Following the midterm this week, we discussed beginning to delve further into the documents of out soldiers. I created a new Google spreadsheet with the required information and then used my Inventory spreadsheet on Wilhelm Kurz to pick and choose which documents I thought would provide me with the most helpful information. In the end, I actually ended up simply opening every single document (save the original copies of forms that had a typed transcript) because I didn’t want to miss any information that might be interesting on Kurz.

Most of the documents were pension records, and from reading them I learned that he was apparently injured in the Second Battle of Bull Run with a hemorrhage from the nose when running in retreat from battle. He also incurred a neck injury at the Battle at Chancellorsville. When filing for pension, Kurz filed on the basis that he was “wholly” unable to continue to support himself as a baker because the lasting effects of his injuries made it impossible for him to work approximately three fourths of the time.  When he applied for an increase in his $8 per month invalid pension payments, he was awarded it based on a dilated heart and rheumatism, but not given credit for his supposed hemorrhage.

The documents also revealed that he had two very close friends in Camden, NJ, where h lived with his family for most of his later life, that were almost always included in affidavits. It also seems as if his widow, Phillippine, split her time between New Jersey and Philadelphia later in life, because even though her residence is listed in New Jersey, most widow pension documents are stamped from Pennsylvania. It is also evident from the widow pension documents that the couple had more than one child, but they are only mentioned once in passing, and not by name.  Also through looking at FamilySearch, I found the name of the boat and date of Wilhelm’s immigration from Germany.

This week in class, we finally got the names of our soldiers as well as each individual soldier’s war-related documents. During class, the assignment was to go through each scanned document and create an inventory of what documents we were in possession of.  This entailed discerning what each document was, wether it be a CMSR, pension record, affidavit, medical examinations, etcetera, the date the document was created, and the author of the document. To catalog this information, I used a Google Docs spreadsheet, with each document in a row of its own. The task was really, really tedious, and at some points proved to be more challenging than I expected. At times it was hard to read the archaic handwriting of the 19th century doctors and clerics. The technology side, though, worked well. Having all of the data itemized on a spreadsheet  makes it much more accessible.

In addition to the inventory, we also were asked to create a second sheet on our google doc spreadsheet where we outline the vital information about our soldier. Mine, named Wilhelm (or William) Kurz was a 5’3″ German man who was 24 at age of enlistment and 62 when he died. The more I learn about Wilhelm, his young wife Phillippine, his life in New York and New Jersey, and his time in the Union Army, I am beginning to look at him as more of an individual and less as a faceless Civil War soldier. This project helps humanize history. As per our class discussion about the difference between genealogy, biography, microhistory, and taxonomy, this project definitely fits in the microhistory category; the soldiers we are studying weren’t the Generals and well-known war heroes we read about in textbooks, but each individual gives us a sense of how different each soldier’s experience was in the same army, or even in the same regiment.

Doing History Online

       This class, we began by discussing the differences between HTML and XML. This introduced the idea of source code and how to view the source code in different boundaries. We also looked at scans of a letter dated from the Civil War. Mostly, though, we discussed the way that historians think and how it differs from other areas of academia, and the advantages and disadvantages of digital history.

       When historians think about the past, they do so differently than most of the general public. For instance, they are unconcerned with bias because they understand no history can be completely objective. Additionally, they tend to focus on a single period or moment so their studies can be immersive, for they hate to generalize. They also prefer complexity because they see history as multi-causal, and centered around humans. Lastly, they use narrative storytelling as a way to convey historical knowledge.

       For me, the historical thinking strategy that is most different and unfamiliar to me is the historian view of bias. Throughout high school, I was taught to investigate for any potential bias an author of a document may have had. Teachers time and time again told me that this bias was something to look  upon negatively, as a hindrance of the author’s ability to convey factual historical events. In the historian mindset, though, bias is an accepted part of history. An author’s bias is not seen as a weakness, but simply as one of the many points of view history can have. Like I mentioned before, history can never be completely objective. This idea was not introduced to me until I left high school, and it makes analyzing documents a lot more productive because it allows for the author’s point of view to become an other area of analysis instead of something to be worked around.

Getting Started: Concepts You Need To Know To Understand How The Internet Works

• IN 1957, timesharing, sharing the processing power of a computer with multiple users, made computing more feasible
• Military Network by Rand Network
• Packet-switching: files were divided into packets to send, then put together again for the receiver.
• Decentralized network architecture: if one node of the network went down, the whole system would not be shut down because it would not longer be centralized
• Cyclades: Inter-network communication, creating the idea of “internet”
• X.25: enabled communication through phone company servers for a monthly fee
• IMP (Interface Message Processor): In Arpanet, the computer that controlled network activities for a mainframe computer.
• Open System Interconnection: Standardize and layer the network in a standard layout
• Network Control protocol
• Server
• ISP: Internet Service Provider
• Personal Computers do not connect directly to the internet because they do not (typically) have their own servers; they are called clients because they are connected to the internet through ISP.
• Packets: pieces of a message that were broken down to send and then are put back together for the receiver to read.
• IP Adress: Unique code of each computing device that connects to a server
• Routers: direct packets around the internet
• The internet is a wire, and servers connected to the wire can communicate.

In class, we discussed the course agenda, going in-depth into the final project, which involves looking into the life of a civil war soldier. The first activity was to search the Professor online, and the second activity was to search ourself online; I was unable to find anything related to me on the first few pages when I googled myself, but like the professor says, each computer will have different Google results. This relates to the reading “Creating Your Web Presence” from the week one reading list. We were also introduced briefly to Zotero and Omeka, but only to say that we would be using them eventually.  We also watched two introductory videos about the internet that taught me, essentially, everything I now know about the internet.