Reflections & News About Working With the Past
The April issue of Maryland Life has a piece I wrote called “Bicentennial of a Blindsiding: When the Brits Stormed Havre de Grace.” It’s about the devastating attack that took place there during the War of 1812, and the City’s plans for the 200th anniversary observance. The attractively situated community at the top of the Chesapeake has been working on this celebration for a couple of years now and they are anticipating 20,000 visitors on the first weekend in May.
On the day the Digital Public Library of America opened its virtual doors to the public, I was in Havre de Grace to do a talk with author Heidi Glatfelter on “Researching and Writing about the War of 1812.” We took a team approach to the program as I focused on new methods of doing digital research, while Heidi discussed how she accumulated information to produce her just released title, “Havre de Grace in the War of 1812: Fire on the Chesapeake.” We both drew on our experience in working as consultants on the 1812 Bicentennial celebration that is taking place this spring in the beautiful community at the top of the Chesapeake. Heidi was the grant administrator and I served as a consulting public historian.
Online research has made a broader universe of information easily available to anyone studying the past. So for this community-oriented audience I talked about some of the basic virtual repositories such as the Internet Archive, the American Memory and Chronicling America collections at the Library of Congress, and Project Gutenberg. As old maps are of interest, we took some time to examine some of the portals for cartography such as Old Maps Online. Of course, in the age when we all Google our information, we took a little deeper look at some of the tools in that massive index, such as Google scholar and newspaper archive. These were free resources, but we also talked about the commercial content providers.
Once Heidi finished talking about how she accumulated her body of data and developed the narrative for the enjoyable and informative work, we turned to the audience for questions. They were interested in discussing how to use the online tools and other topics such as derivative digital copyrights.
Here is a link to online research resources you may find helpful.
I have been working as a consulting public historian since 2011 on a project to document the story of Havre de Grace around the time the British burned the town in May 1813.
This work was part of the development of the Star Spangled Banner National Historic Trail. As one of two project historians, my assignment was to design and direct research focused on the community narrative. Another historian worked on the military aspect.
My final assignment involved preparation of an interpretative plan for the heritage museums of Havre de Grace. The document focused on helping those stakeholders deliver their unique storyline to the public during the Bicentennial.
It was an exciting project, as I worked with a great group of volunteers, local historians, museums and community subject matter experts to piece together the forgotten parts of the town’s past and develop the Havre de Grace Interpretive Plan.