As mentioned in class today, you may want to revisit this earlier post on how to use RSS to keep on top of updates to the blogs for this course. Especially as you begin working on the group projects, you’ll want to keep up to speed on what the different groups are doing, as well as on any new resources I announce here on the main blog.
Archive for March, 2011
From the archives: RSS
Tuesday, March 29th, 2011More on Emancipation Park
Tuesday, March 29th, 2011Post written by Jaclyn Youngblood
[Note: The author of this post is a student in HIST 300, an independent study group that has been reading historiography about Dowling, the Battle of Sabine Pass, and the contested memory of the Civil War. To satisfy one of the requirements for that course, Jaclyn did some additional research about Emancipation Park and the streets named after Dowling that bound it. Here is her own report of her findings.]
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Emancipation Park came to life in 1872. Under the leadership of Reverend John Henry Yates, pastor at Antioch Baptist Church, former slaves reached out to Houston’s black community to raise $800 to purchase land for Juneteenth celebrations (McCullough). The ten-acre tract of land sits squarely in Houston’s third ward, once a vibrant center of black life in the city (Wintz). Interesting, then, that the park is bordered on two sides by streets named in honor of Dick Dowling, a man whose success at the Battle of Sabine Pass contributed to the delay of emancipation in Texas.
The intersection of Tuam Street and Dowling Street form the easternmost boundary of Emancipation Park, land purchased explicitly for commemorating June 19, 1865, the day of the formal reading of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas. Is this juxtaposition a message to Houston’s black community? It seems as though in the war between Emancipation and Confederate memory, the battle of Emancipation Park versus its border streets is a question of space and timing.
The Dowling St.-Tuam St. border of Emancipation Park is somewhat of a chicken-or-the-egg question. Did the park exist before the streets were named as such? If so, was the city and/or the organizations responsible for having the streets named trying to send a message to the black community? Or did the streets, named as such, exist before the park, making the juxtaposition irony instead of ill-will?
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Blog Post #9
Monday, March 28th, 2011Your ninth blog post will basically be a “progress report” on the work that you do this week in conjunction with your small group project. Tomorrow in class, I will be allotting time for you to talk with your group members and develop a list of “next actions” that you need to take to get your project off the ground. Your group will assign each member one or more of these next actions. Your assignment for Blog Post #9 will then consist of two parts:
- Write a post discussing what you have done to complete the “next action(s)” assigned to you by your group.
- Then, you must write a comment on the posts for each of your other group members. These comments can offer suggestions, questions, or discussion what the next step to take should be. The comment can either be in response to the original post, or in response to other comments left on the post.
Because your library assignments are due Wednesday night, I am slightly revising the deadlines for this blog post assignment. Your blog post should be published by Friday, April 1, at 5 p.m. You should have your comments on the other posts on your group blog posted by Monday, April 4 at 9 a.m..
These are the firm deadlines for this assignment, but be aware that time is of the essence on these group projects. To finish these projects by the deadline, your group needs to get moving fast, especially since next week you will meet with me to draw up a contract for the project. The sooner you can get your posts published, and the sooner you can offer your comments to other group members, the quicker you can move on to the next actions you need to take.
New photos of St. Vincent’s Cemetery
Friday, March 25th, 2011
Tombstone of Dick Dowling by Patrick Feller (From Flickr)
I have just loaded some new photographs into our folder of Dowling archive items. You can access the metadata for them on the Google Spreadsheet, and you can use the link to Dropbox on OWL-Space to see the photos. These are photographs of monuments related to Dowling and the Battle of Sabine Pass in St. Vincent’s Cemetery near Our Lady of Guadalupe church in Houston. They will probably be useful to all four of your groups. Incidentally, in the course of working on your group projects, you may come across other items that you think belong in our digital archive. Or you may take your own photographs of relevant sites. (We need some good photographs of the Dowling monument in Hermann Park, for example.) In that case, you can use the same Google Form you used before to report metadata on Library Assignment #1, and then upload the file on OWL-Space into the folder titled “Uploaded Student Files.”
Mid-week Round-Up
Thursday, March 24th, 2011This week’s prompt asked you to consider how, when, and why Confederate officials began to embrace the idea of enlisting slaves as soldiers, and if this Confederate measure could be called “emancipation.” Adam’s post offers a detailed explanation of how and when Confederates embraced the enlistment of the enslaved as “essentially a last ditch effort.” Craig also explains the how, when, and why of Confederate “Emancipation.” Although he approached Levine’s book with skepticism, he found Confederate Emancipation’s argument convincing because it “ranged across multiple factions” to provide a maximal explanation for slave enlistment, and because Levine’s arguments tied into our previous discussions in this course. Jocelyn’s post takes on Prompt 2, and analyzes Union emancipation in tandem with “Confederate Emancipation.” Jocelyn succinctly argues, “Despite the differences in their concepts of emancipation, though, the Confederacy’s and Union’s reasons for emancipation were surprisingly similar.”
Could differences and similarities between Union and Confederate “Emancipation” reveal something about understandings of masculinity as well as race? What do debates over emancipation – among northerners and southerners – suggest about the co-construction of race and gender?
Start your engines …
Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011I have now posted introductory posts about your group projects to each of the student group blogs. As those posts indicate, you need to begin thinking now about your projects, primarily by brainstorming ideas with your fellow group members and getting up to speed on the technical aspects of the project.
You should also notice that there is now a page of Dowling resources (with a link in the sidebar of this page) that you can use to work on your projects. This page will be updated throughout the remainder of the semester.
Library Assignment #2
Monday, March 21st, 2011
Fondren Library
To complete the assignment, you will need to follow these steps. All of the steps must be completed by 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday, March 30.
STEP 1: Go to this Writeboard, enter the password distributed in class (it’s the same password we used for Library Assignment #1), and then select one of the books on the list. Just as you did last time, edit the Writeboard and put your last name next the title that you are claiming.
STEP 2: Locate the book and any other editions of the book published in other years in Fondren library. You may wish to talk to a librarian to make sure that you can find and access the book(s) you need.
STEP 3: Examine the book and make some notes to yourself about what kind of book it is. Is the book a textbook meant for use in schools? A popular history text? Was it published in Texas or outside of Texas? When was it published first, and what was going on in the country either then or at the time of later editions? Who is the author and what can you find out about him or her, either from the book itself or from other sources like the Handbook of Texas? Were there multiple authors, editors, and compilers involved in making the book?
STEP 4: Look inside the book and locate any passages that talk about Dick Dowling and the Battle of Sabine Pass. If these topics come up in the book, carefully transcribe the complete passage into a document on your computer. If there are multiple editions of the book, check to see if the section that talks about Dowling remains the same in later editions; if it changes, transcribe the new passages as well, making careful note of which edition(s) the passages come from. (Note: If Dowling and Sabine Pass don’t come up in the book, make note of that and see if you can come up with reasons why it doesn’t. Is the Civil War in Texas discussed at all? If so, how?)
STEP 5: Write a blog post about what you’ve found. The post should conform to these specifications:
- The title of the post should be the author of the book you examined.
- At the beginning of the post, provide a full bibliographic citation of the first edition of the book you studied, using the formatting guidelines provided by the Chicago Manual of Style.
- In a paragraph, briefly summarize, using mainly your own words, the author’s presentation of Dowling and the battle or, if the author doesn’t talk about the battle, what parts of the Civil War era in Texas the author talks about instead.
- In a paragraph, briefly summarize any changes in the author’s presentation in later editions, including changes in fact or wording that you noticed. (This won’t apply if there weren’t multiple editions.)
- In a paragraph, briefly report on the reflections you made as part of STEP 3, and any information you located about the kind of book you had.
- Finally, at the end of the post, include your full transcriptions of the passages that you located having to do with Dowling and Sabine Pass. Make sure you indicate what pages the copied passages come from, and use the “blockquote” function within WordPress to make the transcribed passages stand out clearly as quotes from the book.
- Before “publishing” to WordPress, make sure that the box next to “Library Assignments” (in the “Categories” panel on the right hand side of the dashboard) is checked.
Any questions about these steps? Leave them in the comments here or email Dr. McDaniel for more information. Remember that all of these steps must be completed by midnight on Wednesday, March 30. The blog post that you will write for this library assignment is not a substitute for Blog Post #9, which will be a separate assignment having to do with the group projects.
Blog Post #8
Friday, March 18th, 2011On Tuesday, we will be discussing Bruce Levine’s Confederate Emancipation in class. For Blog Post #8, which is due at 9 a.m. that morning (instead of on the usual Thursday deadline), I would like you to write a post addressing ONE of the following prompts, based on your reading of the Levine book:
- How does Levine explain why, when, and how Confederate officials began to embrace the idea of enlisting slaves as soldiers? Based on what you’ve learned about making causal arguments in your position papers and in our in-class discussions, do you find his explanation persuasive?
- The title of the book is “Confederate emancipation.” Is “emancipation” the best word for what Confederate supporters of slave enlistment were envisioning? How did their notions of “emancipation” compare to the ideas we’ve seen in the “Emancipation Proclamation” and other federal policies like the Confiscation Acts?
Optionally, after addressing your prompt, you may also use your post to discuss anything that you found surprising, confusing, or particularly interesting about the book.
Important announcements
Wednesday, March 16th, 2011
Remember that tomorrow, Dr. Murphy will be our guest speaker and will be speaking with you about Irish immigrants in the antebellum United States. Many of you have raised questions about how Dowling’s Irish-ness affected his life and memory, so this will be a wonderful opportunity to ask these questions to one of the experts!
Courtney also emailed me to let me know about another wonderful opportunity that you may want to take advantage of tomorrow night: a lecture at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston about an important Civil War painting.
Finally, as noted on the schedule, please be aware that you need to read Bruce Levine’s Confederate Emancipation this week and weekend. Be prepared to discuss the book in class on Tuesday.
Weekend Round-Up
Saturday, March 12th, 2011Many of you were surprised at Lincoln’s complex views of race and slavery as you examined the Lincoln Documents on Slavery. This week I’d like to point you to two posts. Alex and Juri agree that Lincoln’s understanding of race influenced his attitude toward slavery and what could be done about it. Alex identifies Lincoln’s “segregationist sentiment” – his prejudge against African Americans and concerns about racial coexistence that, he argues, “worked to delay emancipation until Lincoln felt it was absolutely necessary for victory.” Juri holds a similar view of Lincoln. He argues, “I believe that perhaps because of Lincoln’s belief in white superiority, he was not eager to free slaves, unless it benefited the Union.”
Should these views held by Lincoln lead historians to label him a “racist,” as some of you did in your posts? What does calling Lincoln a “racist,” “white supremacist” or “segregationist” illuminate, and what does it obscure?