Surfacing here for a moment (okay, the fifteen minutes it will take me to type all this stuff) to alert readers to a couple of particularly interesting bits about "doing" history.

First, this essay from the Boston Globe, prompted, apparently by the recent death of Howard Zinn. (At least that's what I assume led to the piece because I can't otherwise imagine a newspaper devoting so much space/ink/money to the subject of history.)

And then this discovery today: the Spatial History Project at Stanford University. Richard White, author of the blog entry to which the link leads, is a serious voice/mind in American history. He launched his career writing about the American west. Obviously he's now thinking about history from other angles (no pun intended).

I was alerted to both of these gems by via Twitter by Sterling Fluharty (at Twitter as @sterflu). Good stuff all the way around. And now --- back to doing my own version of history.

I had fun with the first round, so here ya go: more bite-sized text to edit. Click on the link and you'll get a piece of text from the draft of my new manuscript. This is from what I expect will be chapter three. Thank you in advance!

Oh: to answer a question posed in the comments section of the first entry on this subject: Yes, legally, this is okay. I'm only posting small chunks of a draft, which is akin to what I'd do if I were in a writer's group and posted my draft for critique from group members. So feel free; the editing/copyright police won't come get you.

Well, I'm here, but I'm not HERE, if you know what I mean.

I am researching the next chunk of the book. It's certainly the mid-section or perhaps the middle two-thirds, or whatever. In any case, I've moved the research into a new time period which means I'm trying to figure out "what happened" during that particular block of time (in this case roughly 1900-1940).

The only thing I know for sure is that my initial instinct, way back when, was correct: The Jungle didn't "cause" much of anything to happen. It was more of what we'd now call a tipping point than a cause; a straw (beefsteak? pot roast? rolled rump?) that broke the camel's back.

But even that moment (c. 1906) is clearly not the main event in the years from 1900-1920 and beyond. Not even close.

Anyway, it's all fascinating, but the most efficient way for me to deal with all this new information is to stay focused on it. Or, more accurately, to allow my brain to stay focused by not digressing into things like beer, random rants, pondering the nature of the cosmos and other distractions.

So that, dear readers, is why I'm not here ranting away. Soon as I get a good grip on this new material and actually start writing the next chapter(s), blogging will return to its usual pace. 'Cause I can research for hour and hours, but I can only write for a few hours at a time.

I love my work. I know, I know: Sometimes I grouse. But honest: I love my work.

But it can leave my brain feeling like an old sweatsock that's been hit by a Mack truck.

Like today. For the past week, I've had my elbows planted on my desk, reading stacks of books. Stacks of 'em. My elbows are numb and so is my brain.

So: I'm taking a break. Which brings me to my point: How do historians find all those pesky facts? (You know: Those facts that allow us to tell stories.)

As I noted here in another rumination on doing history, historians engage in two kinds of research: Primary and secondary. Most of my work is based on primary sources and if I'm not writing, I'm usually reading those (newspapers, diaries, letters, government reports, legal documents).

Sometime I spend weeks reading nothing but primary sources. But at some point, I have to turn to the secondaries. It's the least  favorite part of my job.  I just can't get as enthused about secondary sources. But they're necessary --- indeed, fundamental --- to the process.

For example: I'm writing a history of meat in modern America. To do so, I need to know about property law, anti-trust regulation, federal land policies, food legislation, and seventy-five other topics that are not directly related to the main topic of "meat." That's where the secondary sources come in.

Take anti-trust regulation. (Please!) Anti-trust laws play a crucial role in the history of modern American meat processing and distribution. But I'm no legal historian, so to learn about anti-trust, I turn to scholars who specialize in its history. (Bless their geeky hearts.) I've waded through several scholarly books and articles on the topic, trying to get a sense of what happened when (and, with any luck, why).

Now that I've done that, I have the background I need to turn directly to the anti-trust cases themselves. Put another way, I use the secondary sources to ground myself so that the primary sources in a specialized field like the history of law make sense. If I tried to just read the anti-trust rulings on their own, I'd be lost. Once I've got some basic background, however, I'm confident I can make my own judgments about the primary material.

But these mini-crash courses are exhausting. Scholars tend to assume their readers are already experts, so I spend half my time decoding their jargon. (That's especially true of legal and economic historians. Jargon City.)

Anyway, that's what I've been doing for the past ten days: Taking crash courses in law, federal land policy, and changes in cattle ranching in the early twentieth century.

And yes, I know what you're wondering: "How do historians know when to focus on primaries and when to rely on secondaries?" "How do they know what's "tangential" to their topic and what's not?" Good questions! I'll answer them later.

Am not around much because I'm  deep into it (the new book, I mean). I just started a new section of the project, which means reading tons (not quite literally, but almost) of material and getting myself up to speed on homesteading laws, property law in the 20th century, the nature and meaning of "modern" agriculture, more in anti-trust legislation, and other matters that probably don't sound interesting. (Although I intend to make them not just interesting but fascinating for the people who read the book).

I'm also at the point of the project where, for better or worse (and I can never decide which) that my sleep at night is wracked with dreams about the book. When I wrote the beer book, for example, for several months running I dreamed about Frederick Pabst and Adolphus Busch. We took carriage rides together, enjoyed long dinners, shared long conversations. (Yes, it was interesting. Although the meals contained an insane amount of heavy, rich food.)

The new book involves also involves people although  none of them enjoy the several-chapters-long central role played by Pabst and Busch. So my current dreams tend to revolve around Congressional hearings, city streets clogged with livestock, and anonymous ranchers and livestock commission agents.

But that's okay. My dream-mind is enjoying lively conversations and I'm listening to people debate and argue and sometimes shout at each other, and in general go about the business of letting me understand their world. (Although frankly I could do with less shouting; the other night, a heated Congressional investigation of some sort kept waking me up. Maddening.)

I know. I know. It's weird. But it's how my mind works when I'm deep into a subject. So --- back at it. I'd say I'll see you in my dreams, but I dunno. I kind of doubt you'll show up there --- and I bet you wouldn't like it if you did. Back to work.

This is the kind of crap that drives me batty. The other day I was reading something (can't remember now what it was) that led me to The Kitchen Garden Network. According to the site's "About" page, the people at KGN are focused on

the politics and economic forces that influence what reaches the food outlets where we shop for what we eat.

Okay. Fine. If they'd stopped there, I wouldn't have had the urge to bang my head against the wall. Instead, the site's founder goes on to note that

Up until the 1970’s a large portion of our food came from local sources . . . ’   Roadside stands, farmer’s markets, local co-ops and the like were a given. Organic produce had not yet become commonly available. By the 1980’s everything changed. The political climate altered the agricultural landscape in many dramatic and detrimental ways. Many farmers went out of business and farms began to be sold off at a rapid pace.

Oh. Ohhhh..... My aching head. Where should I start to correct the errors? (*1)

Should I begin by changing "1970s" to "1870"? Or explain that prior to the 1970s, few Americans bought their food at "roadside stands, farmer's markets [or] local co-ops"? Or dissect the claim that somehow in the 1980s, "everything changed"?

Or just explain that when I read stuff such uninformed nonsense, first I cringe, and then I worry? Because the current debate about food is being fueled by this kind of inane, inaccurate "information." Worse, substantive discussion about the global food system, climate change, and the like is in danger of being derailed by a lack of insight, context, and history.

It drives historians like me crazy. And frankly, it scares the crap out of me. (If too many cooks ruin the soup,  too many ignorant minds and chattering mouths destroy the debate.) So --- maybe I should choose door number three and get back to work on my current project. Because  the "food fight" needs a historian's input.

___________________

*1:  Mind you, I'm not picking on the people at Kitchen Garden Network. I could have used dozens of other, similar examples. This one just happened to be handy.

Or at least "what happens when this historian writes": Mybrain aches. Literally. It's not a headache in the conventional sense of the word.

Instead . . . my brain actually feels, well, like it's just run a marathon. So tired at the end of a day that I have a hard time "thinking" about much of anything. (This is why I make large portions when I cook and why I own a freezer.) (Although, I have to say that cooking is a near-perfect way to unwind an exhausted brain.)

Anyway, I've been writing. Lots. Thousands of words. I have written, as near as I can tell, about a third of the manuscript in the past two weeks alone. (For those keeping track -- who? ME? Nah. --- near as I can tell, I've now written about half of what will be the final product.)

It's always like this: I spend the first, I dunno, eighteen months of a project thinking and reading and sort of writing. Then I start writing the first chapter and it feels as if I'm trying to push a huge wooden wagon out of a rut. I push. And I push. And I push. And I get nowhere.

And then suddenly, the wagon's wheels lurch forward, just a bit. A tiny jolt of momentum. So I lean into the wagon and push harder. And --- the wagon starts rolling. And it moves faster and faster and faster....

But somehow, the mental part of keeping the wagon moving becomes harder and harder and harder. Not because I get lazy or lose interest, but because by the time the wagon lurches forward, my brain is that much more stuffed with facts and information.

More to the point, it's working furiously, processing that information, relating one seemingly unrelated fact or detail or event to another to another to another.

So, for example, as I was writing chapter three (which mysteriously morphed into chapter four...), I realized that I'd been wrong about something I wrote in chapter one.  I misunderstood the relationship of A to B. And as I re-wrote that part of chapter one, I suddenly realized that the new ideas connected to a major point in chapter two.

Which, you guessed it, meant writing a new section to chapter two. Which caused it to balloon in size and focus, so that what had been the second half of the second chapter became the first half of the third chapter. Which meant the second half of the third chapter became the first half of the fourth chapter. And all of it, in turn, caused me to re-think another section of chapter one, so I re-wrote that. And . . .

You get the picture. At the end of a day, I've written perhaps three thousand words, which are not just words but ideas and analyses. And my brain aches. So that's what I've been doing and where I've been. Oh, my aching brain. Oh, my poor, poor neglected blog.

Today's must-read: This entry from Canadian historian Rob MacDougall.(*1) Man, I love this new generation of historians and the way they use the web. (Another example is Alexis Madrigal at Inventing Green.)

And now, back to work. Today's topic: canned meat and how it shaped Americans' demand for fresh meat. (Yes, there is a connection...)

________________

*1: Interesting in and of itself, but timely for me as I've been thinking about the octopus imagery as I write my current chapter about, yes, giant meat processing corporations in the late 19th century.

Whoa. Just had THE weirdest case of historian's deja vu.

A little background: I've spent the week reading testimony from a series of Congressional hearings held in late 1888 and early 1889. The subject was the transportation and sale of meat products. Livestock producers complained about low prices for their cattle. They blamed a collection of meatpackers that they called the "Big Four": Armour, Swift, Morris, and Hammond. The farmers told senate investigators that the Big Four colluded on prices at stockyards, driving prices into the ground and cattle producers into bankruptcy.

As I read the hearing testimony, however, it became clear to me that there is and was little historical evidence of these charges and that the true culprit was over-supply of livestock and decreasing demand for meat (mostly in export markets).

Moreover, this downturn in prices came only after record high prices which, no surprise, had led many investors to buy land and cattle (investors who, for the most part, had no experience and no idea what they were doing). They then flooded the market with (mostly poor) livestock and prices plunged. Anyway, the cattle producers were dead certain there was a conspiracy against them and had no interest in hearing any facts to the contrary.

So today I'm reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about rising milk prices. Same deal, except with milk rather than cattle. Dairy farmers want a federal probe of prices because, they say,

they have too few buyers and too little competition for their milk. The industry is dominated by two players: Dean Foods Co. of Dallas, which is creating a national brand in what had been a fragmented industry, and Dairy Farmers of America Inc., a Kansas City, Mo., cooperative that buys milk from farmers and sells some of it to Dean Foods.

Only toward the end of the article do we learn anything to the contrary:

Many economists doubt that Dean Foods -- which benefits from being able to buy plentiful supplies of cheap raw milk to make everything from bottled milk to cheese to ice cream -- is to blame for this year's depressed milk prices. Indeed, the company's market clout wasn't enough to stop the prices farmers received for their milk from hitting record and near-record high levels in 2007 and 2008.

Yes, I realize this is milk, rather than cattle, but the principle is the same: When the going gets tough, food producers are quick to blame "monopolists" for the sharp price gyrations that are a normal part of the food industry.

Moral of the story? Hmmmm. Beats me. Those who don't know history are bound to repeat their mistakes? We should all read more history? We should all listen when historians speak? We should step back and take the long view? I dunno. (Hey! It's the best I can do on a Friday afternoon after a looooooooooong week.) (Long week, you say? Aren't they all seven days long? Not mine, buddy. Not this week. MY week ran 75 days.)

Tip o' the mug to Dan Mitchell of Daily Bread.

I now resume my fishing expedition. Got interrupted last week by all kinds of crap -- but now back to meat. (Seriously. Am hoping no one and nothing trips my rant trigger and that I lay low so I can focus on research and writing.) (*1) I've been wading through several thousand pages of testimony/evidence/etc. from a 1918 Federal Trade Commission investigation into the affairs of what were then the major meat-packing companies.  (Yes, that's thousands of pages. Sigh.) But hey, it's all good. The new book moves forward. ________ *1: Which, heh, I could manage if I stop reading newspapers, magazines, blogs, twitter, etc. Isolation. I need to become a serious isolationist.

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three 

I’m not. I’m a historian who has chosen to write about a complicated, contentious issue. (Again, I was more or less oblivious to this “food fight” until I was well into the project.) I don’t know where the “story” will go.

Why? Because I’m still researching its contents and, like any historian, I let the facts guide me toward clarity and understanding. But I doubt it will be a “story” one that either side wants to hear. It’ll be too complex. It won’t toe the party line. It won’t conform to the mythology that is the underpinning of both sides’ arguments.

Hey, that’s the nature of real life: it’s complicated and it almost never fits into the either/or, black/white scenario that we’d like it to. That’s also the curse, and the blessing, of the historian’s work.

All this leads to an obvious question: When I’m finished with the book, will I have an opinion about the “food fight”?

Answer: Certainly. By then I’ll know something about the issues, ideas, and events that led to this moment in American history, and I’ll have enough facts to make an informed judgment about this debate and to take a stance on it.

Put another way, I’ll be a more educated, informed citizen. With luck, you’ll read my book and you, too, will have enough information to make your own judgment. And you, too, will be a more informed citizen. At least that’s my hope.

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three 

On one side are committed, passionate grassroots activists, many of whom are focused on what they regard as a "food crisis," for which they propose various solutions.  (*1)

On the other side are people who produce the food. They're hindered in part by their own diversity: There is no single “farm” voice, no single “producer” voice, and as a result it’s hard for food producers to present a coherent defense of the attack on it. (*2)

On one side is a vehement offense ("modern farming is evil and so is corporate food"), on the other a disorganized, bewildered defense ("we're feeding the people of the world! how can we be evil?"), all of it spiced with hefty doses of glib, ignorant chatter that insult one side or the other. (*3)

Lost, and nearly invisible, in the middle are the hundreds of thousands of people --- chemists, biologists, agronomists, economists, etc. --- who have been studying issues of sustainability, global food production, and the like for decades. (I get the distinct impression that many of the antagonists on both sides are blissfully unaware of the history of the "sustainability" issue.)

These are people working in public and private institutions, working with farmers and food manufacturers alike. (Much of their research, it should be noted, is, in this country, taxpayer-funded.) Unfortunately, much of what they have to say is lost amidst the noise.

Result? The public discussion over the modern food system has become so politicized, and its participants so polarized, that people who learn that I'm writing a book about the history of meat assume that I must be "working" for one side or the other. That I intend to either defend big corporations, or write a diatribe against “factory meat.”

Not true. My “agenda” is simple: to explore what it means to be an American. “Meat” is simply a vehicle for doing so.

That’s it. That’s the beginning, the middle, and the end of my agenda. I’m not out to “get” one side or the other. I’m not assuming that one side is right and the other side is wrong.

I’m only  interested in exploring the long view of the big picture. I’m trying to figure out “what happened” and why in hopes of furthering my understanding of who we are as a people and a nation. It’s what I did with my other three books. It’s what I do. It's what other historians do.

Sadly, some people don’t believe that. To this day, many “beer geeks” believe that one of the “corporate brewers” paid me to write the beer book. That’s not true, but since I didn’t toe the “party line” on the subject of beer (Big Beer is evil. Small Beer is saintly), it follows that I MUST be in the pay of the corporations.

Next: Where the historian and the debate finally meet

 ________________

*1: The phrase “food crisis” is itself interesting. It’s a loaded term --- akin to “pro choice” and “pro life” --- that is used to commandeer and define the terms of the debate.

*2: You’re thinking, “Wait! The “food establishment” is big corporations. Surely they can defend themselves.” Easier said than done. Big food corporations, for example, simply ignore the assault as not worth their time, leaving the troops on the ground --- farmers --- to defend themselves. Or, more typically, they aim toward more "ecologically correct" foods by mining all that research being carried out in universities and other laboratories.

*3: For a prime example, see this essay by Nicholas Kristof in a recent issue of the New York Times. It's been awhile since I've read anything quite so inane. No surprise, the many of the nation's hardworking farmers took offense.

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three 

 

This three-part rumination is prompted by a comment from Tim Beauchamp, who blogs at Open Fermenter and who I follow on Twitter. (He provides excellent Twitter content, by the way. None of this “I’m at the grocery store now” crap from him!) For some reason, today he complimented me in a tweet and ended with:

She may be the Upton Sinclair Jr. of today. (*2)

I was touched by his sweet words in the rest of his tweet (modesty prevents me from including those), but --- I gotta say something about the “Upton Sinclair” business. (Tim, this is NOT an attack on you. No way, no how.) He inadvertently hit a nerve. And proved a point that I’ve been wanting to comment on:

That the current “food fight” has become so heated, so contentious that people assume that because I’m writing about meat, I must have an agenda.

So, Tim, thanks for prompting me to get busy writing a blog series that I’d been putting off. (The next beer’s on me.)

I’ve mentioned before, I’m writing a history of meat in modern America (c. 1870-1990). I spend most of my days digging through primary materials, hunting for information, trying to figure out “what happened” and then writing about what I learn.

But as part of my research, I’m also learning as much as I can about current agricultural issues, our existing food system, government food policies, and the like. That’s been an eye-opener. I had no idea how politicized these topics were.

Sure, I knew there were recurrent debates over, for example, farm subsidies. Over food tariffs and export quotes. Yes, I knew about the conflict unfolding here in the midwest over land use: Should large feedlots be allowed to exist? What kinds of controls ought to regulate their wastes? How can we reconcile the rights of homeowners with farmers?

I was, however, more-or-less oblivious to the other food fight: The one between the nation’s food producers --- farmers and manufacturers --- and the people who want to dismantle the existing food production system and replace it with one that is more “sustainable” (preferably more “organic”). (*3)

Next: My "agenda" __________

*1: No pun intended. Honest.

*2: Upton Sinclair was a committed socialist whose intent with The Jungle was the reveal the misery of factory working conditions. As he himself said (and I'm paraphrasing), he aimed for the nation's heart and accidentally hit its stomach.

*3: More accurately: I wasn't completely oblivious to the issues or the debate, but I sure didn't know how, um, heated it had become.

You know. I never run out of things to say. So there's also this in the Washington Post. (One reason why I was a bit crazy this week: The Post calls on Tuesday for a piece to run on Thursday.) (Yes, I can.)

Tony Comstock, one of my Twitter-pals (@tonycomstock) (a truly nice guy who is passionate about personal freedom), asked me (rhetorically) if he'd be able to read the Kama Sutra on the Apple e-reader (or any reader).

Well, I dunno. But I'm guessing that for some time to come, e-readers will only be useful for reading fiction. Mind you, I've never used an e-reader (can't justify that kind of money for something with, at present, marginal utility).

But given my experience reading scholarly journals and monographs online, I  suspect it will be a loooooong time before anyone comes up with an e-reader that can be used to read scholarly stuff. By that I mean books/articles that contain footnotes or endnotes.

'Cause I'm here to tell you that it's mostly a total. pain. in. the. ass. to read that stuff in digital form.

As you probably know, Google and a number of university libraries launched a partnership several years ago to scan the contents of the libraries. Many of those volumes are available at the partner libraries (most notably at the University of Michigan's online library).

I have no idea who designed the software/structure for the project, but mostly it sucks. The project calls for the actual books to be scanned, so the online versions are digital reproductions of the physical books. That's where the problem begins. The software is designed to allow you to "open" only a few e-pages at at time.

But what if the book contains endnotes that were printed at the end of the book? Say you're reading page 24 and it contains five endnotes, and those were printed on page 250?

You guessed it: Close the first set; call up the pages that contain the notes. Total nuisance. Tedious and time-consuming. WAY more complicated than, ya know, just opening the pages of a book and thumbing through them.

And don't EVEN get me started on how fucked up the method is in other databases, ones created by other, different partnerships. Unless you've used them, you canNOT imagine how much those software designers managed to complicate the otherwise simple task of leafing through a journal.

Take my word for it: The printed page is much easier to deal with. So, for that matter, is microfilm.

Right now, for example, I need to read Good Housekeeping from c. 1890 to 1910. I started reading it online --- and gave up. It takes too damn long. It's easier for me to go to the library and read it on microfilm.

Obviously, none of this would matter if the content is designed specifically to be used on some kind of e-reading device. Eg, turn the notes into hyperlinks and create a reading device that allows the reader to jump back and forth from page to note and back. But it would also help if the program designers actually, ya know, tried USING their own programs.

Life in the digital age: Not all it's cracked up to be.

God, where did this diatribe come from???

. . . with myself.

Me: Hey! You here? You've been quiet lately. Myself: Yep, I'm here. Just buried in reading, research, writing for the new book. Me: Whatcha working on right now? Myself: Reading up on Americans' ideas about food and nutrition, and their on-going debate about food, food sources, and food manufacturing in the 1890s. Me: 1890s? Is that The Jungle stuff?

Myself: No, this is earlier than that. The Jungle was the end of a long era of discussion, not the beginning. I think because so many generations of high school students have been forced to read it, its actual role in the history of American food is misunderstood.

Me: Oh. That makes sense. Well, this other stuff you're reading: Is it interesting? Find anything good?

Myself: Sure! Tons of stuff. Too much, in fact.

Me: For example??

Myself: Well, today I was reading about food "fads," for lack of a better word, and came across this hilarious (to me) quote about the rationale for low-calorie diets and fasting. (This was c. 1902-1910.):

Since it . . . appears that the less we eat, the more energy we have . . . it should be our logical conclusion . . . that, were we to eat nothing at all, we should have very much more energy than usual --- since none of it would be used for digestion, and we should be able to use it all for the daily activities. (*1)

Me: Huh? Was this guy nuts?

Myself: Not really. Just, well, fanatical about his pet project. You know: like joggers who think everyone should run five miles a day or people who go ballistic if someone eats hamburgers, or the people who think EVERYONE should drink only craft beer. By the way, not everyone was convinced that fasting and low-calorie diets were a good idea. One man had his assistant try it, and it made the poor guy

Flighty, fidgety, jerky and contumacious . . . weepy, irritable . . . [and] as unreliable as the dope-fiend. (*2)

Me. Um. Interesting. I guess some things never change, huh?

Myself: Yup. That about sums it up. Me: Plus, you sure better not try that kind of diet. You know how cranky you get when you're hungry and your blood sugar drops.

Myself: Heh heh. You got that right. I'd never make it on Survivor.

Me: Well, glad you stopped by. I was beginning to think you fell off a cliff or something.

Myself: Nope. Just working on this new book. Okay, gotta go. See you later!

___________

*1: Hereward Carrington, Vitality, Fasting and Nutrition (New York, 1908), p. 114; quoted in L. Margaret Barnett, "'Every Man His Own Physician': Dietetic Fads, 1890-1914," in The Science and Culture of Nutrition, 1840-1940, ed. Harmke Kamminga and Andrew Cunningham (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995): 169.

*2: Elbert Hubbard, "Fasting Fans," in Selected Writings of Elbert Hubbard (New York, 1922), 9:315; quoted in ibid.

Anyone up for a little audience participation here? (And yes, I’m prepared to be completely mortified if no one responds.) I

just realized that the working title of my new book may not make any sense. The working title  is Carnivore Nation: Meat and the Making of Modern America. (We hot-shit writers refer to the titles of works-in-progress as “working” titles.) (What? You didn’t know I was a hot-shit writer? What’s the matter with you?) (I’m kidding.)

It’s not perfect (the word “nation” as part of a book title is on the verge of becoming a limp cliche), but it’s not bad.

In fact, given the book’s theme and content, it’s a good description: I’m using the production, processing, and consumption of “meat” to examine the fundamental conflicts that Americans experienced as they shifted from an agrarian to an industrial economy, and from a rural nation to an urban one. It will cover the period from 1870 to the present, and will look at beef, pork, and poultry.

But today, it occurred to me that “meat” may not be the most appropriate word choice. So after my long-winded introduction (and if you’re a regular, you know I’m prone to windy), here’s my question:

What does the word “meat” mean to you? If you saw that title, would you assume the book was about beef? And only beef? Or would you assume or expect that the word “meat” includes the three major flesh categories: beef, pork, and poultry?

Any and all comments are welcome and appreciated. (As they always are!) And if you’ve got ideas for a new title, let’s hear ‘em.

As regular readers have noticed, the blogging is slooooow at the moment. Slow. Because I’m deep into the new book and it’s hard to work on it and muster the creative energy necessary for the blog.

Truth be told, I’ve finally landed in the place I always know I’ll find (and that I’m guessing every writer lives for): The moment when frustration and confusion give way to clarity; when interest and attraction become . . . passion.

This is my fourth book and it’s always like this. I come up with the book idea. Think it through. Decide it’s viable. Spend months and months and months (and yes, it takes that long) wading through (literally) millions of words of primary and secondary materials, teaching myself the basics of the topic.

Next comes the getting-off-the-ground process: An even longer slog in which I gather unto myself my newly accumlated knowledge and begin writing.

Or try to. “Slog” hardly describes it. Trying to match that research to words is, at first, like wandering through the murkiest, most pestilential, swampiest swamp imaginable. The journey makes the hobbits’ trek in Lord of the Rings seem like a backyard romp. I wonder if I’ll ever find the other side. Wonder if I’ll ever make sense of the material.

And then . . .  Finally!

The moment I long for (and, truth be told, know will come eventually): I reach the edge of the swamp. I understand the research. I’ve found my “characters” (because although it’s non-fiction, I’m dealing with human beings). I know my theme and my argument.

What had been a getting-to-know-you series of dates turns into all-consuming passion and I’m hooked. No. I’m intoxicated and all I want to do is write so that I can tell the rest of the world about this amazing piece of human history.

So. At the moment, I’m . . . in love. Devoured by my “work.” And blogging is slow.

Wait. “Work”? This is . . . work? Give me more!

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three --- Part Four

One more point about saving newspapers: Newspapers as source material and the weirdness of what matters and what doesn’t. (This, by the way, isn’t directly  connected to the three previous parts of this series, but it’s as good a place as any to make my point.)

As I mentioned in part one, historians today enjoy access to digital archives of many newspapers. It’s possible to read and search the first issue ever published of, say, the New York Times and the Boston Globe. Makes sense, right? We all know that those are important daily newspapers with huge readerships. They’re both regarded as significant records of American life.

Here’s the kicker: Those newspapers were archived because they’re the survivors. But in the nineenth century, neither newspaper was particularly important. Indeed, for decades, the New York Times was a no-account also-ran to three other newspapers: The New York Herald, the New York Tribune, and the New York World. (Throw in the NY Sun, and you’ve got the nation’s Big Four of the nineteenth century). (Several of these papers folded into each other. At one point, for example, the Herald and Tribune merged.) Ditto the Boston Globe, an also-ran to a number of that's city's newspapers.

If you’re a historian and you want to research nineteenth century America, you want to read the most important sources, right? You want to read the NY Tribune or the NY Herald. Lotso luck. All of the afore-mentioned are available on microfilm, but not digitally. There’s a not very useful printed index for the Tribune (or is it the Herald?), but no way otherwise to search these important sources.

Why? Because when various libraries began filming newspapers in the twentieth century, they focused on what were THEN the important papers, in this case the Times and the Globe, rather than the newspapers that had been, in the 19th century, larger and more widely read.

So historians have access to amazing digital newspaper archives -- but those are not necessarily the archives that matter most for historical research. The same is true, by the way, for the two main archives for small-town newspapers: newspaperarchive.com and geneaologybank.com. (Although I have to say that if you can only subscribe to one, go with geneaologybank.com. Newspaperarchive.com is badly designed, riddled with bugs, and hard to use.)

Don’t get me wrong: these are amazing resources for historians. Using these two archives, I’ve been able to piece together the story of major changes in nineteenth century American meat processing and distribution, a story that has never been fully told because of lack of sources.

But those databases also contain newspapers that various Powers That Be decreed as important. In this case, there’s a definitely skew toward New England newspapers, especially ones published in Massachusetts.  (Big relief! By sheer coincidence, the meat-related changes I’m researching unfolded Massachusetts.)

Put another way, these databases are based on decisions made decades ago by various historical societies that decided X was important, not Y. What’s the conclusion? As always, nothing with any wow-factor. Digital newspaper archives are extraordinary tools for research, but no one should assume that they’re perect, or that they’re accurate representations of American society in the past.

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three --- Part Four

Okay, so we know that owners of newspapers typically preserve copies of the printed edition. But what about the electronic editions of defunct newspapers?

Consider the Rocky Mountain News, which went under a couple of weeks ago. I’m certain that the printed editions of that newspaper were preserved, either by filming, scanning, or digitization. As of this moment, the site is still online. It’s not being updated, of course -- it’s essentially frozen at the moment of that last issue -- but you can still search its old contents. (And it has a fee-based archive that goes back to the 1980s.)

But -- who or what will maintain that site? For that matter, who will own and administer access to that electronic archive?

Websites are like empty houses:  Someone needs to show up once in awhile to make sure the roof’s not leaking and no one’s broken in. Same with abandoned websites. Someone needs to maintain it -- or not. If the site is abandoned, eventually all of its contents will disappear. That's the same as hauling the newspaper's paper documents to the city dump.

Frankly, the thought of these sites vanishing is, well, an unhappy one. If the New York Times goes under (god forbid; it's a planetary treasure), will some deep-pocketed person or organization agree to administer the online site?

But the growing number of defunct newspapers also poses another, paper-related matter, namely, what will become of the paper trail generated in the process of publishing a daily newspaper? For example, the staff of the Rocky Mountain News generated photographs (not all of which landed on the website or in the printed edition); drafts of stories; reporters' notes; telephone records; management memos; and other paper-based documents.

In theory, that material will be boxed for storage, and the entity that owns the company itself will look for a repository for this material. A logical choice is the Colorado State Historical Society, or perhaps Special Collections at the University of Colorado or some other university, or the Denver Public Library.

The catch here is money: Anyone can donate material to a historical society or library. You can donate your shopping lists, kids' drawings, family photos, and anything else your heart desires to save. But unless you also donate some some cash, it can be difficult for the recipient to do much with the material except store it in a warehouse.

That's because the task of sorting through and cataloging that paper-based material requires the services of professional archivists. Like everyone else, archivists don’t work for free, so until and unless an institution can afford to sort, process, and catalog a paper collection, it will sit in boxes. (I hasten to add boxes of archival material are stored in buildings with high-tech controls for humidity and temperature.)

So the short answer to the question that launched this series is that newspapers have been saving their contents, but the future of the paper version of a newspaper is more certain than the future of its online version. Which is completely counterintuitive, but hey, this the Age of E-Quarius. Who knows what will happen?

NEXT: How a historian's research is affected by what is, and is not, saved.