I’m presenting my paper at the Wash DC Historical Studies conference this Saturday. I’ve read my paper and the middle portion is boring. Dullsville. I’m working on making an exciting speech, based on the boring paper.
Why boring? I have a lot of so-in-so lived next door to so-in-so who was black/white/ Irish. Going individually, house to house is more exciting when mapping it out and seeing the neighborhood as a whole. The Truxton Circle of 1880 was a sparsely populated area. I say this because there were blocks with no one on them, or sections of blocks that are empty. This changes by the 20th century, but the 1900s+ aren’t covered in this paper. Gonna have to wait a few more years for the 20th century.
I’ll probably post the paper and all the images that don’t want to print on the &^%! printer, after the conference, on the web. If anyone with any editing skills wants to read it, e-mail me and tell me what kind of editing you do.
2 thoughts on “Come and listen to the world’s most boring history paper”
Comments are closed.
Sorry for the self-promotion, but it occurs to me that this might be a great chance to create a customized Google Map using the DCist Maps customization feature (or, if you don’t want the metro in there, you could use MapBuilder.net or one of the similar services).
Well the google map is good for pointing out specific addresses. My problem is I’m trying to do every address (imagine a sea of little red pointers). 1880 Truxton maps are a pain. I know 1900 will be much better because house numbers weren’t a foriegn concept in 1900 like they seemed to have been in 1880. Also I can make little green pointers for my Irish and little red pointers for my Germans, black pointers for AfAms and so on and so forth.
The other problem with 2005 Google maps and pre-1930 addresses, is that houses and some streets that existed during the time of my study don’t exist now.