0.19 Civil war washington, the walt whitman archive, and some  (Page 10/12)

Susan Lawrence, associate director of the project and a historian of medicine, will write an essay on the health of the city and its citizens, drawing on the collected Civil War Washington resources to illuminate the health challenges facing Washington’s newly emancipated population. Sickness and suffering permeated the capital because of overcrowding and the breakdown in sanitation and also because of the massive influx of sick and wounded soldiers into the hospitals established there. The war’s humanitarian crisis was far from abstract for Washington’s inhabitants. This essay will contribute to the scholarly literature on how Americans understood the health of places, as humans transformed their landscapes with urban environments, and the relationships between health and citizenship.

My own contribution will be an analysis of The Armory Square Hospital Gazette . We are making available as many issues as can be found of this fascinating newspaper (it has never been available in microfilm or online, and no library has a complete run). Washington, D.C., cared for more wounded soldiers than any other city, with the worst cases directed to Armory Square Hospital. This was the hospital Walt Whitman visited most frequently, and he stated that he contributed to this newspaper (contributions were typically anonymous; those by Whitman have yet to be identified). He was convinced that the Civil War hospitals held the key to the war’s meaning: for him, it was the stoicism and courage of tens of thousands of otherwise ordinary people that lent the war its meaning. To Whitman—certain that the “real war” would never get in the books—it was the forgotten people rather than the famous battles and generals who most mattered.

In a sense, Civil War Washington is a biography of the city: more particularly, it is a slice of life of the city, what we believe is the defining moment of crisis in that city’s life. We have started with foci that seem to us most significant. No doubt even as the project continues to evolve, selection will remain a thorny issue for Civil War Washington . It is much less of one for the Whitman Archive , not because less selection is happening in the Walt Whitman Archive but because we are working in a well-established tradition of selection. One could imagine a Whitman Archive that might feel quite complete—at least as editing projects have been pursued historically and in our time—and it is possible to imagine many of our stated goals realized. Some of our longest-term goals were articulated for the NEH endowment grant application. In 2005, we made a twenty-year plan for NEH when seeking an endowment, a plan we’ve been able to adhere to thus far. 2006: six authorized editions and "deathbed" printing of Leaves of Grass ; interviews. 2007: Whitman's poetry in periodicals. 2008: Whitman's annotated copies of Leaves of Grass 1855 and 1860 (the so-called "blue book"); two-way correspondence. 2010: poetry manuscripts; nine volumes of With Walt Whitman in Camden . 2011: Whitman and the Civil War completed; symposium on Whitman, Lincoln, and the Civil War. 2012: printed texts published in Whitman's lifetime: Franklin Evans ; Democratic Vistas ; After All, Not to Create Only ; Passage to India ; As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free . 2013: additional printed texts published in Whitman's lifetime: Two Rivulets ; Specimen Days&Collect ; Complete Poems&Prose ; Democratic Vistas, and Other Papers ; November Boughs; Good-Bye My Fancy ; Complete Prose Works . 2014: direct NEH summer seminar for teachers; symposium on pedagogical and scholarly use of the Archive . 2015: symposium proceedings 2016: selected critical texts from the University of Iowa Press Whitman series. 2017: Walt Whitman Quarterly Review —full text of entire run of back issues. 2018: expand critical library with selected out-of-copyright texts. 2019: major conference at UNL celebrating the bicentennial of Whitman's birth. 2020: prose manuscripts. 2022: complete journalism. 2024: complete marginalia; proofs. 2025: collaborative works On the other hand, is a complete Civil War Washington achievable or even imaginable? Philip J. Ethington discusses the “ultimate unknowability of any metropolis.” See his “Los Angeles and the Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge” (External Link) I doubt it. It would be possible to develop a particular view of Civil War Washington that relies heavily on historic soil samples; or on environmental history; or on women’s diaries; or on crime statistics; or on foreign language newspapers in the city; and so on, indefinitely. I don’t think that anyone can fully imagine, much less fully realize, a complete Civil War Washington project. The best that can be done is to imagine various versions of what the project could be, and then build something that achieves interesting and illuminating results, results that reflect the biases and leading concerns of the investigators, but that also leave the data accessible to others who may want to supplement the work or turn the data to different uses. One possibility for the future is that we could open up a project like this one far beyond the work group at Nebraska, through alliances with scholars, as NINES has done, or through crowdsourcing, in a way made famous by Wikipedia (though perhaps additional control mechanisms could be introduced). Would a larger, perhaps much larger collaborative group, yield better results? The Mannahatta Project ( themannahattaproject.org ), an attempt to recreate the natural landscape of Manhattan island before European settlement, has a collaborative team of over fifty historians, geographers, archaeologists zoologists, botanists, conservationists, and illustrators. See “Before New York,” National Geographic, 216, no. 3 (2009), 122-37. Of course, in physics even bigger teams are known, with more than a thousand collaborators on some projects. Is this project a candidate for a new type of humanities, a Big Humanities? I don’t have the answers to these questions, though I do think that if we ever moved toward a crowdsourcing model the key issues would be 1) establishing community buy-in and 2) ensuring quality. Civil War Washington is still at a sufficiently early stage of its development that I present these issues in a spirit of openness and with the hope that the project may benefit from the deliberations in Charlottesville.