Rubes Log

Over the course of the class this blog has been used for I believe I have gained the most experience and knowledge in the technology that was used. Before this class I had not heard of zotero or tropy to record sources or keep track of information. In previous classes where I had to collect a handful of sources, I had always just directly put the citation on a page of whatever I needed the sources for. Sometimes it is a little difficult finding some metadata for some sources that is needed for zotero and tropy, but it is still an easier way to keep track of my sources.

The scariest part of this class wasnt so much scary as it was worrying. The most worrying part for me was simply choosing a research subject, I had some trouble trying to think of a suitable subject that would have worked for the projects. When it comes to choosing a subject entirely on my own, I am often overwhelmed with indecision so it helps when some sort of limitation. Luckily when it came to these projects, I was able to narrow it down to two choices but there was a point where I had forgotten one of my options.

When it comes to the research subject I had chosen, John Brown, I learned some things that I hadn’t known before. The most interesting thing I had learned was that John Brown was the first person in US history to be executed for treason. Something that is equally as interesting was that John Wilkes Booth attended his execution.

I believe that using a timeline is the best method to tell the story of John Brown because it allows for images that help with the storytelling. A timeline allows for a more direct presentation of information and events, if a little boring that way. If a podcast allowed for visuals, it would have been a better format but at that point its just a video to put on youtube.

If I had to describe this class to a future student in just one sentence, I would say: This is a class that will teach you to learn how to use technology to bring history into the digital scene. I’d say it this way because that’s how I saw this class, using different digital medias to apply to a historical topic and to maybe shed some more light on said topic.

One skill that I will continue to use is the ability to more accurately and deftly use databases to search for sources for a primary topic as well as the ability to find the metadata on whatever source I find. I would think this is an especially useful skill to have for me since I am a history major and plan to have some kind of job in the historical field, whatever that may be.

The podcast episode covers John Browns raid on Harpers Ferry while exploring some lesser-known details and people that I found during my research into this subject while also finding them very fascinating.

Bibliography:

Atun-Shei Films. “Holy Horror: A New History of John Brown’s Raid (feat. InRangeTV)”. Youtube video. 40:12. January 24, 2024. Holy Horror: A New History of John Brown’s Raid (feat. InRangeTV) (youtube.com)

Osborne Perry Anderson. 1861. A Voice from Harper’s Ferry. https://archive.org/details/voicefromharpers01ande

Music used in this episode:

Nella Nostra Bellezza by Boom Boom Beckett, Free Music Archives

Full Transcript Below:

For this blog post I looked into my own data on the internet through a quick google search. I started off with just my name and as expected there were a lot of people with the same name. When I narrowed it down to my current city, I got less results but none of them were actually me. I even searched my name through fastpeoplesearch.com and found one result with my full name, the same middle name as well, but it also wasn’t me as I live on the other side of the country. I also used the college I attend as a search term, but it also came up with nothing related to me, the only results it gave me were judicial case files with people with the same name as well as documents from the Defense Technical Information Center. Using my old high school also yielded no results but it did give me my sisters name on a graduation sheet.

The only piece of information I have on the internet seems to be my Facebook account which has no other information besides my name. There really doesn’t seem to be any concrete information about me anywhere I could find, I searched just about every school I could recall attending and every place I used to live and came up with nothing. I suppose something I can do to increase my digital security is to use a vpn which is something I have thought about but costs money which I am hesitant to spend.

The subject of this timeline is all of John Brown’s actions against the institution of slavery. Though difficult to find initially, I have found that the only perspective I could find in creating a timeline of one person’s actions, is through the perspective of that person themselves. Early in his life, John Brown had dedicated himself to the destruction of slavery though he really developed a militant attitude about doing so after, at age 12, witnessing a slave boy the same age as him being beat with an iron shovel. His budding militant attitude was furthered by the murder of Elijah Parish Lovejoy. The death of his son Frederick during his actions against pro-slavery forces in Kansas could have withered his resolve but seemed to bolster it instead. Since John Brown first began actively fighting slavery, he believed himself to be a sort of American Moses, destined to lead the enslaved of the south to freedom. But after his defeat and capture he was convinced that he had another destiny, to be a martyr in the battle against the evil institution of slavery.

The game I chose for this discussion is the Real-Time-Strategy (or rts) game, Hearts of Iron IV (or hoi4). A real-time-strategy game means that you don’t play as one character but as an entity, like a whole country, where you control nearly every aspect. Hearts of Iron IV is a World War 2 rts game so you pick a country during the 1930s to play as throughout the entire conflict and you control quite a few different aspects, such as the army, navy, air force, civilian and military industries (most recently the devs added a fuel mechanic so you’ve got to keep your armed forces supplied), as well researching new technologies, so it can be a pretty big learning curve.

Games can be an effective way to educate people less interested about history, history. Presenting it in an interactive, creative, and interesting way if done right. Hearts of Iron IV may not be for everyone, but it is pretty accurate for the most part. Every major event is presented to the player via newspaper events, like the Anschluss of Austria appearing on March 13th, 1938 or the Remilitarization of the Rhineland, and other major nations that the player doesn’t control reacts as they did in history. Of course, there is a setting that players can enable before staring a game to toggle Historical AI on or off and if left alone the game will progress along a historical route. Granted every battle may not happen the same or even happen at all. That being said, this game can quickly go awry in a historical sense with it being a video game, players have the freedom to take whatever country they play down a different path. For example, while playing as Germany, players can make certain choices causing Hitler to be ousted via a coup and have the Kaiser return to power before 1940. Games can distort our views of history by allowing a player in a game like this a great amount of freedom to take whatever path they want. They can also be subject to biases or simply limitations as to what would be an enjoyable game.

All in all though I think video games can be very useful format for the study and presentation of history. It is a way to give everyday people or children or simply non-historians the opportunity to learn about chunks of history in a way that could keep them engaged. It presents history in a relaxing way without the worry of grading when it comes to children or those in school. With as many beneficial points they have, video games come with just as many negative points with biases and misinformation and they should never outright replace a history class.

Digital accessibility is very important in this digital age and even more so as time passes and technology advances. And with the advancement of technology, creating accessible features gets easier and more intuitive. An item on the WCAG Compliance checklist is to make sure that any media does not autoplay and can be paused at any time. A video that autoplays may be disruptive and distracting to those with any kind of cognitive disability and on the more extreme end a video may contain content which can cause seizures. In most cases I believe this is followed by most sites except Youtube, although that may be an exception, and more often than not any kind of news website.

Digital Harlem is a title which is pretty self-explanatory created by Dr. Robertson to map and explore Harlem in the 1920s-30s. A challenge Dr. Robertson ran into was giving context to the maps and converting the maps to print would have taken away their dynamic nature and make them more static. Transferring the digital maps into print would have taken away much of the work that was put into the maps to begin with, but the maps couldn’t have just existed by themselves, it would have been confusing without any guidance. To solve this issue Dr. Robertson made the decision to give the maps context and additional data a blog form, which itself evolved over the different iterations of Digital Harlem. A blog to go along with the maps site gives a sort of symbiotic relationship as the blog will give more context to the map and to elaborate on certain topics more, and the map can give the blog more substance as well as provide images to quickly connect to the writing.

In Robertsons blog post “Harlem and Baseball in the 1920s” Dr. Robertson explores baseballs journey through Harlem and the baseball team The Lincoln Giants. Something I learned, and probably shouldn’t be surprised about, is that the Olympic Fields baseball field for Harlem home games was demolished and turned into a parking garage. For all but one of his sources used to create this blog post, Dr. Robertson used the old newspaper New York Age about baseball games, which I would say is the best source he could have used for all the details about Harlem’s baseball teams. The map that is used in the blog post is a map of baseball fields in and around Harlem. I believe this map helps support Dr. Robertson’s argument as he describes some of the fields that are used by Harlem based baseball teams that were shut down or demolished causing the teams to have to go to fields that are further away for home games. The map allows us to see the distance far better than we can imagine any distance by reading some numbers or locations.

The search terms I have used are Rebellion, Harper’s Ferry, and John Brown. The last two alone may not be much on their own, but when paired together they complement each other very well. These three terms all relate to my research topic because, aside from John Brown himself, they make up what John Brown is most known for and his goals. I had tried to use the terms ‘Abolitionist’ and ‘Terrorist’ for both views on John Brown but nothing very interesting came of them when put next to the other terms. The third term I used which is ‘Rebellion’ fits into this as both North and South were worried about rebellion from one group or another. The North was worried about rebellion from the southern states, or outright secession, and the South was worried about both the north reducing the power of slavery and of a slave rebellion which was a fear that was further stoked by John Brown’s actions at Harper’s Ferry.

The n-gram shows that all three terms have a large spike before the Civil War and throughout it. ‘Rebellion’ stays at a high rate of use just due to its broader use but ‘Harper’s Ferry’ and ‘John Brown’ both drop after the Civil War. ‘Harper’s Ferry’ drops more than ‘John Brown’ but has a small recovery hill in 1883 but again begins to drop to a far lower rate than the other terms. ‘John Brown’ also has a small recovery hill and doesn’t drop as far as the previous term but does have a gradual slope down. All three terms had the same large spike beginning in 1856 which is interesting to me because John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry occurred in 1859 but googles sources could include Brown’s personal letters in its documents which would then make sense due to John Brown’s planning of his raid. After the raid there would of course be a large number of eyes on the event and subsequently writing on it in newspapers and the like.

Narrowing down a topic for an individual as eccentric as John Brown was a little difficult but I have managed to narrow down the question to, ‘How John Brown’s personal goal changed from armed rebellion to martyrdom.’ I have begun to hear that the actual catalyst for the Civil War wasn’t the firing on Fort Sumter, but that it was John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry that made the war inevitable. Three of these sources come from John Brown’s own words or his own writing which will help in discovering his thought process which led him to his raid and his eventual execution. One source is an artist’s depiction of Brown’s final moments before his execution giving us a glimpse as to how some people during those years thought of John Brown. My final source is a short book written by one of John Browns own raiders who managed to escape Harper’s Ferry giving a firsthand account to events before and after.

• Holy Horror: A New History of John Brown’s Raid (Feat. InRangeTV), 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfFrHOhKZDo.

This secondary source is one that I would personally vouch for as a reliable source. Hosted by Andrew Rakich Atun-Shei Films covers a few different topics, but I mainly know him for his Civil War videos which cover a few different on their own. For every video Rakich makes where he quotes anything or lists specific information, he provides the sources he pulled them from and lists them in his video descriptions.

• Carvalho, Joseph. “John Brown’s Transformation: The Springfield Years, 1846-1849.” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 48, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 46-95,X.

This source is written by a Joseph Carvalho and is written to explore how John Brown was transformed by his role in Bleeding Kansas. The journal explores how John Brown was radicalized against the institution of slavery and how he came to the conclusion that it could only be washed away with blood. This journal has a total of 68 separate sources used to provide its information with most sources being before 1920.

• TRODD, ZOE. “John Brown’s Spirit: The Abolitionist Aesthetic of Emancipatory Martyrdom in Early Antilynching Protest Literature.” Journal of American Studies 49, no. 2 (May 2015): 305–21. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875815000055.

This source is written by Zoe Trodd who has also written several other works with half of their topics being about Frederick Douglass. This journal is meant to explore how John Brown’s letters written while he was awaiting his execution became an inspiration for early antilynching protest literature with an “Abolitionist Aesthetic of Emancipatory Martyrdom”. I believe this source is reliable because it directly pulls from letters written by John Brown himself.

• Hinton, Richard J. John Brown and His Men: With Some Account of the Roads They Traveled to Reach Harper’s Ferry. American Reformers. New York ; [London ; Toronto: Funk and Wagnalls Company London and Toronto, 1894.

This book was written by Richard J. Hinton who was born in 1830 and was active during John Browns actions and the Civil War. I dont know if Hinton was with John Brown during his raid on Harpers Ferry but according to Hinton himself in this book “These men, of whom I have written, were for me, in a humble sense, as dear comrades. They fell; I escaped!” This book describes the journey John Brown went through which led him to his raid on Harper’s Ferry. Hinton has also written books about Abraham Lincoln.

• Chamberlin, Joseph Edgar. John Brown. Beacon Biographies of Eminent Americans. Boston: Small, Maynard and Company, 1899.

This book was written by a Joesph Edgar Chamberlin who was born in 1851. In the preface for this book, Chamberlin makes it clear that this is simply to tell John Browns life story without inquiry about the effects of his work. Chamberlin provides in this book, before it actually begins, a pretty specific timeline of John Brown’s entire life such as “1837: Swore his family to active opposition to slavery.” Which makes me wonder how Chamberlin knows this and if there is something that supports this.

Entire Bibliography:

John Brown Secondary Sources Bibliography.docx