Amazed by Technology - part 1

Among the many books I plan to write is one titled Technology Drives Everything. I may stick (Almost) between Drives and Everything, for I'm sure some matters of the heart still move regardless of how technology does.

Technology rose up this week, yesterday and today, in a good way. I must digress first and set the scene. As I've written before I am an occasional student of the life and writing of Thomas Carlyle, English author, philosopher, and prophet. I can't for sure remember how I was drawing into his circle, but probably from books in my possession passed down from Uncle David Sexton to my mom to my dad and now to me. A couple of them were by Carlyle, and for a while I picked up some more from used book sources.

Every now and then I leave the writing route I should be on and follow Carlyle down various forest paths, finding a work, reading a few paragraphs, downloading it (if available to do so), finding a reference, downloading that. Sidelines Syndrome always compels me, however, to do more than read Carlyle or about Carlyle, and so I must write about him. The engineer in me wants things to be organized; hence I'm working on a bibliography of Carlyle's writings based on the date of composition rather than the date of publication. For me the composition is more critical than the publication date, though the latter is of interest as well.

In this pursuit I first came across some website that had various Carlyle compositions listed. I blended these into one typed document. Slowly I learned of more, and added them. I discovered some older bibliographies that were available for download from Google books, downloaded them, and continued to expand the blended bibliography. I learned that everyone seemed to be most interested in the chronology of publication, not of composition.

But let me stop a moment. I downloaded those bibliographies, and had them immediately available. What an incredible convenience, and boon to research. Using my current research subject as an example of the old way, on 3 November 1825, Carlyle wrote to William Tait, a London publisher, and told him about books he needed for his project for Tait to translate German novelists into English. After discussing the German writers and which of their works he wished to translate, Carlyle got down to the need of having copies.

If I had these books ready by me, I should reckon the undertaking half completed. Perhaps it may not be so difficult to obtain at least a perusal of them. Most, nay all of them, are marketable works, and I could read, without injuring , them. By your commercial connexions I trust you may be able to procure me the greater part of them: I shall expect your tidings on the subject soon....

He referred to an earlier letter, to a different colleague, who he wanted to procure books in Germany and ship them to him.

One work about Carlyle that I saw references on at several places is Sartor Called Resartus, by G.B. Tennyson. Published in 1966, it is still under copyright protection and hence not available for viewing on the Internet. Checking my usual places for purchasing books, I found it could be had for about $20 plus shipping, a little more than I wanted to pay at the moment. Inter-library loan costs $2.00 per book, whether they can get it or not. But would such a book as this, not exactly mainstream for scholars and readers, even be available through ILL?

I was looking somewhere for this book on line when I noticed a button for checking the book out in WorldCat. I keep forgetting that this service is out there. It's a joint catalog of many, many libraries. I don't know if it's limited to the libraries of academia, or if it includes public libraries. Through this I learned that the University of Arkansas library in Fayetteville, 25 miles down the road, had a copy. Except I have no relationship and no privileges there, and the cost of a 50 mile round trip was about equal to purchasing the book.

Expanding my search I found it in other places where I might go sometime or where I have friend, including the Stephen F. Austin University library in Nacogdoches Texas. A writing colleague in nearby Lufkin graduated from there. But I soon found it was as far for her to drive as it would be for me to go to Fayetteville.

Then I thought of my alma mater, the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. In the WorldCat I searched for libraries close to my old area code. URI popped up as having the book. Given that URI is 1,400 or so miles away, I thought of my friend Gary who works there. Taking a chance, I e-mailed him Tuesday morning to see if he had library privileges and if he would undertake getting me copies of certain pages from the book. Three e-mails later and the book was checked-out, the pages scanned, and an e-mail brought them to me in Bentonville Arkansas. Reading those pages caused me to realize I could use some others, and those were in my inbox the next morning.

What an incredible convenience this is! The very thing that Carlyle wrote several letters on, obtaining resources for his writing, I was able to work through in a matter of four hours. Yes, it took correspondence with a couple of friends to make it happen. That part was the same as for Carlyle. But the communications went two ways in minutes, and the needed work was procured in a few hours, whereas for Carlyle it took months for exchanging correspondence, finding books to borrow to avoid expensive purchases, waiting for those books to be shipped, etc.

Technology is an incredible thing. I'm glad to be living in this era.

Still Learning From Thomas Carlyle

I'm probably wasting my time reading Thomas Carlyle. Not really just reading him, but studying him. Right now I'm reading his 1840 book On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic Heroic in History. This is the first time I've read that, and I'm 330 pages into its 523. I'm also doing some formatting of his book Past and Present, with an eye toward putting it into a certain printed volume of his works.

I started reading Past and Present years ago, maybe 2005, but put it aside for other things that were more important at the time. This is an interesting book. Carlyle had finished Heroes and was working on a book on Oliver Cromwell and the English Civil War of the 1640s.

Something going on in England troubled Carlyle, so he broke off from the Cromwell book and in a hurry put together and published Past and Present. I read the first couple of chapters of the Cromwell book some years ago, and as I say am reading the Heroes book right now. So three books, from 1840, 1842, and 1844 have passed from Carlyle's mind to his pen to my mind fairly recently.

It's interesting to see the common themes in these books, even common wording and overlapping ideas. In Heroes Carlyle frequently makes reference to German literature. Early in his career Carlyle wrote extensively  on German literature. In Cromwell Carlyle used "Dryasdust" as a euphemism in the Introduction. In Past and Present he uses "Dryasdust" as well, though I'm not sure yet of the context. I suspect, as I go through his writings, I'm going to find much more overlap.

Which leads me to a memory from Saudi Arabia and North Carolina. This will take a while to explain. In Saudi it was very hard to find good English language reading material. One day I stumbled upon the library in Dhahran, the Aramco community. In that library I found an atlas of the stars. Actually, it was an atlas and sort-of encyclopedia of astronomy. When I was at Dhahran for business, I would look for occasions to spend an hour in the library. I studied certain things in the encyclopedia, learning about galaxies, galaxy clusters, and all the stars closest to us.

Fast forward a few years to our time in North Carolina. In the Asheboro public library I found two magazines of great interest. One was on astronomy, the other on NASA and the space exploration it did. I found many excuses to go to the library (fortunately my children were at a good go-to-the-library age then), and so we were in the library often. Those two mags were my main reading material in those visits.

In the astronomy mag I read an article about a certain astronomer. The interview explained how getting telescope time at a major telescope was difficult. The other problem was getting the time when whatever it was he waned to see was visible. He might have to wait months if not a year for telescope time at the right time. But when he did, he planned out his work, maximized his time, and then spent months going over the photographs. So meticulous planning led to six hours in the key place which led to months of deciphering research/work which then led to many publication.

Carlyle did the same thing as this astronomer did. His early work on German literature found much more use for him than just those translations and articles. Carlyle may have over done it some, however.

Which leads me to...what thought? That I need to do a good job of planning my research, of finding time in the "right seat" at the right time. Then to use that research over a long period of time to write whatever it is I right. I think I'm on the right path with this, but probably need to do a better job of it.

In another post, I may explore this habit of Carlyle of overdoing the same themes from book to book.

The Two Eternal Types in Fiction

It's strange where research takes you. I blogged about this a long time ago. Recently I had another incidence of this.

For my book Documenting America, in which I excepted a number of historical American documents, I decided I should try to read the entire documents. Mostly I had worked from excerpts in The Annals of America. At first I felt that was good enough for my purposes. But then I thought to make sure the previous abridger hadn't removed essential contact, I had better read the entire document.

Not surprisingly, most of the documents were easy to find using Internet search engines. A couple had to be teased out by multiple searches. Google Books was the main source, though other patriotic websites also had documents I needed. In some of the documents I did find material that the previous abridgment that I could use in my essays.

One document that gave me some trouble was the essay "Our Blundering Foreign Policy" by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. I found it, but didn't bookmark it. Then I couldn't find it next time I looked for it. Then I found it again. Then, when it was time to put a link in the homeshcool edition of the book, I once again couldn't find it. I knew it appeared in the March 1895 issue of The Forum magazine, but I could no longer find it on-line.

But...one of the times I did find it I read the Table of Contents for the entire volume, and found an article titled "The Two Eternal Types in Fiction". I figured that was something I should read, so I printed it and set it aside. I found it a couple of days ago while doing a paper clean-up at the house, but I wasn't sure where it came from. I thought it might have been that magazine, but wasn't sure. So I searched for that phrase, and found a ton of information about it. That included finding a new (to me) site for accessing old documents, www.unz.org/Pub/. This is not a university site. It's a free, on-line library. I've only briefly begun to explore it, but it appears to be an on-line place I should try to know well.

So (trying to focus here), I found the article in the March 1895 issue of The Forum. It was written by a man named Hamilton W. Mabie. A little Wikipedia work gave me what I needed to know about him. He was an American writer, essayist, critic, editor, and lecturer. I decided to give Mr. Mabie's article a read.

The main premise of the article is that there are two types of novels: one being the novel of romance and adventure, the other being the novel of realism. I'm not sure that Mabie was saying these were the only kinds of novels, but these are the ones he set opposed to each other. When realism was strong, romance and adventure declines. Realism had just come through a strong, strong period, with many critics saying it was the wave of the future. Realism would dominate literature forever.

Mabrie disagreed, and gave many examples of novels of then recent years that showed just the opposite: romance and adventure were making a comeback. I must confess to not recognizing most of the names. In fact I think Arthur Conan Doyle was the only one I did recognize.

But that's not really what the two types are. The two types Mabrie refers to are two types of lead character: the hero and the wanderer. The man who achieves and the man who experiences. The man who
masters life by superiority of soul or body, and the man who masters it by completeness of knowledge.

Unfortunately, I must end this blog post now, being out of time and almost out of cooperating gray cells. Look for a follow-up post soon.

Research for Documenting America

When I was on the working vacation recently, Moses Austin went with me. Moses wrote a journal on his trip through the Ohio Valley and on to Saint Louis. That trip took place during the bitterly cold and snowy winter of 1796-97. He started out from the mountains of Virginia, then into Kentucky, then territory that would eventually become Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri (still under the control of Spain at that time). His return trip was by way of Kentucky and Tennessee.


An excerpt of this journal is the first item in Volume 4 of the Annals of America, an Encyclopedia Britannica publication. My analysis of that document, or rather of that excerpt, is a chapter in Documenting America. I took that volume with me for research reading material. Lynda drove some on the first day of the trip, so I pulled that out of my reading bag and started at the beginning. Later, at our hotel in Orlando, I was able to finish the excerpt and write two chapters in manuscript.

Now, a journal of a trip, even a trip through wilderness areas, may not be inspiring writing. When I began reading it I wasn't sure it would be good material for a chapter, let alone two. But I did find it to contain information that I thought readers of Documenting America might want to know about. So I read the whole thing and wrote. After returning home I typed the two chapters, no. 27 and 28.

My research didn't stop there. First I made a trip to Wikipedia for a brief bio. Now I know a lot of people moan about Wikipedia and inaccuracies. I'm sure they have some, maybe many. But for initial research and sources of information, I've found it to be a good place to go. Austin's bio was brief, but certainly longer than the paragraph in my source. It gave me some good background, subject to confirmation if I used any of it.

As I said my source gave only an excerpt of the journal. Those ellipses that the Encyclopedia Britannica people use don't tell me much. Was there good material in those left out sections or not? They took it from Vol 5 of The American Historical Review, which sounded like a publication. A search through Google Books turned up the volume. Talk about instant library loan, without the $2.00 search fee! Downloaded in five seconds, and the applicable pages printed in another hundred or so.

Before the journal was a biographical sketch of Moses Austin, written by his son, the famed Stephen F. Austin, and edited by one of Moses' grandsons. Only a few pages long, it was an excellent short bio. It blew away the information given in the Annals and in Wikipedia. It's tempting to join Wiki as a contributor, just to be able to flesh out Moses Austin's biography. Maybe later.

The full journal, in all its glorious, archaic language full of long paragraphs, inconsistent spellings, and poor punctuation was there, having appeared in the April 1900 issue of the magazine. I scanned the full journal before typing the chapters. Some of the removed material was good, and I included it in the quote portion of the chapter. The except had been six or seven pages. The full journal was twenty. Should I read the whole thing? After all, the chapters were written, complete except for any editing I will do upon later contemplation. And having written two chapters from this document, I'm not likely to write another.


I was fascinated by this journal, however, and decided to read it all. I'm glad I did. Much of the removed material was of great interest to me. Austin described his route, including the towns he stayed in or the isolated farms he either found hospitality at or was rejected. I was able to trace his route on my road atlas. Some of the places still have the same names, such as Crab Orchard Kentucky.


Austin described the towns, and gave thoughts on their economic prospects. It's interesting to see what he wrote about the prospects for places such as Louisville, and how he was correct about what it could become. I also found his constant bemoaning of the American government's neglect of the areas he traveled through to be quite interesting (sorry, Joe F and Mrs. Rosen). The US government was busy trying to establish its place in the roll call of nations, develop governmental institutions, and figure out if a self-governing republic would really work. It was kind of to do all that and establish regional or civil governments in Cahoika or Kaskasia, or even Vincennes. I found in Austin's words a third chapter, on the idea that even back in the late 1700s there were people who wanted the government to guarantee an outcome. But that chapter will have to wait for another volume.


The purpose of Austin's trip was to see the lead mines in eastern Missouri. This was under Spanish dominion, so he needed certain letters and permissions to do this. I never knew that sixty miles south of Saint Louis, thirty or forty miles up from the Mississippi River, were rich lead deposits that were easily mined. But there was. The place names today reflect that: Leadwood, Irondale, Iron Mountain, Old Mines, Leadington. Missouri has an historic site there, called Missouri Mines State Historic Site. So I learned something in this extra research.

One other item of research to mention, something I haven't done, and probably won't. In The American Historical Review are many footnotes concerning journal entries. Mention is made of various original documents, such as American State Department papers, that would probably be good reading. Various secondary documents that further illustrate the points Austin makes are also cited. How wonderful it would be to find some of these documents and study further!

But, that would not make Documenting America a better book, I don't think. I'm not writing a scholarly work, but a popular "history", bringing lessons out of historical documents to see what lessons they hold for today's America. Research for my own enjoyment won't further that goal.

A Little Bit of Progress

I have two main writing tasks at present:

1. Complete as many chapters as possible in the first volume of Documenting America.
2. Complete the article I'm under contract to write for Safe Highway Matters.

On the second one, I'm having trouble getting hold of various sources the editor suggested. I've done all the research I can without talking to some people. I could almost write the article from the research, but really it would read much better, and I'm sure be more valuable, if I could get some quotes and some practical information in it. I hope I hope I hope today I'll be able to reach some people. The article is due next Wednesday; only 400 words.

On Documenting America I'm making good progress. Last night I finished chapter 21. Unfortunately this took me a lot longer than I wanted, due to letting myself get caught up in the tentacles of research. This chapter is about the wilderness conditions the first settlers encountered on coming to America. The source is one I found in my 20 volume set of The Annals of America, an Encyclopedia Britannica product I picked up for $25 at a thrift store. Back before the Internet, that was my source for original documents. Now, of course, so much is on the Internet I don't have to rely on that for original documents. But I still use it to find things and make decisions on what document to base a chapter on.

The document in question is a 1711 letter written by Rev. John Urmstone, a missionary/pastor in North Carolina, to his sponsoring organization, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. The Annals have only an excerpt of the letter, and gave no biographical information about Urmstone. The excerpt was suitable for my purposes. Urmstone described the harsh conditions and the work he had to do just to survive, work that supposedly would prevent him from his work of propagating the gospel. However, the excerpt seemed to have a whiny tone, so I wanted to see the full letter if I could.

Through a simple Google search I found plenty. I didn't find the whole letter (thought Wheaten College has it on microfilm if I want to drive eleven hours each way), but I did find a longer extract of the part in the Annals and I found extracts of two other parts. What I found was a lot of information on Urmstone. Rather than take too much time to write it out, here's what one of his colleagues wrote about him to the same person in England: "Mr. Urmston is lame and says he cannot do now what he formerly has done, but this lazy distemper has seized him by what I hear ever since his coming to the country." Wow! Not exactly a glowing recommendation.

So, that, and the other biographical information I found, puts the entire body of writing by Urmstone in question. His letters to England over ten years were constant complaints about his situation: no servants; little meat; unproductive land; slaves too expensive; wicked parishioners; etc. His description of the North Carolina wilderness is probably accurate, and I can still use is at the document for a chapter. But how much more interesting it is given the knowledge about the original writer. I shall have to have a later chapter on Urmstone, maybe one about how not everyone came to America for religious liberty reasons. Some, like the good reverend, really came for economic gain.

In all of this, I spent way too much time on research. I managed to pound out the chapter last night, not yet in polished form. But what should have taken me four hours took seven. Maybe the extra three will form the basis of an other chapter, maybe not. But I've got to get more efficient in my work if I'm ever going to finish the book.

The Joys of the Day

This morning, before work, after reading for a few enjoyable minutes in John Wesley's letters, I had some additional time to do some genealogy work. So I went to the digital library of Brigham Young University (which I discovered only yesterday) and did some more experimentation on how to use the site. I searched for John Cheney, Lynda's immigrant ancestor on her paternal line, going back to Newbury Massachusetts in 1636 and in Lawford and Mistley, Essexshire, England before that. The search in the "family history collection" returned 33 hits, which I began going through. Some I recognized. Oh, and I admit to taking some work time on this, not starting my business day right at straight up 8 AM. I shall have to make up some time.

One of the hits was a 100 page (approx.) typed manuscript dealing with Cheney families in England. It turned out it was mainly concerned with John Cheney's English origins. While it did not have the full source citations it needs to have to be fully credible, it's about the best document on the subject I've seen, and worthy of further study. So genealogy was a joy today.

Work was pretty good too. I spent two hours (in two different sessions) with a department head in our office who has a very difficult construction project. I've spent much time with him already on this project, but he had two new issues come up that he wanted to get my input on. Such a discussion is good, and enjoyable. I think we worked out the best possible response for him to make. Then it was off to Centerton to deal with the flood study that has plagued me for so long, and resolving one nagging question on the site topography. I've dreaded getting back on it, but cannot wait any longer. I finished writing a difficult specification today (another joy), and so I have non-distracted time I can put into this project and get it done. That would be a joy. Oh, wait, I have another one for the City I'll have to do when I finish this one. At least it is a much simpler flood study. I did the complicated one first.

I left work more or less on time (I'll make up my time another day) and went to the Bentonville library. Time in a library is always a joy. To be around thousands of books and a hundred different magazines, people studying, librarians working--that's where I love to be. The hour passed all too quickly, but I found a magazine I might be able to pitch an article to.

Church was enjoyable, a Bible study in Daniel chapter 8.

Now here at home, I read twenty pages in the book I'm working on. Less than 60 pages to go, and it has been an enjoyable read. Now I'm in the Dungeon, on the computer. I worked 30 minutes on the current genealogy project, then this.

How much much joy can a day contain? If it weren't for having robbed my employer of some time. That was the only blot on the day. Well, buying some chips too. But all in all, I wish all my days were like this.

Random Road Trip Thoughts

That's random thoughts from a road trip, not thoughts on a random road trip, by the way. We returned yesterday after 3,700 plus miles, going to Oklahoma City (for grandson Ephraim's first birthday party) by way of Rhode Island (for nephew Chris' wedding). Here are some thoughts as I think of them.

- Arkansas has the most road kill per mile, by far. I say this even though only about 50 miles of the trip were in Arkansas.

- Gas prices are fairly equal from Oklahoma to New England. The lowest I saw was $1.779 per gallon around the Tulsa area. The most $2.099 in Rhode Island. That's only an 18 percent difference. In 1990-91, when we made a couple of similar road trips between North Carolina and Arkansas, the price varied by more than 50 percent.

- Many New England towns are quaint and pleasant to drive through. The area between Worcester MA and Woonsocket RI is filled with towns such as Grafton, Upton, Uxbridge, Milford, and Sutton that have some type of central core (not so much a village green as a downtown, but different than the downtowns in the midwest) that is full of old buildings--churches, government offices, retail, residential--that are pleasant to drive by and observe. At several places I would have loved to have had the time to stop and wander around on foot.

- Rhode Island has the worst roads of any state we drove in. The Interstate highways were fine, but the roads a notch below that, the state highways, left much to be desires, and the city streets were generally awful.

- Pennsylvania may just be the most beautiful state in the nation. I know other states have higher mountains, more magnificent rivers, and mixtures of landscape and climate. But I love to drive I-80 across Pennsylvania. This is the Allegheny mountains much of the way, and pretty good sized hills for the rest. You don't go through any towns or cities until the far eastern end, which we bypassed this time. Many times the road is on high bridges that tower above a river or stream below. Frequently the east-bound and west-bound lanes are on different grades, and you seem to be on a one way road. We took this in daylight both directions, and I enjoyed the 10 hours thoroughly.

- Judging by the truck traffic, the economic depression is not too deep. Except, the traffic is down on weekends and at nights compared to previous road trips I've taken. So while many trucks still transport their cargo on our Interstate highways, they are not pushing as hard as the did previously. Perhaps I'll be proved wrong about being in a depression that will last approximately eight years. But I'm not throwing in the towel on that yet.

- It's good to get off the Interstates some. We did so at Toledo, where we spent a night, and went on state highways to Fort Wayne. Aside from being confused by the place names (in rapid succession we passed through or saw signs for Waterville--also a Vermont town we know--Grand Rapids--Ohio, not Michigan--Texas, Florida, Antwerp, and three or four similar well-known places not expected in northwest Ohio), and besides fighting rain, we enjoyed the brief chance to drive at slower speeds and see a new part of the country up close. Even being slowed down to pass through the towns was not all that bad.

- The genealogy section in the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana, is all it is cracked up to be. What a fantastic collection! I planned to spend an hour there, doing the small bit of research needed for my article, and wound up spending nearly six hours, as Lynda had some work to do there for renewing her nursing license. Since I hadn't planned for that much time I was not well prepared for it, but hopefully used it well to search for one elusive line of ancestors and find more information on one of my well-studied ones.

This post is long enough already. I'll have more to day in another post or two.

The Tentacles of Research

I find myself with more time on my hands while abstaining from computer games during Lent. Last night I used that time to return to research on Doctor Luke's Assistant, things that have been nagging me and leaving me fearful that some things might not be historically accurate. So, using the miracle of search engines, I began this task.

In the book, I have the educated farmer, Jacob of Ain Karem, making ink from animal blood and keeping it in a container fashioned from a leg bone of an ox. Is this even possible? Would the blood congeal, even if mixed with something? Would it be absorbed into the bone? Or would it form a film, that maybe would prevent very much from absorbing? This may not be a major item, but I'd like to get it right.

So I searched for "ancient documents" and "ink", and had the usual large number of hits, many of which were not germane. One, however, was to the book Forty Centuries Of Ink, by David N. Carvalho. Who knew such a book existing, or that it was on-line at http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/tech/printing/fortycenturiesofink/toc.html . I haven't yet found the answer to my question, but I have much more of this to read, and other links to pursue.

Then, since I'm preparing the correspondence of Augustus ben Adam, assistant to Doctor Luke, I wanted to research some expert references regarding ancient letters for form and content. I've done some of this already, but not as extensive as I'd like. So I searched for "ancient letters" and had thousands of returns, some amazing documents, either books or articles on-line, or blogs, or professors' web sites. And these sites have hundreds of references to original sources they used. It's a veritable treasure trove of information. When I am at home tonight, I will edit in some of the names of the originally found document and some of the references of interest. How I would love to access and read it all!

But, maybe I don't need to go that far. While perhaps one article or book cannot be considered definitive, maybe two is enough for the purpose at hand. The derivative research, which would be more pleasure than research, will have to wait.