Explore Some Small-Town Museums with TinCan

I am continuing to keep the blogging light to work on some pressing projects. Here is something neat that I discovered the other day Tin Can's Youtube channel, which includes a series of short video visits to small-town museums in our region.

Every small-town in eastern Washington seems to have a history museum, but they are hard to visit. Most are staffed by volunteers, open only a few hours a month, and have little or no web presences. So these videos are a real service. They were produced as a part of the grant-funded Inland Northwest Memories Project. 

These videos are good but by no means exhaustive--there are dozens of additional small-town museums within an hour of Spokane. It would be nice to see someone pick up this project, perhaps as a part of a film course at a local university.

A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything

More silliness! I wanted to get this out of the way before our surprise guest blogger arrives. This is a 2100 page series of flip books by an art student named Jamie Bell. Nice work, Jamie:

Lahal: A Close Look at the Bone Game

Lahal: A Close Look at the Bone Game is a charming low-key brief documentary by Matthew Lulua about a popular northwest Indian game, also known as the stick game. Accounts of Indians playing the stick game and gambling for high stakes are common in the literature of the encounter, and archeology has revealed stick game pieces thousands of years old. And yet I have to admit that I never quite understood how the game is played until I watched this film. I don't know much about the film or its maker--let me know if you do!

YouTube EDU--Where is the Good Stuff?

This useful post over at the estimable AHA Today blog highlights a resource that sounds far more useful than it actually is: YouTube - EDU Directory. The EDU Directory brings together all of the programs and channels posted to YouTube from universities. Great, right?

Well, maybe. The content is a mixed bag. A look through the thumbnails and titles of the videos on the EDU landing page tell the story. Most are either sporting events, promotional videos, or videos of public talks or round tables (few of them featuring historians).

And try finding anything. I went to the Brandeis University channel because I listened to a good podcasted lecture from David Hackett Fischer this morning. Brandeis has 67 videos online at YouTube, but their page offers no sorting or guide. Most of the video are not lectures at all but Brandeis promotional pieces and recordings of public talks and concerts around campus. All well and good, but disappointing for the history fan dreaming of finding a full semester of Fischer's lectures. You can search, but the YouTube search function is a blunt instrument, with no advanced search capabilities. So I searched for "history" and found 4 videos--all PR videos from Brandeis. A search for "Fischer" came up with nothing.

The whole EDU portal is like that--there may be some great content (and AHA Today found some) but it is buried beneath the near-random pile of stuff that is YouTube. YouTube would work a lot better if channel owners could provide some categorization, or if it allowed user tagging.

Bottom Line: No matter how good some of the content, YouTube is not currently a good archive for history materials.

LOC Launches a YouTube Channel

The Library of Congress has just announced that they have a YouTube channel. I'll let them tell you about it:

Well, this is a day that has been a long time in coming. The Library of Congress has been working for several months now so that we could “do YouTube right.” When you’re the stewards of the world’s largest collection of audiovisual materials (some 6 million films, broadcasts and sound recordings), nothing less would be expected of you, and our own YouTube channel has now gone public.

We are starting with more than 70 videos, arranged in the following playlists: 2008 National Book Festival author presentations, the Books and Beyond author series, Journeys and Crossings (a series of curator discussions), “Westinghouse” industrial films from 1904 (I defy you to watch some of them without thinking of the Carl Stalling song “Powerhouse”), scholar discussions from the John W. Kluge Center, and the earliest movies made by Thomas Edison, including the first moving image ever made (curiously enough, a sneeze by a man named Fred Ott).

There is not a ton of material there yet, let alone Northwest material, but I did find this wonderful snipped of some unidentified Plains Indians who worked for Buffalo Bill doing a buffalo dance:



I see that the LOC has disabled comments on the videos! I am a bit surprised--not very 2.0 of them!

History as an Advertisement

I quite like this ad from Hovis Bread, with one boy running through 122 years of English history:



(via)

Authentic Music of the Oregon Trail

Here is a fine introduction to the music of the Oregon Trail:


Other YouTube videos of historic fiddler Truman Price include "Wait for the Wagon," "Uncle Sam's Farm," "Mississippi Sawyer," and "June Apple."

By the way, the racist lyric to Oh! Susanna can be found at the Wikipedia page. Though we might today think of the song as some kind of traditional Appalachian folk ballad it was in fact a brand new hist song at the time of the Oregon Trail and California Gold Rush. It was penned by Stephen Foster in 1847 for a blackface minstrel show.

The Immigration Debate of 1621

This contains some coarse language!