Death at Norridgewock

An addition to my subsite on American Catholic history, an excellent piece of detective work, stripping away the 18c French government propaganda from a hagiographic tale of the death of Father Sebastian Rasles (or Rale), missionary to the Abnaki Indians of Maine: The Attack on Norridgewock, 1724, by Fannie Eckstorm (New England Quarterly, 1934). The author has been pilloried by some as anti-Catholic for this article, but it shows nothing of the sort; if anything, she has reconstructed a piece of real life and shown us a real man, who may still well be a saint.

The homepage of my American history site (26 books, 12,000 pages of print, 600 images in 800+ webpages) is here.

Epic of the Overland

Not the book I promised a coupla posts ago, but another railroad item just the same: Robert Lardin Fulton’s Epic of the Overland, a short account of the human side of the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, by a man who worked on it; there are a couple of hilarious stories in it, as well as some rather somber stories of hangings and scalpings, and then those poor itchy buffaloes: it’s a good read, and includes a detailed map of the line from Omaha to San Francisco. [In sum, to use a railroad image, I got sidetracked. The (much longer, more technical) book I promised otter be finished in a day or two; a few images remain to be scanned.]

The homepage of my American history site (26 books, 12,000 pages of print, 600 images in 800+ webpages) is here.

Chilean history

Expanding the meaning of “American history” a bit, the latest addition to my site goes beyond the United States, with an excellent (if not optimally translated) book, A History of Chile by Luis Galdames. I won’t make a habit of it, at least not a very frequent one; but to accommodate similar items from time to time in the future — and there’s another already onsite from a while back — I also set up a page on History of the Americas.

The homepage of my American history site (25 books, 12,000 pages of print, 600 images in 800+ webpages) is here.

American railroad history

One of the most important and characteristic aspects of American history is how we managed to expand so fast over an entire continent, and a key element in that expansion was the building of America’s railroads. One would think therefore that the story of the railroads’ rôle in that expansion would be well represented online, but it isn’t really — so I intend to do my six bits’ worth in filling up that gap. Today’s item, maybe I didn’t choose so well, since it’s already online in three or four other places; but the book was so short that it took me less than 4 days to input it and proofread it, and then I include the maps, which the other sites out there kissed off, or at least those that I looked at. More on American railroad history is on its way, including of course, now that I’ve done my research a bit better, stuff not online anywhere. For now, though: John Moody’s The Railroad Builders.

The homepage of my American history site (25 books, 12,000 pages of print, 600 images in 800+ webpages) is here.

Boat chase

California has by now become firmly celebrated for its car chases: some nut or hoodlum at one end, the local authorities at the other; the latter winning out, almost always. Hollywood knows we like car chases. Today’s item, The Itata Incident, is a celebrated boat chase of 1891, with an arms-laden boat — two of them actually — and as chases go, it was a long one, of several thousand miles down the west coast of the Americas. We nearly went to war with Chile over it. (I wonder why it hasn’t been made into a movie; or, more seriously, there are many points in common with marine chases today that could have grave consequences to our national security.)

The homepage of my American history site (25 books, 12,000 pages of print, 600 images in 800+ webpages) is here.

Diplomatic archbishop

Many Americans think that the Constitution mandates a total separation of church and state: the government should have nothing to do whatsoever with any religious organization. This is a recent development, though; in the 19c, the U. S. Government had a special battalion of Mormons in the U. S. Army; it paid Quakers and Catholics and others to educate native Americans; and, in the little item I just put up today, it commissioned a Catholic archbishop as a diplomatic representative: read all about it. (Oh, and in case you’re still wondering, what the Constitution prohibits is the establishment of any religious belief; which presumably includes atheism and secular humanism.)

The homepage of my American history site (25 books, 12,000 pages of print, 600 images in 800+ webpages) is here.

American Catholic history

I tend to mark September 11 by adding some important item to the site. Today, it’s American Catholic History: an orientation page to what I expect will be a growing site on the Catholic contribution to our American history, and in particular to the development of the frontier, which is my main theme these days. Right now, the linchpin of the site is not John Gilmary Shea’s History or one of the (few) public-domain works by Ellis or some similar general item, but a rather odd one, a 600‑page book by Camillus Maes: the Life of Charles Nerinckx, a Belgian pioneer priest of Kentucky. Some journal articles round out the site: some of them related to Fr. Nerinckx, but among the others, Flemish Franciscan Missionaries in North America; Father Sebastian Rale, S. J. (1657‑1724) who evangelized the Abnaki Indians in Maine; The Significance of the Frontier to the Historian of the Catholic Church in the United States, a vigorous rebuttal to an exaggerated application of Frederick Jackson Turner’s theory of the frontier; and The Mission as a Frontier Institution in the Spanish-American Colonies by Herbert Bolton, solid as that author always is.

The homepage of my American history site (25 books, 12,000 pages of print, 600 images in 800+ webpages) is here.

Unexplained phenomenon

Thomas Jefferson’s UFO has been onsite for a while now, but in honor of today’s Google doodle, I’ll play too: unexplained phenomenon.

The homepage of my American history site (24 books, 11,000 pages of print, 600 images in 700+ webpages) is here.

An academic view of USMA

One more addition to the largish section of my site on the history of West Point: a 1937 paper, titled Military Education in the United States: A proposal to Differentiate Training into Pre-Military and Military. It’s a critique of West Point by an educator, a professed admirer of the Academy, who doesn’t let that blind him to what he views at its flaws from an academic standpoint: (1) the non-military education suffers because the instructor and professorial staff is grossly unqualified; (2) this non-military education (calculus and French and so on) could be dispatched in a civilian college, bumping up USMA to a school teaching exclusively military subjects: a proposal rather like pre-med before med school; (3) the professorial staff is inbred, by and large themselves products of the Academy, and thus less likely to be aware of the need for change.

The well-intentioned suggestion is one of a family of such proposals over the years in favor of turning West Point into a technical school. As far as I can tell, the teaching staff is now much more academically qualified, but some of the author’s other points still seem to be valid, in particular the inbreeding, which has been looked at much more recently by other outsiders with the same general assessment. I can’t say much for his solution though; turning West Point into a technical school, no matter how high-quality, misses the boat somehow, and even graduating cadets as first lieutenants as he proposes: this guy’s approach would give us a sort of a cross between USMAPS and the War College; no go.

The homepage of my American history site (24 books, 11,000 pages of print, 600 images in 700+ webpages) is here.

Louisiana takes over her forts in 1861

Today’s item is a 1961 journal article (rather late for public domain, but the copyright was not renewed) on The Seizure of the Forts and Public Property in Louisiana (in 1861): a straightforward account of the actual mechanics of the process by which control of government property was forcibly transferred from the old government of Louisiana to the new.

The homepage of my American history site (24 books, 11,000 pages of print, 600 images in 700+ webpages) is here.

Resaca de la Palma

Yesterday’s output: a 1937 journal article on the Mexican War battle of Resaca de la Palma, one of the victories that ensured the official American control of Texas. It remains the defining battle for the Second Cav.

The homepage of my American history site (24 books, 11,000 pages of print, 600 images in 700+ webpages) is here.

Two views of West Point

Two more West Point items (yet another part of the largish section of my site on the history of West Point): one of them pretty good, the other pretty bad; but as Pliny the Elder said, no book is ever so bad that something useful can’t be got from it.

The good one is an 1869 article on The System of Instruction at West Point, laudatory but not unthinkingly so, by a young graduate of Yale who finds much in Sylvanus Thayer’s educational system that might be profitably applied to civilian universities.

The other is a paper published in a 1901 medical weekly, The Nervous Exhaustion due to West Point Training. The author — a graduate of Annapolis, natch — just embarking on a mercifully brief career as a crackpot eugenicist, tells us that West Pointers are fragile (as you can tell by observing any grade-school playground), die easily in the tropics, are permanently induced to a lifetime of bibliophobia; and a bit more leisure time and vacation couldn’t do them any harm: as I said, some good points. An entertaining read, and I’ve intentionally not quoted you the most bizarre item of the lot, which has to be seen to be believed.

The homepage of my American history site (24 books, 11,000 pages of print, 600 images in 700+ webpages) is here.

West Point, 1852‑1902

And, online this morning to join the previous West Point items, William Godson’s History of West Point: 1852‑1902. As doctoral dissertations go, a failure, for the reasons I point out on that page; but the summary account of those 50 years is still good to have, and there’s an OK bibliography.

The homepage of my American history site (24 books, 11,000 pages of print, 600 images in 700+ webpages) is here.

History of West Point

Long overdue, finally put online a few minutes ago: a decentish site on The History of West Point. Right this minute, in addition to some material already onsite (MacArthur’s 1962 farewell address to the Corps, Francis Smith’s 1879 address to his classmates of the Class of 1829, Union and Confederate brought together for the time after the War), new material put on the WP section of my site these past ten days:

Roswell Park’s Sketch of the History and Topography of West Point and the Military Academy: published in 1840, it was the first history of the Academy.

E. D. J. Waugh’s West Point: The Story Of The United States Military Academy: published in 1944, an odd mix of history and anecdote and war propaganda, but not bad.

I expect to expand the site considerably.

The homepage of my American history site (24 books, 11,000 pages of print, 600 images in 700+ webpages) is here.

The History of Kona, Kentucky

Very, very minor — but in one sense, not: A Brief History of Kona, Letcher County is one of the rare items onsite that had never been published. Interesting, too: this little town of maybe a hundred inhabitants has a bit more history than one might expect, and even the shadow of Daniel Boone.

The homepage of my American history site (24 books, 11,000 pages of print, 600 images in 700+ webpages) is here.

John Sevier’s Diary

The “large and relatively significant item” is now online: Gov. Sevier’s Journal (or Diary, same difference); nominally complete — although I may have unearthed some hanky-panky: the gory details are on that orientation page. Other related material as well.

The homepage of my American history site (24 books, 11,000 pages of print, 600 images in 700+ webpages) is here.

Bedford’s Tour

More Tennessee, all from the Tennessee Historical Magazine: one small item — Why the First Settlers of Tennessee were from Virginia (as opposed to North Carolina, which after all has a much longer border with what is now Tennessee, and is due east rather than kitty-corner like Virginia): a question that is weird only when you don’t think of it, so to speak, and with an interesting answer — but mostly Bedford’s Tour down the Cumberland, Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, the 1807 diary of a man who traveled from Nashville to New Orleans in a very small boat, and in winter: we all know that “free navigation of the Mississippi” was for decades the buzzword that justified much of early United States diplomacy, but this gives us an extraordinarily clear view of what it was actually like in practical terms.

And no, this isn’t the “large and relatively significant item” I mentioned in my last entry as in prep. I shouldn’t tease people that long; I need to finish it.

The homepage of my American history site (24 books, 11,000 pages of print, 600 images in 700+ webpages) is here.

History of Tennessee

New items yesterday, all from the journal of the Tennessee Historical Society — not elsewhere online so I’ve collected them, and the ones to come (a large and relatively significant item is in prep, another original document not to be found on the Web right now) on their own index page — Management of Negroes upon Southern Estates in which two 19c plantation owners offer advice on how to manage slaves since after all their welfare insures greater profits to their owners; The North Carolina-Tennessee Boundary Line Survey of 1799, the centerpiece of which is a complete transcription of Strother’s Diary, the personal record kept by one of surveyors in the party, introduced by several pages of background material; and Henderson and Company’s Purchase within the Limits of Tennessee, in which we see just what a harsh business environment it was on the frontier: Richard Henderson is cheated by the States of Virginia and North Carolina, but he in turn seems to have cheated others pretty badly.

The homepage of my American history site (24 books, 11,000 pages of print, 600 images in 500+ webpages) is here.

On the way to Georgia

Continuing on the theme of the western frontier, a transcription of Projects for Colonization in the South, 1684‑1732, by Verner W. Crane (MVHR 12:23‑35); it deals with the colonies that immediately preceded and, to an extent, led up to, the foundation of Georgia.

The homepage of my American history site (24 books, 11,000 pages of print, 600 images in 500+ webpages) is here.

Whitaker’s Spanish-American Frontier

As promised, the latest book onsite is now complete, with its maps: Arthur Preston Whitaker’s Spanish-American Frontier, 1783‑1795. Backwoodsmen, diplomatic intrigue — yes, James Wilkinson, of course (but also Pinckney and Godoy and Carondelet) — and thru it all, the mighty Mississippi. Enjoy.

The homepage of my American history site (24 books, 11,000 pages of print, 600 images in 500+ webpages) is here.

New stuff, January and February

Well, I dunno what happened, but WordPress finally did index this blog, several weeks late…. So I’ll be posting items here from time to time, as originally planned.

In January and February, my new items were one of the key primary sources behind Ellis & Morris’s book on King Philip’s War: Easton’s Relation; and, spurred by an e-mail from a frequent site visitor expressing interest in the frontier theory of Frederick Jackson Turner, a brief article of his on Geographical Sectionalism in American History.

This last, in turn, has got me interested in the mechanics of the American frontier, and I’m currently transcribing a full-length book on that, which will probably be onsite within a week. The most interesting point made by the historians of the frontier is that the genius of America does not lie in our government, but in our people and our personal initiative: the genius of the government, such as it is, is in getting out of the way. In the last fifty or sixty years we’ve increasingly forgotten that, and expect everything from government; or maybe, to be run by government, or to be ruined by government!

The homepage of my American history site (24 books, 11,000 pages of print, 600 images in 500+ webpages) is here.

American history site

Well, I finally threw in the towel. Although my American History site is one of the larger ones out there, certainly by a single individual, the otherwise pretty amazing Google has done an inexplicably poor job of picking up on it. Soooo … maybe this will give the site a bit better visibility: I’ll be announcing new items here as I churn them out. Of the twenty books onsite, the most recent, as of December 31st, is Ellis and Morris’s King Philip’s War.