Archive for the ‘History’ Category
Fact, fabrication, and the Internet
I love pondering issues like this. The Atlantic headline and subtitle pretty much explain it: “How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit” T. Miles Kelly encourages his students to deceive thousands of people on the Web. This has angered many, but the experiment helps reveal the shifting nature of the truth on [...]
May 16th, 2012Pinyin, created
Zhou Youguang, creator of modern pinyin, Romanized Chinese as we know it. Photo by Shiho Fukada. When we think of languages, there is a tendency to see them as always having been there, as changing maybe slightly over time, but being unending mostly. English speakers tend to have an overly bold attitude about their language, [...]
April 5th, 2012In which discussing my job becomes instead a tangent on why we cannot digitize everything
Old court dockets, relative to my hand. (Basically, they’re enormous!) I work part-time as an Archives Technician at the National Archives at Atlanta. During those days, half of my time is spent in the public area, meaning I am either in the research room assisting genealogists or in the textual research room observing and assisting [...]
March 24th, 2012My life is richer, simply because I asked
Subtitle: An oral history project, incredible families, much talk on adoption, China, love, and family, and how I found a title for this project Last January, I was struck with an idea for a project. I had read a book about a generation of Chinese girls who had been adopted into families worldwide, with a [...]
February 29th, 20121988: “History will record…”
An incredibly powerful photo from Cleve Jones’s book. He says: "Here I am with the friends of Zoel St. Sauver at his panel, 1988. For many of us, AIDS was our World War II, our Vietnam. This photograph reminds me of the classic memorial to Iwo Jima. All of us in the picture were HIV [...]
February 12th, 2012A Drama of Medicine & Man
In another life, I could have been a doctor, a medical researcher, someone spending a lifetime in the lab finding ways, meanings, solutions to diseases and maladies. I say this because I find medical history, the progression and discovery and trials and missteps, to be wildly fascinating (but honestly, fascination doesn’t equal brilliance in that field, let [...]
January 11th, 20122011 [a year like no other] and its place in history
I have read two articles in the last week whose arguments have begun with Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay The End of History, which argued that as we reached the final demise of the U.S.S.R., “liberal democracy had triumphed and become the undisputed evolutionary end point toward which every national system was inexorably moving: fundamental political ferment was over [...]
December 27th, 2011“In Small Things Forgotten”
The "aesthetic of the ugly" has persisted with the folk culture of making ugly-face pottery. Man, archeologists love them some old pottery, too. “Some things in our lives are so pervasive, that we give them little thought. A ballpoint pen, for example, or a rubberband. The coffee filter gets little consideration too.” It is a [...]
December 22nd, 2011On Christmas and material memory
1950s holiday cheer, and kitsch old & new 1954 sampling of Christmas decorations, which were one way that people made use of electricity in the Tennessee Valley, and the reason someone was paid by the TVA to document and photograph these things. One day last week, I spent the morning compiling and digitizing documents to [...]
December 11th, 2011On people, or: “I didn’t want to start with an issue”
Peter Hessler, former English teacher in China and author of several books on Chinese life and people, both historical and modern, is a 2011 MacArthur Fellow and long-form journalist. In his interview in reception of his prize, he spoke on what it is to write about China and Chinese life, to him: “There’s always been [...]
November 26th, 2011