Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978)
Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998)
Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)
Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)
Susan Juster, Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003)
Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991)
Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)
Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)
Andrew R. Murray, Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America (State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001)
David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) Filed under: Uncategorized
I remember playing the game “Going on a Lion Hunt” when I was a kid. I loved the simulation of a safari hunter going through different areas of the jungle in search of a lion, making noises like being stuck in the mud, swishing through the savannah grass with my hands, and verbalizing repetitively “I’m not afraid.”
Doing history research in the twenty-first century is a whole new hunt with digital technology and a plethora of resources available. Online resources open new horizons by increasing information in amazing and exciting ways. Lyman’s article, “How Much Information? Executive Summary” recaps the consistent growth of digital information. Turkel’s blog, “Methodology for the Infinite Archive” echoes the explosion of information. Turkel raises an important implication: the importance of new skills needed to deal with available information. Turkel speaks from the tech’s point of view–as a producer rather than a consumer–when he talkes about the need to configure new metadata, to write programs that search, spider, scrape, and mine, and to create bots, agents, and mechanical turks. As well, Cohen lists two ways in particular to disseminate the information, particularly with syllabus finders and similar programs of text extraction, and H-bots to find relevant documents, interpret questions, and analyze text.
As history producers find new and exciting ways to present history, history consumers must find new ways to actually find history. I loved Turkel’s blog, “Teaching Young Historians to Search, Spider and Scrape.” While perhaps history methodologies haven’t changed, research methodologies take us into an entirely different world. Spidering and scraping are things that we must learn how to do and teach others how to do. Mary Ellen Bates makes a good attempt in her search tactics, but we must make consistent efforts to teach students, clients, and web users how to take advantage of new search capabilities. It’s like taking the lion hunt into an entirely different dimension with much more than sounds made by our own mouths and actions by our own hands. We just have to learn how and take others on the hunt.
