is a good start.

Educators visiting the WRHS website will find a wide range of teaching materials available for nearly all grade levels. Perhaps the best of the online education programs “An Urban Childhood” which introduces students to life in Cleveland in 1850. The site uses animation and sound, combined with images of primary source documents and museum objects to teach students about historical issues as complex as “the 4 factors of production”. The educational materials do not dumb down history, and they encourage questions and debate. Furthermore, the materials encourage educators to bring their students to the museum to view the objects and documents for themselves. The “Urban Childhood” program features two sites, one for before the field trip and one for after. This is not only beneficial to the students, but it is another way to bring visitors and revenue to the museum.

While the site certainly has its flaws, notably the lack of community building features, it does manage to support the mission of the Western Reserve Historical society by providing a greater degree of access to the collections and assisting in the education of the public. While the site's color scheme leaves something to be desired, it is well organized and easy to navigate. Essentially, any criticisms of the site are diminished because of their marginal importance, while strengths are magnified because they happen to be in the areas most important in a public history website.

1. DeRuyver et. al. Rating System for Evaluating Public History Websites. April 30, 2000. http://www.publichistory.org/reviews/rating_system.html, Feb 10, 2008