Here's a pretty exciting idea, which I guess some number of people are experimenting with -- crowd sourcing peer review. Ohio University Press will be publishing soon a volume called Subjecting History: Building a Relationship Between History and Its Alternatives. The volume asks how the perspectives of historians and the public differ about history. That is, the volume makes history the subject of study. Cribbing now from the book's website, the editors Trevor R. Getz and Thomas G. Padilla are interested in question such as: how well academic scholarship represents past? Does it align or conflict with nonacademic ways of understanding the past? What are ways that academic scholarship can better represent the past without appearing to ignore interpretations that run counter to it? These questions are important and I'd think that down the road one might address how judges think about history, perhaps differently from how academics historians think about it.
As part of an NSF funded experiment in open peer and public review, the editors have put drafts of the chapters on the net and are asking for public comment. You can read all the chapters and then comment on them. Just to be clear, these are drafts that are still undergoing revision. And this I find particularly interesting -- the Press may include the public comments in their final volume. The essays deal with a bunch of different micro-level stories -- one, for instance, deals with a Rhode Island playground named after a child who passed away in the late nineenth century. Reminds me of how a lot of people use parks to create memorials to their friends -- and also in the early twentieth century used restrictive covenants to control who could use the park.
I learned about this because my friend Jim Hall of the University of Alabama has a chapter on how the University preserved (and in some cases removed) the ruins of the campus after it was burned by the United States army at the conclusion of the Civil War. The short version of Jim's story is that campus was largely burned at the conclusion of the War and some of the ruins were maintained for several decades (and in fact a few ruins are still on the campus). All of this is tragic -- the University was yet another of the many, many victims of the extraordinary violence unleashed by the war (and that preceeded the war during the era of slavery). The library was one of the many buildings burned. And so we lost the collection of books -- though if you're interested in this, here's a catalog of the books in that library. One of these days I'm going to write something about that collection. There's also an important story about the compensation that the federal government gave the University (in the form of land in the late nineteenth century).
The image is of the University of Alabama's campus before the War. As the caption indicates, the Mound (one of the ruins that Jim writes about) is on the site of the Washington Dormitory.
Re the image: Does anyone know if UA's original layout was based somewhat on Jefferson's Rotunda/Lawn at UVA? It certainly resembles early depictions of UVA, and (until the last sentence of the post) I assumed that's what the image was.
Posted by: UVA Alum | March 25, 2013 at 08:31 PM
Really good question, to which I don't have a great answer. I know that there were a lot of connections between Alabama and UVA -- Alabama hired a number of faculty educated at UVA. Henry Tutwiler comes to mind in particular -- he was among the first faculty at Alabama, if not the first, and may have had some influence on the architecture. Tutwiler was one of the first people to earn a graduate degree at UVA. (Alabama opened in 1831.) Alabama's Lyceum certainly looks a lot like the Rotunda at UVA, doesn't it?
Here is a link to a photograph of Alabama's Lyceum, which looks even more like UVA's Rotunda than the artist's depiction in the illustration of this post. It certainly was a beautiful building.
http://www.lib.ua.edu/sites/default/files/Rotunda(1).jpg
Posted by: Alfred Brophy | March 25, 2013 at 09:00 PM
Off the topic of the original blog post but on the topic of the first comment, I have always been struck by the similarity of the Duke East campus and the UVA Jefferson designed campus. That old Duke campus always struck me as a poor folks' version of the Jefferson campus at UVA. I always wondered if there was some tie or intentional copying on a low cost budget. The new Duke campus with its Gothic design is, of course, what most people are familiar with and bears no similarity to UVA.
Posted by: Bill Turnier | March 26, 2013 at 10:54 AM
The University of Alabama was not an innocent victim of the Civil War; it was a training ground for Confederate officers and militia. It made itself a part of the Confederate war machine that started the war and became a legitimate target for Union reprisals.
Posted by: TWBB | March 27, 2013 at 10:09 AM