Pursuits : Elizabeth Thomsen

Archive for the ‘History’ Category

No Mans Land, Flanders Field, France, 1919

In Flanders Field
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

— Lt.-Col. John McCrae (1872 – 1918)

When I was a child, my parents had an old recording of this song and I loved it’s rousing, patriotic cheerfulness, sending the boys off to the War to End All Wars. But in school my teacher recited In Flanders Field to the class, and I found the middle verse chilling: “We are the dead. Short days ago, we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow…” I still do, and think of it every time I read more young men and women going off to war and dying.

Over There, by George M. Cohan, sung by Arthur Fields, Columbia A2470, recorded in 1917, from the 78RPM Collection on the Internet Archive

I have lived in Massachusetts most of my life, and I have always been aware of these distinctive historical markers. The first one I really remember was the one for the Fairbanks House in Dedham. We lived nearby and used to pass it all the time. Then I noticed others around occasionally when we went on Sunday drives. I never gave them much thought, though — I’ve always just thought of them as part of the landscape.

Then I started photographing them and putting them on Flickr, and it became a sort of game, trying to “collect” as many as I could find. They were put in place as part of in 1930, and although they’re sturdy, heavy signs made of iron, many have been lost over the years to storms, accidents, development and other causes. I have heard that some may have been melted down in a World War II iron drive, but no one really knows what happened to them all, or how many are left.

But we do know how many there were, where they were located and what they said, because the book Historical Markers Erected by Massachusetts Bay Colony is available from the Internet Archive. The book was published in 1930 by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and it’s an alphabetical list by community with the text and location of every marker, and includes a few photographs of the markers. It’s interesting reading these. It makes me wonder how the decisions were made on what places and events were selected for the markers.

The text for the signs was revised and approved by historian Samuel Eliot Morrison, giving them a high degree of trustworthiness. However, at least one sign, the John Rogers Homestead, had an error. The text reads: “Near this spot stood the John Rogers homestead, which was destroyed in the Indian massacre of 1695, and the entire family killed.” However, the entire family was not killed, according to the 1816 An Historical Memoir of Billerica, in Massachusetts. This sign has the last phrase, “and the entire family killed” painted out. This is an interesting effect. The intent of the white paint to remove the text is clear, but the raised letters make it easy to read the original text. It’s much like strikeover text online…it makes the correction while preserving record of the error.

The condition of the markers varies greatly. Some are in excellent condition, some are in good shape and show signs of repair and restoration, and some are in poor condition, like the Oldest House in Cambridge marker. MassHighway is responsible for maintenance, and this post on their blog, Historic Signs of a Job Well Done, shows a marker before and after restoration, and asks the public to report markers in need of attention.

The signs were erected in 1930 with the auto tourist in mind, and are placed so they can be read from the car. Most are easy to photograph, especially since they have two identical sides. I try both sides to get the best results in terms of both light and background.

I’m not the only one photographing these, of course. I started the Massachusetts Bay Colony Tercentenary Historical Markers group on Flickr, and others have posted some pictures there. There are also many of the signs photographed and documented on two of my favorite sites: the Historic Marker Database (Example: The Church in Salem Village) and the Waymarking site (Example: Macy-Colby House.)

Every time the Library of Congress adds new photographs to their Flickr Commons site, I jump right on them, flipping through looking for interesting photographs.

I especially love the News in the 1910s set, black-and-white news photographs from the Bain News Service. The Commons has an active community of fans and volunteers. People add notes directly on the photographs, identifying particular objects in the picture, calling attention to details or transcribing text from signs and packages, and they add tags to improve the findability of the photographs.

But my main interest adding comments that provide more information about the person or event shown in the picture. The Bain collection is perfect for this — one of the reasons the Library of Congress selected this collection for Flickr is that they had minimal information for most of these pictures, and I’m not the only person who likes working on these. I often have to look through several pictures that other people have identified and described to find one to work on. (I almost wrote “to find one that needs me,” which is really how I think of this.)

And I wonder, sometimes, why we do this. I’m a librarian, and I do this kind of work for a living. Why are so many people jumping in to help research and catalog these photographs for free? If this were my job, it wouldn’t be nearly so much fun. I can’t speak for the whole Commons community, of course, but I know why I like participating in this project. It’s satisfying to add that first comment to a photograph, providing basic information. It’s like being a kids at school raising your hand to answer a question: “I know! I know!” It feels good to be helpful, and to be part of a project. There’s often some back-and-forth discussion among the people leaving comments, as we do our detective work to identify some of these pictures.

But in addition to community spirit, we also have access to resources that make it pretty easy to get the information we need. This work wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun back in the old days, working with printed indexes and microfilm readers.

Here are some of the resources that I have found especially useful in working with the Library of Congress Flickr collection:

• Wikipedia — Wikipedia links are often the first to appear on Commons photographs, identifying a person or event. It’s amazing how many articles there are, even on fairly obscure people, places and events, and how good most of the articles are. And as a free and open resource, it’s so very linkable.
• New York Times Archive — The archives from 1951-1922 are available online as scanned images in PDF format, free and linkable. This is an incredible resource for all kinds of historical research, but it’s especially useful for the Bain photographs because of the date range.
• Time — Time makes their complete archives available from 1923 on. For the Bain collection, Time articles can provide additional information on the life of people shown in the photographs. The obituaries are especially helpful in providing biographical information for political figures.
• Google Books — These searchable books can be a great resource. For this photograph of actress Irene Bordoni, Flickr user swanq provides a link to a directly to biographical information in a book called Vaudeville, Old and New. For this photograph of Dr. Anna Shaw, I added a link to her autobiography on Google Books.

Government websites are useful for biographical information on political figures: for example, see this photograph of Morris Sheppard with a link to the Senate website. Even YouTube can be a useful source in certain instances — for example, I added links to YouTube videos to a photograph of Titta Ruffo, an opera singer.

There are many other useful sites — I nearly always start with Google and see where it leads me.

Flickr Commons Links

• Flickr: The Commons — “The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.”
• Flickr Commons group — “A place for the Commons Community to share and discuss the truly awesome collections being made available in the Flickr Commons”
• Indicommons — “The Indicommons blog represents outreach from the Flickr Commons group beyond Flickr, to broaden knowledge of The Commons among the public and civic institutions around the world and to increase participation by the public in the Commons.”

Here’s a great photograph of suffragists to kick off Women’s History Month. It’s from the Library of Congress collection on Flickr. The Library of Congress was the first participant in The Commons on Flickr, a project where cultural institutions share historical images that are free of copyright restrictions, and encourage members of the Flickr community to add notes, tags and comments.

Suffrage Pageant Flower Girls — Photo page on Flickr

Hempstead Aglow in Suffrage Hues — Here’s a 1913 article from the New York Times about the event shown in this photograph, a Suffrage Pageant on Long Island organized by “General” Rosalie Jones.