01 November 2012
A History photographed: Canada in World War 1
Joker, patriotic fund collector
This work (Joker, waiting for the call, shelfmark HS85/10, by creator: D. Will McKay, producer: British Library), identified by British Library, is free of known copyright restrictions.
A milestone to celebrate with you all today. After much selection, work-flow organisation, scanning, quality checking and metadata addition, a selection of photographs of Canadian troops departing for war in Europe is now available via the Library’s Digitised Manuscripts catalogue. The photographs are a small part of the Library’s contribution to the Europeana Collections 1914-1918 project and will be co-hosted on the British Library and Europeana sites.
The Canadian WWI photographs are part of a collection we’ve written about here before; it contains the work of Canadian photographers who copyrighted their work between 1895 and 1924. As a result, the collection contains a number of photographs relating to the war, although almost all of them are produced on Canadian soil. These have been digitised for the Europeana project and just over 150 pictures of regimental mascots, soldiers leaving for Europe, Canadian war work and military inspections are available to search and view in detail.
This work (Scene at embarkation of 26th Battalion and ammunition column, by creator: D. Smith Reid, producer: British Library), identified by British Library, is free of known copyright restrictions.
The bulk of the pictures are battalion panoramas and the scale of these always drives home to me the horror of the war – rows and rows of individuals marching off to a mechanised war which consumed the lives of so many. With that in mind, making these items available online is perhaps a good way to mark the centenary of the war; a forceful reminder of the individual and social cost of the conflict.
If you would like to browse the whole collection of photographs the best way to do this (at the moment) is to use the search function on the homepage of Digitised Manuscripts. Simply add ‘Canada’ as a keyword and reduce the date range to ‘1875 – 2000’, this should bring up just over 150 results. There are a few teething problems to sort out and we’re working on them right now, but if you find any you have my apologies.
[PJH]
14 September 2012
The Empire of Haiti: digitising some of the Nineteenth Century
Coronation of Faustin I, from Album Imperiale d'Haiti, New York 1852
A short but well-illustrated Team Americas post this week. We've all been a bit busy (especially Carole and Matthew who are currently refining the Kerouac exhibition labels like a pair of master sculptors). One of the things I'm currently working on is making a home for some Haiti materials we recently had digitised and so today seemed like a good time to share some highlights of the content with you.
The whole selection is quite broad, composed of various manuscripts, maps and a book of lithographic prints. Two of the book's prints and one of the maps are on show here. The book Album Imperiale d'Haiti commemorates the coronation of Faustin I (previously Faustin-Elie Soulouque). Above is the coronation scene and below the lavish frontispiece. The book also contains a further scene of Faustin leaving the ceremony and portraits of a number of dignitaries.
Frontispiece from Album Imperiale d'Haiti, New York 1852
Due to the impracticality of uploading .tiff files to the blog what you see here are very low resolution images. Once the full size versions are up you will be able to see them in all their zoom-able glory. While the maps were designed to be viewed in microscopic detail, I doubt that the engraver for the Album imagined that his work would ever be looked at so closely - and I suspect there are some interesting omissions in the landscape plates for keen-eyed viewers.
Carte de l'Isle de Saint Domingue, 1722 [BL Shelfmark: Maps.K.Top.123.35]
Team Americas is feeling very digital at the moment, with the American Civil War, War of 1812 and this project all going on at the same time. We'll keep you posted as to how all of them are coming together - look for any announcements interspersed amongst the On the Road quotes on our Twitter stream.
[PJH]
24 August 2012
The Battle of Bladensburg: some War of 1812 project notes
Map of the Battle of Bladensburg showing Washington. British Library Manuscript [Add. Mss. 57715 (f.10)]
Today marks 198 years since the Battle of Bladensburg, during which a British force landed at Benedict, on the Patuxent River, and marched on Washington D.C. The resulting battle was a victory for the British and ended with the burning of public buildings in the city.
As part of the War of 1812 digitisation project that myself and Matthew are working on I’ve come across the above map of the battle, a black and white reproduction of which can be found in Lossing’s The Pictorial Fieldbook of the War of 1812 (held in a later edition at the Library, DSC 81/8962). The image above is just a low-res copy as we've as yet to start the digitisation in earnest.
Digitisation will start in September, with the first selections (all maps) heading off to Imaging Services. There’s some interesting material in there, including maps of the Battle of New Orleans and a map of the Battle of Moriaviantown. There are also some interesting general maps and atlases which show the landscape and settlements of early nineteenth century North America as well as the theatre of war.
When the first materials go up we’ll let you know.
[PJH]
27 July 2012
The Siege of Atlanta
This work (Map illustrating the Siege of Atlanta, by the U.S. Forces under command of Maj. Gen. W. T. Sherman) [Maps 72580.(4)], identified by British Library, is free of known copyright restrictions.
A slightly tenuous link for this week's Civil War map, which is a plan of the Siege of Atlanta in 1864. It's a few days after the 148th anniversary of the start of the campaign, the eventual success of which proved to be a great morale boost for the north, and helped to seal Lincoln's 1864 electoral success. We wouldn't like to suggest that London is under seige (indeed, your correspondent is doing his best to welcome the world to the UK during the opening ceremony this evening), but simply note that Atlanta, like London, is an Olympic city.
Maps 72580.(4) (detail). Gone with the Wind comments welcome...
And on the Olympic theme, don't miss the British Library's official (and free) Olympex: Collecting the Olympic Games exhibition or the brilliant Writing Britain exhibition, which is part of the simultaneous Cultural Olympiad, if you are in town during the next few weeks. And if you are in front of a TV this evening, keep an eye out for a curator rather out of his comfort zone after the Parade of the Athletes.
[M.J.S.]
19 July 2012
Know Your (Union) Generals
This work (The Field of Battle and Prominent Union Generals, Creator: Ensign & Bridgman, New York; Producer: The British Library), identified by The British Library, is free of known copyright restrictions.
I promised some more maps from the U.S. Civil War project, so here's another one, The Field of Battle and Prominent Union Generals [1864?]. And Mr Sherman, it's time for your close-up:
[M.J.S.]
11 July 2012
US Civil War Project: What time is this place?
This work (History of the Civil War in the United States, 1860-1865, Toronto, 1897 [Shelmark Maps.71492(39)], by Comparative Synoptical Chart Co., Limited), identified by The British Library, is free of known copyright restrictions.
I mentioned the maps in my last Civil War post. Most of them are as one would expect: campaign maps or overviews of the territory produced for an eager public in Britain and the States. Some, however, are a little different, such as Prang's bird's eye-view maps. And some are very different, such as the one above. You can see a little more of what is going on in this enlargement:
In this large-scale map, the history of the war in the major states is charted, and mapped against contributing factors, such as the stength of the army, the relationship between gold and paper money, and national and international events, such as the Trent Affair. It was published by the Comparative Synoptical Chart Co., and is a particularly fine example of the nineteenth-century vogue for representing historical events visually: an early educational example of the infographic. (The Co. also drummed up interest in its products through newspaper quizzes, offering Century bicycles as prizes). There's more on this sort of thing in Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time (New York, 2010) and also on Stephen Boyd Davis's blog, http://chronographics.blogspot.co.uk/. Those flumuxed by the chart above could also resort to an Index with 'Introductory Notes'; today, you can also read it online.
A larger, downloadable version of the chart is currently available via the Library of Congress.
[M.J.S.]
09 July 2012
Civil War Project: Abraham Lincoln in Black and White
The end is in sight for the US Civil War project. Most of the materials have been digitally photographed or scanned. These have been renamed to try and reflect the pagination or foliation of the items, and then converted into 'zoomable' images before they are added to www.bl.uk/manuscripts (and, if they are printed materials, added to the catalogue driving the system that we are piggybacking on). I've just received a wonderful batch of maps, which I hope to share shortly, and was able to put online the Library's copy of Gardner's Photographic Sketchbook of the War, vols. 1 and 2 (let me know your thoughts on the lack of blank recto pages in the viewer). The online gallery 'feature' on Britain and the U.S. Civil War is also almost ready to go once there is a critical mass of digitized materials online.
This said, like any campaign, there are the occasional setbacks. We recently acquired a collection of a printer's proofs of Civil War song sheets [RB.23.b.7019]. I was particularly looking forward to seeing the images of these, as they are often colourful, as well as capture something of the everyday life of the war from all sides of the conflict. They are individually catalogued on explore.bl.uk, so the collection also raised a few issues about how to catalogue them for www.bl.uk/manuscripts, a process that promised to be a useful experiment for the system.
I've just collected the images from the studio, but it looks as though I've collected greyscale jpegs, rather than getting colour tiffs as is usual (even the proofs weren't originally coloured, there is something about the quality of the paper and print that only colour images record). A small hiccup, which will easily be remedied. Meanwhile, here's one of the jpegs (top) lamenting the loss of Abraham Lincoln (which, in any case, isn't coloured). As I said, more to follow.
[M.J.S.]
11 April 2012
There will never be anything more interesting than that American civil war
There has been much in the press over the last week or so concerning revised estimates of the death toll during the American Civil War so we've dusted off and updated an earlier blog on the subject.
A couple of years ago I started to follow Professor David Blight's Yale course on the American Civil War on the wonderful Academic Earth (we can all have a Yale education now!). The right statistics can really help to focus the mind - I had known that around 620,000 Americans had died during the Civil War, but when I heard Professor Blight say that if you applied the same death rate per capita to the Vietnam war, some 4 million American soldiers would have died in Vietnam (as opposed to the actual –and still staggering figure of c.58,000), that really helped to bring home to me the enormity of the conflict. And now we learn that those figures may have been underestimated by as much as 20% and that the real figure is likely to be between 650,000 and 850,000. The revising of the estimate is due to the work of J. David Hacker, an historian at Binghamton University, who has been examining newly digitised census data for the Nineteenth Century. For more information on this important work, see an article in the New York Times and a piece on the BBC News website. You can also read Hacker's full article A Census-based Count of the Civil War Dead in Civil War History (Vol. LVII No.4, 2011).
These days we are all too used to seeing images of war in the papers or on our TV screens but photography was still relatively new at the time of the Civil War. Roger Fenton’s photographs from the Crimea in 1855 represent one of the earliest attempts to document war, but although he recorded the landscape and the military personnel etc, there are no battle scenes. Not really surprising since the cumbersome equipment and laborious wet-plate photographic process made it much too difficult and dangerous to photograph actual fighting. But Fenton also deliberately chose not to record the bloody aftermath of battle.
Alexander Gardner, a Scot who worked for Matthew Brady, went to photograph the Civil War in 1861 and, unlike Fenton, he did record the resulting carnage. This included the aftermath of one of the bloodiest days in American history at Antietam, Maryland, in September 1862, when McClellan’s Army of the Potomac faced Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. And here’s another statistic from Professor Blight- each year 23,000 candle lamps are placed on the battlefield at a ceremony held to commemorate the number of casualties that fell there over the course of the almost day long battle.
Gardner’s photographs of the dead at Antietam were exhibited at Brady’s New York gallery and understandably caused a sensation. But he was soon to part company with Brady (who often took the credit for the photos of others) and set up his own studio. More of Brady’s photographers joined him and together they continued to document the encampments, soldiers and battle fields. Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War appeared in 2 editions -one in 1865 and one in 1866, both consisting of 2 volumes, each volume containing 50 albumen print photographs, and each photograph accompanied by a descriptive caption. Of course, much has been written on Gardner's 'staging' of some of the scenes and bodies, not to mention the veracity of some of the descriptions (for some examples see our Points of View webpages and also the Library of Congress), but the Sketch Book still represents one of the earliest visual evocations of the horrors of war.
Another statistic that I learnt from Professor Blight, equally staggering but in a different way, was that over 65,000 books have been written on the Civil War, which would tend to give credence to Gertrude Stein’s comment (at the top of the blog) on its enduring interest. And no doubt that figure also now needs to be revised upwards. I certainly don’t think that the Library can claim to have all of the books on the subject, although our holdings are strong. And Matthew is still beavering away on a feature on the Civil War for the Library's online gallery. Quite a bit of material has already been digitised (we're focussing on our rare and unique items) and Matthew has been blogging about his activities and discoveries over the last year. You can find his updates on the project by clicking on Civil War in the categories section which appears on the left-hand side of the blog. We're keeping our fingers tightly crossed that the feature will see the light of day in the next couple of months.
[C.H.]
Americas and Oceania Collections blog recent posts
- Digital resources on the 17th, 18th and 19th century Caribbean
- James Knight’s “History of Jamaica”
- Canada in the UK: waiting and training in WW1
- Off the Wall Fridays
- Off the Wall Fridays
- Marking ANZAC Day: 'Fighting Australasia'
- US Civil War Maps
- A million first steps: some early Team Americas favourites
- Team Americas celebrates Movember
- Civil War Project update – A journey through the Southern (and Northern) States
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