The first time that I came across the name Roy Rosenzweig was in the textbook for a class titled simply, “Historiography.” The book discussed Rosenzweig’s 1983 book, Eight Hours for What We Will, as a key work in American labor history. Since Eight Hours is a history of workers in Worcester, Massachusetts, just thirty miles from where I grew up, I went to the library and checked out the book. As I read, I was captivated by how Rosenzweig had captured the lives and labors of working-class people.

Sometime later I had my first encounter with the Center for History and New Media, which was not yet named after Roy Rosenzweig. I was trying to create a website and couldn’t get it to look the way I wanted. (I am still terrible at CSS.) I wrote to a graduate student who was working at CHNM and asked if I could copy and paste the design for his website. He graciously said yes, introducing me to some of the key values of CHNM: collaboration and openly sharing with all.

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I am grateful to have worked for Mills Kelly for the past four years as he has served as the executive director at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. In a blog post on our website, he reflects on the last four years at RRCHNM, and a bit beyond.

According to the whiteboard outside our kitchen, there are fourteen days left of summer. So here is a summertime newsletter, heavy on the pictures and light on the prose.

Currently listening

I found this double LP album for $3 at the CD Cellar in Falls Church. Merle Haggard and The Strangers were recorded live during services at four different churches or chapels. I’m listening it to it for a book I’m researching.

Currently visualizing

Kellen Funk and I recently presented our work on Legal Modernism at the Conference on Data Science and Law held at Fordham University. Above is one of the many visualizations from the paper. This one is drawn from the dataset we have generated, which includes 8.2 million citations from 9,749 U.S. legal treatises published before 1926 to some 368,000 distinct U.S. cases.

Currently collaborating

Since I last wrote, John Turner and I have received another $350k grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for our American Religious Ecologies project. Our wonderful project team (a few of whom are pictured above) also presented a poster at the American Historical Association annual meeting.

Currently defending

Greta Swain—a PhD student in history at George Mason and a key contributor to the Mapping Early American Elections and American Religious Ecologies projects at RRCHNM—successfully defended her dissertation on “Potomac Networks” last week. Here is why the dissertation is a masterclass in using digital methods for historical interpretation. Greta is off to Southern Methodist University as a postdoc.

Currently reading

This week my wife will send in the manuscript of her book for final copyediting. The book is provisionally titled The Olive Branch and the Sword: The United States in the Mediterranean, 1800–1805, and it will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press. For our fifteenth wedding anniversary, we took a trip to some of the sites in her book. Here we are outside the fortifications in Tangier.

Currently moving

I am packing up all of the books in my office at RRCHNM to move to the other side of the wall. More on that next time.

Greta Swain—a PhD student in history at George Mason and a key contributor to many projects at RRCHNM—has successfully defended her dissertation. For a long time now I’ve been trying to persuade people to use digital history methods to say something meaningful about the past, and not to stop with creating tools and databases. And that is just what Greta has done in a remarkable way. In her dissertation she has created a fantastic database tracking the social history of the family of George Mason IV and the people he enslaved. And she has created a compelling series of maps and network visualizations showing how both free and enslaved people used the upper Potomac River for kinship and economic development. Besides being a masterclass in how to use digital methods for historical interpretation, the dissertation has broad implications for the understanding the history of waterways and commercial development in early America.

Below is the title and abstract for the dissertation. As with all dissertations, it will take some time for the final version to be submitted, but you’ll want look it up once it has been.

Greta is off to be a postdoc at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University this fall.

Potomac Networks: Waterways, Commerce, and Enslavement in the George Mason Family, 1700–1828

While George Mason IV is best known as a Virginia political writer, tobacco planter and slaveholder, Mason IV was also an opportunistic Chesapeake businessman, taking advantage of an aqueous landscape bisected by the Potomac River. Through a focus on waterways, aquatic business ventures and local connections, this dissertation presents a new approach to the Mason family. In the eighteenth century, the Potomac River was not a divider, but rather a connector of people, places and enterprises along its shores. The Mason family built landholdings and houses, networks and businesses, on both sides of the river. Through digital analysis and visualizations, this dissertation argues that both the Mason family and the people they enslaved deployed waterways like the Potomac River to create opportunities and form strategic connections which furthered their own economic or personal goals. For the people the Masons enslaved, waterways often perpetuated the cycle of enslavement, but sometimes furnished opportunities for freedom. At a time when many of Mason IV’s peers were failing financially from their almost exclusive investment in land-based tobacco agriculture, Mason IV maintained economic stability by using waterways to diversify his sources of income. Ferries and fisheries, fueled largely by enslaved labor, became main contributors to the family’s eighteenth-century Potomac prosperity. In addition, the family’s success was bolstered by Mason IV’s skills as an expert networker. Mason IV did not hesitate to use the people with which he was connected as resources. He promoted his businesses and the family’s power and prestige through dense webs of relationships that stretched across the Potomac region and beyond. Mason IV’s networks and influence allowed him to manipulate Potomac region events and decisions so as to benefit the community but also himself. In short, we see how the Potomac River played a critical role in the lives, networks, and socioeconomic trajectory of the Mason family over several generations.

A new podcast—or rather, a longstanding podcast—has joined R2 Studios at RRCHNM.

Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant is a women’s history podcast that showcases 18th and early 19th-century women’s letters that don’t always make it into the history books. Using her training as a historian and documentary editor, Kathryn Gehred and her guests dig into the story behind each letter and the lives of the women who wrote or received them.

Gehred began the podcast in 2020 and has released 38 episodes with approximately 50,000 downloads to date. “I am THRILLED to announce that Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant is joining the R2 Studios podcast network!,” Gehred said. “This means you’re going to see more episodes, with better editing, produced on a regular schedule, with all the same great 18th and 19th-century scandals you’ve come to expect.”

News about four students from GMU’s PhD program in history: one off to be a postdoc, one off to work at the Center for Military History, two off to positions as assistant professors.

The May newsletter from RRCHNM contains news of a visualization about Victor Recording’s expeditions in Latin America, two graduate student successes, and a grant for American religious history. Subscribe here.

We are grateful to acknowledge a second NEH grant in support of our American Religious Ecologies project. The National Endowment for the Humanities announced this week that RRCHNM will receive a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant for $350,000 to continue our work with the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies for the next three years. This new grant follow on our previous award, also from the HCRR program in the NEH’s Division of Preservation and Access, which was received in 2019.

At the start of the twentieth century, Congress authorized the U.S. Census Bureau to survey the nation’s “religious bodies.” For five decades, the Bureau partnered with religious organizations to identify hundreds of thousands of individual congregations across the country. Though the Census Bureau conducted several censuses of religion, only for the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies are the original schedules, or forms, preserved.

These schedules are a rich source of information about American religious institutions in the early twentieth century. They contain a wealth of information about each congregation, including its membership by age and sex, its expenditures on buildings and missions, its minister’s name and whether he or she had gone to seminary, and its denominational affiliation, which the Census Bureau cataloged into 213 different groups. The schedules also include the location of the congregations, usually by county and city or town, and in many cases the street address as well.

Thanks to the previous support of the NEH, the American Religious Ecologies project team has already photographed many of the census schedules at the National Archives, despite the delays and closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Those schedules are then cataloged by denomination and county and made publicly available. Using the NEH-supported DataScribe software created at RRCHNM, a team of researchers is also transcribing the schedules into datasets which can be analyzed and visualized.

“Thanks to the NEH’s continued support, we will be able to complete our digitization of the 1926 census, which is already well underway” said co-project director Lincoln Mullen. “Those schedules will be of interest to local historians, as well as to scholars of American religion. But just as important, we will be able to create datasets from these schedules which will be useful for understanding the demography and geography of American religion. And we will be able to fill in gaps for religious groups that the Census Bureau failed to count. Once completed, the 1926 census will be the single most comprehensive dataset for the study of American religion.”

A large team at RRCHNM, including thirty-nine different people over the course of the past several years, have been working on the 1926 census. A large number of those team members are students at GMU, who get hands-on experience learning how to work with historical sources and ways of thinking about the past. “Undergraduate, M.A., and Ph.D. students have been central to American Religious Ecologies,” said co-project director John Turner. “They photograph census schedules, catalog batches of photographs, and prepare items for public display. Students have learned a variety of research skills, but they have also contributed to the project in many unexpected ways. They notice quirks in the ways that congregations recorded data and raise key questions about the procedures of the Census Bureau.”

You can see the work that the American Religious Ecologies team has already published at the project website. To follow the work, subscribe to RRCHNM’s newsletters, including the “Religion@RRCHNM” newsletter.

If you care about the open web, you probably use RSS feeds. And if you use feeds and you’re on a Mac or iOS, then NetNewsWire is the best RSS reader available. And it’s free and open source.

The American Historical Association is accepting entries for the 2023 Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History.

The Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Creativity in Digital History is sponsored jointly by the AHA and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM) at George Mason University (GMU). It was developed by friends and colleagues of Roy Rosenzweig (1950–2007), the Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of History and New Media at GMU, to honor his life and work as a pioneer in the field of digital history.

This prize is awarded annually to honor and support work on a creative and freely available new media project, and in particular for work that reflects thoughtful, critical, and rigorous engagement with technology and the practice of history. The current prize amount is $4,000, funded by donations to GMU’s AHA/RRCHNM Rosenzweig Prize Fund.

You can see the AHA website for details about how to enter your work for consideration for the prize. The due date is May 15, 2023. RRCHNM will also accept donations that go towards funding the prize.