Donson’s Blog

I’m in California to work with archival materials at the Hoover Institution, but I have been finding that I spend much of my time on the internet.  It’s remarkable how much in the intervening years the internet has transformed the methods of historical research.   The way to do the groundwork for a new project – making bibliographies of primary and secondary sources, finding names of the historical actors, and locating archives and their indexes – is now dependent upon being online.  My colleagues and I took advantage of the new information resources as they became available, but the approach to starting a new project now looks little like it did a decade ago when I started my last project.  Then, email was still rudimentary, and the libraries that were most important for my research, such as the Staatsbibliothek Berlin and the New York Public Library, had not yet cataloged books published before 1986 or so.  We also still used paper:  When I cleared out my files after finishing my book, I found a seven-page bibliography of sources in the New York Public Library that I had handwritten in 1994.  This was a relic – I haven’t handwritten any bibliography or any notes, lectures, or whatever since then.  Everything since 1994 is on my computer, and it’s not just wikipedia.

 Here are some of the steps in my research that were unthinkable ten years ago.   Through leads on the internet, I found and had a conversation per email with a researcher in Moscow, who then (for money) took digital photographs of 1600 pages of archival material, burned them to a CD, and sent it to me, saving me thousands of dollars in travel and hundreds of hours of time.   While in Germany in the summer of 2006, I had the Stasi archive in East Germany photocopy the 400 pages in the secret police file of a Comintern agent.  I then scanned the pages, burned them to a disk, and sent them to a colleague with whom I am collaborating.  Then there is the bibliographical resource WorldCat.  It’s mind-boggling that one can now find every available book at almost every major research library in the United States and Germany in a single search, and for most, I can have a copy sent to me at my office.  I can do incredible searches on the new online library catalogs.  For my project on the German Revolution of 1918/19 I got a list of every single book in the library that was published in Berlin in 1919.  (There were 5,000 of them, which believe it or not isn’t too many to go through systematically.)  These kinds of searches turn up all sorts of sources I would never have found, such as this book:  Sexualethik by H. E. Timerding.  I discovered a clever way to search the site that lists all the personal papers (Nachlasse) in the world:  To find the personal papers of professional German women whose documents might be helpful for my project, I entered the range of their birth and death years (for me, born between 1855 and 1904, died between 1920 and 2008) and insert the wild-card search in the profession field:  “*in”.  (For you non-German speakers, the profession of women almost always ends in “in”, as in Ärtzin, for a female doctor).  Lo and behold:  I have the list of every personal papers of German professional women in the world.

 OK, the tedium of being a historian hasn’t changed.  If anything the overload of information has exacerbated it, and I find I spend a good deal of my time going through lists and lists.  No computer will find for me the important books of those 5,000 published in Berlin in 1919.  But the ability to access all this information from anywhere has made it possible to undertake far more sophisticated projects than were possible a decade or two ago.  In fact – and here I am going to be eraist – the books by historians written in the last two decades, that is, since the computer, are far more sophisticated than those written in the 1970s and before.  It’s true.  The earlier ones, with notable exceptions, were usually vanilla narratives of some institution or foreign service office.

 By the way, I am preparing to be humiliated myself by scholars in the future who have better technology that can access more data and sift through it more easily.

I’m on research leave until September 2008, and for all you voyeurs, I’ll be posting various reports about the joys and woes of writing a book. Here’s a start:

I’ll confess. I’m a heretic and use wikipedia all the time now. Disclaimer (students please read): Until the American Historical Association endorses a future Journal of Unverifiable History, historians can’t publish anything reputable based on a wikipedia entry. Why? Because the discipline of history is a science whose single most important precept is that others can verify the information in scholarly books and articles. As Michael on The Office said, “Wikipedia is the best thing ever: Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information.” Yes, Michael is an idiot. We have to know who provided the information and what the person’s credentials were. We can’t just make things up, so we have footnotes, and if you write in German, you have lots and lots of them.

That said, I use wikipedia all the time now to get basic biographical information on all sorts of obscure people who had totally incredible lives that I might want to research. Check these folks out: Manfred Stern, Lou Andreas-Salome (a woman), or Richard Sorge. And then some really obscure ones that you don’t care about unless you are doing a project on German women in the 1918/19 Revolution: Louise Dumont. You can’t assume wikipedia is true, but it can lead you to find the verifiable information. It’s an excellent start though never an end for research.

Check out the wikipedia entries I edited: Burgfrieden and Spirit of 1914. Note: I did not reveal myself as the author, you don’t know that I was, and you can’t cite this page in any paper or book on history. You can, however, read the books in the bibliography at the end.

Here are two fabulously useful wikis: A pretty comprehensive list of historical German-language newspapers and one of German-language journals and magazines. Do add to the list.

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