There’s a level of excitement that I feel when I visit – and potentially use material from – a good-looking digital history website that looks well-maintained, attractive, and scholarly. Conversely, I often get an icky feeling when I visit a digital history site that is clearly not maintained (or at least not maintained well) and whose functionality is limited or clearly not up to snuff in terms of being intuitive for the user/viewer/reader.
As I seek to create my own digital presence, these are issues that I think of not only as I choose design elements and make certain choices about content, but about the attention my project will require of me going forward. At some point digital projects may be “done” content-wise and presented for public consumption, but they aren’t ever quite “done” if the creator wants them to remain available and used/read. I get excited at the thought of producing attractive digital history projects; I get a bit intimidated at the thought that, as Bradley Daigle at UVA has stated, digital stewardship “involves care and feeding” requiring keeping up with ever-changing technologies. (1) This especially because I’m a self-funded historian with little prospect of obtaining a grant or being financially able to hire tech people to help me maintain anything I build.
In addition to storing something as simple as a database’s password and backing everything up in multiple locations and in multiple formats, a good suggestion is potentially donating administration of it to an organization like a library or, in my case, the Shiloh National Military Park’s Corinth division. Yeah, the source for that seems a bit dated at year 2006, but the suggestion to find like-minded people or organizations who might be interested in carrying on your work (and not to mention potentially have the money to do so) is well taken. (2) The opportunities digital scholarship presents are many, but comes with unique challenges and responsibilities.
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1: Jennifer Howard, “Born Digital, Projects Need Attention to Survive,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (January 6, 2014). https://blueline.instructure.com/courses/1183664/assignments/6402261. Accessed May 2023.
2: Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, “The Long Term Fate of Your Site” in DigitalHistory (2006). https://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/preserving/6.php.html. Accessed May 2023.
Visually interesting and text-illuminating maps are among my favorite elements of any historical treatment, be it article, book, website, exhibit, and so on. They not only make text come alive, but can be used to illuminate concepts and trends that might otherwise remain obscured. It’s safe to say that as someone who loves geography and has an interest in environmental history, I orient myself to the world spatially probably more than many others. And given my interest in environmental and military affairs, maps are pretty much necessary for works seeking to communicate important nature-human relationships.
For my project on the Siege of Corinth, Mississippi, I took two maps – a manuscript map from 1862 showing the route of advance of Halleck’s U.S. Army ,and a state geology map for Mississippi – and georeferenced them using the technology at oldmapsonline.com. For this class assignment I checked on these again, and broke them down into separate entities for use in this post. The Halleck map, being from 1862, required more georeferencing (14 locations) than did the state of Mississippi geology map (4 locations).
There are tools on the right side of the screen that let you change the opacity of the maps. Doing this helped me correct – and make reasonable inferences about – any differences between them.
Printing out multiple versions of these overlays, I was able to trace the geology map an accurately represent Halleck’s advance over that geology on his way to Corinth. An artist friend assisted in making my creation on Microsoft Illustrator. The map was created in greyscale because it is designed for publication. Nonetheless I was happy with how the gradients of gray came through. The geology of the Tennessee-Mississippi border region near Corinth mattered for his soldiers’ access to water during the campaign, and was a critical component of the disease environment. The Selma-Demopolis Chalk (atop which Corinth, MS and Monterey, TN are located) drastically limited the water available to the U.S. Army during the hottest part of the siege. I submitted this map alongside a few other graphics/charts in my recently-submitted article.
For this assignment I chose to analyze text from John Trowbridge’s 1866 travelogue titled The South: A Tour of Its Battle-Fields and Ruined Cities, A Journey Through the Desolated States, and Talks with the People. I obtained the text through Google Books here: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_South/IsBOdvp_1A4C?hl=en&gbpv=0
This popular work chronicles Trowbridge’s voyage through the southern states of the ex-Confederacy at the end of the Civil War, producing for a largely northern readership an on-the-ground view of the war-torn landscape of the South, its crumbling infrastructure and social order, and the beginnings of a new social order taking shape. It is a popular account meant for a mass audience, and contains considerable dialogue and unique situations that one cannot help but think are either embellished for literary quality or simply made up. It is an entertaining account that does give the reader a sense of the lived reality of the postwar South, of the texture of daily life, at least through the eyes of a northern white man of the 1860s.
Trowbridge (right) with Mark Twain in 1908. https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:m613n470b
I used this work because Trowbridge spends some time in the Corinth, Mississippi area, and relates some colorful experiences in the town and the countryside between it and the famous Battle of Shiloh across the state line in Tennessee.
First Visualization: Word Cloud
Once I removed the stopwords, some interesting trends in the text became clear. Some are unsurprising: war, white, freedmen, people, negro, rebel, cotton, union, and battle all relate to the just-finished Civil War and are common vocabulary terms of the time, with an emphasis upon race and the newly-freed condition of the formerly enslaved peoples of the region trying to establish an economic foundation in the wake of war. This economic foundation is likely best indicated as an important theme by the inclusion of the word “work” among the most frequent in the text. I found most interesting, though, the frequency of “man” or “men,” as it indicates the gender conventions of the time and Trowbridge’s prioritizing of males over females in his telling. The most popular word – “said” – indicates how much dialogue there is, while “house” likely reveals Trowbridge’s attention to the built environment of the region and his common visits to people’s homes as he is traveling. The common use of “old” could indicate Trowbridge’s attention to the form and functions of an old society dying and a new one being born.
Second Visualization: Trend Graph
Frequency of the words “Corinth” or “Corinthians.” Trowbridge visited Corinth and southwest Tennessee about halfway through his journey throughout the South. He makes lots of comments about war-torn Corinth, the most notable of which is the bad reception he gets from a Corinth woman who, after learning Trowbridge is from Massachusetts, comments “Ohhh you’re a bad Yankee!” Again, whether this is true or not, or embellished, is up for debate. But it’s entertaining.
Third Visualization: Trend Graph
This is a graph of the frequency of the words “Said” (in gray) and “House” (in pink), providing general evidence of the connection in the book between dialogue and visits to houses or towns. It gives insights into the flow of Trowbridge’s narrative.
Below are samples and summaries of primary and secondary sources from which this project will draw.
Primary
Often the first source for historians looking to get a handle on Confederate memorial culture, Confederate Veteran provides important background for this project. In addition to publishing calls for fundraising and soldiers’ memoirs, the popular periodical reported enthusiastically about commemorative successes like that of the second monument to Colonel William P. Rogers of the 2nd Texas Infantry at his gravesite in Corinth.
“Monument to Colonel Rogers,” Confederate Veteran, March 1913, 102
Postcards can provide evidence of the built environment of Corinth and its relationship to Civil War commemoration within the town. The first Rogers monument – that to Rogers and other Confederate soldiers who fell at the October 4, 1862 Battle of Corinth – once occupied the intersection of Franklin and Waldron Streets in downtown Corinth. This was moved to the courthouse lawn in 1918, but Corinth was one of only a small handful of Mississippi towns who placed their Confederate memorials outside of cemetery or government property. That they did so is indicative of the clear political message monument supporters intended.
“Waldron Street, Showing Roger’s Monument, Corinth, Miss.” Cooper Postcard Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, MS.
Various records relate the history of Black struggles for freedom, education, and bodily autonomy in post-Civil War Corinth. These political efforts by the newly-freedpeople and the federal government provide crucial political context to the first memorial and commemorative activities of the competing interpretive traditions taking root in Corinth in the war’s aftermath, both of which were always connected to contemporary political events.
John D. Moore to A.W. Preston, May 2, 1867, Freedman’s Bureau Papers, Corinth Records, Volume 1: Letters Sent, March 1867-February 1868, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.
Manuscript collections often hold interesting photos of Confederate memorial culture and its relationship to educating youth in town:
“Thirty-Sixth Annual Reunion Miss. Division-U.C.V. Corinth, Mississippi,” Madge Burney Papers, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS.
The monthly newsletter of the Mississippi Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy holds valuable and revealing details about the inner workings of this Confederate memorial organization and its commitment to white supremacy:
“Notes from Corinth,” Our Heritage, May 1, 1920.
Secondary
Three foundational secondary sources for this project are Karen Cox’s Dixie’s Daughters (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), Stephen Cresswell’s Rednecks, Redeemers, and Race (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), and Timothy B. Smith’s Altogether Fitting and Proper (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2015). Cox’s book is the preeminent account of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and explores the gendered dimensions of a Confederate commemorative culture based upon white supremacy and a perversion of the past for political – and psychological – purposes (otherwise known as the Lost Cause). Cresswell’s study chronicles the state’s machinations to institute apartheid Jim Crow rule, beginning with “redemption” in the mid-1870s, gaining strength from an 1890 state constitution that effectively disfranchised Black Mississippians, and the beginning of the all-white primary in 1903. Like Cresswell’s work, Smith’s overview of Civil War battlefield preservation provides critical context for how Corinth’s preservation and commemorative activities fit within the broader cultural and political movement of preserving place as sites of cultural memory and representations of (often competing) political priorities. Many other works form the secondary source foundation of this project, which by necessity blends Civil War and Reconstruction history with the broader works on southern politics, race, gender, and memory from 1866 to the present.
This project will be sensitive to the politically and racially charged nature of its subject, and will properly contextualize historic documents, symbols, and dated interpretations and racial and gender attitudes in the primary sources it presents. It takes serious the notion articulated by Leslie Madsen-Brooks that good digital history often takes the role not of “’sage on the stage’” but “’guide on the side.’” (1) This guiding role is especially important in light of the ongoing controversy with Confederate monuments, which has been particularly acute since 2015. This site wants to engage with the contending commemorative traditions alive in Corinth, and uses these documents as a way to communicate how these traditions are today jockeying for supremacy in town. The site seeks to honestly confront a white supremacist Confederate commemorative tradition that is very much alive in Corinth today.
Dougherty, Jack. Writing History In the Digital Age. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2013. https://doi.org/10.3998/dh.12230987.0001.001. EPUB. Quote p. 61.
This project will create a searchable research database, virtual exhibits, and essays about the contested commemorative history of the Civil War in Corinth, Mississippi. It seeks to answer this question: How and why have Corinthians, Mississippians, and Americans remembered and commemorated the Civil War in Corinth?
I envision first creating a searchable research database of all primary source materials gathered for this project since its beginnings in Fall 2020. These materials include newspapers, manuscript letters, government and legal documents, tourism and promotional brochures, newsletters, military records, postcards, photographs, and illustrations. I’m planning on using these next two weeks to teach myself the ins and outs of subject tagging, metadata, and other tools I’ve read are essential to creating a useable database. Whether I will use Omeka or a separate plugin is as yet undecided, but I lean toward the latter and am currently reviewing products to see which best fits the project’s needs.
Once the research database is created, I will create two virtual exhibits (each with an accompanying short essay) that provide a focused look at two eras of commemoration in Corinth – likely the Jim Crow era (1890-1940) and the Civil Rights era (1941-1965). Other possibilities include Reconstruction (1865-1877) and the Modern Era (1990-Present). The goal of each exhibit and short essay will be to contextualize Civil War memory and commemoration in Corinth in that particular era. I seek to show how memory and commemoration are reflections of their time, place, and political milieu.
Having done my site review on on the Colored Conventions Project, I envision the exhibits looking similar (and being as user-friendly) as those on the CCP website:
These exhibits will showcase many of the documents located in the searchable research database.
Begun at the University of Delaware in 2012 and now part of Penn State’s Center for Black Digital Research, the Colored Conventions Project (CCP) presents the rich and long-overlooked history of Black political organizing between 1830-1900. CCP chronicles this history of justice activism from its beginnings in 1830’s Ohio through the turbulent years of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the retreat from a potential multiracial democracy to the entrenchment of racialized discrimination. Throughout this period “Colored Conventions,” as they would come to be known, served as “empowering hubs of Black political thought and organizing” that engaged a diverse array of Black thought leaders and enthusiastic parties across gender and class lines seeking a common goal of racial justice. These gatherings in cities and towns across the country “provided space for informed public audiences to develop political plans and community-building projects.”
The Colored Conventions Project main page.
“Homepage,” Colored Conventions Project. Accessed January 29, 2023.https://coloredconventions.org
Styling itself as “an interdisciplinary research hub that uses digital tools to bring the buried history of nineteenth-century Black organizing to life” and boasting support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the CCP is at once a place of peer-reviewed scholarship, a growing digital archive, and front-facing activistm . Indeed, one of the key aims of CCP is to use historical scholarship about the Colored Conventions to contextualize, inform, and, ultimately, advance those the goals of racial justice in the present. The project demonstrates history’s dynamic connection to the present, unflinchingly stating that the past can be used – and should be used – to provide insight into modern political dilemmas and to elevate marginalized voices, particularly those of Black women.
This ethos is perhaps best illustrated by CCP’s involvement in the August 2022 unveiling of two new murals to black political organizing in Philadelphia – one to the Colored Conventions of the 19th century in the city (with references to multiple historical figures featured on the mural) and the other to the 20th and early 21st century continuation of that tradition, including the Black Lives Matter movement.
Like the Colored Conventions themselves, CCP emphasizes that its work is a “collective” of multiple voices working toward a mutual goal of bringing the history of racial justice activism to life. In the spirit of restoring humanity to overlooked actors and crediting participants, CCP stresses that its strength and vigor comes from multiple parties working to “locate, transcribe, and archive the documentary record related to this nearly forgotten history and to curate digital exhibits that highlight its stories, events, and themes.”
“Introducing the Colored Conventions Project.” Colored Conventions Project. Accessed January 29, 2023.https://coloredconventions.org/about/
CCP’s site contains two key areas: 1) Records and 2) Exhibits.
The Records section is an Omeka-based site where users can plumb thousands of historical documents relating to the Colored Conventions.
“Conventions Records.” Colored Conventions Project. Accessed January 29, 2023.https://coloredconventions.org/about-records/
Researchers can employ a simple keyword search, choose to browse, or search via delegate name, the results for which show connections between convention delegates, highlighting the spatial dynamic of Black organizing. Users can likewise search the conventions by state, year, or type. Significantly, CCP does not present its documented conventions as the exhaustive list. Rather, it encourages submission of additional material, providing instructions on how to submit new documents.
A bounty of primary sources await a patient researcher. The Records section contains hundreds of “minutes, proceedings, newspaper articles, speeches, letters, transcripts, and images.” Many of these sources are transcribed for easy reading.
The Exhibits section of the site features 18 interactive exhibits ranging in topic from the “Birth of Southern Conventions after the Civil War” to “Black Women’s Rights in the 1850s” to “Black Boardinghouses” and “Black Mobility.” This section’s main page features a useful keyword search to narrow down subject matter.
One of the strengths of the exhibits is the liberal use of graphs, pictures, videos, and other interactive elements that compliment the text. Each exhibit manages to pack a lot of nuanced information into its respective sections while keeping the visual aspect of the presentation fresh. Occasionally the differing text sizes on certain pages makes some material look slightly disorganized, but this is a minor quibble. The exhibits on the whole work well. Citations accompany each exhibit, and reading lists for further engagement are also provided.
Users seeking additional information on Black political organizing and Black life benefit from a robust bibliography pointing them in the direction of pertinent works on the topic. Most notable is a newer book, published in 2021: The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century. Eight exhibits connected to the book are online, each with a teaching guide for K-12 educators and another for Advanced Placement and College instructors.
A welcome improvement would be the inclusion of an introductory video explaining how to use the site. The volume of information might be intimidating to some, and an intuitive video quick-guide would be beneficial.
This small suggestion aside, the Colored Conventions Project provides an exemplary digital experience for seasoned historians and novice students alike, managing to walk the line between accessible and scholarly. The root of the site’s success is that it manages to communicate the complexity and texture of history without losing sight of the fact that most of the exhibit viewers need more than just text and photos to encourage continued scrolling. Given the relevant, timely nature of the subject matter and the CCP’s goal of encouraging historically informed engagement in modern political discourse, this certainly makes the site a success.
Civil War Corinth is the digital home of ongoing research projects exploring aspects of Corinth, Mississippi’s rich wartime and post-war history. The essays, maps, and data presented here explore the military, political, socio-cultural, environmental, and contested commemorative history of the Civil War in Mississippi’s most famous railroad town.
My name is Chris Slocombe, and I’m an independent scholar based in Omaha, Nebraska. I obtained my Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Communication Studies from Marquette University and my Master of Science in History from the University of Edinburgh. When I’m not doing admissions work at Creighton University or dancing badly with my kids, I spend much of my time reading and researching about the Civil War and its memory in northeast Mississippi. Anyone interested in talking about Corinth or sharing sources or stories, please feel free to reach out at christopherslocombe@gmail.com.
At the earthworks of Davies’ Division in December 2022.
Civil War Corinth aims to bring the town’s Civil War history alive using digital tools. Parts of this site, particularly those relating to the environmental history of the Siege of Corinth, will go live before my conference presentation at the Mississippi Historical Society’s annual meeting on March 2-3 in Jackson. Other pages will be built as I take HIS 316: Introduction to Digital Humanities at Creighton this spring semester 2023.
The final project for HIS 316 will serve as the “second wave” of this site’s development. Potential projects for this assignment include:
Online Exhibit of Corinth Civil War Commemoration. This project would feature pictures, documents, and essays exploring the contested and troubled commemorative history of the Civil War in town. Locations featured include the Corinth National Cemetery (formerly Union National Cemetery), Confederate Park, Battery Robinett, the Contraband Camp, Confederate memorial organizations like Corinth’s Chapter 333 of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Johnston Camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and, finally, the town’s various and politically significant war monuments and historic markers.
Mapping Illness during the Siege of Corinth. This project would map both the hospitals created by the U.S. Army during the siege as well as document the flow of some 12,000 ill soldiers sent away from Corinth via hospital steamers to established and new hospitals in the wartime North. The goal of this project would be twofold: create a visual history of the massive logistical effort to get these sick men to northern hospitals and provide insights into how modern medical structures and processes formed amidst severe trial.
