Seacoast History Blog #37
March 12, 2009 

I couldn’t do what I do without the Web. Writing history is enormously time- consuming. You not only have to write about the past in a way that captures the over-stimulated modern reader, but you have to get the facts right. Facts are hard to find. They hide in corners in dusty archives, spread all across the planet. That used to mean costly trips to libraries, getting access to archives, waiting for reference librarians to access those sources, taking notes on the fly. Now, in more and more cases, I can get what I am looking for in seconds by clicking a mouse. (Continued below)

Web turns crawl into cakewalk

Take today. This morning I was reading a text on child labor practices for a book I’m working on. I have more than a dozen books piled up on my desk that I ordered from Amazon.com, the largest supplier of books in the world. I paid as little as a dollar (plus $3.99 postage) for texts I could not have found in a lifetime of rummaging through used bookshops. Same goes for scholarly articles. Essays that might take weeks to obtain via interlibrary loan, I can now download in seconds. I paid $8 the other day for a 10-page article via PayPal and thought it was a bargain made in heaven.

So far I’ve spent a little over $100 on research for this project and saved myself weeks of digging. I downloaded a bunch of books on child labor reformers from Google books. Minutes ago, I learned about the "anti" reformers too. These were people who thought child labor was a good thing, not evil. One of those reformers was Thomas Robinson Dawley, Jr. He wrote a book in 1913 arguing that kids in Appalachia were better off working in factories than on failed family farms. A 12-year old boy could now earn one-and-a-half times more money than his 40-year-old father, Dawley said. He complained that the Northern progressives who wanted to stop child labor were "parasites". Their efforts to vilify child labor practices, he wrote, were further Yankee attempts to control Southern mills as they had done with Southern lifestyles in the Civil War. I needed to see that point of view.

Thanks to the Web, I was able to put down my text book and, in less than a minute, find a 1913 review of Dawley’s book online at the New York Times. I ran that article onto my printer. Dawley’s entire book "The Child That Toileth Not" is online. In minutes I was able to look directly into the time period I am writing about. I could see the issue from both sides and read Dawley’s own words. Before the Internet, just finding that NYT article meant slogging through the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature and, with luck, locating the piece on microfilm. What might have been a forgotten footnote, became a lively counterpoint to the chapter I am writing. We tend to read only about the winners in history and quickly dismiss the failed opposition. This creates a highly skewed view that becomes increasingly oversimplified as time scrubs the gritty truth down to a polished chestnut. At least a dozen times a day I go down a short research rabbit hole. I can visit 10 web sites in half an hour, widen my knowledge, and sharpen my views.

This is important. Historians, as I often note, tend to recycle the stuff that previous historians wrote. That info, especially when done by local amateurs, is often out of date, or biased, or based on inaccurate sources. Penetrating resources back to their primary (or even secondary) sources is exhausting work. That’s why it can take years to research and write a college thesis. Working writers, paid by the piece or by the hour, rarely have the luxury to dig deeper. So what we write is just more recycled history.

Now there is time to double or triple check the facts, or to dig into deeper, diverse, sometimes previously undiscovered sources. Take this piece on Daniel Webster I’m writing for Monday’s newspaper. I wanted to confirm a quotation from a short story by Stephen Vincent Benet, but I don’t own a copy of "The Devil and Daniel Webster". But there it was, right online. So was the data about the two film versions of the story, rich retails on Webster’s life, details about his time at Dartmouth, his speeches and court cases, and on and on.

One of my editor’s recently sent a note reminding authors that they may not use Wikipedia as a research source. Good call. The online encyclopedia is often unreliable, but a wonderful place to start. I found some info there while researching privateering last week. That led me to a web site of a researcher in Scotland. We emailed back and forth and then, out of the blue, he offered to check a few maritime documents for me during his next trip to a maritime archive in London. They arrived by email days later – a project that would have taken me a week, thousands of travel miles, and cost at least $1000. Yes, I missed a trip to London, but when I go, I won’t have to spend all my time in the library.

The wider the Web reaches, the more enjoyable the research gets, and the more quickly I can finish richer and better-documented articles and books. One must be cautious. Speed kills, I know. But remember that, until recently, we were crawling. Now history writers can finally walk upright, and some days, even break into a slow run.  

Copyright © 2009 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.