Making Claims
As I traveled through the Southwest over the past few months, I met a lot of people. Some academics and archivists and National Park Service rangers, but also waiters, bartenders,...
A Complicated Man: John Baylor’s Letters to His Family
In February 1854 John Robert Baylor wrote a letter to his wife Emmy from Austin, where he was serving in the Texas state legislature. He wrote to tell her that...
Reading the Landscape
For the past two months, I have been on a researching road trip through the West and Southwest—Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and now Texas. As readers of this column know,...
Visualizing History
What can visual images tell us about the past? For most historians (who are not art historians), the answer to this question is, “not much.” They use images only as...
Finding Your Place in Letters
In nineteenth-century America, letter writing was the only way that people separated by long distances could communicate with one another. High rates of literacy and mobility, along with a growing...
Finding Your Place by Looking at Maps
How do you know where you are? Sometimes you know by experience—you have been to this neighborhood before, walked along or driven these streets. Your geographic knowledge and memory grows...
Adventures in Historical Research
Every archive is different, has its own set of rules. But by the time you sit down at a table in any special collections reading room you have likely filled...