MeghanIsMe

As I did schoolwork today, I thought about one of the single most valuable pieces of advice I've ever received about reading and writing just about anything. Consider who the target audience is. Thinking about the five different archives' collection policies I just read and doing the good old compare and contrast, thinking of who they were written for and thus why they address what they address gave me a ton of insight into those policies and what they say about the institution.

That analytical lens has been in my toolbox since before I knew what an analytic lens was, let alone had enough of them to need a toolbox! I think it might have been my mother. She told me a great many incredibly useful things when I was growing up. If it was her, she deserves major credit!

Another bit found in research (this time for my poli-sci paper) that's too good not to share. And that will warm the hearts of car-skeptical urbanists like myself.

"I would like to know why it is that the police permit these begoggled ruffians to have things all their own way. It is a fact that they go so fast that the bicycle policeman are unable, in a majority of cases, to overtake them, if they try."

This, from an anonymous "old resident on upper Broadway", quoted in the 22 November 1903 New York Times, in an article called "Chauffeurs Who Imperil Lives."

Shouldn't The Begoggled Ruffians be a band?

Maybe I'm feeling extra sensitive lately, or perhaps it's because I feel lonely out here, but sometimes the lives of the inventors I'm researching make me sad.

George W. R. Harriman was born the youngest of four in Somerville, Massachusetts on May 25th, 1871. His father, John, was a printer, while his mother, unusually for the time I think, seems to have worked in some capacity for the railroad. In 1900, he married Mable Locke in a November ceremony in Malden. The couple had several children; Roger, Charlotte, Elizabeth, and by the time he was 20, he had moved with his family to Boston. There he worked as a civil engineer after having patented an invention in 1916. The patent is quite interesting; a form of display for geographic information that included half a dozen pages of intricately drawn out charts and page layouts. His brothers, with whom he shared a house, had interesting lines of work as a solar printer (I'm not quite sure what that was) and as a theatrical agent.

Soon after, George and Mable moved to Washington DC. George continued his engineering work, and may have become president of a publishing company that produced city planning maps, as well as accepting government printing contracts. The family remained there through at least 1930, living at one point in the beautiful Beaux-Arts Toronto building, and at another point in a nice townhouse on Q Street, very near Dupont Circle. Sometime before 1930 though, Mable died, leaving George a widower living with just one of his sons and his daughter, the youngest of three. Later, by 1935, George had made his way to a rooming house in Manhattan at 295 East 53rd Street. In 1940, 69-year-old George was living alone, though in the company of other roomers who were a mix of western and northern European immigrants, with a few from places like Austria or Hungary, and a few others from elsewhere in the US. The census taker noted that he was a civil engineer working in "buildings," and that he'd been seeking work for some time prior to enumeration. After that, he disappears from the records. So many people don't seem to leave an obituary, a death record, or a gravemarker anywhere I can find them online. Miriam said that maybe he decided to have a grand adventure, once his kids had become independent adults, and move somewhere new. Certainly I'd love to be in New York City for a while. I'd like to think that's the case, but I have a feeling it's not. But I'd love to know how he ended up in New York City.

Being exposed to so many of these life stories in quick succession, even as abstracted and incomplete as they are, makes me think about my own life story and what it is that I want to prioritize and accomplish. It also makes me miss the people in my life that I'm away from, and miss having time to make new connections. I'm going to make a bunch of progress over Thanksgiving break. I'm going to make time to be social and have people in my life outside of the internet....

"Instead of it being used as a slang expression here, this little town and the community round about is afflicted with "too much Johnson," a Newman Grove (Neb.) correspondent of the Sioux City Journal says. "I believe there are more Johnsons to the square inch in and around this town than anywhere else in the world, figuring on the same area. I have counted them up and find that, taking this town as a center, there are 958 Johnsons within a radius of twelve miles...." " From the Dakota County Herald, Dakota City, Nebraska, 27 May 1910.

Sometimes the jokes write themselves.

It looks like *my* Johnson may be hard to find. I'm looking in Omaha, but there are supposedly 623 John Johnsons in the Dakota City area, so it might be worse in a more populated area. The article goes on to say that banks are refusing to do business with any John Johnsons without assigning them a number to avoid account errors.

I found a large (64GB) thumb drive at the workstation I'm at in the library. I found myself briefly tempted to hang on to it. Not, I don't think, because my desire for it selfishly trumps my perception of another's need, but because, having worked in a library, I know how many abandoned thumb drives end up never being claimed. Weighed against months (years?) spent sitting in a box, I could make far better use of it. But I returned it anyway.

I learned today that the map library has excellent high-res color scans of Syracuse fire insurance maps from the late 1890s through the first third of the twentieth century. I'm really excited about potentially using them for my research on the historical background of the highways. I'm going to come back with a big hard drive and some time to copy the DVDs.

I'm sitting in the library downloading patent gazettes right now and looking forward to going home in twenty minutes when I have my four hours in for the day.

So I just sent my advisor a letter saying that I think I've been on an entirely wrong path in grad school so far and I need to change my topic completely for his class that I'm half-way through. Fortunately it's a research *design* class where the end result is a research proposal; I haven't actually done any *research* yet.

I wrote:

Hi [advisor],

I’ve been working on the literature review for the project I outlined for your research design class and it’s been slow going. In fact, a lot of my work this semester has been really slow going. I’ve been thinking about the causes of that for a while and I have an answer; I’m not going in the right direction.

I wrote in my application statement that an activist approach to current issues is critical to me. That I love cities and want to make them better places. That’s still true, but the research I’m contemplating doing to pursue that agenda is not connecting to the passion that led me to apply to grad school and that led me back to school in the first place. What inspires my passion is looking at things as they are now and then finding out how they came to be. What they mean historically and in the present. How differently they were understood at different times by different people: the multivocalic understandings that come through dichronic perspective. That’s what drew me to photographing abandoned buildings and learning their histories, and it’s what draws me to historical approaches.

So as emotionally invested as I am in issues of current transportation accessibility and urban public transportation, I’m having a hard time getting intellectually invested in them. I’d much rather be sitting in a computer lab georeferencing historic maps, or combing through fifty-year-old public records in an archive. I’d like to talk to people about what their environment means to them and how they feel about it, especially people who have lived experiences of a different era as I did in my research in Kenosha on Pike Creek.

I started thinking actively about this when you told me that my proposal for public transit research was very presentist, and that it lacked a historical element. I realized that was very true, and I got back to reading Axsiom’s thesis that I’d set down a while ago and hadn’t found time for. As I read it, I got excited. I got excited in a way that I haven’t really felt since the more historically-focused work I was doing in Kenosha. As I read Axsiom, I thought about the other historically-focused material from our classes. When Bob Wilson talked about “wallowing in the archives” one of the other students later commented that she could see my eyes light up. I had the same reaction to reading Cole Harris’ article, which I suspect is the place that Bob got the phrase from. It reminds me of how happy I was working in the archives at Parkside, and how unhappy I’ve been here in comparison.

Perhaps these are realizations I should have made before going to grad school. I saw two paths; engaging actively with current issues of social justice, or diving into historical geography that I felt more passionately about but that I worried would be less connected to making change in the world. I chose the former, but as I take steps toward that goal, it feels increasingly out of line with what motivates me intellectually. Without that motivation and passion, the amount of dedication required for grad school does not feel worthwhile.

I’m now asking myself how to reconcile these seemingly disparate motivations. Is there such a thing as activist historical geography? Maybe we can talk about this more on Monday if there’s time, or schedule a meeting.

Regardless, if you’re willing, I think I need a new topic for the research I’m interested in, whether for the proposal for your class or anywhere else. As I noted, Axsiom’s thesis is quite close to the kind of work I’d like to do. I’ve been thinking of the idea of proceeding into transportation after after the 1936 Jubilee. Since I have to cross under 690 and 81 every day on the way to school or when I go to Lake Onondaga via the Creekwalk, I’m fascinated by the way these pieces of macro infrastructure shape both the larger built environment of the city and people’s experiences of their environment. Axsiom was looking specifically at the elevated railroad that became 690; I’d like to expand from that and look at the construction of 81 as well. I could research how that project was presented to Syracusans and how it has shaped their lives now, consciously and unconsciously. I can see a project that incorporates map comparisons, “official” accounts from newspapers and hegemonic sources, and perhaps even oral histories if I can find people who remember the construction, which seems possible given its date. I found a history dissertation from SU in 1978 on the topic of Syracuse’s highways: it was written by Jerome Allan Cohn in 1978, with David Bennett as his advisor . I may be able to incorporate insights from Axsiom’s and Cohn’s work with additional spatial, more recent historical, and experiential elements. Susan Robertson of the University of Brighton did something similar in a paper about an elevated highway in London. (Visions of Urban Mobility: the Westway, London, England. Cultural Geographies 2007 (14): 74-91)

Sorry this got long. Thanks for your time!

Chris

You think you know how to cite things? Elizabeth Mills knows how to cite things. She wrote an 885 page book on how to cite things. I'm kind of in awe of this book, and I want a copy. I have one via ILL right now to work on citations for the research on inventors.

51 pages on how to cite different kinds of censuses!

I've seen a lot of unusual first names working in tech support and in geneaology. Today, though, I saw one I've never seen before. The father of the person I'm researching is named Xury. I've confirmed the spelling on several documents. He was born in Ohio in 1858. The census says his ethnicity is White. It looks like his father was named Joseph and died in the Civil War. I have no good guess as to where that name comes from. Any ideas?

Seeing that presentation on mapping the Holocaust affected me more than I realized. There was a point during the presentation when I was feeling uncomfortable enough to think about leaving. I didn't because it felt like I was overreacting. The discomfort I was feeling was difficult to pin down, and I didn't want to look like I wasn't appreciating the talk, and the work she was doing is amazing and powerful, and it's important that these things be shared.

I was feeling a delayed reaction I think. It's a bit like a delayed response I had to someone (unintentionally for what that's worth) saying something deeply personally hurtful to me at a social event. I didn't realize how emotional I was at the time because it made me kind of numb.

I've been pretty stressed in general lately, so that doesn't help. But when I started talking to Danae about it last evening on Skype, I realized how upset I was and how difficult it is to deal with thinking about these things. I vividly remembered a picture from the talk and it seemed more powerful than before. I was less numb, or more vulnerable while talking to someone I care about. Especially when that person is ethnically Jewish. And maybe that's another part of why it affected me more; it felt more personal. Maybe part was the viciously explanatory visualizations, presenting this topic in new and more integrated ways. Maybe it's just a different me at a different time in my life with different experiences than the last time I thought seriously about Nazi genocide.

Talking about it, I realized that I was sad and angry. And the anger spilled over a bit, in retrospect, into stronger feelings about other things I was looking at yesterday. The 1940s Miami city directories that listed "white residents" separately from "colored residents," for instance. I happened to see "white residents" at the head a page and got upset. The 1940s. That wasn't that long ago. I asked myself what the hell was wrong with people that they didn't see this?

That picture from the presentation wasn't of something graphic and violent. It was just two columns of people, one of men, one of women and children, lined up in front of the train they'd just disembarked from. The guards at the front, Professor Knowles noted, were sending them one way or another. To barracks and the labor camps, or to death in the gas chambers. But without that context, it's such an innocent image. People in line to stamp their passports or buy tickets. I'm more and more glad that she and her group are doing this work. People need to see the fruits of racism and rampant nationalism, as hard is it is to confront head-on.

I'm researching a guy named Alphons Van der Grinten. Or, according to census takers, maybe vandergrinten. Or possibly Vandergrinden. Or maybe it's Alphonse? Poor guy.

And his wife! Nobody can spell her name right either. I mean, how hard is it to write Adeleaide Van der Grinten, really? (Or is it Adelade? Or....)