Douglass Day

Thanks to running across a post on BlueSky this afternoon, I ended up doing a bit of crowdsourced history this afternoon. When Frederick Douglass passed away in 1895, an activist named Mary Church Terrell led a effort to create a holiday celebrating Douglass’s birthday every February 14th. This holiday eventually grew into Black History Month. Starting in 2017, Douglass Day was revived as a way to bring participation into the Colored Conventions Project, a collaborative effort to surface the 19th century history of Black political organizing conventions.

One of the ways this effort is participatory is by running transcribe-a-thons of documents from the Colored Conventions during Douglass Day. This years’ effort was coordinated by the UC Santa Barbara Department of English and the UCSB Library. They are running this effort through Zooniverse, which is a platform famous for hosting crowdsourced research projects. As of this writing they’ve had 964 volunteers for the 2026 effort. I signed up on Zooniverse and transcribed five documents this afternoon. I’ll be doing more over the rest of this month.

Unsettling Memoryscapes

I have just finished taking notes on a couple of books I recently read to understand more of the context of my ancestral entanglements with Native Americans of the northeast. The books are Memory Wars: Settlers and Natives Remember Washington’s Sullivan Expedition of 1779 , by A. Lynn Smith (2023) and Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast by Christine DeLucia (2018). Both books examine place, memory, and commemoration following two distinct violent events, namely the scorched-earth campaign in 1779 ordered by Washington against the Haudenosaunee peoples of Western New York, and the hugely destructive King Philip’s War in 1675 in New England. Memory Wars focuses on the monuments that were placed throughout Pennsylvania and New York starting in the late 19th century to commemorate the Sullivan Expedition. Memory Lands considers local history and memory of several sites of trauma from the war, namely Deer Island in Boston Harbor, the Great Swamp in Rhode Island, the Connecticut River Valley in Western Massachusetts, and Bermuda. The two books treat place and memory from the perspectives of both the white settlers and Native Americans.

A couple thoughts from reading these books. Memoryscapes operate in parallel and different people in different communities will bring different meanings to a place and its history. And there is always a history behind monuments and markers. Who were the people who placed them? What were their values, and what sort of power was behind them?

(The photo shows a marker from the Native American Contemplative Garden in the UC Davis Arboretum.)

Under the Banner of the Goddess

In 1979 my sister travelled across the United States with two guys, one of whom was an archeologist. They had an interesting stop in Salt Lake City where they toured a museum focusing on Mormon history. For those unfamiliar, Mormon doctrine holds that ancient Hebrews traveled to the New World and became the Nephites and the Lamanites, the goodies and the baddies among the Native Americans, the baddies having the dark skin that was “the mark of Cain.” Needless to say there is no archeological evidence anywhere in the Americas to support this, that great battles between these two factions had taken place, a fact which my sister’s friend was quick to point out (a waste of breath as it always is when confronted by the iron-clad certainty of religious belief).

Her story of this event was the first time I’d ever heard of the Mormons or, as they prefer to be called, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I went on to read about them (Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer was my first introduction to one of the fundamentalist wings of the LDS Church, one that still practices polygamy, and I have also been following various podcasts here and here over the past year or so).

The story is fascinating to me because Mormons are famously good at documenting their history, raising the question of the veracity of all revealed religion. Their founder, Joseph Smith, supposedly had the Book of Mormon dictated to him by an Angel, or he found buried gold plates which contained the text of the book (which nobody else ever saw), receiving the translation by looking inside a hat. Smith had been a fraudulent treasure seeker in upstate New York before he found religion in the early nineteenth century. (He was also a voracious sexual predator, marrying at least 30 women, some of whom were in their early teens, some of whom were already married to other men.)

L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, once said “You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, start a religion.” The LDS church is a high-demand religion where unless you pay 10% of your income to the church, you are excluded from some of the highest privileges of worship, including access to the LDS temple. The result has been exploding financial growth in a church that now owns about 4% of public land in the United States and whose net worth is over $200 billion, wealth accrued not just from tithes but also from aggressive investment in tech and real estate, somewhat inconsistent with the notion that churches are accorded non-profit designations.

Religious belief is a fundamental human right. It is also true that patriarchal religions have done untold harm across the centuries, inflicting violence in the form of Crusades and other holy wars across the world, torture under the Inquisition, murder especially of women accused of witchcraft for over five hundred years, and the abuse of children on the part of clergy, protected by the very institutions charged with protecting the young.

There is now a vocal ex-mormon presence online, intent on exposing abuses and injustices inflicted on members by the patriarchal authority of old (very old) white men. By all metrics, the LDS church qualifies as a cult by Steven Hassan. Though some of the rules demanded of members seem quaint (no coffee, no alcohol, weird holy underwear), others, such as a virulent anti-gay and anti-trans agenda, are more harmful (gay teen suicides are rife in Utah; the millions of dollars poured into defeating California’s gay marriage initiative in 2008 led many young members to leave the church in droves, a massive miscalculation on the part of the church leadership). I personally have a big problem with any church intent on missionary work especially in developing countries, but Africa is a rich recruiting ground for the LDS church (though how many converts persist in their faith 10 years after their baptism is an interesting question). I also have a revulsion toward the practice of baptisms for the dead, ANY dead, your grandparents, your family who died in the Holocaust.

Curiously, though, LDS doctrine also holds that God has a wife, the Goddess, or Heavenly Mother as she is known to Mormons, a being who has given birth to billions of human spirits. Members are discouraged from praying to her or even from talking about her; it seems that a patriarchal religion that goes so far as to posit a woman of power is so afraid of her that she is made invisible. Mormon women are leaving the church in high numbers. But it doesn’t matter: the church doesn’t need their tithes anymore, not with all that accumulated wealth…

From Space Into Time

As I’ve mentioned in my posts on Zettelkasten, I have begun an open-ended research adventure. Two months into this journey, I have figured out that I want to do history — a shift for me from being a spatial data analyst of present-day conditions to tracing threads in the past. In some ways this is coming full circle for me, since my route into the field of geography involved a deep dive into the concept of landscape and landscape history.

What sort of history and where? The where is most likely California, since I grew up here and live here and travel to archives is easier (I today learned about an online collation of some 60,000 collection guides to more than 350 archives in the state). As for what, some combination of historical geography and environmental history and cultural history, perhaps with an eye looking out towards the Pacific and histories of that ocean. It will be many, many months before I converge on a topic, especially since I have to bootstrap learning how to do history as I go along.

Here’s a thread I learned about this evening while watching one of my doubly-subtitled Catalan videos. I knew that the first governor of Alta California, Gaspar de Portolà, was from Catalunya. (My junior high school was named after Portolà.) This video was a short presentation on Occitan influence in the New World. It turns out Portolà’s family was from Arties in the Vall d’Aran, which is this little Occitan enclave up in the Pyrenees of Catalunya. There’s a restaurant named after the family there.

Sign of Error

A month ago (back when we had sun) I was walking by the old church associated with the Newman Center near the university and noticed a paperback book stuffed into the empty bulletin board box in front. The book was Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.

I have not read this book, though I’d like to. It is a classic work of French history about the lives of the inhabitants of a small village in the Pyrenees at the beginning of the 14th century in the wake of the suppression of the Cathars. The history is based on a set of records set down by the Inquisition (the Fournier Register) between 1318 and 1325. Historiographically the book was a famous study from the Annales school of historians and was an important example of writing microhistory. I do not know if the person who placed the copy in the display case was making a commentary on the inquisitorial legacy of the Church.

The Memory Keeper

I’m continuing down my genealogical rabbithole and while reading up on WikiTree I came across a reference to an obscure but quite intriguing piece of software called The Memory Keeper. This is genealogical and historical research that is built on something called TiddlyWiki.

TiddlyWiki is personal wiki software that extremely cleverly functions entirely inside of a single HTML page. The individual wiki pages are units called “tiddlers” and the code in the HTML page sets up forms to edit and save the tiddlers. I have been using TiddlyWiki since 2017 to keep a research log for work. There is a substantial community around TiddlyWiki who have built many extensions and plugins for the system.

Memory Keeper consists of a set of these plugins and templates that have been organized around genealogical and historical research. It is not meant as a replacement for traditional genealogy software but rather to help in the research process. The trouble with most genealogy software is that the software typically is good at organizing the results of the research (individuals, their relationships in families, events, places, and sources and citations) but the software isn’t really a place to record one’s working notes. Nowadays there are many software systems for taking non-linear notes (in addition to TiddlyWiki, systems like Zettlr, Obsidian, and Scrivener come to mind). What Memory Keeper does is marry the two types of software, providing fields for genealogical data while allowing for non-linear wiki entry linking.

I’ve been testing Memory Keeper out these past couple of days and I think it will be very useful. I’m using Hosea Curtice as my test case. Here is an illustration. There is a note in the published genealogy for the Curtice family that he served in the French and Indian Wars and that lists the captain commanding his company. I easily look up what company this was, but this leads into researching the campaigns of this company and its regiment. Traditional genealogy software will not have fields to store that information, but this is ideal for a wiki-based system.

My previous work with TiddlyWiki was not very sophisticated, but I see lots of potential for Memory Keeper, particularly around keeping track of geographies in personal historical research.

Genealogical Rabbitholes

I really ought to enter a lot more of my genealogy into WikiTree. I have entered four people in there, including myself. No matter — I can find ancestors of mine who are already entered into WikiTree, and learn from there.

Here is the WikiTree entry for Hosea Curtice (b. 1739), about whom I wrote a couple days ago. (I come from a long line of Hosea Curtices, so I have to specify the birth date). He was married to Susannah Kellogg, whose genealogy leads in interesting directions. 1) She is part of the Kellogg family, which in another century brings us to Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and in this past century to the Kellogg Foundation. 2) You can trace a connection from Susannah Kellogg to Emily Dickinson. I am quite proud to have Emily Dickinson as my cousin, as the title of our blog would imply. 3) Susannah’s great-grandfather Samuel Kellogg (b. 1669) was kidnapped by Indians in 1677 and hauled off to Canada, eventually to be ransomed out of captivity. His mother Sarah Day was killed in the raid where Samuel was captured. Sarah Day is also the common ancestor I share with Emily Dickinson, through an earlier marriage of Sarah’s.

This raid happened in the aftermath of King Philip’s War, and there is an account of it on the website for the wonderful book Our Beloved Kin: Remapping A New History of King Philip’s War, by Lisa Brooks. I need to reread her book: it’s an illuminating journey into 17th century Indigenous geographies.

In The Wake of Ethnic Cleansing

The most haunting bit for me of The American Revolution documentary came in Episode 5, covering 1778 through 1780. In 1779 Washington sent a third of his army into western New York with the aim of destroying Iroquois settlements there. To quote from Washington’s orders to Major General John Sullivan (this was known as the Sullivan Expedition or the Sullivan Campaign): “The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.” They destroyed 40 villages and drove 5,000 Iroquois west towards Fort Niagara controlled by the British.

I had known about the Sullivan Campaign previously but watching the episode I realized with angst that the aftermath of the campaign probably intersected with my family history. I looked up the details and my hunch was right. One line of my family goes back to 17th century New England; these ancestors migrated westward until around the 1820s they ended up in Lorain County, Ohio where they settled for a century-and-a-half. One of these westward hops was to the town of Locke, in Cayuga County, New York. Locke was founded in 1790, and in 1803 or thereabouts my ancestor Hosea Curtice (born 1739) moved to that town. Locke is a few kilometers east of Cayuga Lake; in September 1779 Sullivan’s soldiers destroyed the Cayuga villages on the east side of the lake. Lands in the Finger Lakes region were designated as bounty lands for New York’s soldiers in 1781, and the Locke township was named by 1790.

The American Revolution (Ken Burns Series)

We finished watching the final of six two-hour-long episodes about the American Revolution today. I must say it’s been eye-opening (I didn’t learn much about it in school in England), and I’ve particularly been interested to hear the Native American and African American scholars’ contributions to the project. (The slaughter of Native Americans during what became a colonizing, imperial effort by the leaders of the Revolution was highlighted and sickening; I’m told American teenagers don’t get told this story much in history classes either.)

What has particularly impressed me about this series is the storytelling, much of it done through original paintings but a great deal of which was filled in with watercolors by Greg Harlin, whose depiction of the encamped Continental Army during a harsh winter — I can’t remember if it was at Valley Forge or Morristown) is shown above. These paintings have been a great complement to drone footage, maps, and still photos or footage of colonial interiors. The letters and accounts by soldiers from both sides, from politicians, from enslaved men and women, and from colonial women whether loyalist or rebel, have been brilliantly woven together. What an editing job this must have been…

The American Revolution was driven by ideas. It was a product of the Enlightenment. As the democracy that was born of this great and costly experiment lies under ever-greater threat, it’s good to look back into what it was all about. I’m glad we’ve taken the time to do this.

Journey Into the American Revolution

We watched the first episode of Ken Burns’ new documentary about the American Revolution this afternoon. The series consists of six two-hour episodes so like most of Ken Burns’ documentaries it is a serious effort both to watch and of course to produce — this documentary was a decade in the making.

The first episode presents the years leading up to the war, starting in 1754 just before the Seven Years’ War and ending in 1775 after the battles of Lexington and Concord. So far the documentary is excellent. Documenting the 18th century is a challenge for filmmakers since there is no archival footage, recordings, or photographs to draw upon but so far they are bringing the era very much to life with landscape footage, period illustrations, maps, interviews with historians, and many voiceover readings of texts from the period. (They have a star-studded cast of voice actors). It is clear that the filmmakers want to highlight the role of marginalized peoples — I was pleased that in this first episode they had interviews with at least three Native American scholars.

The series is quite timely. We are in a period of great division over what our country ought to be, so it is good to take a deep dive into its origins.