Longfellow’s Children?: Reading Common-place’s Poetic Research Column

The editors of the online journal Common-place perhaps had Whitman’s line from the 1855 preface of Leaves of Grass: “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem” in mind when they decided recently to inaugurate a column that features contemporary poetry based on historical research. “Poetic Research” is a reminder that history is not the sole province of professional historians and that some of the best history has been written by poets.

To introduce readers to the column, the site offers this statement:

Something is going on in the world of contemporary poetry--history is flooding in. Poets are pursuing history and its dilemmas head-on; they are using primary source material to flesh out social, political, and lyric imaginaries; they are ransacking the tools of historiography to provision all manner of aesthetic expeditions. Within the last ten years or so, such creative inclinations have quietly evolved into a major, and pervasive, mode of literary production. History lovers, take note: these poets’ research work is thorough and driven, their archive instincts are free-range, even feral, and their use of historical source runs from the beautiful to the bizarre.

Why are so many twenty-first-century poets weaving American history into their process and product? What are the effects of this literary-historical groundswell? The answers are forthcoming, issue by issue, here in Common-place. Each edition of this new column will present the work of a poet whose creative process is deeply engaged with historical research. We will read their poems. And the poets will also give us something new, something the literary world hasn't asked for yet, a Statement of Poetic Research—poets’ own descriptions of history’s influences on their art, how they approach (and are altered by) research, and the new ways they hope their work brings history to readers.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the statement’s boldness, I sense a bit of defensiveness here. As if poets may be self-conscious about treading on historians’ turf and therefore need simultaneously to flaunt their “feral” spirit while asserting that their research processes are both “thorough” and “driven.” But is such a show necessary? Is it not our modern, professionalized conception of the historical discipline that has created a distinction between poetry and history? Are we not part of a common pursuit: gaining a deeper understanding of how and why human beings have thought and acted in certain ways in particular times and places? Perhaps contemporary poets feel it necessary to apologize for the sins of their forebears: Homer, Virgil, Tennyson, and Longfellow, to name a few. Many critics, past and present, argue that their history was not accurate—they distorted the truth or just got basic facts wrong. Different from their predecessors, today’s historical poets, this statement suggests, are capable of balancing good research with “beautiful,” and even “bizarre” creativity.

As a public historian I have a different perspective on this issue than some of my stodgier colleagues might. In graduate school, I worked at the Paul Revere House in Boston, a historic site that would not exist without a poem. Longfellow’s 1860 poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” was the text that made a middling Boston silversmith of modest significance to the revolutionary cause into a household name and a staple of historical curricula. Whenever I began a talk with “Listen my children and you shall hear,” young and old visitors alike could invariably add: “Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,” and they could always recite the line: “One if by land, and two if by sea.” From there, it was easy to get them engaged in the story of Revere’s ride and its significance to the outbreak of the American Revolution. Although I confess to having corrected the historical inaccuracies of the poem many times, Longfellow was, I hoped, the gateway to a deeper understanding of a key moment in American history.

As an interpreter, I was painfully aware of the stark contrast between Longfellow’s lyricism and my academic explanations of past events. Poetry, it seemed, was a much more effective means of communicating a history that people both remembered and enjoyed. In some ways, it was perhaps also truer, in the sense that it conveyed the spirit of the Revolution and the contingency of the moment better than historians’ descriptions of the same events. So, do the poems on Common-place’s “Poetic Research” page match up to their distinguished forebears? Readers will have to judge for themselves. The first two installments--Robert Strong’s account of the making of the Eliot Bible, “Bright Advent,” and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s musings on the “The Age of Phillis” (Wheatley, that is)--offer dramaturgical explorations of cross-cultural encounters. We hear, for example, John Sassamon and John Eliot’s musings on the challenges of translation and conversion, Susanna Wheatley’s advice to her slave, and Phillis’s longing for her African mother. For this reader, hearing from, rather than about, these historical actors was refreshing and illuminating. With precious few historical sources to narrate the history of Native-English interaction in seventeenth-century New England or slavery in eighteenth-century Boston, having poets’ imaginative reconstructions of the thoughts and dialogues of Eliot, Sassamon, and the Wheatleys (owner and slave) opens new avenues for discussing and thinking about the past.

Whether readers enjoy these particular poems as much as I did, I think they will agree that Common-place’s decision to include poetry alongside its excellent essays and book reviews was inspired. Other history journals would do well to emulate their model. Like a good issue of The New Yorker, prose and poetry complement one another, making for a challenging, but ultimately more stimulating, reading experience.

~ Will Walker

Chile's complicated commemoration of 1973

This September Chile celebrated its 200th birthday. And not unlike other nations that have marked this monumental milestone, the Southern Cone country rolled out the proverbial red carpet to celebrate the event. Throughout the long, thin country festive festivities flourished: fiestas patrias, national dances and dishes, declarations and speeches.

In addition to the bicentennial celebrations, Chile also put together a laundry list of public works projects to polish the occasion: Santiago’s 690 kilometer intra/intercity bike path, the river-walk park Gran Parque Mapocho, Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center, and the renovation of the nation’s National Stadium, among many others.

This September also marked the 37th anniversary of the military coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Marxist president Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973. But for the commemorators remembering ‘la via chilena al socialismo’ (the Chilean path to socialism) and Allende’s Popular Unity government, mixing the bicentennial euphoria with the memories of a socialist dream crushed by the harsh realities of dictatorship brought about a bitter-sweet taste.

Perhaps this was no more apparent than at the September 11th memorial act hosted by the human rights organization Agrupación Metropolitana de ex Presas y Presos Políticos at the National Stadium. As many may or may not know, the National Stadium was converted into a concentration camp for 58 days following the bloody U.S.-backed coup. There, countless thousands of Chileans and hundreds of foreigners passed through the portals and into hell: tension, torture, terror; detention, disappearance, death.

I had followed an invitation by the Agrupación’s president and director, Ms. Wally Kunstmann, to participate in the inauguration ceremony not of the newly remodeled stadium (something reserved for the following day) but of a small section of stadium seating that had been left untouched during the bicentennial renovation. Assigned “special protection” status in 2003 when the stadium was declared a National Historic Monument (thanks in large part to the Agrupación’s initiative), the wooden bleachers and entranceway just beneath, known as “Escotilla 8,” were saved in memory of the stadium’s one-time prisoners.

The handbills distributed at the evening event by aging members and younger allies of the Agrupación informed me and hundreds more that “For the first time, the National Stadium opens its doors on this emblematic date to pay tribute to President Allende, to the comrades that were detained in this site of prison and torture” and that the stadium’s “stands after 37 years recover their dignity.”

Today’s visitor to the stadium will at once notice the marked difference between Escotilla 8 and the newly polished stadium dressed in state-of-the-art seating and a world-class track and field. Escotilla 8’s splintered row-benches and uneven concrete stand in stark contrast to the clean, straight lines of the stadium’s new multi-million dollar improvements. The disparity between the historically saved section of seats and the stadium’s upgraded aesthetics is at once drastic, and impossible to ignore, generating an emotive, if not eerie, sensation for the unsuspecting visitor.

Memorializing the figurative and physical starting point of seventeen years of state-sponsored terror has proved a daunting task. Even with the 2003 National Historic Monument designation, constructing mediations at the site has resulted in a laundry list of problems: competing memorialization projects, state and political stonewalling, and schisms between human rights organizations. It is ironic then that the bicentennial renovation contributed to revealing the stadium’s not-so-secret secret. By revamping the sporting complex, so too was the stadium’s scar exposed.

The inauguration of Escotilla 8 proved to be historically important for human rights actors and activists commemorating a complicated past. The large banner I helped hang with Agrupación members above Escotilla 8 read “Contra la Tortura y la Impunidad” (Against Torture and Impunity), an assertion that seems especially urgent given September 12th’s official bicentennial inauguration of the newly renovated National Stadium. This event was presided over by recently elected right-wing president Sebastian Piñera (whose party faithful make no bones about their pro-Pinochet sympathies) in an effort to move the country forward to an uncomplicated future. In Chile, then, the official mantra appears to be: in with the new and out with the old—leaving human rights commemorators with the difficult task of “reconstructing memory” in the face of impunity.

But I have a feeling that the future, like the present and past, will indeed be complicated. In many ways Escotilla 8 and its nod to 1973 stand out as a bitter black-eye, not only in the newly polished National Stadium but also in the sea of Chile’s bicentennial sweetness—and, of course, in the annals of human rights and history.

~ Zachary McKiernan

Guest blogger Zachary McKiernan is a graduate study in the History Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Mourning or marketing? The strange afterlife of the Montréal Expos

In 1967, Montréal hosted a world’s fair, Expo ’67. It was Canada’s centenary, and Expo is often looked back at as the moment when both Montréal and Canada came of age and entered onto the world stage. For Montréal, it was a victory, the first Canadian city with an international reputation, and it went on to hold the 1976 Summer Olympics. That didn’t end so well, with the city left under a mountain of debt. The Olympic Stadium, an architectural disaster, took 30 years to pay off. Colloquially, Montrealers refer to it as the Big Owe.

But all of that was in the future in 1969, when the Montréal Expos took to the field for the first time at Jarry Park in the city’s north end. The team’s name, of course, recalled 1967, commemorating and immortalising Montréal’s summer of love with the whole world. The Expos were Canada’s first baseball team (the Toronto Blue Jays followed in 1977). Montréal had a long history with the sport, dating back to the 19th century. It was also in Montréal, on 18 April 1946, that Jackie Robinson broke the colour barrier, playing for the Montréal Royals, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ top minor league affiliate.

Nevertheless, an entire new vocabulary had to be created to translate the game into French with the birth of the Expos. Much of the credit for this goes to original Expos broadcaster Jacques Doucet. For instance, in French, the field is le terrain, and le lanceur stands on le monticule before throwing to his receveur, unless le frappeur gets in the way and smacks un coup sûr. Montrealers flocked to Jarry Park to watch Nos Amours. In 1976, after the Olympics, the Expos moved to the Big O (the more acceptable nickname for Olympic Stadium).

For their first decade, the Expos lost. A lot. But then, in 1979, in the new stadium, they won 95 games and embarked on a 15-year run as a perennial contender. They made the playoffs in the strike-shortened 1981 season, only to heartbreakingly lose to the LA Dodgers. The irony here is that it was the 1981 strike that got the Expos to the playoffs. The next time there was a strike, in 1994, things didn’t go so well for Montréal and its Expos. When the strike began, the Expos were 74-40, the best team in baseball and comfortably in first place in the National League East. But that was as far as it went: the rest of the season and the entire post-season were cancelled. The Expos lost their chance at immortality and a World Series victory.

The 1994 strike was also the beginning of the end for the Expos. In the aftermath, the owners began a firesale of all their best players, including the Canadian Larry Walker. And the Expos slid into mediocrity, or worse. Ownership was unstable. Plans for a new stadium down the street from the Montréal Canadiens’ new home fell through (the site is now covered with soulless condos). Montrealers fell out of love with the Expos. Crowds dwindled. 8,000 fans in a stadium that seats 50,000 is more than depressing. Ultimately, the team was owned by Major League Baseball (MLB), which farmed the team off to Puerto Rico for some “home” games, and then, in 2005, moved the team to Washington, itself a failed MLB city.

After the Expos left town, Montrealers quickly forgot them, and re-focussed all their passions on the Canadiens, the most successful hockey team of all time. But, in the past few years, the strangest thing has happened. Expos paraphernalia is all over the city. Expos caps, t-shirts, jerseys, toques, hoodies, warm-up jackets (just like the one manager Buck Rodgers wore in 1986). Expos caps come in the traditional “beanie” style, in bleu, blanc, rouge, as well as the more traditional blue version they wore from the early 90s. For the fashion conscious, the cap also comes in purple, black, brown, green, yellow, orange, and even camouflage.

An unscientific study of four sports paraphernalia stores in downtown Montréal this week reveals that Expos’ gear cannot stay on the shelves. It’s easier to find new iPhone than a black Expos cap in this city. I myself own three Expos caps, the beanie, the blue, and a brown one. (In my defence, the beanie and the blue actually date to when the Expos still existed.)

This leaves me wondering how much of this trend is Montrealers mourning the loss of Nos Amours and how much of it is clever marketing? The Expos gear today is part of MLB’s “Cooperstown Collection,” recalling the heritage of the sport. And certainly, vintage sports logos and gear are all the rage. Jerseys and caps of defunct teams are sported by everyone from rappers on MTV to my students. Similarly, disused logos of teams that are still around are just as popular. Thus, one could be excused for forgetting that the New York Titans have been the Jets since the early 1960s. Or that the Hartford Whalers moved to Carolina to become the Hurricanes in 1996. Long-standing clubs like the Chicago Bears and Boston Bruins market their old jerseys as “vintage.” The NFL even mandates certain games as heritage matches, and the teams wear vintage uniforms.

So is the plethora of Expos gear a reflection of this trend? Are we being duped by MLB once again here in Montréal? I know I for one feel slightly queasy in buying Expos gear, or even admiring it. On one hand, it recalls my youth, a time when the Expos were contenders, and it recalls fond memories of games at the Big O, or on the radio or TV, in French or English. And baseball, if nothing else, is a sport that is marketed based on its history, its place in (North) American life. More than that, the mystique of the game also translates north (as well as south) of the border. We have our own fields of dreams here.

And this, ultimately, is the problem when marketing meets nostalgia. Nostalgia isn’t simply some kitschy view of the past, it is a real, tangible emotion. It plays heavily on our hearts, as we recall our pasts. The advertising industry has clearly figured this out. It appeals to our nostalgia in trying to sell everything to us, from cars to beer to food. And, ultimately, the Expos are just another part of this. Certainly, Expos nostalgia is a real, tangible emotion in Montréal, but we are also just the intended targets of a slick marketing campaign. And ultimately, what makes me queasiest is the fact that not only did MLB kill my baseball team, I am now shelling out my money to the very same corporation for a new Expos cap.

~ Matthew Barlow

History on the menu

I spent the first part of this summer in North Yorkshire leading the University of South Carolina’s England Field School. In the early evening while we gathered in the TV room waiting for dinner to be prepared, I valiantly argued that East Enders was the best thing on the BBC – a downright cultural phenomenon that they should appreciate. The students decidedly disagreed. They favored Great British Menu, a reality cooking show where regional chefs competed, course by course, with the ultimate winner cooking for Prince Charles and 100 guests.

Although sulking a bit about the students’ choice, I slowly got hooked on GBM. What intrigued me about the show was its sponsorship by the National Trust, a charitable organization founded in 1895to preserve “places of historic interest for the benefit of the nation.” The competing chefs were each assigned to a National Trust property, and they had to draw inspiration for their food from the gardens and surrounding area.

This move into sponsoring a reality cooking show actually fits nicely with the National Trust’s ongoing campaign to support a local foods movement. NT has developed a food policy that guides the procurement of food sold at the restaurants and tearooms at NT properties. Capitalizing on the beautiful gardens at many of the NT estates, they market the working gardens that provide tasty snacks for visitors.

Indeed, the description in the NT guidebook of the restaurant and garden at Clumber Park was so intriguing, that my friend and I decided to visit one Saturday. The day was perfect. With beautiful sunny weather, we strolled through the gardens, visited the small exhibit rooms, and enjoyed a three-course lunch in the courtyard restaurant.

The meal was delicious – and I urge US parks and museums to consider hosting “real” restaurants instead of mass-produced institutional fare. But everywhere I turned, the message “Eat Local” was hammered home to the point it became the dominant topic of conversation.

Granted, my companion and I are not average visitors. As museum professionals with rather strong backgrounds in foodways, we always visit such sites with a critical eye. Sometimes those critiques come at oblique angles.

For example, Clumber Park has a great exhibit on WWII and the home front. Clumber Park happened to be a huge munitions store as well as the testing ground for war machinery. I applaud NT for creating an exhibit that goes beyond the typical country home or garden variety. How does this connect with Great British Menu? The connection comes with the juxtaposition of the exhibit on the WWII decontamination facilities next door to the tearoom. Did any other guests look at the munitions map of the estate and question the quality of the water supply? I’d be much more reassured about the National Trust’s campaign against bottled water if I were guaranteed that the local water source was not contaminated with lead.

I’m not against historic sites as being places of advocacy, nor am I against the local foods movement (did I mention how good the restaurant was!), but I encourage curators to continue to back up their positions with honest scholarship. It is great advertising to claim the walled garden provides the food for the restaurant, but one look at the chalkboard of what’s in season proves that the property is not self-sufficient.

Do an exhibit on the challenges of the local food movement--both the current trend and its historical base. How self-sufficient were these grand homes? How many acres of farmland were necessary to supply an aristocratic meal? Or a corollary question: what did the diet look like seasonally? I suspect that if visitors had to choose between a historically accurate meal and one sourced today, there would be no competition.
Challenge visitors to think about the lasting effects of war. Do the decontamination facilities and buried munitions pose any health problems with regard to the water supply or the food grown on the estate? If so, explain how National Trust has mitigated the contamination. If not, explain the science so people aren’t worried about what might be buried in their own backyards.

It would only take a few more text panels or a 30 second plug on Great British Menu, to turn a public relations campaign into a learning opportunity.

~ Allison Marsh

An Artifact of the Road Not Taken

The National Museum of American History is home to all sorts of presidential artifacts. From Warren Harding’s silk pajamas to the gavel used in Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial to the ornate inkstand Abraham Lincoln dipped his pen into when signing the Emancipation Proclamation, the material culture of the American presidency is preserved, exhibited and interpreted. Last year, the museum added to its collection one of the solar panels that had graced the White House roof during the Carter administration. In doing so, it joined the Carter Library and Museum in Atlanta, which also houses one of the president’s panels.

When Carter first had the solar panels installed on the roof of the White House staff eating area in 1979, they represented “Solar America,” just one strategy among many to educate Americans about the energy crisis and to instigate a national effort to reduce dependence on fossil fuel through a combination of individual changes and national legislation. From wearing a cardigan sweater during a speech on energy policy to exhorting the virtues of self-sacrifice, Carter wanted to underscore the fact that change often begins at home. Putting in the solar panels on the White House was his way of demonstrating this.

It was also an object lesson on the choices available to the nation. Carter declared, “A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people-harnessing the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.”

The 32 solar panels came down off the White House roof in 1986. In 1991, their new home became the cafeteria roof at Maine’s Unity College, which exercised its commitment to sustainability by putting up twelve of the panels, where they were in operation until 2005; after that point they remained on the roof but were not operational. In 2007, Swiss artists Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller, with cooperation from Jimmy Carter, made a documentary about the panels, entitled, appropriately enough, “The Road Not Taken.” They took two panels from a storage facility at Unity and traveled and delivered them, in a van powered by biodiesel, to the Museum of American History and the Carter Library, examining the history of Carter’s energy efforts along the way. The Museum of American History added its panel to the White House collection, while the Carter museum made its acquisition part of a permanent display on the former president’s energy initiatives.

While 2002 saw 167 solar energy panels installed on White House grounds, courtesy of the National Park Service, no American president has made a personal commitment to using renewable energy sources at the White House since the Carter Administration. Last week, environmentalist, educator and writer Bill McKibben and three Unity College students sought to change that. They delivered one of Unity’s solar panels to the White House with a request that Obama install it as a symbolic resolution to address climate change and address energy issues despite the Senate filibuster of the energy bill.

McKibben and his crew wanted to bring home the fact that President can make a difference by doing small things. As McKibben pointed out in a recent article, “That’s what we kept telling reporters as they turned out along the route: if the Obamas will put solar panels back on the White House roof, or on the lawn, or anywhere else where people can see them, it will help get the message across--the same way that seed sales climbed 30% across the country in the year after Michelle planted her garden.”

Disappointed by their lukewarm reception and the White House’s refusal to accept the solar panel, McKibben and the Unity students nonetheless acknowledged another lesson from history as they carted the panel away. Yes, Obama entered the White House with a message that was remarkably similar to Carter’s speeches of the ‘70s--emphasizing national unity, sacrifice and a spirit of creativity coupled with responsibility as our best bet for licking the nation’s problems. Americans responded to Carter by electing Reagan. With seven weeks until a midterm election that sees a surprising number of candidates declaring that there is no such thing as climate change, they did not want to give the pundits and adversaries of President Obama any more ammunition.

Me, I think Obama should erect that solar panel, call it living history, and be proud of it.

~ Margo Shea

Should everything have a history button?

On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and Historiography: This particular book—or rather, set of books—is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article’s inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.

It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes “Saddam Hussein was a dickhead”.

This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.

James Bridle's printed and bound Wikipedia article the Iraq War, with edits, is a fantastic visualization of how Wikipedia works when covering a contentious and ongoing topic. "For the first time in history, we’re building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information," Bridle enthuses. "Everything should have a history button."

I have mixed feelings. Whatever the opinions of academics like myself, the cultural importance of Wikipedia is only growing. I think it is fair to say that it has become the first stop for basic factual information for most people in our culture--college undergraduates, journalists, professionals in all kinds of fields, and (rumor has it) even a few history professors. There is no use fighting it anymore. At the same time I suspect the genesis of Wikipedia articles is fairly mysterious to most users. Brindle's row of bound volumes illustrates the mutability of Wikipedia. It is shifting sand.

What Brindle doesn't do is offer any analysis of the forces that went into the 12,000 edits of the Iraq War article. It would be interesting to see someone mine the data. Are there spikes in the editing activity, and do they coincide with breaking events? Can the users be divided into categories or factions, and how do the factions seek to control the narrative? What has the role of the moderators been in shaping the article? This article points to some interesting possibilities for such research. As one of the commenters over at MetaFilter wrote, "I guess that's the difference between 'making an art project' and 'writing a book.'"

Bridle's talk which accompanied the project is available online, as are the slides. His blog, booktwo.org, featuring "literature, technology and book futurism" is wonderfully thoughtful and interesting.

~ Larry Cebula
Cross-posted from Northwest History

Voices from the Grave

Quite by accident while researching freeware backup solutions, I stumbled upon a web site that did not back up my systems, but instead tried to convince me to back up my “vital digital property.” Legacy Locker, which has been around since Spring 2009, sells services to protect families in the unfortunate but inevitable event(s) of “loss, death, or disability.” Basically, for a small fee of $30 per year, they will store passwords to your online accounts. (I immediately think of my super important Facebook page and the millions stored in my off–grid PayPal bank account.)

The brainchild of Jeremy Toeman, Legacy Locker begs your serious consideration as an online service filling a legitimate, contemporary need. "I have young children that can't read yet,” Toeman enthusiastically reveals. More importantly, “One day my blog will have meaning to them in the same way you find an old photo of your grandfather and wonder what the story was.” With measured testimonials from news organizations (Wall Street Journal and Yahoo! News), Legacy Locker postures for position in a market already saturated with personal e-solutions for [fill-in-the-blank].

The visuals of the Legacy Locker landing site are tidy but pedestrian, a formulaic web delivery to help the target audience feel comfortable with the untidy topic of death. The page has a carefully structured layout and calming baby blue palette. Prominently featured is a white, middle class, heteronormative family, back dropped by a pseudo-Craftsman suburban split level. (What world am I living in? Not this world!)

Legacy Locker exemplifies the kind of niche entrepreneurial opportunities modern digital culture has created for hobby archivists. Capitalizing on the momentum of personal digital archiving, these often trivial markets target consumers interested in creating a personal narrative of themselves: children and anniversaries, accomplishments, careers, memories and memorials, lots and lots of pictures, and...passwords.

At what point does archiving of digital minutiae, the minutiae of the minutiae, become a ridiculous exercise in self-absorption? MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (and OMG, Tweet-a-Watt) are among the better known venues. The fascinating sociological cult of self is exhibited by a near frantic mania to preserve our own legacies, an eagerness to establish social relevancy via real time scripting of our story, the preemptive writing of tomorrow’s history.

Archival functions are a system of preservation. Within historiography, digital archiving of objects and documents has the broad mission of ensuring preservation of materials for access by current and future generations. Archivists, like everyone else, have particularities of standpoint—education, generation, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, politics, geography—which shape perspectives concerning appraisal and retention. These inherent biases complicate the measurement of value, those objects important enough to be documented. There is obvious and significant difference between the professional and hobby archivist, and value-of-self creates opportunities for passionate, explorative discourse.

“On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” Nietzsche’s canonical essay, speaks to the unanswerable questions of historical ownership and relevancy: "The fact that life does need the service of history must be as clearly grasped as that an excess of history hurts it... History is necessary to the living man in three ways: In relation to his action and struggle, his conservatism and reverence, his suffering and his desire for deliverance." Nietzsche discusses at length the painful fear of irrelevancy humans impose upon themselves: "The fiercest battle is fought round the demand for greatness to be eternal... For they wish but one thing: to live at any cost". Perhaps, through archiving the self, we hope to “balance the ledger of life,” and through calculated e-conservation efforts we will successfully establish eternal personal mandate. We will have succeeded in defining our historical selves and will have attempted to preserve (our)selves for others who we hope encounter our dutiful archival efforts.


Technology is growing at an exponentially fantastic speed. The archive grows in unison. But do my loved ones really need a web service to help them cope with my LinkedIn account when I “pass?” At the risk of exposing myself as trapped in the same tar pit as my ancestors, I seriously think they do not. My survivors can find the crayon drawings from first grade in a box in the garage, clearly labeled. The legal papers are filed with the attorney, copies in the desk. Passwords? For the time being, I’ll continue to use a freeware password application. The super secret code to that is on the Post-It under the keyboard. See you on the other side. We’ll look at pictures of our grandfathers.

~ Anne Gehr