coffee grounds

But the hemp industry wasn't very large in South Carolina ...

A little historical humor. For what it's worth I gave this one the point it deserved.

Shooting rats, hitting people

How common was shooting at rats but hitting a person in early twentieth century America?

I pose this question because twice in the last couple of weeks I've come across small-town-newspaper stories from the early twentieth century Midwest that report on people shooting rats—trying to shoot rats might be a better description of activities—missing, and hitting a person. I haven't gone looking for these stories, I've just happened upon them while looking for stories about a [New Zealand] Maori entertainer in small-town America in the 1910s and 1920s. Maybe I got lucky, and I happened upon the couple of rare instances of "man shoots at rat, hits person" stories that ever appeared. But I suspect not. A cursory search on Newspaper Archive brings up more similar stories. Do a similar Google News search today and you don't get anything.

To my modern eyes these stories appear tragicomic, and a little absurd. But historians can't merely laugh at the past, they have to explain it. Why did people get hit by stray bullets aimed at rats? A plausible explanation would include the following elements

• There really were more rats around the city in the late 19th and early 20th century. Cities were dirtier.
  
• People were more inclined to shoot rats rather than trap them. Other articles about the sorry perpetrators of these shootings mentioned that hordes of rats undeterred by traps drove people to shoot them.
  
• When there's no-one around to contradict your claim, what a convenient excuse for an accidental shooting!
  
• What a great story for the newspaper! I suspect the tragicomic appeal of the story was not lost on the editors of small town papers competing for readers.
  

Merry Christmas, and don't get shot by the rat catcher!

The AHA's muddled approach to classifying research

The American Historical Association (AHA) has a confused way of classifying its members' research interests. That confusion causes members some consternation when the AHA then proposes to eliminate certain categories.

The root of the confusion is that the AHA's taxonomy attempts to fit several dimensions of historical research into a one-dimensional list. The AHA claims that since members "can select up to three categories that interest them," a category that lacks support from at least five members must "lack a significant constituency" in the membership. Last year the AHA tried to eliminate "psychohistory," this year they propose to potentially eliminate various periods of Japanese history, New Zealand history, Sudanese history, and British Columbia because fewer than five members listed these categories as a research interest. In response I've gone and changed my membership profile to now include New Zealand history, perhaps to save it from the chopping block.

Apparently, some of the reasoning behind eliminating categories is to save space on the printed form that members fill out to indicate their research interests. In the age of the Internet it scarcely seems necessary to have printing technology dictate intellectual decisions about classifying the areas of historical research. A favorite rhetorical trick of historians is to say "What if your students said that?" Well, what if your students used similar logic? This is the AHA saying that it is revising intellectual distinctions because it ran out of notepaper. What if your students said that?

The AHA is at pains to point out that categories can be added back into the taxonomy of research interests, if enough members request it. This is hardly the way to organize a classification system. To be meaningful a classification system should be stable over time, not subject to the whims of membership votes. If a category is significant as a field of study it should be left in the taxonomy, so that if and when it re-emerges with more support that change can be accurately tracked.

The biggest confusion in the AHA's research taxonomy is its approach to combining geographical, chronological and topical classificiations into one dimension. A basic principle of classification is that you should not combine separate aspects into one. Take my own research, for example. A compact description of what I do is economic and business history of New Zealand and the United States between [about] 1860 and 1960. I think I have a relatively coherent research agenda, but the AHA's muddled research taxonomy doesn't allow me to adequately describe it in the three categories I'm allowed to choose.

How the AHA comes up with its categories I don't know. Under United States history you're allowed to choose various time periods, including in the modern era "1877-1920," and "since 1920." Every time I see this it mystifies me. I understand that 1877 is significant as the end of Reconstruction, but that surely privileges a particular master narrative of American history over any alternatives. And "since 1920"? You can make any sort of argument you like for the significance of 1920, but 1930 is pretty significant too, as well as 1932, and 1912, and well, you get the idea ...

The AHA should revise its research taxonomy entirely. It should allow members to separately

• Select several countries they are interested in. If countries have important sub-national divisions, either historic or contemporary, they can be selected too. At present the AHA's categories for Canadian research are a mystery as well. You can select British Columbia or Québec as separate subjects, but Ontario must fall under the generic "Prairie Provinces." I know only a little about Canadian history (it's glorious!) but Ontario is a little different than Manitoba, principally on account of the city of Toronto and its environs.
  
• Select the time period they are interested in. This could be specified as a starting year and ending year. It would then be trivial for analysis to combine similar years into categories and centuries for tabulation. More interesting information on the overlap in research time would result from this approach rather than the rigidly specified "1877-1920" approach taken at the moment.
  
• Select several topical approaches they are interested in. The present list of topics is an alphabetically ordered soup of themes and methods. Comparative, economic and psychohistory are arguably methods, mixed in with themes or topics like labor, immigration, and the mysterious "General Studies". The latter is about three times more popular than New Zealand history, for what it's worth.
  

The AHA might reasonably respond that this would lead to an explosion of information. It is not clear whether the AHA's membership taxonomy is meant to be a survey of the core topics its members are prioritizing in their research right now, or a broad survey of the wider field members set their research in. The way it's set up at present you have to choose between different levels of specification. For example, say you're a Canadian historian and you're presently working on a topic in British Columbia. Which do you choose? The obvious answer would be both, with the choice being presented as the hierarchy of precision that it is. The current system forces a trade-off between narrow and broad visions of research without indicating what the system is designed to elicit.

The geographic and chronological categories reflect this confusion. Take those U.S. history time periods again. Why the 43 years between 1877 and 1920 deserve their own category while the modern era (87 years and counting) and the colonial period (about 200 years) are implicitly all of the same is not clear. Within these eras, few people are likely to be doing research on the whole period specified by the AHA. It can't possibly be a fair representation of what people are doing. If your research spans several of these artificial eras, what are you meant to do? My dissertation dealt with the period from 1850 to 1940. I could use all three of my apparently generous allocation of category choices to describe only my time period. If you do American Indian history your chronological divisions are Pre-contact, Colonial, 19th century, and 20th century. Perhaps there's a long 19th century concept in here that covers the 1776-1800 period, but that's not stated. And why does American Indian history work in neat centuries while the rest of American history pivots on wars and presidential elections?

Similar absurdities in chronological specificity are apparently present in the Asian history section. In the Chinese history section if you study Taiwan you're explicitly constrained to doing it after 1949, but if you study Hong Kong and Macao there's no time period. I can sort of divine the reasoning here, but it's not really clear. Moreover, "and"? What if you only studied one of Hong Kong or Macao?

The same error appears where "Australasia and Oceania" are specified as options. I appreciate the AHA specifying New Zealand as a separate option, but in case they don't know Australasia implies Australia and New Zealand. As it stands, it's the Australian historians who could complain they're not fairly represented. Moreover, while many historians of the Pacific islands (Oceania) have to consider Australasia, the converse is not true. Most Australian and New Zealand historians work in blissful ignorance of the Pacific islands, the islands being merely convenient transit points on the way to San Francisco or Vancouver by boat or telegraph. You could also be an historian of Oceania's interaction with the United States or other Pacific Rim countries without studying Australasia much, if at all. Lumping Oceania in with Australia and New Zealand misrepresents that field too.

In short, the taxonomy is a mess. It would be better to start over than keep building on the existing foundations.

A short history of hill repeats

Arthur Lydiard is indelibly associated with the history of long distance running in New Zealand. It's a history of great achievements in the 1960s, lack of official recognition in the 1970s, and growing appreciation for Lydiard's achievements in the last two decades. It has been interesting for me to watch a talented guy in Arizona work through Lydiard's schedules, including hill repeats, faithful to the schedules Lydiard drew up in Auckland and beyond.

Although Lydiard is associated with New Zealand, within the country he is associated with Auckland running. Hill repeats are a good example of the association with Auckland. Around the country, the influence of Lydiard on New Zealand running is clear, though "the schedules" have been modified by succeeding generations of coaches who have been dissatisfied with the periodization or other aspects. I could not claim that no one in Wellington does hill repeats, or that no one ever has, but I will claim that there's a strong tradition in Wellington running that disregards hill repeats for the long or hard run "over the hills".

Lydiard's hill repeats are not a general theory of the best way to train, but a specific adaptation to the local environment. Compared to Wellington, Auckland has lower, fewer, and flatter hills. You really have to work hard to avoid the hills in Wellington, and you can design a relatively long run with regular steep climbs and steps that gives you all the benefits of the hill repeats with none of the structure. You come to a hill, you run up it hard. You come to a set of 200-500 steps. You run up them. As my high school coach used to say, "you can shuffle uphill, but if you shuffle up steps you'll break your legs." If you think hills are good for your leg strength, steps are even better. Taking them one at a time teaches quick movement, while bounding up two or more at a time builds power in your push off. If you have a flat stretch you might stride out a bit, but save something for the hills to come. You could plausibly do 20 miles or more in this fashion in Wellington. This is much less possible in Auckland. The hill repeats were the way to get in lots of hills in that environment.

The Wellingtonian attitude to hills is in no way a disdain for the idea that hills are really good for you. The disdain is for the idea that you need a formal structure to running on hills. When you live in a place where 300m of vertical gain in an hour's recovery run is normal you really don't to run hill repeats.

Do they?

This is a fortune, but in reality I think that's an open question ...

A short jaunt past history

This entry represents the confluence of two of my favorite things: running on trails and history. Meeker Island lock and dam was the first set of locks constructed on the upper Mississippi river in 1907. If you are strolling or running along the east bank of the river just where Minneapolis meets Saint Paul it has always been possible to go down some steps (in Minneapolis) or down a rutted little trail (in Saint Paul) to the riverbank and see the remnants of the dam. When the river level is low you can see a lot of what was there, if not the island itself which is submerged by the now much deeper channel of the river.

The lock and dam lasted just five years, and was then submerged by the raising of the river achieved with the construction of the much larger dam at the Ford Parkway.

Now with the centenary of the Meeker Island dam upon us, the Saint Paul city council has spruced up the area a little, added some tables and benches, and made the path alongside the river more runnable (or walkable). The best way to see this on a run is to run down the wagon road on the Saint Paul side, along the river, and then up some iron steps (beside a storm water outlet) into Minneapolis to emerge about 100 meters from where you went down the wagon road.

Lake St bridge

Minneapolis' beach on the Mississippi

Links
Wikipedia
National Parks Service book on the history of the Mississippi in the Twin Cities

My work here is done

This entry got delayed and delayed because I had so many different ideas in my head about how to write it. That feels a bit like a metaphor for the whole dissertation ... I also hesitated over the title [of this entry]. Strictly speaking my work here is only very nearly done, as I have a few trivial footnotes to revise, forms to submit, and Graduate School bureaucracy to wait for, before the degree is conferred. That's a metaphor for life and history itself. Few things have clear endings.

All that is prelude to saying that last Friday I successfully defended my dissertation. The title is "Her real sphere? Married women's labor force participation in the United States, 1860-1940". If you really want to know more ... you can easily contact me.

It's a good feeling to be done. The best metaphor for what the defense was like, was that it was like a moderately long race. The defense lasted about 1 hour and 40 minutes, and once I'd settled into the ebb and flow of the discussion it was good. I was tired afterwards—like you would be after racing for that long—but I didn't feel totally wiped out by it. All the advice I've gotten suggests that I should put the dissertation topic aside for a few months before returning to any research on it. In that way, defending your dissertation is like a marathon. You've got to forget about it before you return to it. Except that few people try and defend a dissertation in all fifty states. (I've heard of people with two PhDs, or a PhD and a MD. Not common, but not unheard of. My grandfather told me, erroneously I just now learn, that Albert Schweitzer had four doctoral degrees. The always reliable internet tells me that Schweitzer was merely accomplished in theology, music, philosophy, and medicine. His doctorate and M.D. appear to be his only academic qualifications.)

It will be easy to take a break from studying millions of dead men's wives, because on 1 July I take up my new job as a Lecturer (equivalent to Assistant Professor in the North American academic system) in New Zealand and United States history at Victoria University of Wellington. This will not be news to some readers of this blog who I know in "real life," and will be news to others.

Hopefully time will allow me to maintain some blogging. That, after all, is the advantage of the magic internet. It's everywhere, even in New Zealand ... But who knows? In the last six months as I finished the dissertation it should have been obvious to regular readers that my intellectual energies were elsewhere. This blog has always been a eclectic mix of the personal, professional and political ... and I hope to keep it that way. The proportions of that mix are not fixed over time.

Academic readers may be curious to know whether the blog had any effect on my job search. If you go by the measure that I got the job, obviously not. I made no effort to highlight or hide the blog while I was applying for jobs. It's always been a useful discipline for me to imagine that people might read this while googling about my job application. If they exclude me on the basis of what I've written here, so be it. The blog is a good predictor of the kind of conservation you might have with me at morning or afternoon tea.

And on that note, time for an early morning cup of coffee ...

Military history and other subfields

Memorial Day brought with it the opportunity for some people to lament the apparent passing of military history from the nation's universities. I'm sympathetic to the argument that military history is an important field, possibly somewhat neglected, but I don't believe there's any great conspiracy to chase military history out of history. Academia just doesn't work like that.

Change the nouns in those articles, and you have a template for complaining about the decline of "X history," and "Y economics," and "Z sociology." Military historians are hardly the only people to feel themselves on the outs. Indeed, please show me the sub-field anywhere that feels it is making out at the expense of all the others. Few academics feel that way. It's hardly motivating to feel you've conquered the academic world, and answered all the questions. Every academic needs to feel a little insecurity about the value of what they're studying. It keeps you on your toes. In the lab, archives, or library it's easy to convince yourself that what you're doing is self-evidently important. It isn't.

The rise and fall of topical interests in academia is chaotic rather than conspiratorial. People are rewarded for doing new and different scholarship. Inevitably that leads to golden ages followed by declines. Or, if you like, periods of excess in one direction, followed by corrections. Booms and busts. The military historians have a lot on their side for a resurgence. War has been a significant part of human history by any measure. It has changed the borders of nations, killed people, uprooted millions of men and women from their normal jobs and put them in the service of their country, brought down political leaders, and led to the rise of others. Significantly, war is often quite well documented, leaving much material for the later historian. People will return to military history because there really is something there to study, and precisely because there are fewer people doing it now.

Looking at faculty lists is a terrible single indicator of what anybody is studying now. The faculty at elite institutions represent what was happening in history at best a few years ago when the most recent hire selected a dissertation topic, and on average perhaps 15-20 years ago (a reasonable guess at median time since PhD graduation for all faculty in elite departments). Faculty webpages do not list what people are becoming interested in -- they represent conservative, historical information on what someone has done. Dissertations, conference papers and articles are a better leading indicator of what's going to be significant soon, though harder to compile and evaluate. 15-20 years ago history was in the middle of the "cultural turn." I'm glad that historians have learned that "language matters," but some of the excess along the way was not to my intellectual tastes. The new enthusiasm in history for transnational history shows its origins in cultural history. Basically, some transnational history is about how the same "texts" were read in different ways in different places. But once you start asking that question, you end up asking about how the places, people and events differed to give those different readings. You're not quite through the looking glass, but you're getting back to bigger questions than the intense analysis of obscure texts can support.

If transnational history can't open the door for a revival of military history, I'm not sure what will. It won't be the same military history that we had in the past, but nothing is ever the same the second time around. It might even be better after decades of intellectual marination. Take, for example, the economic history of institutions or business history. I cite these examples because I (sort of) know them. Back in the day (that would be the first half of the twentieth century) economic history was nearly entirely contiguous with the history of state institutions and policies, and the history of businesses, often the history of specific firms. With new ways to analyze old data, economic history in the second half of the twentieth century was (and I generalize broadly) concerned with questions that could be answered with microdata, and the macroeconomic question of what drives economic growth. But now lo and behold, there's renewed interest in business history and state policies and institutions. It looks quite different than it did 50 years ago.

A revived military history will not be about battles we already know about. It's been done. No one gets rewarded for literally reinventing the wheel. They get rewarded for finding new uses for old wheels, and marketing old wheels as new. Things change in 50 years. You can't go back, but you can take it with you.

Advertising you don't see today

I found this advertisement in a 1937 issue of Fortune magazine. It's revealing, to say the least. Fortune was regarded as a relatively "progressive" business magazine, and before World War II had a staff of excellent journalists and photographers.

Among the interesting aspects of the advertisement is the black man working as a servant. The vast majority of black domestic service workers in the 1930s were women. Butlers—which this man appears to be—were not as common in the United States as in Britain. It's doubly interesting that this advertisement portrays having a black butler as part of a desirable lifestyle.

Watch your denominators!

Interracial marriage is apparently on the rise—they're surging according to the New York Times, which makes me wonder how soon if ever it will be until the word "surge" gains an unfortunate connotation from the success or otherwise of the "surge" in Iraq, but I digress—.

My one quibble, and multiple questions, about this new trend relate to the near complete absence (at least in the article) of any context for some of the numbers. We learn, for example, that in 1970 there were 65,000 inter-racial marriages and 422,000 in 2005. That's all very well, but how many marriages were there in total? A quick trip over to the National Center for Health Statistics (who actually keep the data) shows there were 2,230,000 marriages in 2005. That's a pretty impressive flow of inter-racial marriages into the stock of marriages, on the order of about 1 in 4. Certainly it captures the trend better than the 7% of existing marriages being inter-racial.

Perhaps this is all covered in the book, but rates of inter-marriage are in part artifacts of the proportion of the population that are different races. Say you have 90% of the population white and 10% black (this is a reasonable approximation of the American population from 1870 to 1990), even if you assume marriage is totally random with respect to race, you're not going to get a very high rate of inter-racial marriage. Change the way you enumerate race in 2000 and you'll get a rapid increase in the number of non-white people, and a significantly greater chance that white people will end up married to non-white people (simply because white people are 75% of the population, a random inter-racial marriage will more often be a white person married to a non-white person than two different non-white races).

In other words, some of the increase in inter-racial marriage is probably algebraic rather than attitudinal.

The best prophet

I don't think this is true.

A desecration on the landscape

I think this blurb was meant to read "The Industrial Revolution has sometimes been regarded as a catastrophe ..." Otherwise, that's one very influential and damaging book.

(from the latest Oxford University Press catalog)

Anthony Trollope on Wellington

Plus c'est la meme chose, plus ça change. Trollope wrote in 1874.

But would you want your daughter to marry then?

Recently the New York Times ran a story about how "51% of women are now living without a spouse," and copped some criticism for including 15 year olds in that total of women. Some of the criticism revolved round the mathematical confusion between ≥ and >. Around such weighty matters does our public discourse revolve! Is the inequality strict or not?

But the better—more amusing—part of the debate was witnessing the outrage that 15 year olds were counted as women. It may shock modern morals to know that back in the late nineteenth century girls could marry as young as twelve, and sometimes earlier. The common law rule was that

If a child below the legal age should marry, the marriage is not necessarily invalid, provided he or she be above the age of seven years. If the parties continue to live together after both have attained legal age, the marriage is thus ratified, but either party may disaffirm it by ceasing to live with the other before that time arrives.
(From Leila Robinson, The Law of Husband and Wife, 1890 [PDF])

Above seven years old ... Good thing the New York Times didn't include eight year olds in its definition of women, or we would never have heard the end of it! The careful reader will note how apparently easy it was for nine year olds to escape their premature marriages, they "just" had to leave their spouse. Except that provisions in the common law for child marriage were not to allow play dates to turn into wedding ceremonies, but to unite families through marriage as a largely economic transaction. So, any children so united at an early age would likely have had little volition to leave their new spouse. It was this residual provision for the elite to marry their children young that survived into the nineteenth century. But with better means for families to combine their economic interests the rationale for child marriage was lost, yet the legal grounding for it survived. Few laws are passed with an expiration date. Provisions like this can hang around on the books for years without much use, only to be rediscovered as an "outrage" to modern sensibilities that must be corrected.

But the thing is, or was ... that by the late nineteenth century few early-to-mid-teenage "women" took advantage of their freedom to marry. In 1880 a scant 0.07% of 12 year old girls were married. Even at 15 just 1.4% were married, 4.2% at 16 and then 9.3% at 17, 14.5% at 18, and 25.6% at 19. 15 year olds were not rushing to the altar in the late nineteenth century, but 19 year olds were. In other words, the upward revision in the minimum age to legally marry has not been the cause of declining early-teenage marriage. For historical comparability it's completely appropriate to include 15 year olds with other women. But I wouldn't advise any girl to get married at that age. Unless he's really rich ...

Civilization?

Discuss.

From the Appleton Post Crescent (Appleton, Wisconsin), Tuesday 21 June 1921, p.4.

Death of a downtown department store

Filene's Basement flagship store in Boston is closing, if apparently only temporarily. Though it is now no longer part of the Filene's chain, it began as a way to sell discounted items from Edward Filene's department store. In the historiography of department stores, Filene's is significant because Susan Porter Benson used the store's archives (particularly its staff magazine) for her Counter Cultures book, where modern department store historiography really begins.

While I still believe the death of the department store has been exaggerated, this is sad news.

It didn't [really] happen there, either

Seymour Martin Lipset has died (see here and here for commentary and round-up), and hopefully taken to his grave the mis-specified question of why there is no socialist party in the United States.

I say that with a great deal of admiration for Lipset's career, research interests, and writing. His writing was provocative in the best way, his research comparing Canada and the United States illuminated our understanding of both those countries (and others), and proved the basis for a long career. As one long interested in at least dabbling in comparative history you have to admire and engage Lipset's work. You do have to wonder a little how someone can make a career out of the logical trap of seeing the United States as "exceptional," yet also open to understanding by comparison.

Lipset was scarcely responsible for originating the question, since Werner Sombart got in well before him with his 1906 book, Why is there no socialism in the United States? (Google books link in German only!) Yet there was socialism in the United States. Not as a governing party anywhere, not as a winning political movement (unless you count wins against other left-wingers, which socialists have more often specialized in achieving), but certainly as an animating idea in the heads of many laborers and intellectuals. Lipset re-specified this already badly specified question a little by asking why there wasn't really even a social democratic party in the United States.

The changing question gives some of its own answer: the supposedly socialist Labo[u]r parties of Australasia and Britain had become social democratic to actually gain and maintain governments. As a swag of recent literature shows the actual policy differences between social democratic governments in Canada and Australasia, and American Democratic administrations were smaller than the difference in rhetoric would imply. Moreover, it's quite clear that the parties saw themselves as representing the same elements and ideas in their respective polities. The Australasian Labour parties saw the Democratic party as their American counterpart. While population differences meant the relationship was asymmetric, Democrats who did look abroad for inspiration saw the Labo[u]r parties.

The substantive difference to be explained is how socialist and social democratic ideas were incorporated into national governments in different ways in different places. As Lipset noted, socialists did win office in the United States. At the local and state level. But national office was something else. To win and maintain office, the Labour parties had to abandon much of what made them truly socialist.

The largest difference in policy between the Democratic party and the Labour parties would appear to be over national government ownership of companies. Specifically, in Australasia and Britain socialism became watered down to the national government owning the "commanding heights" of the economy: airlines, banks, energy and much else besides. Yet even here, the socialism was thin, and the contrasts with the United States overdrawn. For example, the federal government owns substantial amounts of land, particularly in the western states, that have been leased cheaply to private farmers. Fannie Mae was and continues to be a massive intervention in the residential property market by the federal government.

The arguments social democratic parties made for nationalizing businesses veered away from socialism, and towards market failures (often monopoly) and ensuring social opportunity for individuals and families—arguments similar to those made for United States federal government interventions in the economy. It remains broadly true also that the federal government is somewhat less important in the United States than the national governments in Australasia and Canada. A true accounting of the success of social democratic ideas would have to trace them across the states and provinces as well. United States governments (state and federal) have, broadly speaking, relied more on regulation and subsidy than outright ownership of private business. Placing some sort of value on these regulatory interventions, subsidies and tax breaks, and evaluating the rhetoric surrounding them would probably show smaller differences in the success of socialism or social democracy than Lipset allows.

Lipset's point that the Democratic party has never been a true social democratic party is mostly well made. If (if!) the Democratic party had evolved in the North only, perhaps it might have become a social democratic party. But for a century after the Civil War it remained the political vehicle for segregationist southern whites. If anything is allowed to stand for a single explanation of why social democracy did not flourish in the United States, that would be it.

Tokyo Olympiad

Anyone with any interest in running history should rent and watch Tokyo Olympiad. Directed and produced by Kon Ichikawa this is the best moving footage of the Olympics I've seen from before the era of mass-televised coverage. The movie is in color, which instantly sets it apart from all the other Tokyo coverage I've seen (e.g; these YouTube links) If you are expecting, say, full coverage of the 10,000m you'll be disappointed. But they do have 3 minutes in full, clear color including the whole last lap and it is amazing to see how many lapped runners Mills, Gammoudi and Clarke had to pass as they swapped the lead in the last 400m. Other, shorter, races are covered in full.

The coverage is artistic, rather than functional, There could be coverage of more events in its 170 minutes. You might get frustrated at the women's 80m hurdles being replayed from multiple angles—from the front, focusing on their leg muscles etc—while the men's 1500m gets only the briefest finish shot. But that would be to miss Ichikawa's intentions of recording the human drama and artistry of the Olympics.

It is not entirely track and field, with gymnastics and swimming also being covered. But the "other sports" get surprisingly little coverage. Track and field, and especially Abebe Bikila's marathon, receive the most footage.

There is no plot to the coverage, so it's quite possible to watch it in snippets when you have the chance. I've been watching it while doing my daily stretches. It might make for good relief from boredom on the treadmill. However you watch it, if you instantly recognize some of these names—Hayes, Clarke, Gammoudi, Packer, Roelants, Odlozil, Tyus—you'll get more than a little enjoyment out of this film.

Links: New York Times review. Wikipedia

Even better than the microfilm scanner

A couple of weeks ago I waxed poetic about the beauties of the microfilm/fiche scanner. Now I've discovered something quicker and often higher quality: using your digital camera to take photos of the microfilm screen.

One of the disadvantages of the microfilm scanner compared to the digital camera is speed. My best estimate is that in an hour you can take 400 digital photos or 130 scanned microfilm images. That's a substantial difference.

To do this well you will need a tripod so that you can hold the camera steady. You can get a perfectly adequate tripod for these purposes for $30, perhaps less. Or you may already own one. Then it's simple. Line up the camera so that is horizontal and facing at the microfilm screen, put your camera on the setting you use for taking photos of documents, and snap away to your heart's content.

So far I have only done this at my own university's library. There some of the staff and other patrons have just looked at me a little quizically about the tripod bag I'm carrying. It has an uncanny resemblance to a bag you might carry a gun in. No telling what the policies of other archives are about bringing in tripods, so you wouldn't want to rely on this method for reproducing material off microfilm. But a time saving tip worth knowing about if you need to reproduce microfilm images.

As always with microfilm the quality of your image will depend on the quality of the original microfilming. This varies tremendously, but the great thing about digital images of microfilm is that you can use photo editing software to alter the black-white balance to improve legibility if there are serious problems with the original microfilm copy.

Shopping your ideas

Earlier this week the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that there was no governmental purpose in denying same-sex couples the benefits of marriage, and that the state had six months to remedy this. Gay marriage, per se, did not have to be one of the remedies, civil unions would also do.

In passing I'll note that this ruling has attracted much less public attention than previous rulings in Massachusetts and Vermont, which might suggest that American politics is heading towards some kind of compromise on this.

While there has been less debate about the decision you don't have to look hard to find [mostly Republican and right-leaning] people criticizing the courts for making this decision. It's telling that the conservative response is to criticize the venue of the decision—the courts— and not (entirely) the decision itself. It's fair to say that until very recently conservative parties in Anglo-American democracies saw the courts as the bulwark of tradition and order against populist change.

It's striking that in America there is a populist right that sees the judiciary and the common law as anti-democratic and revolutionary. Historically conservatives saw the courts as a bulwark against populist democratic change. There are traces of this attitude in Australasia, Canada and Britain, but it's less pronounced because social movements have not used the courts to try and achieve social change quite as much. Perhaps that is for the better, since changes are achieved with democratic support, but I suspect that it reflects rationally different choices in political strategy contingent on legislative and judicial structure.

Now, I'm no lawyer, but one of the defining characteristics of Anglo-American government is that laws are made both by the legislative/executive branches (statue law), and by judges interpreting the law in cases (common law). In almost every setting groups seeking social change use both mechanisms to try and affect change. This is such an established, bipartisan part of our broad political heritage that current critiques of it by people opposed to gay marriage are, I suspect, largely disengenuous.

For the sake of argument, wandering away from the issue at hand, look at the movement for the 8 hour day. Unions campaigned for this at three levels

• Trying to achieve it through contracts with individual employers
  
• Multi-employer contract negotiations (particularly the Australian and New Zealand arbitration systems
  
• Legislative restrictions on working hours.
  

Venue shopping by political and social movements is an inherent part of the Anglo-American political and legal structure. If some groups really do feel those rules of the "game" are unfair and should be changed, that's a problem, but I'm inclined to guess that for now they're being disengenuous and will happily shop their own ideas round whatever sympathetic legislature or court they feel will take them.

Tip o' the day

Microfilm scanners are a wonderful invention, and I'm so enamored with them that in writing this post I browsed the web to see what they cost. At least as much as the top of the line Apple Powerbook and maybe as much as a VW Passat to put it in terms of other desirable items. Of course, the relative prices may change. Not buying any of those things for myself any time soon ...

Anyway, here's my tip for your microfilm scanning. As best I can tell what the scanner does is similar to what an automatic focus camera does—sensing the relative amounts of white and black in the viewfinder and then capturing the image. Now if you've ever taken photos on an automatic camera you'll know they are easy to fool by composing a shot that is a mix of both dark and light areas. Same goes, it seems, for the microfilm scanners.

If you have significant amounts of the black film between the pages in your images, the digital image will not be as well exposed for the part of the image you want. Previously my preference when using the microfilm scanner was to have the black space on the side of the page, rather than cropped parts of another page. This works OK for pages that are quite dark anyway (whole pages of text). It works poorly when you are trying to capture an image of a page that has a lot of white space in it—tabular data, for example—because then the automatic exposure settings can't cope very well, and will wash out the detail you are interested in.

Bottom line advice is this: For the best exposure on microfilm scanners try capturing an image without any of the black film space between pages.

Articles or books?

This article in Perspectives is welcome news that leading historians may be giving more weight to articles than books. My view has long been that historians publish too many books and not enough articles, while economists have the opposite problem.

Miracle off 34th St

Papers around the country are leading, or at least leading their business sections, with the story of how Federated is changing venerable old stores like Marshall Fields, Kaufmann's, and Foley's into Macy's.

All of the stories, though locally written and not from the wire services, have the same basic structure. They note the historic (centuries old!) roots of the store, and then use the occasion of the change-over to Macys to quote "retail consultants" saying things like

department stores have become dinosaurs ... [t]he department store model is eroding. Business models don't last forever

The whole department store base is questionable today

the power of such plans to inject new life into traditional department stores will prove out only over time, just as the segment took many years to decline

Color me just a little sceptical of the near-uniform pessimism about the prospects for department stores from "retail consultants." Now, it's not as if every business takeover story is revealed to be far-sighted prescience, but if the prospects for department stores were that bad, why would Federated be doubing down its investment in the sector?

A little historical perspective on this goes a long way.

Been here before
This is also a newspaper story I've seen before. If the department store is dying it is taking a mighty long time. You can read similar predictions from 1930s retail consultants when Woolworths was growing rapidly. When did you last shop at an American Woolworths? Quite a while ago. That's right.

Department store consolidation began in the 1920s, in the sense of consolidated ownership. But operations, from the name of the store to purchasing, were not really co-ordinated across these groups until computerized point-of-sale systems became both common and reliable. So, there is something different to what is going on today with greater centralization of purchasing and management by Federated.

As to whether department stores will survive, it's a basic point, but easily forgotten by some business journalists that just because you aren't growing doesn't mean you can't be consistently profitable. Now, department stores have had trouble being consistently profitable, but it's still worth remembering down the road. Department stores might not be the newest thing on the block, but they can rake in a steady cash flow which is no small advantage in any business.

What do department stores do, anyway?
Nearly all of the press coverage pits department stores against Target and Walmart, because they're all large and sell a variety of goods. Well, so does Home Depot if you think about it like that.

Let's start on the demand side. The demand for stores which sell a wide variety of apparently, and often genuinely, unrelated products is fundamentally a demand to save time. That's why the "big box" retailers have grown rapidly recently--people can and do buy 96 rolls of toilet paper at a time because the fixed time involved in buying 12 is about the same. Same goes for department stores, whose early business model was all about encouraging the idea you could get everything you wanted there. This had a lot of appeal before World War II when work hours were significantly longer than they are now.

On the other side of the market, the shopping mall has eroded some of the advantages of the department store. It is possible to visit multiple stores, and get all the goods you might have previously purchased at one department store.

One of the advantages department stores had over competitors (and some still do) is that situated downtown they were at the hub of public and private transport networks in their city. Not so much anymore (though there are exceptions in Chicago and New York, at least) in the United States. The real story here is the slow decline of downtown shopping in the United States, a decline aided and abetted by politicians and private business over a long time. Perhaps, perhaps, if gas prices stay high and American cities develop public transport that people feel comfortable using for shopping this will reverse. Downtowns have not died everywhere, and still have enough physical and locational capital invested in them, that they may revive.

To put it more simply, one shouldn't confuse the decline of the downtown department store with the decline of the department store itself.

On the other side of the market, department stores are fundamentally about aggregating a range of functions that have some scale economies when combined over a diverse selection of products. The most obvious are real estate management, labor relations, financial control, and advertising. Consolidation of stores into larger chains merely continues that search for scale economies further up the management hierarchy.

The Federated/Macy's expansion has better prospects of succeeding than previous attempts, if for no other reason than the previously cited change in technology. Historically department stores did rely on the local intelligence of department managers and salespeople to determine what to buy and sell because accounting systems were paper-based and communicating information across a large number of people, or across the country, was relatively slow and expensive.

Federated claims that one of their changes will be to target discounts and sales to customers who have an account with them, and reward them for shopping with the store. While this was possible back-in-the-day, it's cheaper to do on a large scale now, and makes sense. What department stores offer is not exclusive, you can get it elsewhere, and "loyalty" schemes are a rational attempt to bind customers to particular stores.

The key, as it probably ever was, for department stores is the merchandising side. If they can compete with the specialty clothing and housewares stores on the merchandise side, and offer the benefits of saving time, and accumulating loyalty rewards across combined purchases, department stores will probably survive. There is still a place for the salespeople, however, and I don't say that just out of misguided affection from having studied them.

While it's true that Sears and Montgomery Wards started in mail order, and that some department stores did well at mail order (the internet shopping of 1913), department stores' competitive advantage right now is going to be in selling goods people like to try on, touch, and experiment with before buying. It's just more difficult to try on pants online, right? In the end what department stores will be selling, over and above the goods, is what they always claimed to be in the business of providing: good service. If your pants don't fit quite right, you can come back and get them exchanged by an actual human being who is paid to pretend to care in a more convincing way than the person on "live chat" at the internet store.

Department stores are not the hot new business innovation of tomorrow, but they'll be around in some form for decades to come.

East of Eden

It's easy to think of the situation in the Middle East as intractable, innate and insoluble—as if the current crisis, tensions, war, whatever you wish to call it, had been pre-destined since various improbable events like floods and burning bushes. But it's not. The specific conflict we're seeing now is entirely due to the founding and existence of Israel, which has itself only existed since 1948. Less than sixty years, which is an eternity going forward, but really not so long for historians looking backward. I mean this not to take sides on the question of Zionism or a Palestinian state, but rather that if Israel wasn't there we wouldn't have the current specific conflict. In the end that's a rather trivial statement. I think it fair to speculate, though it could never be shown, that even if Israel did not exist (if the Jewish state has been somewhere in Africa or North America) the Middle East would still not be filled with stable, democratic governments. Countries with borders shaped oddly by departing colonial powers and economies dependent on resource extraction tend that way.

Even going back fifty years you can see how dramatically things can turn. That much is clear from the Guardian's recent retrospective on the Suez crisis. In the current crisis, Israel and the United States are closely allied, with Britain at a small remove, and France seen by supporters of the Israeli government as a potentially duplicitous friend of autocratic regimes. But fifty years ago it was France, Britain and Israel that invaded Egypt while a Republican President in the United States urged caution, and worked to undermine the trio's plan for a military strike on Egypt. And then there's this fascinating backdrop to the whole disasterous caper into the canal: that before they invaded Egypt, Britain had plans for how to invade Israel if that proved necessary to fulfil treaty obligations with Arab states.

You can, if you like, draw parallels between Suez and Iraq, but I prefer to restrict myself to the more banal sentiment that just seeing how much has changed since 1956 show that the current crisis is not intractable, that things can change. Perhaps the current events will be resolved with an unstable truce, but there is always the possibility, at least, of real peace.

Oxygen debt? At work?

More "great" quotes from the 1930s.

Women have obviously a great need for rest pauses during the work spell so that the oxygen debt will not accumulate and decrease their productivity. Special provision needs to be made for a comfortable restroom for women workers, a room fitted with couches and chairs in which they can really relax. Merely providing a rest period is not adequate, and by far the majority of provisions that are made are as unattractive as they are essential. A matron or nurse in the restroom in larger places is a wise investment. Women shoppers, too, need provision for comfortable places where they can rest for a few minutes to overcome growing fatigue and get back into a comfortable humor. That is why escalators make money for a store. In assigning women to work, and in their supervision, it must be remembered that, comparatively speaking, women are born anemic. More Upholstery Woman’s body is soft and attractively curved because as a species she has more fat to upholster her muscles and bones ...

Laird, Donald A. "Women Are Weaker." Factory Management and Maintenance, June 1937, 61.

I have read more material from before World War II on where and why to place chairs in department stores than may be advisable for a young man, but I don't recall seeing this argument made so explicitly that women were weaker. In the retailing literature it's all about giving people a chance to be comfortable and to linger and shop more. Moreover, some of the chairs were for those poor husbands who had to accompany their wives to the store.

The future of aviation

Visions of a future that did not come. The pictures that accompany this article illustrate some of what we would now see as far-fetched.

From present indications planes of the future will be mostly tri-motored machines, carrying from 20 to 25 passengers. This means ample room must be provided for landing and takeoff. Airports must be designed with a view to future expansion as well as to present needs. As I visualize the future airport terminal, say for a city like New York, I can envision a Grand Central Station of air traffic, with hundreds of planes carrying commuters from their homes 100 to 200 miles away. I can see provision made for the safe landing of these planes every few seconds, just as subway trains pull into Times Square every few seconds without incident. Passengers will be taken directly into the air terminal by plane. From there they will be discharged into automobiles, subways or railroad trains The future airport that seems most logical to me at this time is of the beehive type ... A dome-shaped hotel 850 feet high—higher than New York's tallest skyscraper—on a plateau 1500 feet across dominates the circular field, 7500 feet in diameter. Below the surface of the field tunnels will provide direct access for automobiles, subways and railroad trains. The landing field will have runways of 3,000 feet, with a two and one-half per cent grade towad the center to slow up incoming planes and give additional speed to machines taking off. On these runways 44 planes can land or take off simultaneously. Regardless of the wind's direction, air traffic can start from and stop at the pivotal group of buildings. The hotel will be constructed in the outer crust of the dome, and will have several hundred rooms, each with bath. Every fifth story will have a terrace from which guests can watch the planes. On top of the hotel will be a mooring mast for dirigibles and a weather station .... Provision will be made for two-story hangars holding several thousand planes. Parking space for automobiles will be provided near the hangars.

Francis Keally, "Tomorrow's Airports: A prophetic view of the Grand Central Station of the air," Nation's Business April 1929, p.32.

What about electricity?

The new Minneapolis public library deserves all the plaudits it has been getting. Open stacks to browse, plenty of room to add new collections, a comfortable feeling of both light and scholarship, and a cafe in the building ... what more could you want?

Working electrical outlets would be nice ... After a happy afternoon reading the Gas Age, the Coal Age, Electrical World, and other sirens of industrial triumphalism from the early twentieth century, and being able to connect to the magic internet via wireless that the power points aren't working! It seems I was just reading in a 1918 issue of Electrical World (while looking for an article about employing women as heavy coil winders) that the marvellous thing about electricity was its reliability ...

Rob MacDougall had a good post a year or so ago that drew some artful comparisons between early twentieth century telephone triumphalism and our latter-day turn of the century enthusiasm for the internet. Even the Coal Age (in 1918, when really, coal was not the coming technology) has that business press enthusiasm for the possibilities of human advancement you just don't get in other media.

Electricity. The marvel of the age.

Finding Mackenzie King

Is anyone else interested in running through cemeteries, demographic history, and Commonwealth political history?

I thought Toronto was not a great running city, but today I had one of the best surprise discoveries of any run ever. There's no network of cross-city asphalt paths, so you find yourself running on the sidewalk a lot. Not that this is all bad, there is a great diversity of street life in Toronto that is worth seeing.

The best unpaved trail close to the city appeared to be the Belt Line trail on the north-eastern edge of downtown, so I ambled over there early on Sunday morning before my flight home. The trail takes you along the path of an old railway, up through a ravine, and to the entrance of Mount Pleasant Cemetery. The gates to the cemetery were closed though it was past the appointed opening hours, so I jumped the fence, following the lead of two women running slightly ahead of me.

A digression. Trust me, if you're waiting for Mackenzie King we'll get there ... Not to sound kooky, but running in cemeteries is one of life's little delights for the running historian. Not to mention the demographic historian. You can see the demographic history of the west as you run past graves. Infant mortality, and industrial accidents, and their twentieth century decline. The influenza pandemic of 1918. Drowning: "the New Zealand disease." Though no doubt others who crossed frontier rivers and lakes had high rates of death by drowning too. The remarkably high toll of the early railroad. They're all there. Infant mortality tells its simple tale just in the tiny gap between birth and death dates. Industrial accidents are less often marked on the graves, but the painful shock of death in a mine, or on the waterfront can be told in the space available on a gravestone. The rise in living standards that allowed even the working class to afford a small plot in the graveyard. North American and Australasian cemeteries are much less crowded than European ones. Sometimes the names, rather than the age and cause of death are interesting too. Local elite. Politicans. Industrial barons. Names you've also seen on storefronts.

It's almost always so peaceful in cemeteries. I grew up near Wellington's large, hilly, trail-covered Karori cemetery which was a popular place for walking and running and biking on its network of paved and unpaved paths. Some of the unpaved paths were originally paved, but like the bodies around them were reverting to a more primoridal form. And I've happily run through cemeteries in Melbourne, Hobart, Auckland, London, Bath, and Montreal. Americans, and I generalize here on the basis of Arlington National Cemetery and Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge (MA) are more apt to restrict recreation in cemeteries. Though I should mention that I've run undisturbed through Hillside Cemetery in Minneapolis, and the Mount Moriah cemetery in Deadwood (SD) (resting place of Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickock. Anyway, the good managers of Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto have signs up encouraging you to walk, run, or bike through there.

Mount Pleasant, like a lot of New World cemeteries, has its Chinese immigrant section. The Chinese always appear to have gotten a spot far from the entrance, out of the way of the Catholics and the Protestants. I have no doubt this was deliberate; giving the Chinese the most marginal spot in the graveyard. But in both Karori and Notre-Dame-des-Neiges in Montréal the Chinese section for all its remoteness from the gates, were actually now in some of the prettiest spots of all.

Following the trail through Mount Pleasant on this unusually cool summer morning I was surprised to see a modern sign with a 100 word biography of William Lyon Mackenzie King, the longest serving Prime Minister in Commonwealth history. I stopped. Was his grave around here somewhere? I saw no large monument. Surely the great Grit was buried in something quite imposing. Mackenzie King is, after all, the Canadian equivalent of Franklin Roosevelt, Michael Joseph Savage, Peter Fraser, orJohn Curtin; leading his country through depression or war, or both. The Roosevelt and Savage memorials, at least, are sprawling.

But there it was, Mackenzie King's grave. A plain slab, with the simple words "Mackenzie King". Every grave around it was more assuming and imposing. There was a small, weather beaten Canadian flag on the grave, weighed down by a small stone. The grass around the grave was ragged. So there he was. Mackenzie King. Buried in a modest plot in a beautiful cemetery in Toronto, his grave distinguished from the others only by the small sign with his biography that you could easily miss.

There is, I find, a somewhat more substantial statue to the man in Ottawa (follow this link to see Lester Pearson speaking at its unveiling). But his grave was remarkable in its modesty and simplicity, and anonymity. Just there on the side of the path on my morning run. And that is why running through cemeteries is such a glorious thing.

(The Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada has a good list of the graves of Canadian prime ministers. People really do study demographic history using the data from headstones)

Recent economic history in graphs

Google Gapminder shows recent (last thirty years) economic and demographic statistics on cool graphs.

Amateur digitization for historians

This query about buying a digital camera stimulated me to put finger to keyboard and jot down my collected wisdom about using a digital camera for your research. Some of what I say will pertain mostly to historians—that will be the references to the mysterious archives that conveys a lot to historians and perhaps diddly to others—but the basic idea of substituting digital photography for photocopying will have general applicability for a lot of people.

Getting my caveats up front, I should note that, like photocopying itself, photographing material you could just be reading and taking notes on and being done with, is one of those productive forms of procrastination that feel like work but don't get the real job—writing—done.

That aside, what I outline here really can save time and money over a period of a couple of years. Digital photography is a lot quicker than photocopying (time is money); you can file your documents more compactly, which can be worth a lot if you anticipate/are moving homes or offices; and if you name your files or folders well (and use shortcuts/aliases) you can file your materials more effectively. Some people may ask, what about scanners? Don't bother, is my opinion. Scanners take much longer to record their image, are potentially more damaging to the documents, and are larger and heavier making them far less convenient for traveling to archives. Not to mention, ever tried taking a family photo with a scanner?

The bottom line figures for historians to keep in mind is that if you are photographing quickly and not stopping to examine and select material you can photograph up to 400 pages an hour. A linear foot of archival material is approximately 2000 pages. Thus, allowing for distractions and breaks to prevent RSI etc ... you could photograph a linear foot of archival material in an eight hour day. Do your own calculation here on how long it would take you to work through this reading and taking notes. If you can photograph material I think it quickly becomes an economical option for a lot of research.

The cost-benefit calculation of photographing the documents and returning home, versus going to the archives and reading the material there will depend on your situation. Most importantly, the archive or library has to allow self-copying with a digital camera. This is becoming more common, but may depend on precisely what you are looking at a particular place. As always, contact the archivist before you go! Other variables to consider in deciding whether to hit the archives, photograph and return include;

1. What is the cost (time/money) of spending time at the archives? The higher the cost of research trips the more you want to consider the short trip to photograph material. It might be less obvious that the slower you read, the more you should consider the "photograph and run" approach to archival visits.
   
2. Other ways of thinking about archival time versus time with your photographed images are;
   
   
   
   • How intensely are you taking notes from something? If you're basically transcribing a page, well, photograping is a lot quicker than sitting in an archive far from home. Taking dictation from dead people, as it were. Though I do grant that typing direct quotations from your sources is an unparalleled way of internalizing the sources you're looking at. In short, if you are doing more than a couple of lines summary of every page you look at, consider photographing it for posterity and note taking later. If you're looking at making some sort of systematic database of whatever (probates, wills, laundry lists, surveys) don't do data entry in the archives if you can avoid it. Photograph it and take it home. This also allows you to double key some of your entries if you have the time and inclination to do so. And once your data is all entered you can verify any strange entries.
     
   • How accurate do your notes have to be? If you write "taht" for "that" there's minimal damage to your research. Indeed, what with modern standards that we shouldn't even sic basic errors like that, maybe none. But if you change a 39 year old to a 93 year old on a census schedule (for example) suddenly someone who was a wife and mother looks like perhaps she should be a great grandmother and mother in law in the same house. That's quite a change. In other words, the more accurate your notes have to be, or the easier it is to make errors while taking notes quickly, the more you want to photograph.
     
   • Do you know in advance what you're looking for? The less you know what it is you're looking for, the more it helps to photograph the documents for later persual, in case your initial note-taking focused on the "wrong" thing. Lists and tables and the like are prime candidates for photographing as they defy easy, accurate and quick summary in notes. If it's in a table it's already a summary so you often can't just take one or two figures from it, as you might summarize a page of an argument in a couple of sentences. If you've ever reproduced a table of figures from an archival source in your notes you'll know what I mean, it takes a while. You have to count the columns and rows, and then decide which way to read the table to enter the data accurately etc. Photograph it and take it home.
     
   
   
3. Are you going want to follow up leads you find in material you've copied? How well have you identified beforehand what you are going to copy? The most productive "hit the archives and copy" trips are those where you know precisely what you want to copy before you go, and aren't likely to be needing to use other collections.
   
4. How much do you need to look at? If you only have a small amount of material to work through the traditional approach to visiting the archives should work. The larger the collection, the more you probably want to copy.
   
5. Are you looking at images or small text that is difficult to read? Being able to view an enlargement of your material can be really, really useful in some situations. With a photograph you are not limited to the 200% enlargement you could get on a photocopier.
   
6. Are you going to use it again? The more you are going to re-use a particular page, the more you want to photograph it.
   
7. Do you anticipate giving presentations about your research where you might want to illustrate what you are talking about? Being able to show a slide of the sources you are using can be very interesting for conference presentations, and especially when you have images. As best I can tell from talking to archivists displaying an image in a conference presentation does not constitute reproduction that requires permission since there is no permanent copy of the item being distributed. You should check this for yourself for 'your' collections, but digital photography can open up new possibilities for what you include in teaching and conference presentations.
   

If you have decided to hit the archives to photograph material, what follows is potted practical advice on how to go about it. It bears repeating, check with the archivist you can do this before you start ...

Camera: To reproduce archival material or modern printed books and journals a camera with a "document" mode is ideal. The Nikon Coolpix range has this feature. Personally, I have been using the Coolpix 5900 which (of course, one year later) has been superseded by the 5600 which you can pick up for $250-300. Apparently Sony also has cameras with this setting. I have been very pleased with the Nikon as it is small and lightweight, while still having a large LCD screen. The 5900 has a 5 megapixel default setting, which is just about ideal for document photography.

Flash and macro settings: The document mode mentioned above defaults to black and white images with no flash. Many archives want you to avoid flash to protect the sources. However, if you're photographing modern material (journals/books) you may choose to use a flash to get better contrast. Beware of glossy pages and make sure that if you are using flash it is not reflecting on the pages. Many older books have non-glossy text and then glossy photographs, so be sure to be aware of this if you are photographing books with the flash on. If you get a camera without a document mode, you want to be sure you can turn the flash off, set it to black and white, and use a close-up or macro setting. This will allow you to focus closely on the pages and get high quality reproductions of the documents.

Memory cards: If you are copying a lot of material you will want high capacity memory cards. On a 5 megapixel document setting, each image is about 950kb, depending on how complicated the image is. Just for comparison, a regular colour photo will be about 2/3 larger again. The image for a nearly blank piece of paper might be as small as 700kb, but if there's lots of text then it might be around 1mb. A 1GB card can hold up to 1300 document images. Your needs will vary, so this is only a guide.

Power source: A lightweight camera (like the Nikon Coolpix range) runs on rechargable lithium batteries which run out relatively quickly. If you are using the battery you'll be lucky to make 400 images before having to change the battery or stop (for several hours) to recharge it. The bottom line is that if you are going to be photographing a lot of pages in a short period of time, then you need at least two batteries so you can be charging one while you are using the other, or buy a power adapter for the camera. A power adapter is relatively cheap, and can be purchased separately from the camera. Unless you are going to urgently photograph a lot of documents in a short period of time (e.g; you are at an archive for one day and can't return easily if you don't finish) start with a couple of batteries, and purchase the power adapter if there's a demonstrated need. Of course, if you have a research grant you need to spend on equipment ...

Copy stand or tripod: Tripods are widely available and with a little fiddling can be set up in such a way that you get good images. However, if you are going to be doing a lot of photography of sources, consider buying a portable copy stand. You can get a good one for approximately $70 (or see here, at buy.com). Note that you will also need a piece of cardboard to lay over the legs of the copy stand to put your documents on so they lie flat under the camera. The huge advantage of a copy stand is that the documents lie flat under the camera. Many tripods can only be configured to photograph the documents at a slight angle, reducing readability and accurate reproduction. If you have a copy stand you can—if you make good copies—do your own reproductions for publication (though be sure to get permission to publish). Many archives charge $10 (at least) for photographic reproductions of material suitable for publication. You don't have to do this many times to exceed the cost of the copy stand. A copy stand is not something any one person will be using all the time, so you might consider seeing if your department could purchase one for loan to people who need one.

How the copy stand works
Since I first published this post, people have asked the most questions about the copy stand. Hopefully these pictures will illustrate it better. As you can see the camera is looking directly down upon the documents, which is difficult to achieve with a tripod, unless you have a tripod arm. The height of the copy stand is adjustable. With the Testrite CS-7 I've been using I can photograph A3 or legal paper by having the camera at the highest point.

Document photography with the copystand proceeds most rapidly with loose leaf paper. The procedure is simple. Put the paper on the stand, photograph, move the next piece of paper on, photograph ... repeat. Doing this it is straightforward to achieve 300-400 pages per hour, though this gets tiring.

Books are slower, since you sometimes have to hold the books open at a particular page. Although this means getting partial images of your hands beside the document text, it is quicker than using beaded book weights to hold each page down.

Source information: Make sure that you include information on the source in the image, so you know where the material came from. If you know ahead of time what collections you will be photographing material from you can print out reference information that you cut into strips to lay beside the documents when you photograph them. These strips of paper should include the collection and library and other information. You can leave space on the paper to add any document-specific information with pencil, erase it, and use the same paper for the next document.

Transferring images and organizing files: If you are concerned with making the most of your time in the archives, wait until the end of the day to transfer images from the camera to your computer. If you have multiple images it can take quite a while, as most cameras transfer data via USB which is not that fast.

Once you have the images on your computer, it really is up to you to organize as you see fit. Since hard disk and other computer failures are more frequent than house fires, whatever you do should include backing up your images at least once. This need not be too complicated or expensive. If you are at a university, you should have access to some form of network server storage provided by the university that is backed up regularly and reliably (onto tapes and stored offsite ideally). This should probably be your first option for a backup. Don't rely on CDs or DVDs for long-term storage unless you want to be spending your time rotating disks and checking that one set hasn't failed etc etc ... Network storage is the way to go as your house is unlikely to burn down at the same time as the university does. If it does you are probably living in an area with geothermal risks or hurricane activity. Or Chicago in 1871.

Backing up is the most important thing everyone should do with their images. Beyond that my advice, for what it's worth, is that you find a way of organizing your files that does not take too much time, while still allowing you to find things quickly. You could spend a l