Know Your Archives: The Center for Popular Music

Randall Stephens

It takes a certain temperament to be a historian.  For example, you have to, at least on some level, enjoy rummaging through dusty manuscripts and spending hour upon hour hunting down sources, reading, rereading, and conducting keyword searches until your fingers become arthritic claws.

I don't enjoy that last one, but I do enjoy visiting archives.  Some more than others.  I've been to a variety of amazing collections over the years.  Maybe only one of those, the Reading Room of the Library of Congress, matched shear beauty with the amazing scope of materials.  (Getting tired of reading through that bound volume of brittle 19th-century newspapers?  Have a stretch and look up at the beautiful dome.) For the most part, historians don't visit archives for the lovely vistas. Quite a few archives are situated in cold basements with little sunlight and flickering, humming florescent lights.  An ideal setting for a troglodyte, but not a vitamin-D-deprived historian.

Downtown Nashville, summer 2012

This past summer I went on the road to do some initial research for my next book project, currently titled The Devil's Music: Rock and Christianity from Elvis to Larry Norman.  It was a great experience.  All the archivists and assistants I encountered proved terrifically helpful.  I visited some really stunning collections.  Wheaton College's Billy Graham Center may lay claim to being the best place to study all things related to 20th-century Protestantism, and evangelicalism in particular.  (Don't let their hopelessly outdated 1990s website make you think any less of the place.)  To the south of Wheaton I trekked to the Southern Baptist Historical Library. The staff their gave me numerous tips and helped me track down obscure pamphlets, documents, and letters that I could never have imagined even existed.  As a bonus, the Southern Baptist Historical Library is in Nashville.  Music nuts can take a break by boot-scooting over to the Country Music Hall of Fame or dropping some greenbacks at the Ernest Tubb Record Shop, founded in 1947.

My favorite collection that I visited on this cross-country trip was the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, TN. Seldom has research been more fun.  I perused dozens and dozens of books on rock history, gospel, and pop music.  (It was hard not to fall down an rabbit hole.) I listened to a rare, 1956 acetate interview with Elvis Presley from a Texas radio station.  Girls screamed in the background as a flustered Elvis answered with his typical "yessir." I thumbed through anti-rock diatribes from the Carter years.  Through it all I got a better handle on my topic. 

The Center holds acres of records, tapes, magazines, books, manuscripts, and much more. (Search there extensive collection here.)  And the staff at this place, the gem in its crown, could not have been more helpful.  With their aid I found enough research material to keep me working away for months. 

In the Know Your Archives interview embedded above, I speak with Dale Cockrell, Director, and Martin Fisher, Curator of Recorded Media Collections.  They describe the materials the Center collects, the kinds of research being done there, and pretty much explain why anyone doing anything on music history should make the trip to MTSU. 

John Fea's Virtual Office Hours

Randall Stephens

Historical Society member, Springsteen disciple, and historian extraordinaire John Fea recently launched a series of videos called "Virtual Office Hours" from his blog The Way of Improvement Leads Home.

So far he's created four clips.  In these Fea discusses some of the concepts that animate a course he teaches on historical methods.  Listen to Fea discuss "The Past is a Foreign Country," "In Search of a Usable Past," "Are Historians Revisionists?" and "How Do Historians Think?"

Fea does a wonderful job of explaining concepts like historicism, Whig history, and the much-misunderstood/maligned revisionism.  Students of history, and their profs, too, would do well to watch these.  And many of us who teach courses on historiography, methods, and the like could take a page out of Fea's playbook here.

Perhaps the next step would be to get students to use technology to engage the concepts and themes introduced in a methods class.  Maybe they could make group-project videos that explore the uses and abuses of the past, the role that history plays in forming policy, how our understanding of the past changes from one generation to the next, and more. 

Contemporary Images of the Indians in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show

Heather Cox Richardson

I have recently tumbled over two youtube videos that show provocative images of the Indian performers in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. These videos compile images from the collections of the Library of Congress.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show is well

known. It was William F. Cody’s venture to cash in on the rodeos that were popular across the West. He launched the Wild West Show in 1883, promising to bring the “real” West to customers back east. He showed cowboys and stagecoach robberies and battles between soldiers and Indians, promising to eastern audiences that they were seeing the reality of life in the late nineteenth-century American West.

Historians have torn Buffalo Bill’s claim to shreds, pointing out how carefully Cody crafted the performances to illustrate his own beliefs about the meaning of America and the West. But, “true” or not, the show was a roaring success. In 1887, Cody boasted: “I kick worse than any quartermaster’s mule ever kicked if I don’t clear a thousand dollars a day.” That year, he took the show to England to perform for Queen Victoria.

The Wild West Show was popular enough that Thomas Edison expended some of his early film to record pieces of it. The first video shows images from his experiment spliced together. It reveals the performers parading through a

packed street as they entered a town. Indians and cavalrymen move in a column amid a churning throng of boys and men. It’s a male crowd; only one girl is immediately obvious, and she seems notably uncomfortable in the setting. Many modern Americans forget that, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Indians were not uncommon sights in urban America. This chaotic street scene (complete with boys darting right in front of a horse, which shies away) is an eye-opener.

The rest of the clips on the video show Annie Oakley, a cowboy riding a bronco, and two scenes of Indian dances. The dances are good illustrations that Cody’s “real” West was carefully crafted to show what eastern audiences wanted to see. The filmed dances say far more about racist audiences than Indian cultural practices.

Those dancing scenes contrast powerfully with the still images on this second video. These are photographs taken in the late nineteenth century by artist Gertrude Kasebier. Her goal was to take images of the Lakota in the Wild West Show that would reveal them as individuals. She preferred to capture her subjects at rest, without the accouterments of their stage personas. Her images are quite a contrast to those in the Edison film.

Grades Are In!!!!

Heather Cox Richardson

This is what teachers feel like when the semester finally drags to an end:

Good luck to all of our graduates. We hope you learned as much from us as we did from you.

American History TV at the OAH

Randall Stephens

Readers might be interested in the latest from C-Span's American History TV. On C-Span 3, the program offers "event coverage, eyewitness accounts, and discussions with authors, historians and teachers. Click here to learn more about American History TV."  Here are selections from the show's Organization of American Historians conference coverage:

History of Birth Control - NYU Historian Linda Gordon at OAH in Milwaukee

History of Beer and Spirits: Backstory with the American History Guys in Milwaukee

See more OAH interviews here.

And speaking of interviews and C-Span, our very own blogger, Philip White, recently appeared on BookTV to speak about his new book, Our Supreme Task: How Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain Speech Defined the Cold War Alliance.

"The Past . . . It's Here": NYPL Trailer

Randall Stephens

Ah . . . the adventures of the archives. The thrill of the dusty old book hunt. The joy of finding that seldom-seen document. Have a look at this fun video that the NYPL has put out there to capture the wonderful world of research. (H/t to Susan Watkins, director of ENC's Nease Library.)

Some background from the good people at the NYPL:

Here in the Milstein Division we are very excited to finally show off our movie trailer-style promo video that debuted this week on YouTube. We loved some of the videos that other divisions and branches of the library were making, especially Jefferson Market’s Haunted Library, so we knew that we had to make our own. After writing a script, we contacted some great people in the film and television industry that were willing to help us out.

Our hero, played by actor Ronan Babbitt, uses several library resources to help him discover his family secrets. We first see him receive library materials from our page, Sarah, which means that he filled in a call slip after consulting the library catalog. Our hero then flips through the card catalog drawers. Since we no longer use the old card catalog drawers for our books, what you will find here are three sets of indexes: one for coats of arms, one for images of passenger ships, and one of New York City illustrations.>>>

Acres of Glitter and Denim: David Bowie's Age of Fracture?

Randall Stephens

Art rock chameleon David Bowie turned 65 yesterday. The BBC has a slew of programs that it lined up to celebrate the star's reaching that milestone. An original 1973 TV performance of "The Jean Geanie," presumed lost, has been rediscovered and re-aired.

At the Guardian Alexis Petridis reflects on the unlikely longevity of Bowie:

It wasn't just the drugs: there was something about the intensity with which he worked during that decade - the scarcely-believable ten-year creative streak that begins with the 1970s The Man Who Sold The World and ends with the 1980's Scary Monsters And Super-Creeps – that suggests an early demise. Someone that burns that brightly probably isn't going to burn for long.

And the Telegraph reports that fans are clamoring for a tour: "Dozens of music industry celebrities from Boy George to Gary Barlow took to the online social networking site Twitter to congratulate him on a remarkable career."

One of the more interesting historical perspectives on the gender-bending, shape-shifting Bowie comes from Peter Doggett, author of The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie And The 1970s

(Random House, 2012), who argues that, in hindsight, the Thin White Duke was the most influential rock star of the 1970s. Certainly, when looking at how instrumental Bowie was in creating the rock persona and inspiring so much music in the 1980s, there's a case to be made here.

Writes Doggett in the intro to his book:

Fragmentation was central to Bowie's seventies. He pursued it in artistic terms by applying cut-up techniques to his language, subverting musical expectations, employing noise as a way of augmenting and substituting for melody, using a familiar formula and distorting it into an alarming new shape. He applied the same tools to his identities and images, assembling each different persona from the remnants of the past. Even Ziggy Stardust, the guise in which Bowie left his most enduring mark on the decade, was assembled like a collage from a bewildering variety of sources, despite his appearance of having stepped fully formed from a passing flying saucer. Elements of Ziggy came from pop: from Judy Garland, the Rolling Stones, the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, the Beatles, Elvis Presley, Little Richard. Strands of pop art were also visible in his disguise, from Richard Hamilton's assimilation of science fact and science fiction to Andy Warhol's obsession with surface and the borrowed sheen of stardom.

Do we have enough perspective on the 1970s to make those kinds of broad claims? The Age of Fracture through David Bowie's career and music?

Computing Machines

Randall Stephens

How did we get here?

I'm typing this on my MacBook Pro, a laptop that is a gazillion times more powerful and "pro" than the towering, whirring, always-freezing-up computers I used back in grad school. In fact, my iPad is much faster on many applications than the Dell laptop I carted around five years ago. (Check out Dan's great post from February on a related topic.)

For a little wisdom on the early days of computing and the accelerated pace of change, have a look at this clip of a BBC documentary from the early 1990s.

Jack Rakove on Why I Became a Historian

Randall Stephens

For the last year I've been kicking around an idea for a new series of video interviews. I thought it might be interesting to ask various historians why they decided to study history. In the short responses that I'll post

you'll hear about what drew a scholar to the field and what engaged them on a personal level. I've always enjoyed reading autobiographical reflections of historians, and this is, in some way, a little extension of that genre.

The first installment features Jack N. Rakove, who reflects on his early fascination with history and his later pursuit of graduate study and career as a professor and author.

Rakove is William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and Professor of Political Science and Law at Stanford University. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1975. Rakove is the author of a variety of books on legal and political history and the American Revolution, including: The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (Knopf, 1979); James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic (Scott Forsman, 1990); Declaring Rights: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford 1997); Founding America: Documents from the Revolution to the Bill of Rights (Barnes & Noble, 2006); and Revolutionaries: Inventing an American Nation (Houghton Mifflin, 2010). His Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (Knopf, 1996) won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in History. Rakove is currently working on a book titled Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience: The Radical Significance of the Free Exercise of Religion for Oxford University Press.

War of 1812, What Was It Good for . . . ?

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A tip of the felt shako with plume hat to John Fea for this amusing video:

Sal Khan and Online Teaching

Dan Allosso

For those who don’t recognize his name, Sal Khan is the founder and faculty of Khan Academy, which offers over 2,400 educational videos on the web, free of charge. Khan’s goal is to educate the world.

He’s been featured on PBS’s News Hour, he’s on Forbes list of “Names You Need to Know,” he’s spoken at TED and at the end of his talk Bill Gates came up on stage to say how cool he thought Khan was.

In the TED Talk clip (at about 2:50), Sal Khan tells the story of how he began tutoring his cousins, and putting “refresher” talks on YouTube for them to look at when he wasn’t around. The cousins preferred the videos to the tutoring, and Khan realized the reason was that they could go over them at their own pace, without the pressure of a teacher looking at them. He extended this idea to the classroom, and suggested teachers use the videos as “homework,” and then follow up in class. Teachers become less involved in lecturing and more involved in mentoring, students get instruction that moves at their pace and requires them to master a concept before they move on (Khan says even smart students get to the end of traditional curricula with a “swiss-cheese” knowledge of a subject, which can cause problems for them later), and schools can focus less on teacher-student ratios, and more on meaningful interaction between teachers and students.

I think this is insanely cool. So does Bill Gates, and you can see what he says about it at the end of the TED Talk, and also in the clip from The Gates Notes on the Khan Academy homepage. Bill especially likes the fact that Khan “has taken all this material, and broken it down into little 12-minute lectures.” Of course I like this, because I’m doing the same thing with my online American Environmental History program. But more than that, I think it’s an editing process that helps you focus on what is really important in a topic.

Well okay, you may be thinking, but the Khan Academy format is better suited to some kinds of learning. Sure it is, but let’s not kid ourselves that there’s none of that kind of learning in what we do as history teachers. Even at the college level. Yes, he’s got a lot more math up there than he does history. And yes, I think that’s partly because history is much more driven by interpretation—it’s not just a careful accumulation of brick-like facts that get stacked one on another until you’ve built a wall (with apologies to Arthur Marwick). But the idea of turning lectures and discussions/reflections upside-down is exciting!

There’s been a lot of recent talk here and throughout the history blogosphere (for example) about the positive and negative possibilities of online education. I think Khan Academy is worth looking at carefully, and keeping a sharp eye on.