For my first diary I have thought about various topics and discarded them over the course of the last year or so, while feeling increasingly guilty about enjoying everyone else's diaries, but not writing any myself. I've decided it is time to change that, and the way to begin is to just start writing something, and the easiest something is probably to discuss what it is I've been doing lately.
I have been immersed in the American Civil War for some months now, and it occurred to me that this might provide the material for an acceptable diary. But then, I'm no sort of expert on the topic, and lots of people around here probably are. However, perhaps describing how I came to be reading all these things, and looking at all sorts of Civil War pictures, and where and how I am finding all of this just might make for an interesting diary. So here is a little essay about Accidental Learning in a Digital Age, because my current immersion in the Civil War was not really a choice, but came about by purest accident.
As you no doubt know we are in the midst of the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War, so it is not surprising that the History Channel is sometimes showing actual programs about history. I was idly channel surfing one night last year and happened across one of these history documentaries, "Sherman's March"--which seemed to be not half bad. I watched it and liked it well enough.
A little while later I was at one of the used book stores I visit and couldn't find anything there that was on my to-read list, so thought I would check the history and biography sections to see if there was anything about Sherman and/or the Civil War that looked interesting. I found "Sherman: A Soldier's Passion for Order" by John Marszalek, discovered that although it hadn't been written in this century, it had been written within the last 20 years, and thus well after I had last studied the Civil War era. To me that made it seem like relatively recent scholarship, and it was certainly cheap enough. I bought it, read it, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
In October I got an iPad for my birthday, and started looking for things to read on it. First I got some freebies, including Mark Twain's "Life on the Mississippi" which I had not previously read. Hmm. Back in the Nineteenth Century again! There are a number of books which I have looked for, some for quite a few years, and not found in my used book stores, and I soon discovered that a few of them are available as ebooks, either from Amazon or iTunes. One of the books that I wanted was Connie Willis' novel "Lincoln's Dreams"--and since I had just read her "All Clear" and was still in a Willis sort of mood, I decided to download it. I discovered it really ought to have been called "Robert E. Lee's Dreams" but I loved it anyway.
One of the things about reading books on the iPad that I really appreciate is that you can tap a word and look it up on the spot. You can use a built-in dictionary in both iBooks and the Kindle app, and if that doesn't provide enough information you can quiz Wikipedia, and then go further afield on the internet. As I read "Lincoln's Dreams" there was a lot to look up, especially about Civl War battlefields and major players. I'm afraid I can be easily led astray, in many ways, and I not only looked up things like Arlington National Cemetery, but started looking for pictures of all the things that could have pictures of them, such as people and places and objects (didn't you ever wonder what different sorts of mortars looked like?). And I checked out maps of places, and Google Earth views, and tactical battle maps. All easily done while reading a book on my iPad. I found more things to download: Sherman's memoirs are out of copyright and thus free, ditto for U. S. Grant's memoirs--both can be readily found at Project Gutenberg. I discovered Ambrose Bierce had written a whole batch of short stories based on his own Civil War experiences, and these too were available at Gutenberg--and the stories were a lot more horrifying than the descriptions of the same events in a history book. And there was Mary Chesnut's "Civil War Diary" available from a web site dedicated to her--I had known about her diary since grad school, but never read it. Now seemed a good time.
There were things in my own personal library I hadn't looked at in years, or even decades, including a book with a small selection of Mathew Brady photos taken during the war, and a copy of Bruce Catton's own Civil War Centennial book "Terrible Swift Sword" (egads! fifty years have gone by since it was written!)--which I re-read, and then I had to download "Stillness at Appomattox" and start reading it (about half-way thru it now). While I was reading the print book I decided I needed a cheat sheet or two showing portraits of the various generals, so I downloaded portraits, arranged them in Photoshop Elements to fit on a standard page, and printed them out. I ended up with four pages of Union and Confederate generals. It's nice to be able to provide yourself with the illustrations that YOU find most useful, rather than being stuck with only the illustrations an author happened to pick.
I realized that there were limited numbers of portraits online, and most internet sites just used the same things other sites used, and thus there must, somewhere, be a set of originals that everyone else was stealing. Eventually this led me to discover that the government has posted a ginormous amount of stuff from various collections. Since it is our government it is our stuff, and we can freely partake of it, although it is often like trying to drink from a firehose. Did you know the Feds have 6000 Mathew Brady photos? Digitized no less! That's six thousand photos to look at and find ones I want to study. Six thousand! That beggars the reference book of Brady Civil War photos that I used to look at in the wonderful library of my home town. Fortunately there are ways to search that can speed things up. For instance, for our convenience some wonderful bureaucrat got the idea of putting some of their photos, organized by categories, on Flickr. Other government librarians decided that was a grand idea, so there are photos, that I've found so far, from The Library of Congress and The U. S. National Archives, and the Smithsonian has stuff on their own web site. Of course, you can go to the web sites of The Library of Congress and The National Archives to find still more amazing things. I've only just begun to scratch the surface of these fonts of original source material.
But wait! There's more! Some years back my local PBS station had done a Ken Burns Civil War marathon, and I had taped the whole thing. I still have the tapes and one functioning VCR player, so I've been watching this on TV, an hour or so a night. Going online and looking up various subjects from the Ken Burns film I discovered there was a Pulitzer Prize winning novel on the Battle of Gettysburg, Michael Shaara's "The Killer Angels"--which I downloaded for the iPad. I'm about two-thirds of the way thru it. I also discovered there was a movie made of the novel some years back, which is available on iTunes, and since my brother gave me an Apple TV for Christmas, I think I'll rent it and watch it on my big flat screen TV after I finish the novel.
Oh, and one more thing: I also checked out Civil War music on YouTube and bought some at iTunes. There were several nice things on YouTube, including many different versions of "Ashokan Farewell" (featured in the Ken Burns documentary), and another by Jay Ungar that is an interesting take on "Marching Through Georgia."
I'm not sure what sort of moral one should draw from all this, except perhaps that learning can be done in all sorts of ways, quite easily, in our Digital Age.