Instead Veronica Stirnitzke and I, Jason Perry, will talk about the news as it happened 100 years ago. So for example, Veronica (Roni) Stirnitzke today will write a post talking about a news item in the papers on March 1, 1911. We will discuss these events as they unfold. We will try not to taint what we write with knowledge of how events turn out. For example, a major story in our first week of operations will be the ethics investigation of William Lorimer, a US senator from Illinois who was accused of bribing state assemblymen in order to secure his election to the Senate. He eventually is found guilty, but not for another two years. After all, when other news blogs write about current events, they do so with the same lack of foreknowledge. The two of us feel that presenting history this way will provide a better connection with the internet-reading public.
Our source for this work is the fantastic website, Chronicling America, published by the Library of Congress. The site stores scanned copies of tens of newspapers from 1860 to 1922. For this exercise, we will using only a few of those papers, in this case a local paper from here in Southern Arizona, the Bisbee Daily Review, two Washington papers (the Washington Herald and the Washington Times), and a New York City paper, the New York Tribune. These papers should allow us to cover a variety of topics from local issues like the path to Arizona statehood, which finally takes place in February 1912, national politics during the run up to the contentious 1912 elections, and international news like the Mexican Revolution, the Italian-Turkish War, and the "calm" years leading up to World War I.
In addition to talking about the news, we will be offering our opinion. We will do our best to present the arguments that we ongoing at the time. For example, I will be presenting the news as a supporter of President Taft (read: conservative Republican) would see it. So expect stories that make ex-President Roosevelt look bad... From Roni, expect a very different perspective as she looks at events from a more progressive, nay, anarchist point-of-view. This should make discussions of the upcoming 1912 election and this, the height of the progressive era, more interesting. If you should find parallels with politics of the present, those are entire coincidental and intentional.
Please note that while we will try to present arguments from points-of-view that would be familiar with those living in the 1910s, we (or at least I) will not be making an attempt to replicate the language of the day. Sorry, I can only go so far in transporting myself to 1911.
I hope everyone comes back each day for a brand new post and comes back later today for Roni's first post.
No comments:
Post a Comment