River City Confidential: The Willamette River’s Pollution Story Revealed

Come one, come all!

"River City Confidential: The Willamette River’s Pollution Story Revealed."

March 21, 2012 7:00-8:30 pm.

EcoTrust Jean Vollum Natural Capital Center, Billy Frank Jr. Conference Center, 721 NW 9th Ave., Portland, OR, United States View on Google Maps

"James Hillegas shares insights from his upcoming book on the original Willamette River pollution cleanup, from the 1920s to the 1970s. Co-hosted by the Portland Harbor Community Advisory Group and Oregon Historical Society."

http://www.portlandharborpartnership.com/news-and-events/?event=787

Where to draw the line?

A few months ago, I heard from my bosses in the PSU University Studies Dept. that the Capstone course I have taught now for nine consecutive quarters would come to an end after the Spring 2011 quarter. I was told that the School of Business Administration, under which my Capstone was administered, was reacting to budget reductions by cutting or incorporating within the department 20% of their Capstones, and that my course would likely be on the chopping block.

C'est la vie. Time to make lemonade. Etc.

So, since I heard this news I've been looking for work. I've been looking at a variety of positions that will enable me to apply my expertise in urban environmental history outside of academia. I've applied to a few positions where I would be working with teams engaged in one aspect or another of the Portland Harbor Superfund Cleanup process.

I recently came across a Portland Business Journal article "Attorneys vie for Superfund work," where I read that "Attorneys are lining up to snag their share of Superfund work along the Portland Harbor."

"A-ha!" I thought, "Perhaps I'll see if I can get on with one of these firms, since the Superfund cleanup process is sure to be complex and long-term, and, of course, whomever is working on it will benefit from insights of an historian."

Slam-dunk for me, eh?

There were a number of specific legal firms identified in the Portland Business Journal article, so I navigated to their websites and started to poke around. Then I saw lists of some of their current and past clients. I read on one website that the firm had "Defended salmon aquaculture industry in appeals of waste discharge permits by environmental groups." Another firm expressed a feeling of privilege "to serve market leaders that have been driving forces in their industries."

Uh-oh.

History & Place Online: A Selection of Very Interesting Web-Based Resources

Following upon my posts covering a fascinating online historical mapping project documenting St. Louis' urban and social history and on the topic of user-modified online maps, I wanted to bring together a selection of other web-based history projects. The links below were brought to my attention in response to Coll Thrush's query to the H-Enviro list serve in November 2009. Coll's query was:

I'm writing to ask if anyone can suggest websites or articles representing community-based investigations of places and/or neighbourhoods. I'm including readings on bioregionalist approaches, but those tend to be very ecosystem-focused rather than engages layers of human inhabitation, particularly in urban places. I know the West Philadelphia Landscape Project; any others? And any articles on these kinds of initiatives?

The responses included the following . . .

Carronade Beach

Watch the full episode. See more History Detectives.

I was recently reminded of something really neat and fascinating: the Feb., 2008, discovery of two carronades from the U.S.S. Shark at Arch Cape (near Cannon Beach), Oregon. The History Detectives episode above provides an overview of this discovery, and the initial research that went in to determining whether or not the discovery related to the Shark. Greg Shine, who is featured in the History Detectives episode, wrote an article on the life & times of the U.S.S. Shark: ""A Gallant Little Schooner": The U.S. Schooner Shark and the Oregon Country, 1846," Oregon Historical Quarterly 109:4 (Winter 2008), 536-565.

The Oregon Parks & Recreation Department also has a page on this topic: "Arch Cannon Updates."

Also: Nancy Burke, "USS Shark opens portal to the past, Oregonian, Aug. 17, 2008.

-

Follow in Ian Curtis' footsteps . . .

. . . though I would advise stopping a step or two before he hangs himself in his flat.

Ian's final few footsteps would be too morbid and final for me to follow, but the prospect of sauntering about Macclesfield to ogle locations central to Ian's formative years does sound like a fun time. The Silk Museum in Macclesfield has created a map of the area annotated with locations noteworthy in Ian's life. This map coincided with other community events through the summer 2010 commemorating the 30th anniversary of Ian's demise.

From www.joydivisionexhibition.com:

The Silk Museum [of Macclesfield] has released a map of Ian Curtis’ Macclesfield to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the singer’s death. Destined to become a real collector’s item, the iconic map guides visitors to the key sites in Macclesfield associated with Ian Curtis and Joy Division.

The reverse of the A2 fold-out map features a poster sized image of an iconic shot of Ian Curtis by long-time friend of the band Mark Reeder alongside a specially commissioned article by music writer Paul Morley.

The map, produced by designers Gary White and Colin Gardner of Pure Designs Limited, will be obtainable from the Tourism Information Centre in Macclesfield Town Hall (price £1.00) or the Heritage Centre, Roe Street, Macclesfield where a limited collector’s edition of 500 is for sale (price £3.00 plus P&P where necessary).

-

Urban history in the ground

This morning I listened to a great program on Steve Scher's Weekday program (on Seattle's KUOW radio), Construction Projects and the Archaeology of City Development. This show focused on some specific urban infrastructure projects in Seattle, but the discussion addressed broadly relevant aspects of archaeology and cultural resource management (CRM) issues in urban settings.

When the 520 bridge design is finally agreed on, the digging will begin. What will we find underground? There are already several major construction projects digging deep under Seattle's urban center. In addition to all the dirt, they may be removing artifacts of this city's storied history. If the deep–bore tunnel ends up going right through a Native American village site, what happens to the construction project? What happens to the artifacts that are recovered? Who pays for the archaeological surveys? What can we learn about Seattle's hidden history from the mega–construction projects?

Great uses of the Internet for history-related purposes

To accompany this post from the other day, I have two more great examples of the wonderful things being done with technology these days--in this case, the kinds of fascinating projects that are becoming increasingly more ubiquitous on the web ("web 2.0," as they say). The tools identified below make important historical and cultural information available to anyone in the world using just a few clicks, which, in turn, has the potential to help broaden understanding.

PhilaPlace is an interesting project:

Portland's Black Panther Party & local media response

On Thursday, March 18, the Northwest History Network (NHN) sponsored a presentation by Martha Gies and Jules Boykoff on the topic of media representation of Portland's Black Panther Party from ca. 1969 to 1978. Former Portland BPP members Percy Hampton and Kent Ford were also featured at this event, and provided stories from their own experiences to augment Martha & Jules' analysis.

A representative from KBOO was there and recorded the event. He told me that the radio station may broadcast the event in its entirety, or they may use clips of the recording to create a news story; as of today, I checked their website and didn't find archived broadcast of the event or an announcement of such a broadcast in the near future. I did, however, find an archived show from Feb. 28, 2008, here featuring "former members of the Portland Chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense: Oscar Johnson, Percy Hampton, Gary Clay, and Kent Ford."

When lived experience expands intellectual understanding

Jennifer and I attended the History Pub event at McMenamins Kennedy School on Monday, Feb. 22. The topic on this evening was “Renewal and Removal in North/Northeast Portland.” Presenters included PSU professor Carl Abbott, Thomas Robinson of Historic Photo Archives, and long-time residents of the area Harvey Rice and Donna Maxey.

This event focused on the drastic changes in the social and built environments of the Albina area of North Portland beginning in the 1950s, particularly in the area bounded by Interstate (west), MLK (east), Alberta (north), and Broadway (south).

I knew some of the basics of this narrative before the presentation -- the general pattern of wide-scale infrastructure changes initiated by white urban planners in the 1950s and 1960s in which working-class and ethnic neighborhoods in a great many American cities were reduced and divided in the name of "urban renewal." However, this presentation has helped me see the area in a much different way, and I'll never again look at this area as I did before.

Portland Brownfield Program

Here's something of interest to a historian specializing in the urban environment (such as myself).

This program is interesting to me because of a general question I raised in an earlier post, to wit: What kinds of social and cultural changes help spur a community's shifting priorities such that areas that were formerly considered OK to despoil in the name of economic "progress" are now the focus of millions of dollars of restoration and reclamation efforts?

This program is also interesting to me because of the potential for being able to contribute in some way. My cultural resource management experience in Bellingham, WA, involved researching specific parcels of land to determine the historic uses of the sites and changes over time. I delivered my findings to archaeologists who were then able to focus their survey work on areas with a higher potential for excavating cultural resources (building foundations, middens, fire pits, etc.). Perhaps this kind of research would aid in determining specific land use changes over time for the Portland brownfields?

-

What is "Public History?"

The recent issue of the National Council on Public History's newsletter drew my attention to the "public history" page on Wikipedia. The NCPH has this to say:

Projects like Wikipedia may be the ultimate in "shared authority"--vast collaborative knowledge projects that invite and incorporate a wide range of voices within a more-or-less agreed-upon framework of presentation. Less than a decade old, Wikipedia is now the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, and surely one of the most contentious. Techno-visionaries praise it for its radical openness (its content is created and edited by users) while educators bemoan the uncritical way that many students have come to use it for one-stop information-shopping. It is a world not unlike public history and it's also one of the most frequently consulted online sources, so whatever definition of public history appears there is a visible and potentially influential one.

-

Museum of the City

The Oregonian today featured Chet Orloff's Museum of the City project:

The Museum of the City will be on the Internet. The project, with international backing, will create a Web site that visitors will enter through a "lobby" leading to the museum's "wings" and "galleries" then to exhibits, the number of which could be infinite.

But unlike a traditional museum, Orloff says amateurs will be welcome. Along the same lines as the Web resource Wikipedia, anyone anywhere will be able to submit an exhibit to the Museum of the City, and if the professional curators approve, it will join the collection, and the author will become an assistant curator.

"I have this belief," Orloff said, "that the more people know about the place where they live, generally the better they can take care of it. I have another belief that the better we understand how our communities work, the better informed we're going to be and, theoretically, the better citizens we'll be."

This is an intriguing project, in-line with the goals of making history more accessible and making the generation of historical narratives more democratic.

-

Oregon, history, & the Internet

Oregon Public Broadcasting's Think Out Loud program on May 8 2009 featured a discussion of the Oregon Encyclopedia in comparison to Wikipedia -- specifically WikiProject Oregon.

This program raised some fascinating questions and thoughts about the production and dissemination of knowledge, and the role of different publishing methods in this production and dissemination.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts after you've listened to this show and read some of the comments. Here's some of what I think about when comparing & contrasting the Oregon Encyclopedia (OE) and WikiProject Oregon (WO):

** The OE and WO can be -- and in this case are -- complementary publications: The OE is often cited in WO, and many of the topics in WO reflect the range of interests of the general public that, much of the time, should be (and often is) covered in the OE.

** The OE prides itself in maintaining a distinct authorial voice for all of its entries while publishing entries that achieve a fundamental level of readability, relevance, and veracity; the WO relies on a community to compose, edit, and modify the entries, without much regard for a distinct authorial voice.

** OE entries undergo a review process that includes double-blind review from established experts, fact checking, copy editing, proofreading, and two reviews by the Editors-in-Chief, before being published; WO relies upon input from a community of interested parties to add, subtract, and edit individual entries.

** The OE holds community meetings throughout the state to solicit local and regional topic ideas and identify writers; the WO relies predominately on the Internet to generate interest and input.

That's what I got, off the top of my head. I'll leave it up to the commentariat to rank and grade these according to the requisite moral, ideological, and philosophical points of view.

-

Museum of the Warsaw Rising

John Radzilowski has written a fascinating review of the Museum of the Warsaw Rising in the most recent issue of The Public Historian.[1]

Radzilowski's review provides an overview of the weaknesses and strengths of the museum. He finds that the primary weakness is that the museum requires a visitor to have some kind of prior knowledge of the event in order to make sense of displays that are often disjointed and that lack a clear spatial-chronological relationship. The strengths that he finds are that the museum reflects an important event in World War II that is under-appreciated outside of Poland but that served as an important prelude to the Cold War. Additionally, the museum serves an important role for Poles by serving as a site for commemoration and for foreigners by "attempting to rebuild a coherent historical memory of the darkest period in Polish history, marked by both trauma and heroism."

To learn more about the Warsaw Rising, see the museum's website, and this site.


----
[1] John Radzilowski, "Remembrance and Recovery: The Museum of the Warsaw Rising and the Memory of World War II in Post-Communist Poland," The Public Historian 31: 4 (Nov. 2009), 143-158.

-

Happy Thanksgiving!!

The Christian Science Monitor published an article seven years ago on the history of Thanksgiving as Americans now practice it. This article shows clearly how a cultural observance has two distinct "histories" -- the history of what really happened, as best as can be discerned, and the history of the mythology that gets built up around the observance.

This basic pattern can be seen in a multitude of observances, historical sites, cultural narratives, etc., and I welcome additional references to other such examples.

When I see examples of this pattern, I ask myself, "what ends are served by creating and perpetuating this mythology?" In the case of Thanksgiving, the CSM article provides one reason:

"'In the 19th and 20th centuries, Thanksgiving was really a tool for Americanization amid the great influx of immigration. It was supposed to bind this diverse population into one union.'"

(Thanks to Becka for forwarding this along this morning.)

-

Finding a way to make conferences more accessible to grad students and everyone else

Thanks to Making History Podcast: The Blog for this post. I agree with the comments #3 & #4, and want to follow-up with another idea.

Why do conferences need to be held at some kind of a large, corporate hotel? I understand the logistical ease of having one company host the event, provide coffee & continental breakfast, etc. However, within the context of trying to be sustainable,* why can't we try the following?

1) Local organizers set up local people to house attendees from afar, á la exchange students?

2) Local organizers find a range of nearby, local venues to house people and conference events?

3) Local organizers make a point of connecting with local organizations--historical societies, subject-specific organizations, etc.--to help with #1 and #2 above?

4) As a result of #3 above, it seems to me that if more local and non-local people attend a given conference, the more amenities and less expense there will be for everyone involved (which also may help to erode the town-gown barrier).

The above suggestions would, I'm confident, help lower the overall costs of attending a conference, for grad students and anyone else.

----------
* Which is a goal espoused by the ASEH, UHA, and SACRPH, in my experience.

-

Asphalt = Joy & Freedom! Yippee!!

Here is a synopsis of an article I wrote in 2004 for the Journal of the Whatcom County Historical Society on the construction of Interstate 5 through Bellingham, Washington.

It was a fun project.

Not many comments to Jared's blog post, however.

-

The Oregon Encyclopedia

I recommend checking out the Oregon Encyclopedia, an online resource of history and culture.

I work for the OE so some may consider me biased,* but I also believe in the goals of Encyclopedia, which include representing the full diversity of the state. We hold community meetings to solicit entry ideas and authors, and we have a place on our website for people to make these suggestions. The OE is ongoing, and we publish more entries and images nearly every day.

Some of my favorite sets of photos are to be found with the following entries:

** Japanese Americans in Oregon

** Erickson Air-Crane

** Douglas fir

** Housing Authority of Portland

There's much more on the way!!

-----------
* I don't, however, get any commissions for directing traffic to the site

-