edwired

This news is not new, nor it is — alas — very surprising. But it is terrible nonetheless. Acting on what appear to be very trumped up charges, Russian authorities raided the offices of the St. Petersburg based human rights group Memorial in mid-December and seized the extensive files Memorial has gathered on the history of the Gulag in the former Soviet Union. Memorial is our partner on the Gulag: Many Lives, Many Days project.

This seizure included the removal of hard drives containing data Memorial has gathered on tens of thousands of victims of the Gulag and was in the process of making available through their Virtual Gulag Museum. For now, the website remains up and running, but the underlying data — much, if not most, of which is still not available online — is now in the hands of a prosecutor and, we can only assume, now removed from public view until such time as the political winds start blowing a different way in Russia.

This shameful act by the Russia authorities — masked men raiding a human rights organization doing nothing more damaging than documenting crimes of a former regime — means that there is now almost no way for citizens of the former Soviet Union to access information on the Gulag. Even more chilling, however, is the message it sends. At a time when Stalin was recently voted the third most important figure in Russian history (never mind the irony that he was a Georgian), anyone in Russia thinking of working on a project that might be haunted by Stalin’s ghost will now have to think twice before going forward.

I don’t know many people who won’t be glad to see 2008 over and 2009 underway. But before we let go of a year that had many less than sterling qualities, it’s worth noting that some very excellent history blogging took place in 2008. The Cliopatria Awards for 2008 were just announced at the AHA annual meeting and if you haven’t seen the list of winners yet, it is well worth your time to take a few minutes to revisit some of the best of 2008 in the history blogosphere.

Looking ahead (with cautious optimism) to 2009, Dan, Tom, and I cut our last podcast of the year just as December was fading away. DigitalCampus #35 offers up a top ten list from 2008 with plenty of commentary on what we think the next big things will be in digital humanities for 2009. Give us a listen and see if you agree.

Finally, I’m happy to say that this post is the 300th in a blog that began back in October 2005 with a post about students using websites. When I started the blog, I had no idea that I would keep at it this long or that it would become such an essential part of my professional life as an educator. Thanks to everyone who visits, reads, and comments on what I’ve been writing about these past 27 months.

Readers of edwired will know that for several years I’ve been pursuing the identities and history of eight guys from Trenton, NJ who happen to live on my office all in a photograph I procured from a junk shop almost three decades ago.

Of late I’ve been zeroing in on them just a bit more — first as a result of an email I sent to someone connected to the frame shop that framed the image and now as a result of a posting on H-Net’s H-New-Jersey discussion forum. Those who know the history of my discussions of H-Net here will surely get a chuckle from the fact that I obtained useful information from H-New-Jersey, but I stand by my original views on that particular subject (email vs. blogs and social networks).

Nevertheless, there is no denying that John Fabiano’s contribution to H-New-Jersey has me thinking that I might need to get in my car one of these weekend and drive up to Trenton to see if anyone recognizes one or more of these guys. I have also written to the Roma Bank (descendant of the Roma Building and Loan) but didn’t hear back from them. So I may need to go knock on their door to get an answer — or better yet, access to their archives.

Back at the beginning of the semester I warned readers of this blog that I was teaching a course called Lying About the Past in which the students would — after studying historical hoaxes for half a semester — create a historical hoax and turn it loose on the Internet.

They did just that and the results of their work can be found at the website they created.

The hoax launched during the first week of December and between then and now more than 1,200 unique visitors came to the hoax website. Almost 200 visited Jane Browning’s YouTube channel. A few bloggers — most notably one at USAToday — picked up the story. The Wikipedia entry on our pirate was edited by several people not in the class — mostly to fix issues with the Wikipedia syntax.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story on the class in its Friday, December 19, 2008 edition [premium access only, alas].

I know the creating and launching of an online historical hoax by my students will offend some people and I understand all of the possible objections that might be raised. Before you start flaming me in the comments field, however, I’d ask that you download and read a copy of the class syllabus and read Jennifer Howard’s piece in the Chronicle. Then you can decide if you are still mad.

When I designed the course, my hope was that my students would learn that something fun and funny — hoaxes and hoaxing — have a real history that can be researched and written about in the same ways that historians write about the First World War or the Scientific Revolution. I also hoped that they would become much more skeptical consumers of online information and that they would learn both some additional research skills and some digital skills along the way. Finally, I hoped that they would have some fun in a history class (what a concept).

I will admit to being very gratified at how well the class went. I think it’s fair to say that I’ve never had a group of history students who worked so hard and so long on a group project. Once we decided on “the last American pirate” as our hoax, they dove into the work with a zest and level of commitment I’ve not seen before at any of the four colleges or universities where I’ve taught.

The challenge for me coming out of this course is how to capture that same level of enthusiasm in the other courses I teach. I think I’m going to have a difficult time doing it, but the trying will certainly be fun.

If you are one of the victims of our hoax, I apologize in advance if you are offended. We spent a lot of time in class discussing the ethical issues surrounding our project, which is why we created a hoax on something so innocuous as a small time pirate who never amounted to much. I hope you’ll be able to see the humor in what we did.