Academics cleared of wrongdoing in the balloon boy saga by country sheriff:  “He may be nutty, but he’s not a professor.” Richard Heene, the mad-scientist father in the case, turns out to be a high-school educated handy-man.

(Message: I am still here, just trying to catch up with other stuff.)

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Now playing: The Broken Family Band – Devil in the Details
via FoxyTunes

There have been some good posts over at the new Historical Society blog–I want to respond to Chris Beneke’s, in particular, sometime soon.  (I’d like to try and keep our readers abreast of some of the other relevant blogs out there that touch on the early American history world–maybe I’ll do a feature on them and see if any of my suggestions inspire Jeff to update the ol’ blogroll.)

For now I’d like to respond to Randall Stephens’s post, “Goodbye Library?” with a defense of brick and mortar, shelving and circ-desks.  (Although when the digital revolution comes, I’ll be cheering when they line the microfilm readers up against the wall.)

This year I’m working on a book on the Boston Tea Party, and I’ve had a lot of chances to reflect on how I gain access to sources.  For a topic like this, it’s absolutely amazing how much I can read without ever leaving my study: all the Boston newspapers from 1773 are in America’s Historical Newspapers.  Most of the known pamphlets, broadsides, and books are on Early American Imprints.  (Thanks, AAS!)  Over on the other side of the pond, a lot of the relevant British material is at ECCO, although British newspapers can sometimes be harder to track down.  Furthermore, even once you start needing nineteenth-century serials, or Benjamin Bussey Thatcher’s Traits of the Tea Party (which Alfred F. Young used extensively for The Shoemaker and the Tea Party), or the Reports of the Record Commissioners of the City of Boston (which include the Boston Town Records and Selectmen’s Minutes), much of that stuff has been scanned on Google Books.  Many of the major academic journals are available through such resources as Project Muse, JSTOR, etc., although the gaps here are sometimes huge, and immensely frustrating.  As clunky or misleading or incomplete as these electronic resources can sometimes be, if you need to double-check a fact or a footnote without leaving your study, they’re massively convenient.

And yet, as catchy as it sounds to wave “Goodbye, Library!” I don’t think any of us (including Stephens) are ready to leave them yet.  I’ve had the honor to have library cards at some great libraries: Hewlett-Woodmere Public Library, Yale University Libraries (particularly Sterling Memorial Library and the Beinecke Library), University of Virginia Libraries (particularly Alderman Library), Columbia University Libraries (particularly Butler and Avery, and I like Barnard‘s, too), and Tisch Library at Tufts (which is smaller than the research libraries, but scrappy and surprisingly comprehensive for its size, and there’s a great view from the roof).  And while two of those library systems (CU and Yale) are woefully exclusive when it comes to access and borrowing, the rest of them aren’t (last time I checked), at least where local residents are concerned.  Here are some of the major reasons why, even at a research university with access to multiple electronic databases, I’ll always feel that libraries are a crucial part of my work and life.

1. Rare or unique archival materials. Sometimes I’ll find out, miserably, that a manuscript collection is housed far away in some crazy, inaccessible place.  And given the shrinking of travel budgets and the high cost of fuel, plus the usual time constraints, it really is tempting sometimes to hope that they’ll just put it all online someday and I can save myself the trouble.  Except for a few things: using scanned manuscripts (or crack-brained OCR) online is a nightmare–tough to search, tougher to browse, and a pain to read.  The only thing going for these scanned manuscripts is that they preserve the originals from our oily fingers.  Plus, some collections are really intelligently organized, and you miss out when you don’t consult the collection in person.  Also, sometimes we really do enjoy the excuse to travel (even if you’re just an early American historian and London is as exotic as it gets).
2. Browseable stacks. As beautiful as the New York Public Library, the British Library, and the Library of Congress are, none will ever be my favorite library to use.  Why?  I’m a stack rat, through and through, and these libraries force you to call up most of their materials.  For me, nothing will ever compare to the serendipitous effect of scanning through the stacks and coming upon a book you never knew you needed–you can replicate this to some extent by clicking on the “Subject” of a book you already know in an electronic library catalog, but those categories are never perfect, whereas you can spend all day traipsing through the E’s and F’s (or the B’s and H’s and N’s and P’s…), seeing where your mind takes you.
3. Knowledgeable, experienced librarians. They really do know stuff we don’t, and most of the ones I’ve met really take joy in helping out scholars, students, budding young readers, etc.  I really wish my students spent more time talking to these folks than I suspect they do.
4. The buzz of studious patrons. Libraries are places of quiet contemplation and/or (now with the rise of in-house coffee shops) active conversation.  The frisson of other people working helps me work in turn.  I’ve never been much of a coffee shop writer (I feel like I’m renting the table, hot liquids and laptops don’t mix, the caffeine high will eventually crash, and the vibe just isn’t the same), and although I usually do most writing in a home office, I’m always pleasantly surprised at how much I can accomplish in a library.
5. All the usual reasons to love libraries. They believe in the promotion of literacy, equity of access, and intellectual freedom.  They are refuges for people who live the life of the mind, gateways for those in search of knowledge, and public spaces vital to healthy communities.  The internet and home computers allow each of us to work and play in our own little boxes, not too differently from televisions, video games, and private book collections.  Libraries celebrate the spirit of coming together to share in the pursuit of knowledge.

In short, I appreciate electronic resources as much as the next person–I’m no luddite–but if you’re a history person and you don’t love libraries, you’re probably in the wrong field.

As part of our broader common interest in geographic minutiae, my son Isaac and I like to find out where all the NCAA tournament schools (and the conferences they come from) are located. Robert Morris University was a new one for us. It seems to be the only one of the Founder-named schools to make the NCAAs, and of course it was doubly interesting to me to discover that someone had named a college after a lesser-known (to civilians) and rather disreputable character from American history. Morris was the “financier of the Revolution,” true, but he was also one of the more Madoffian figures of his day,  running his own Ponzi-like schemes in the area of land speculation (frontier real estate flipping) and ending up in debtor’s prison. The Iroquois distrusted Morris and called him the “big eater with the belly” whose appetites ran to food, wine, and their lands. Read up on the Treaty of Big Tree.

We were pleased to find that RMU has a surprisingly nice, somewhat unsugarcoated page about their namesake on the school site. Debtor’s prison was mentioned. There is even a game you can play, and Robert Morris is given his own tabloid-ready nickname, “RoMo.” Really, more Founders need to have their own games and tabloid nicknames: G-Dub, A-Ham, J-Mad, T-Jeff … the list is endless.

The school seems to be a sort of business-oriented institution, which is appropriate but perhaps not so heartening in terms of whom it would good to take as your role model today. I feel certain that RoMo would have loved credit-default swaps and tried to use them to buy Kentucky or something. “FatCats” might be a better mascot than “Colonials.”

My friend DHM has alerted us to the latest adventures of Dr. McNinja, a former student of the clone of Benjamin Franklin.  The tales are written and drawn by Chris Hastings and inked by Kent Archer (click on the picture below to see the host site).

I think Jefferson just sent little starbursts through the screen.  We’ll stay on top of this developing story….

It should not affect this blog, but some of the links on here to my “pasleybrothers.com” domain are temporarily out of order because of a server move and “upgrade” at my hosting service. Use this temporary link to get my “jeff.pasleybrothers.com” home page and all the other materials should still be accessible from the links there. Everything should be back to normal soon.

The St. Louis newspaper reported over the weekend that the state of Illinois is closing three interesting but not very well known French colonial historic sites in “Les Pays des Illinois” along the east side of the Mississippi. Partly this is being done so that no Abraham Lincoln shrine can be left unvisited during Lincoln’s bicentennial next year. French Colonial America has long needed a new agent, especially for the French presence here in the Midwest, but this also strikes me as another case of a modern cultural institution abandoning its duty to make it possible for citizens to discover something they might not have known about, in favor of providing even more about an already popular subject that automatically generates high visitation numbers. (This is related to the phenomenon of public libraries clearing their shelves of world literary classics and non-fiction on relatively obscure topics so as to have more current bestsellers and self-help books on hand, the same ones prominently displayed at the local Target, Barnes & Noble, etc.) Nothing against Honest Abe — far from it — but it is always sad to see Famous Presidents and Their Smallest Doings crowding out other forms of history.

STLtoday – Illinois will close five area historic sites

The Illinois Historic Preservation Agency will close the Cahokia Courthouse in Cahokia, Fort de Chartres near Prairie du Rocher, the Vandalia Statehouse in Vandalia, and Fort Kaskaskia and the Pierre Menard Home, both near Ellis Grove. Those sites are currently open five days a week. Some may open on a limited basis for special events after Oct. 1.

The Cahokia Mounds and Lewis and Clark sites will continue to be open Wednesdays through Sundays, as they have since 2002.

Statewide, 13 historic sites and 11 state parks will be closed to accommodate $1.4 billion in budget cuts made by Gov. Rod Blagojevich after the Legislature passed an unbalanced budget. None of the affected parks are in the Metro East area or Southern Illinois.

Four Abraham Lincoln-related state historic sites — Lincoln’s New Salem near Petersburg and the Lincoln Tomb, Old State Capitol and Lincoln-Herndon Law Offices, all in Springfield — will resume seven-day-per-week schedules next spring, the Historic Preservation Agency has announced. All are currently open five days a week.

Next year is the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth and the expanded hours will be made possible by funding from the Illinois Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.

On the way to a ballgame this weekend, listening to an NPR report on the recent Georgian conflict, my friend the Trotskyist commented that the world seemed to be returning to the pre-WWI Great Power system, with empires gobbling up territory at the expense of smaller, weaker states that needed to find a Great Power protector or become one themselves if they expected to survive. Or at least Russia was returning to that model.

I didn’t have a coherent response in the car, but one of today’s New York Times stories on the conflict makes it sound like the Georgians believed they were operating in a Great Power system. How else to explain why the Georgians thought this would be an opportune moment to deal with their own breakaway regions, which were under Russian protection, the kind involving real troops. The Georgians seem to have thought that Shrub’s cheerleading for their fledgling democracy meant they were under our protection in that old-fashioned sense of our being bound to protect them in case of invasion by another Great Power:

All along the road was grief. Old men pushed wheelbarrows loaded with bags or led cows by tethers. They drove tractors and rickety Ladas packed with suitcases and televisions.

As a column of soldiers passed through Gori, a black-robed priest came out of his church and made the sign of the cross again and again.

One soldier, his face a mask of exhaustion, cradled a Kalashnikov.

“We killed as many of them as we could,” he said. “But where are our friends?”

It was the question of the day. As Russian forces massed Sunday on two fronts, Georgians were heading south with whatever they could carry. When they met Western journalists, they all said the same thing: Where is the United States? When is NATO coming?

Since the conflict began, Western leaders have worked frantically to broker a cease-fire. But for Georgians — so boisterously pro-American that Tbilisi, the capital, has a George W. Bush Street — diplomacy fell far short of what they expected.

Of course, as Shrub’s friend Vlad Putin knows, the U.S. has spent the last five years in Iraq demonstrating just how limited our power is on that side of the world, and precluding any further major interventions anywhere, let alone battling Russia on its near-home turf. If this were the pre-WWI system, we might have declared war on Russia immediately and attacked one of her allies somewhere else or sent troops across the Bering Strait (just as in Risk) or used the Navy to cut off the Black Sea or sink Russian ships in the Pacific. Iran would be in big, big trouble. And World War However Many would have been ready to rumble. You have to feel for the Georgians; they are finding out the hardest way possible how little U.S. neo-imperialists can really be trusted.

. . . at least for me and blogging. Too many papers to grade and year-end events to attend. Back soon!

Congratulations, Jayhawks!