Nez Perce History presentation at Aunties

Spokane readers, have you bought a book from Auntie's lately? We are lucky to have a first-class independent bookstore in our community. In addition to selling books, Aunties regularly sponsors readings and literary gatherings. An upcoming author event may be of interest to readers of Northwest History:

William Craig

 Lin Tull Cannell, Author presentation

 Fri. Aug. 10, 7:00 pm
Auntie's Bookstore, 402 W. Main, Spokane WA 


Local author Lin Tull Cannell is a historian with expertise on William Craig, a native of Virginia who came out west in the mid-1800’s, became a mountain man, married into the Nez Perces tribe, and tried to mediate peace between the tribe and settlers from the east. Cannell visits Auntie’s to talk about her book. The Intermediary: William Craig among the Nez Perces. Please join us for this presentation, which is free and open to the public.

William Craig is fascinating figure in the very early white history of the region. A brief biography of him is here [PDF]. In 1918 an acquaintance of Craig gave a brief reminiscence to the Lewiston Morning Tribune. Cannell is the first person to write a full-length biography of this fascinating figure. Support your local bookstore and turn out for this presentation!

Hacking the Academy, a Publishing Experiment

A brief essay of mine has appeared in a new volume, Hacking the Academy. I am excited because this is not just a book but an experiment in digital publishing, backed by some of the most respected names and institutions in the field of digital humanities.

Hacking the Academy is edited by Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. In May of 2010 they used social media networks to put out a call for contributions to the volume, giving would-be contributors only a week to submit their essays, "the better to focus their attention and energy." They received "329 submissions from 177 authors, with nearly a hundred submissions written during the week-long event and the other two-thirds submitted by authors from their prior writing on the subject matter." One-sixth of the submissions were accepted for the volume, including my "How to Read a Book in One Hour."

Hacking the Academy is interesting for both its content and its approach to publication. The content focuses on "how the academy might be beneficially reformed using digital media and technology," particularly "writing that moved beyond mere complaints about the state of the academy into shrewd diagnoses and potential solutions." The essays are organized into three broad categories: "Hacking Scholarship," "Hacking Teaching," and "Hacking Institutions." The essays alternate between provocative big-picture, "this is how we ought to start doing things" pieces (such as David Parry's Burn the Boats/Books and Jo Gildi's terrific "Reinventing the Academic Journal") and more immediately practical pieces such as "Unconferences," a how-to guide by Ethan Watrall, James Calder, and Jeremy Boggs.

Hacking the Academy will be published in two ways--a free, digital publication available right now and a forthcoming print edition. The publisher is the University of Michigan Press, via their digitalculturebooks imprint. UM Press attracted a lot of attention when they announced a shift to predominantly digital publishing in 2009. The digitalculturebooks series now features over two dozen titles, available online and in print as either cloth of paper editions.

Hacking the Academy is something of a test case for a new model of producing a scholarly anthology. Coming out under the imprimatur of some of the most respected names and institutions in digital humanities, and with an timely topic and high-quality content, this book should have an impact. It will be interesting to see if the work is adopted in classrooms, cited in the literature, blogged and tweeted and run through the social networks. It will also be interesting to see if people will buy print editions of what they could read online for free.

If this is successful it could be a first step into a new publishing world.

How to Read a Book in One Hour

This is the first in an occasional series of posts where I will share some of my teaching materials. This particular post began when I answered a question on Ask Metafilter. These tips are designed for graduate students reading academic monographs--use at your own risk. Googling the phrase "How to read a book in one hour" produces this and this page as well.

How to Read a Book in One Hour


"How do I keep up with the reading?" This is perhaps the most frequent question I get from overwhelmed history graduate students. And no wonder. A graduate history course typically has 500 or more assigned pages a week, and a full slate of courses can quickly push your weekly reading assignments into the thousands of pages. How is it possible to read that much?

Those who survive graduate school learn along the way that it is necessary to change the way you read. As children we are taught that reading is always linear--you start on page one and end on page three-hundred-and-sixty-seven and skipping pages is cheating. That is the way you read all through public school and the way most people read their whole lives. Once you get to grad school, however, it is time to leave that childhood illusion behind.

You are no longer reading books for the stories contained inside. As a historian, you are reading them for other reasons--to understand the authors' arguments, to see how they handle evidence, to examine how they structure their arguments, and to analyze their work as a whole. Perhaps above all, you need to understand how any given book fits into the historiography, how it speaks to other works on the subject, its strengths and weaknesses.  Plodding through a book one page at a time is not the best way to understand a book in graduate school.

You need to devour books, to fall on them like a hungry weasel on a fat chicken. You break their spines, rummage about in their innards for the tasty bits, and make your way to the next chicken coop. Here is how to do it:


1. Create a clean space--a table, the book, paper and a writing utensil, and nothing else.

2. Read two academic reviews of the book you photocopied beforehand. Don't skip this step, these will tell you the book's perceived strengths and weakness. Allow five minutes for this.

3. Read the introduction, carefully. A good intro will give you the book's thesis, clues on the methods and sources, and thumbnail synopses of each chapter. Work quickly but take good notes (with a bibliographic citation at the top of the page.) Allow twenty minutes here.

4. Now turn directly to the conclusion and read that. The conclusion will reinforce the thesis and have some more quotable material. In your notes write down 1-2 direct quotes suitable for using in a review or literature review, should you later be assigned to write such a beast. Ten to fifteen minutes.

5. Turn to the table of contents and think about what each chapter likely contains. You may be done--in many cases in grad school the facts in any particular book will already be familiar to you, what is novel is the interpretation. And you should already have that from the intro and conclusion. Five minutes.

6. (Optional) Skim 1-2 of what seem to be the key chapters. Look for something clever the author has done with her or his evidence, memorable phrases, glaring weaknesses--stuff you can mention and sound thoughtful yourself when it is your turn to talk in the seminar room. Ten minutes, max.

7. Put the notes and photocopied review in a file folder and squirrel it away. These folders will serve as fodder for future assignments, reviews of similar books, lectures, grant applications, etc.

8. Miller time. Meet some friends and tell them the interesting things you just learned (driving it deeper it your memory).

Will you learn as much using this method as you would if you spent the 5-8 hours reading it in the conventional method?  Heck no. But the real meat of the book, the thesis and key points, will actually be more clear to you using this method. Otherwise it is too easy for a graduate student to get lost in the details and miss the main points.

This method works better with some books than others.  If a book is considered especially important, or if it falls squarely within your research area, you should give it more time. And never, ever tell the professor that you read the assignment in an hour. Not even if that professor is me. I'll flunk you.

[Image of a 1960s library poster from Flickr user VB Library and shared via a Creative Commons license.]

Resurrecting Lost Books with PublicDomainReprints.org

One of Isaac Asimov's lesser stories concerned two scientists in the far future who unknowingly reinvent discarded technologies. It was a humorous tale where the 26th-century men "invented" matches, books, and finally a propeller-driven aircraft (to replace laser igniters, computer screens, and anti-gravity cars).

I thought of the old story as I sit down to review PublicDomainReprints.org, "an experimental non-commercial project to archive and re-publish public domain works," The site "any of the supported sites such as the the Internet Archive, Google Books or Universal Library (books in public domain ONLY) and reprint it using Lulu.com. " Millions of out-of-print books back in print, just like that! I learned about PublicDomainReprints.org from a post on Metafilter and decided to give it a whirl.

In keeping with the theme of this blog I selected the Reverend Samuel Parker's Journal of an Exploring Tour Beyond the Rocky Mountains (1838) an important early account from the first missionary to answer the "Macedonian Cry," the dramatic journey of four Nez Perce men to Saint Louis in 1831 to request Christian missionaries. Parker's 1836 journey to the northwest was sponsored by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and his account of the journey was snapped up by eager would-be missionaries and their supporters. It is a work that both shaped the history of the northwest and gives us one of our best descriptions of the region in the fur trade era.

Ordering the book could not have been easier. You find the volume you like on Goggle Books (or the other supported services) and copy the URL. You paste the URL in a box at PublicDomainReprints.org, confirm your email, and are soon sent a link to an order page at Lulu.com, a web based print on demand service. Hand over your information and credit card number and the order is placed. It really was the work of a few minutes and cost $18.29 shipped.

Eight days later I had the book--my very own 1838 (sort of) edition of this important work:


The print quality is pretty good--not exactly crisp but clear and legible (the picture below suffers a bit from being taken in low light):


Some users of the service have complained that it does not handle illustrations very well, while others have commented that this is improving. The illustrations in my reprint were nothing to write home about, fairly muddy though clear enough to give you the idea. It is a shame they are not better, because mid-nineteenth century book engraving are a wonderful lost art:


The quality of the cover and binding were good enough for a paperback. I liked the very wide margins around each page, room for ample note taking for those of us who read with a pencil in hand. I was quite pleased with this service--it is a real boon for historians of the pre-1928 era! (1928 of course is when modern copyright laws kick in to spoil the digital history party.)

Now of course any book that is available for this service can even more easily be downloaded to your hard drive with a couple of clicks--which is just what I did with the Reverend Parker. On my Tablet PC I can pull up this book, read it or search by keyword, digitally highlight key passages, copy and paste quotations into a paper that I am working with, and otherwise have my way with the text in a fashion impossible with a mere printed volume. So what is the point of reprinting it?

I can see a couple of uses. First, not many of us are comfortable reading entire volumes on the computer screen. I could see ordering reprints of key books in my research and reading them with the same book up on my PC for annotations and quotes. This would also be a great way to assign an out-of-print work in the classroom. Especially for those of us who teach local history or obscure topics where key resources are apt to be out of print.