Tuesday 28 July 2015

OGHAP: Primary Sources

When I was studying history as an undergrad, one of my professors was a borderline deranged lunatic on the topic of primary sources. For the uninitiated, primary sources are pieces of historical evidence that constitute eyewitness or participant accounts. If you submitted a paper to him (I think I submitted a total of four) that didn't rest largely on the testimony of primary sources, you were going to have a bad time. As I've researched the service of the Great War Orcadian Gordon Highlanders, I've found myself making use of multiple primary sources.

Medal index cards are often the only remaining official record of a particular soldier's service. (Most First World War personnel service records were destroyed in the Blitz.) My contact in Orkney has diligently assisted me in identifying and procuring the medal cards for the soldiers in question. A few months ago, the BBC published this guide, which includes a guide to reading a medal card. These documents have been extremely valuable in establishing or confirming some basic facts about the various Orcadian Gordon Highlanders.

Earlier this year, I discussed my efforts to procure soldiers' wills for seven Great War Orcadian Gordon Highlanders from the National Archives of Scotland. Since I wrote that post, my contact back in Orkney discovered several additional Orcadian Gordon Highlanders, and one has a will. My good buddy, CN Constable, has agreed to get it for me since the last effort took about a month and cost far more than it needed to.

The United Kingdom's National Archives (known colloquially as "Kew") are releasing and/or digitizing many documents for the Great War's centenary. One such effort is Operation War Diary, about which I learned a couple of months ago from one of War on the Rocks' (W)archives posts. (Here's more information about Operation War Diary.) Since information about many of the Orcadian Gordons is so sparse, I thought that this might be a good way to find information about the various battalions of the Gordon Highlanders, and possibly even about individual Orcadian Gordon Highlanders from my own roster. I put off participating in OWD until I had some time, at which point I discovered that none of the diaries available for tagging pertain to the Gordon Highlanders. However, Kew has a total of thirty-eight individual war diaries, ranging in length from about twelve pages to nearly six hundred. I expect to procure these records in the near future. The National Archives has a good webinar (also available, albeit less illustrative, as a podcast) about how to search for and correlate the various documents available in the archives for the purposes of historical research. I'm not sure I'll have need for more than medal cards and war diaries, but it might be interesting to see what additional resources might be available to allow me to continue researching this and related topics in the future.

I've worked with primary sources before, but this has been my first opportunity to do much archival history. I have to say, I'm really enjoying it, and once I get the book published I may see if my undergraduate alma mater might be interested in having me out to lecture about my experiences doing historical research outside of academia.

Saturday 4 July 2015

Reading in 2015: Mid-Year Update


I recently posted about my progress on my 2015 reading goals. Since I'm doing so well in this endeavour, to the tune of probably exceeding my goals, I'm taking the next logical step by formulating insanely ambitious reading goals for subsequent years that I have no chance whatsoever of actually completing.

One author whose work I enjoyed in high school and college was the late Michael Crichton. Like many young people, I started with Jurassic Park, and continued with (in no particular order): Eaters of the Dead/The 13th Warrior, Congo, Sphere, Rising Sun, Disclosure, The Lost World, and Airframe. There are a number of Crichton's novels that I have yet to read, and I'd like to remedy that. I expect to forego the thrillers that the young Crichton wrote under the pseudonym "John Lange". That leaves some of his older works, and some of his later works: The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man, The Great Train Robbery, Timeline, Prey, State of Fear, Next, Pirate Latitudes, and Micro.

That's nine books, and while it might be fun to follow the nine books I'm likely to read this year with nine books by a single author, I suspect that it would get monotonous, and I have other priorities to satisfy as well. So, what other categories am I considering?

Still in the leisure category, I also read a number of Ian Fleming's classic James Bond novels during and after my undergraduate years. I still have yet to read For Your Eyes Only, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The Man With the Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me, Thunderball, and You Only Live Twice. One of these, For Your Eyes Only, is a collection of short stories that was combined with Octopussy and The Living Daylights into Quantum of Solace in 2008, to coincide with the release of what may have been the worst Bond film ever made. I already read the latter collection around 2006, and I have the Quantum of Solace volume, so I'll just read those stories from that particular volume. Otherwise, I'll try to salt these into the mix along with the Crichton novels.

Aside from these two authors, I hope to read a few other books. One of these is Armor by John Steakley, which has been highly recommended to me for years, and which I attempted to read in 2014. Another is Animal Farm by George Orwell, which I also started reading years ago and only ever got a few pages into - maybe on a plane? I don't remember.

While I was in Scotland, I may have gotten about a quarter of the way into The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, and I'd love to finish it at some point. I've also spent years trying to get through the audiobook of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, and attempted to listen to Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island while on a road trip to the East Coast in 2014. Those may be good bedtime reading/listening projects for the winter months of 2015/'16.

As I continue to identify categories and books within those categories, I'll continue posting about it.