Hello and happy 2023! I just returned to campus and I am happy to be starting the spring semester tomorrow! Since my last blog post, you will see some changes to the site. Most obviously, I added a new section which made up the bulk of my work over winter break. This section, called “Ben Douglass: The Man Behind the Book” takes a look at the historical background of History of Wayne County Ohio to find a work that that is deeply rooted in the events and ideologies of the nineteenth century, but that can be found in many contemporary local historical works.
The landing page provides some interesting background on the book itself, including how the book was written, who helped to write it, and how it was received by the public. My favorite part of this page is the interactive map that allows you to see what other counties in Ohio have similar county history works and when they were published. I limited myself to county-level histories and excluded town or city histories for the most part for the sake of time. I first created a spreadsheet to enter in the basic information used in the map, starting with a list of the 88 counties in Ohio.
I then scoured the internet (mainly google books and internet archive) for the earliest county history written about each county. Two counties, Lawrence and Pike, did not have county histories written about them but were included in regional histories written in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Most books were written in the 1880s, but I found books as early as the 1840s and one as late as 1954. I may have missed volumes that are out of print, as I mainly relied on what county histories were scanned and widely available to the public. To create the map itself, I used ArcGIS StoryMaps to construct this map, and used a single express map block with color coded points to create the map (if you’re unfamiliar with StoryMaps, see this earlier post). I then created folders to group the points by decade, which corresponds to color. To put the map into my site, I used the embed tool in StoryMaps to get the custom HTML (hypertext markup language) and then used a custom HTML block to display the map on WordPress. To center the block itself, I put the custom HTML block in a 96% width column with two spacers set to 2% column width on each side. Overall, I hope this map demonstrates my skills with quantitative history and smaller map projects.
Screenshots showing the custom HTML and how I embedded it in WordPress.
The landing page then gives three options for exploration: “Benjamin Douglass’s World,” “History of Local History,” and “Afterward: Douglass’s Legacy.” They can be viewed in the order listed, a different order, or in isolation. “Benjamin Douglass’s World” provides more biographical context about Douglass’s life and his time spent out west to show that Douglass was influenced both by his upbringing as a direct descendant of early white settlers and by the events of Indigenous removal out west when he wrote History of Wayne County Ohio.
“History of Local History” takes viewers through an exploration of local historical works in New England, where early local history in the US was recorded, and Ohio. It shows that Douglass drew from authors of state and county histories who shared many of the same views towards Indigenous people as early local historians in New England. It also demonstrates the influence of racial pseudoscience on Douglass’s work.
“Afterward: Douglass’s Legacy” then looks at local history in Wayne County in the latter half of the twentieth century. There were local historical works, such as Bowen’s History of Wayne County Ohio (1910), that were published soon after Douglass’s work, but I felt that analyzing them in detail would be redundant. Instead, I wanted to look at newer local histories that were written further away from the nineteenth century. What I found was that many of these works, spanning from the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries, still use many of the same assumptions and even stereotypes about Indigenous history that underpin Douglass’s work and carry the historical context of the nineteenth century with them. This section is not meant, in any way, to attack or condemn the authors whose works I investigate in this section. The central message of this section is simply that relying on Douglass alone to tell local Indigenous history can lead to gaps and misconceptions. I will want to pay extra attention to this section as I think about how I want to engage the public in Wayne County, including those who know or take inspiration from these authors.
Other than that, you will also see some minor changes, such as some edits made to the overall look of the site, updates to the resources section, and some extra bells and whistles like an embedded internet archive scan of Douglass in “Local History: a Closer Look.” In the upcoming weeks, I will make changes and edits to this third section when my advisor gets a chance to look at it. I will also look into collecting more data on user experience and make edits accordingly. Before IS Monday (March 27), I also want to add an FAQ section, continue to improve this site, and wrap up the scholarly essay on this project.
This sounds like a lot, but don’t worry, I also had time to hang out with my family and friends while still home in Pittsburgh, and I got to play for Gov. DeWine’s inauguration in Columbus yesterday!
2 responses to “…and we’re back!”
You should be very proud of the work you have done with the site design as well as the research you are presenting. It is on par with many museum sites created with WordPress.
Thank you very much, and thank you again for all of the tech help throughout this process!