resources – Hawthorne's Celestial Railroad

David Rumsey’s Historical Maps in Google Earth

Ryan Cordell — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 06:25:50 +0000

While preparing for this week’s Modern Language Association Convention in Los Angeles, I revisited the amazing digital collection of the David Rumsey Historical Map archive. This site provides digital copies of many of the 24,000 maps in the archive, even allowing visitors to download high-resolution files of them. I’ve used several of these maps of the United States in the late 1830s and 1840s to trace the spread of “The Celestial Railroad” across the country.

This week, however, I discovered that a number of the maps in the collection can be downloaded as a .kmz file to be viewed in Google Earth. Importing this file into Google Earth allows you to lay maps from the Rumsey collection over the Google Earth globe. These maps are georectified, meaning that the features on the maps have been lined up with their precise places on the more precise modern globe.

After playing with these maps for a few minutes, I quickly decided to overlay an 1839 map from the Rumsey collection with a .kmz I created in Google Maps of the towns in which “The Celestial Railroad” was republished between 1843 and 1860. Within minutes I had this visualization—a “historical” map of the story’s reprintings—

I made larger the markers for those cities where the story was more frequently reprinted. So New York and Philadelphia are the largest, as the story ran many, many times in both cities. That resizing was, for this quick project, entirely subjective—I hand-sized each city’s pin.

This isn’t, of course, the best visualization one could create of this, but I was impressed that I could put something that looks this good together in only a few minutes. I plan to keep experimenting with the Rumsey maps in Google Earth as I think through how best to tell the geospatial aspects of this story about Hawthorne and 19th Century publishing.

Two new reprintings

Ryan Cordell — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:52:05 +0000

Well, it’s been a relatively busy week. I wrote earlier about being given a month’s access to the full archive America’s Historical Newspapers. This investigation has been fruitful: I’ve found a new reprinting in the Jamestown Journal of Jamestown, NY (12 Oct. 1843) and several interesting articles that reference the story, one of which will show up in the revision of the article I’m working on, “‘Taken Possession Of’: Hawthorne’s ‘Celestial Railroad’ in the Evangelical Canon.”

Later in the week, a link in Dan Cohen’s twitter feed led me to a Language Log post that mentions the Pennsylvania Civil War Newspapers archive (whew!). I didn’t know this archive, and a quick search there returned yet another witness, from the Lancaster Intelligencer (1 Feb. 1859). This one includes a short editorial preface—these are my favorite witnesses, as they add not only to the corpus of reprintings but also to the cultural narrative surrounding the story.

This project continues to grow exponentially; every new resource discovered returns new results.

Online Newspaper Archives

Ryan Cordell — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 13:08:52 +0000

At the Poe Studies’ Association Conference last weekend, conversations about this site invariably turned to questions about what online newspaper archives are out there. Most folks are aware of American Periodicals Series Online, but not many of the others that I’ve used . So below I’ve compiled my list so far. These all bear primarily on 19th Century American research, but some include wider resources. They’re organized here alphabetically, but I’d say that APS Online, the Gale Group’s Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers, the Access Newspaper Archive, and the Making of America Projects have been most useful to me. Final caveat—some of these live behind pay-walls. At UVA we subscribe to them, but I’m not certain how many will be accessible if your school doesn’t. Noticing Google Books in this list, my next post will be a “true/but” response to Geoff Nunberg’s recent article, “Google Books: a Metadata Train Wreck.” If you spot any fixable problems with these links, please let me know. If you know an archive of 19th Century American periodicals that I haven’t included, please, please let me know.

Access Newspapers Archive (http://access.newspaperarchive.com)

Accessible Archives (http://www.accessible.com/accessible/preLog)

America’s Historical Newspapers (http://infoweb.newsbank.com/?db=EANX)

American Periodicals Series Online (http://proquest.umi.com/login)

Gale Group, Nineteenth Century U. S. Newspapers (http://infotrac.galegroup.com)

Google Books (http://books.google.com)

Library of Congress, American Memory Collection (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpcoop/moahtml/snchome.html)

Library of Congress, Chronicling America Collection (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/)

Making of America Project, Cornell University (http://digital.library.cornell.edu/m/moa/)

Making of America Project, University of Michigan (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moajrnl/)