| Digitized primary sources from the District of Colombia in the early 1900s.
View looking northwest from Anacostia: Washington DC
This is am image that is classified as a map of Washington DC from 1901. It was painted on paper by John L. Trout and shows a bird’s eye view of the city in 1901. After some looking I couldn’t find much about John L. Trout or this picture in particular.I wondered about what looks like the National Cathedral in the distance, but the National Cathedral wasn’t even started at that point. This map definitely leaves more unanswered questions then answered ones.
Evening Star
This is a page from the Evening Star a newspaper in DC. This was the issue on October 29th, 1905, and this is page 10. Although the content of this page could give us some good insight to the politics of Virginia and the state of equality in the country the ads were what stood out to me. Looking at the individual ads made sourcing difficult, but when looking at all the ads together, it was clear that contextually that beauty was a very common thread that ran through the ads, as well as health. It gave a very clear view on what was considered healthy and beautiful for that time, which was different then a healthy person in American society today.
Another thing I spent time looking at was the ‘The Reign of Chrysanthemum’ article. There was a lot of details that I could use to corroborate with. I found links back to the Department of Agriculture and different achievements of Dr. BT Galloway. What was interesting was that most of all my second and third layers of research were other primary sources, mostly it was other newspapers. It was difficult to find factual information on the event in 1905. I tried the National Chrysanthemum Society, which was founded in 1944. They didn’t seem to have digitized records from anything earlier then the 1999.From these two sources the map was definitely harder to analyze. I think this was because there really was no context for the creator that could be found simply. He didn’t have many pieces accredited to his name, and I couldn’t find much about him. |
3 Responses to “Primary Sources”
February 12th, 2014 at 3:02 am
Hannah,
Good job reading the newspaper article, but I’d like to challenge your reading of the map. Maps are deceptively simple, meaning they are actually more complicated than they first appear. It’s important to note that you had difficulty finding information about the map’s creator, but that doesn’t mean the map isn’t a wealth of potential information. Maps tell us about the way people saw the world at a certain point in time, and what they choose to include or not include is very important to note. You say this map leaves more unanswered questions – great! Now you’re doing history. What are those unanswered questions? Write them down and then see what other sources say – that’s contextualizing and corroborating. That’s what historians do.
– Claire