Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig have issued a call to arms for historians. With all the concerns about the internet, historians should not resign themselves to the amateurs and hacks on the internet. Instead the challenge is to “prod historians to sit down in front of their computers and to get to work. Historians need to confront these issues of quality, durability, readability, passivity, and inaccessibility rather than leave them to the technologists, legislators, and media companies, or even just to our colleagues in libraries and archives.” (Page 13, of Digital History) In addition, “open sources” should be the rallying cry for historians rather than cede this to for profit corporations who will control access.
I do agree with Cohen and Rosenzweig fully; I did have initial reservations about the argument first presented by Dan Cohen about why professors should start blogging. It is not that one should discourage amateurs, the problem remains how to ensure that historians’ websites have the credibility they deserve. The amateurs of popular history are the ones that formerly had limited representation on the bookstore shelf; they also have passionate commentaries and commitments to a historical topic. However, as the authors point out, the problem with amateurs remains their selectivity, analysis, and quality of their work; quality refers to the content of the work not the design the page. It is the interpretation of many websites by amateurs that rehashes old prejudices and old conspiratorial theories that have long been proved incorrect. One of the best examples is the old myth that “FDR knew that Pearl Harbor was going to be bombed and let it happen.” An astounding charge. These historians look at dispatches and communications from the point of view of hindsight. They already know what happened. Instead, on must look at how the materials were interpreted before the event happened. The answer was plain. The US did know about Japanese activities in the Pacific in the winter of 1941. FDR and his advisors suspected that a major event may occur, but what they were expecting was an attack on Singapore because the US had stopped selling high octane gasoline and oil products to the Japanese and Singapore, a British possession, was a major oil producer in Southeast Asia. These same amateurs look at possible radio communications reported by civilians who claimed they heard the Japanese Fleet. Upon further reflection, on finds that many of these civilians “did not say that the communications were Japanese”. They were merely strange or on an unfamiliar channel. In addition, the Japanese fleet observed radio silence for most of their trip so chances are that what was being heard was a very good communication from Asia on a good night. Yet, the argument still circulates and has new light due to the conspiracy theorists on the internet. Historians now have to compete with these very professional websites and dispel their ridiculous arguments
Hence, Cohen and Rosenzweig have offered an answer to the question posed to professors, Why blog? If one reads their article before reading their Book, the answer is not obvious. The article provided no incentive for one to really embrace the different aspects of blogging and its purpose, or lack thereof. For many, it offered no real answer other than a new jazzy way of presenting history along with the traditional method. Now, in Digital History, they have caught my attention and hopefully my colleagues. Action is always the best method. Yet, historians are not always prone to action, we are observers and interpreters. But, in this new era of digital history, one can firmly state that historians MUST embrace the internet, because if they do not we are leaving historical interpretation to those who will continue to present history as conspiracy and political intrigue. Acknowledging that there is a component of history that has those elements, their remains the rest of history, 99%, that does not have those elements. Therefore, Historians cannot ignore this medium because doing so relinquishes history to the hacks and amateurs, no matter how well intended they are.
Some Links for historians to start
Center for History and New Medial
American Social History Project
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