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Craig Gallagher In anticipation of going to my first American Historical Association conference this past weekend in Washington D.C., I sought out a range of senior colleagues who had attended past AHA meetings for advice on what to expect. As a third-year Ph.D. candidate who is about to start writing a dissertation, I was regularly advised that many aspects of the AHA meeting did not yet apply to me, such as the Job Center , where interviews for academic positions are conducted, or the Book Exhibit where publishers meet with scholars and teachers to discuss manuscripts or books for use in the classroom. My first AHA, therefore, was largely confined to the scholarly panels (and, I should add as a brief aside, various receptions, where I shamelessly handed out business cards and tried to score five minutes of chat with some of my favorite scholars. I was mostly successful). I attended six different panels over the four days, enjoying some immensely and others not-so-much. On the whole...

Jonathan Rees When I titled my book Refrigeration Nation , I had to fight the urge to try out any number of bad puns first. Somehow doing that for blog posts seems more acceptable since they’re more transient. So no, I’m not going to make you watch a Vanilla Ice video (although I’m sorely tempted). Instead, take a look at this: By the time this amateur film was made in 1919, the practices it documents had largely passed into history. Testing  ice for thickness, cutting a grid pattern on the ice with what looks exactly like horse-drawn plows, moving blocks of ice across a narrow channel cut in a lake and into an ice house – each of these practices began over a century earlier in New England. Even today it seems incredible that New England once sent its ice for sale as far away as India. Other than shipbuilding and fishing, this may have been that region’s largest industry. Or was it an industry at all? I once knew a retired engineer who told me that anything humans have ever used wa...

Eric Schultz As part of a recent parents weekend at a fine New England educational institution, I had the pleasure of watching Peter Norvig,  director of research at Google, demonstrate Google’s Ngram Viewer  (Ngram section starts around 9:30).  Released in December 2010, Ngram (Wikipedia tells us ) is a “phrase-usage graphing tool” that charts the yearly count of selected n-grams (letter combinations), or words and phrases.  The Google database currently includes 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008 containing 500 billion words in American English, British English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese Peter Norvig’s example that day illustrated the power of the Ngram database, comparing the word combinations “The United States is” and “The United States are.” The result seems logical: the singular “is” becomes the dominant verb after the American Civil War.  This was a relatively straightforward example, however, and I should warn as you r...

Jonathan Rees Norge Refrigerator advertisement, 1953. So I have a new book out .  It’s on the history of the American ice and refrigeration industries and the research and writing only took me thirteen years. Why would anybody work on any subject that long?  Well, to be fair, I have published three other books over that same time.  Still, I developed a few serious problems along the way that really slowed the entire writing process down to a crawl. The first problem was picking the right level of focus for my work.  The very first documents I looked at were ice and refrigeration industry trade journals.  These are giant periodicals, available bound together in only the largest libraries, and written primarily for the refrigerating engineers who used to make what is now a mostly forgotten industry function.   Being something of a perfectionist, I was determined to understand everything they understood, from how ammonia compression refrigeration works to...

Randall Stephens On a recent browse through the loud, garish halls of YouTube I found several interesting history clips.  Without diminishing the importance of LOL catz videos and the endless Fail compilations, I'd like to praise/point to some of the history gems on YouTube .  In the last 5 years YouTube has served as a go-to source for me.  Interviews , documentary films , and materials on teaching draw me in.  It's been a boon to my teaching and research. For example . . . Hear the late esteemed historian and former master of Balliol College, Oxford, Christopher Hill speak about his work on 17th-century England.  He also reminisces on why he became a historian, the nature of revolutions, and more. ("Conversations With Historians: Christopher Hill," BBC Radio 4, October 14, 1991) In this much more recent video (April 11) see historian Taylor Branch discuss the critical year of 1963 and the context of the black freedom struggle.  Branch pieces together ...

Eric Schultz Spring 1976. Wilson Hall, Brown University. The late, great Professor William McLoughlin has just informed his 85 students in “American Social and Intellectual History” that they are to write their first paper. All he has given us is the title: “The Age of Jefferson and Adams.” We groan. Then he adds: “Keep it to three pages or less. Double-spaced.” We smile. Three pages? How hard can that be? “If you make the margins too wide,” McLoughlin adds, “I’ll mark you down a grade.” Needless to say, nobody got an A on that paper, or so the good professor informed us. There may have been a B or two. Not me. It was all I could do to contain my flowery opening paragraph to a single page. Some of us recovered slightly in round two, wherein we committed “The Age of Lincoln and Calhoun” to three, double-spaced pages. Some retreated to organic chemistry and other more reasonable challenges. Little did I know, but I had just been introduced to Big Data —though it would take 35 years to...

Randall Stephens Since 2007 the US Intellectual History (S-USIH) blog has nurtured a lively community of historians. Since then that virtual group has morphed into a series of annual conferences and the Society for US Intellectual History. The revamped S-USIH site is a real model for digital humanities and shows how best to foster conversations within a field. The blog features book reviews, op-eds, think pieces, and essays that frequently spark heated debates in the comments section. (Like many U.S. historians I’ve watched all this with real interest—reading, lurking, and occasionally commenting on posts.) To find out a little bit more about how the website has led to a vibrant Society and what the group does, I recently caught up with key members and founders: Andrew Hartman (Illinois State University), Tim Lacy (Loyola University), Benjamin Alpers (University of Oklahoma), and Ray Haberski (Marian University). Randall Stephens: The US Intellectual History blog started in 2007. Wh...