Forgotten Treasures #9: TROUTING ON THE BRULÉ RIVER --PART 2

"Daniel-San" wrote in message
. net...

...Great stuff.



Dan
...who apparently needs to poke around the LOC site a bit more....

LOC is good. There are many others. There is currently more free
literature available on the web than one could possibly read in a lifetime.
In fact, the volume is growing so fast that a lifetime could be spent merely
in keeping track of it. The trick today is to find and sort through what
one is interested in......and there's something for everyone's interests.
While the bulk of what's freely available is older stuff that has lapsed
into the public domain by virtue of expired copyright (despite the absurd
laws currently in force) there is also much that is hot off the
presses.....so to speak. Tons of stuff emanating from various governmental
agencies at all levels is never copyrighted and is thus freely available to
anyone who can find it. Lots of people are also writing things for free
distribution on their own hook.

It gets even better. In addition to plain text, there are also HTML
versions of many documents, allowing one to see what the originals look
like. There are also millions of photographs, film clips, maps, and other
graphic materials, and music. Want to see what your home town looked like
150 years ago? Look he

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/...ubjindex1.html

If you don't already have it, you'll need to download special software to
read these files. It's free, too. Learn all about it he

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/help/mrsid.html


If you're interested (or anyone else, for that matter), I've got URLs for
about 45 sites that list free e-books and other materials. There's a lot of
overlap, of course, and many of them only list other sources, but each one
has it's own uses. A few of good places to start (in no particular order):

The Internet Archive:
http://www.archive.org/

The Digital Book Index:
http://www.digitalbookindex.org/about.htm

The Internet Public Library:
http://www.ipl.org/

The Etext Archives:
http://www.etext.org/index.shtml

and, of course, Project Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/

Bon Voyage!

Wolfgang

Wolfgang wrote:

If you're interested (or anyone else, for that matter), I've got URLs for
about 45 sites that list free e-books and other materials. There's a lot of
overlap, of course, and many of them only list other sources, but each one
has it's own uses. A few of good places to start (in no particular order):

The Internet Archive:
http://www.archive.org/

The Digital Book Index:
http://www.digitalbookindex.org/about.htm

The Internet Public Library:
http://www.ipl.org/

The Etext Archives:
http://www.etext.org/index.shtml

and, of course, Project Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.org/

You know, I think we could make a librarian out of you yet. :-)


Chuck Vance (not that there's anything wrong with that)

"Wolfgang" wrote in message
...

"Daniel-San" wrote in message
. net...

...Great stuff.



Dan
...who apparently needs to poke around the LOC site a bit more....
Wolgang wrote:
LOC is good. There are many others. There is currently more free
literature available on the web than one could possibly read in a
lifetime. Wolfgang

Hi Wolfgang. Nice piece and thanks for the links.
DaveMohnsen
Denver

"Wolfgang" wrote ...

"Daniel-San" wrote ...

...Great stuff.



Dan
...who apparently needs to poke around the LOC site a bit more....

LOC is good. There are many others. There is currently more free
literature available on the web than one could possibly read in a
lifetime. In fact, the volume is growing so fast that a lifetime could be
spent merely in keeping track of it. The trick today is to find and sort
through what one is interested in......and there's something for
everyone's interests. While the bulk of what's freely available is older
stuff that has lapsed into the public domain by virtue of expired
copyright (despite the absurd laws currently in force) there is also much
that is hot off the presses.....so to speak. Tons of stuff emanating from
various governmental agencies at all levels is never copyrighted and is
thus freely available to anyone who can find it. Lots of people are also
writing things for free distribution on their own hook.

It gets even better. In addition to plain text, there are also HTML
versions of many documents, allowing one to see what the originals look
like. There are also millions of photographs, film clips, maps, and other
graphic materials, and music. Want to see what your home town looked like
150 years ago? Look he

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/...ubjindex1.html

Fun. A good hour or two spent looking at towns I've never heard of.

Emphasis on the word "good". :-)


Not really sure what it is that makes me facinated with old things. Perhaps
a bit of romance for a 'simpler' life. Perhaps, dare I say it, a bit of
"pageantry?" I have no idea. I do know that I look at the dates on every
coin I receive as change. Why? Because I think it's cool to hold a quarter
(dime, whatever) that is sixty, or seventy, or more years old. Certainly, a
coin can't tell its story, but imagine how many -- and whose -- hands have
touched that coin in its 'life'. Imagine what was purchased with it. Imagine
what work was done to earn it. A simple quarter -- a few grams of
essentially worthless metals melted together and emblazoned with a
picture -- can tell so much, all without saying anything. I'm no
numismatist -- I don't care about any monetary value an older coin may hold.
Nor do I much care about the appearance of its mint marks. I just like the
fact that this little trinket has witnessed so much of our history. In my
bizzarro world, receiving a coin in the normal course of a transaction that
is that old just makes me a part of our shared history. Buying an old penny
from a collector, however, is cheating.

So if I like quarters that much... imagine a map. Especially the ones of the
early colonial times. As an undergrad, I took a course that covered the
witch trials in Salem. (Interestingly, under the History and Women's Studies
rubrics.) Various theories were covered, and I suppose that some of them may
have held some merit, but what held my interest in the class (other than,
ahem, studying the women, of course) was the plethora of maps available for
study. They probably held some relevance to the topic at hand, but who
cared, I was into them for the stories they told. Buy a map of town X today,
and it'll show roads, hospitals, and some other points of interest (assuming
said points exist in town X, anyway). A map from the 17th or 18th century
(and, to a somewhat lesser degreee, IMO the 19th and early 20th, too) will
show not only roads, but where _everything_ was. It shows the pasture lands,
the common areas, the shops, the . . . It's very easy to get a feel for what
the place may have looked like. A difficult thing to accomplish with an
atlas today. Maybe it's a simple function of population growth, or changes
in cartographic method, or whatever, but maps today just tell you how to get
somewhere.


I guess I've rambled a lot. I just like old stuff that tells a story. Even
if I have to imagine that story.

Moral of the above: Thanks for the link to the maps. Very good stuff.

Dan

"Daniel-San" wrote in message
. com...

...Want to see what your home town looked like 150 years ago? Look he

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/...ubjindex1.html

Fun. A good hour or two spent looking at towns I've never heard of.

Emphasis on the word "good". :-)


Not really sure what it is that makes me facinated with old things.
Perhaps a bit of romance for a 'simpler' life. Perhaps, dare I say it, a
bit of "pageantry?" I have no idea. I do know that I look at the dates on
every coin I receive as change. Why? Because I think it's cool to hold a
quarter (dime, whatever) that is sixty, or seventy, or more years old.
Certainly, a coin can't tell its story, but imagine how many -- and
whose -- hands have touched that coin in its 'life'. Imagine what was
purchased with it. Imagine what work was done to earn it. A simple
quarter -- a few grams of essentially worthless metals melted together and
emblazoned with a picture -- can tell so much, all without saying
anything. I'm no numismatist -- I don't care about any monetary value an
older coin may hold. Nor do I much care about the appearance of its mint
marks. I just like the fact that this little trinket has witnessed so much
of our history. In my bizzarro world, receiving a coin in the normal
course of a transaction that is that old just makes me a part of our
shared history. Buying an old penny from a collector, however, is
cheating.

So if I like quarters that much... imagine a map. Especially the ones of
the early colonial times. As an undergrad, I took a course that covered
the witch trials in Salem. (Interestingly, under the History and Women's
Studies rubrics.) Various theories were covered, and I suppose that some
of them may have held some merit, but what held my interest in the class
(other than, ahem, studying the women, of course) was the plethora of maps
available for study. They probably held some relevance to the topic at
hand, but who cared, I was into them for the stories they told. Buy a map
of town X today, and it'll show roads, hospitals, and some other points of
interest (assuming said points exist in town X, anyway). A map from the
17th or 18th century (and, to a somewhat lesser degreee, IMO the 19th and
early 20th, too) will show not only roads, but where _everything_ was. It
shows the pasture lands, the common areas, the shops, the . . . It's very
easy to get a feel for what the place may have looked like. A difficult
thing to accomplish with an atlas today. Maybe it's a simple function of
population growth, or changes in cartographic method, or whatever, but
maps today just tell you how to get somewhere.


I guess I've rambled a lot. I just like old stuff that tells a story. Even
if I have to imagine that story.

Moral of the above: Thanks for the link to the maps. Very good stuff.

Nice exposition on old stuff. And, speaking of expositions, somewhere in
that mess of aerial views is a stunningly detailed rendition of Chicago's
1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Wish I could tell you exactly where, but
I changed the file names when I downloaded them. I could email it to you if
you like. It's a 14 megabyte file, and you'll need a MrSID file viewer.
Don't know if you're familiar with the story of the exposition, but it's an
interesting one. The Museum of Science and Industry is the only original
structure remaining. I'd heard a bit about it from time to time, but didn't
know much about it until I read "The Devil in the White City" a couple of
years ago. The story as told by Erik Larsen is a fascinating account of how
an impossible job got done in an amazingly short time......not quite short
enough to make the proposed opening on the 400th anniversary of Columbus's
landing.....but it was done fast nevertheless. The only thing that saves
this from being a REALLY good book is that Larsen seems to have lost his
mind entirely and tried to interweave an inane tale of a serial killer who
was working Chicago at the time into the story of the exposition.....which
it has absolutely nothing to do with.

If you're still interested in that Salem business, Mary Beth Norton's "In
the Devil's Snare" is an excellent and highly detailed chronicle of the
events in and around Salem. That's the good news. The bad news is that she
fails miserably (embarrassingly, I think) to support her thesis. As you
doubtless remember, many theories have been proposed to explain the bizarre
series of events that led eventually to the deaths of 21 people. None of
them has been entirely satisfactory. Norton, borrowing a page from modern
psychology, proposes that the girls and young women at the core of the
accusations all shared a common exposure to depredations by the local Indian
tribes at the margins of settled lands and were all suffering from what is
now called post traumatic stress syndrome. An interesting idea, which the
author outlines pretty well in the introductory matter......and then
virtually ignores until the conclusion, beginning on page 295. It looks as
if she had no confidence at all in her thesis and only pasted some crap in
at the end because she was afraid that someone would remember it from the
beginning. Oh well, everything in between is pretty good.

Wolfgang

"Wolfgang" wrote in message
Don't know if you're familiar with the story of the exposition, but it's
an interesting one. The Museum of Science and Industry is the only
original structure remaining. I'd heard a bit about it from time to time,
but didn't know much about it until I read "The Devil in the White City" a
couple of years ago. The story as told by Erik Larsen is a fascinating
account of how an impossible job got done in an amazingly short
time......not quite short enough to make the proposed opening on the 400th
anniversary of Columbus's landing.....but it was done fast nevertheless.
The only thing that saves this from being a REALLY good book is that
Larsen seems to have lost his mind entirely and tried to interweave an
inane tale of a serial killer who was working Chicago at the time into the
story of the exposition.....which it has absolutely nothing to do with.

I'm glad you mentioned this. My BIL recently gave me a copy, and though I
got a few pages into it, it didn't grab me, then other stuff came up, & I
haven't picked it back up yet. He highly recommended it, however.

Joe F.

"rb608" wrote in message
news:hn_Wf.13409$f21.11144@trnddc01...
"Wolfgang" wrote in message

..."The Devil in the White City"....

I'm glad you mentioned this. My BIL recently gave me a copy, and though I
got a few pages into it, it didn't grab me, then other stuff came up, & I
haven't picked it back up yet. He highly recommended it, however.

Everybody's got different tastes. The good news is there's lots of others
to choose from.

Wolfgang

"Wolfgang" wrote...

snip stuff about old stuff

.. And, speaking of expositions, somewhere in
that mess of aerial views is a stunningly detailed rendition of Chicago's
1893 World's Columbian Exposition.

I have it somewhere (??) as well. A left-over from the history of Chicago
class, different semester. Maybe not the _same_ map, but an intricately
detailed one, almost down to Olmstead's placement of various plant types.

Wish I could tell you exactly where, but
I changed the file names when I downloaded them. I could email it to you
if you like. It's a 14 megabyte file, and you'll need a MrSID file
viewer. Don't know if you're familiar with the story of the exposition,
but it's an interesting one. The Museum of Science and Industry is the
only original structure remaining.

Only structure, yes, but much of the Hyde Park area still shows the fair's
plan. When SWMBO graced the U of C, we walked around the area quite a bit,
with a copy of the aforementioned map in hand. It's amazing how much of the
planning, if not the structure, remains.

If you're in Chicago on a warm summery day, I highly recommend the walk.

Then....take a walking tour of Pullman or the stock yards area. Not as much
evidence remains (well, more does exist in Pullman than the yards, but
either way, not too much) of the 'original' footprint, but there's enough
left to get a feel for what was happening just a few miles away from the
White City's beauty.


I'd heard a bit about it from time to time, but didn't
know much about it until I read "The Devil in the White City" a couple of
years ago. The story as told by Erik Larsen is a fascinating account of
how an impossible job got done in an amazingly short time......not quite
short enough to make the proposed opening on the 400th anniversary of
Columbus's landing.....but it was done fast nevertheless. The only thing
that saves this from being a REALLY good book is that Larsen seems to have
lost his mind entirely and tried to interweave an inane tale of a serial
killer who was working Chicago at the time into the story of the
exposition.....which it has absolutely nothing to do with.

Read it and agree, tho the Holmes (IIRC that was his name) character made
the story a bit more ...hmmm...what's the word? Dunno. Was gonna say it
made the story more titillating, but the letters from Burnham to his wife
were positively scorching (by Victorian standards anyway). I think Larsen
was trying to show two very meticulous men in Burnham and Holmes, in the
same city, at the same time, but with diametrically opposed goals. Or maybe
not? Either way, a good book that kept me company on an Isle Royale trip.



If you're still interested in that Salem business, Mary Beth Norton's "In
the Devil's Snare" is an excellent and highly detailed chronicle of the
events in and around Salem. That's the good news. The bad news is that
she fails miserably (embarrassingly, I think) to support her thesis. As
you doubtless remember, many theories have been proposed to explain the
bizarre series of events that led eventually to the deaths of 21 people.
None of them has been entirely satisfactory. Norton, borrowing a page
from modern psychology, proposes that the girls and young women at the
core of the accusations all shared a common exposure to depredations by
the local Indian tribes at the margins of settled lands and were all
suffering from what is now called post traumatic stress syndrome. An
interesting idea, which the author outlines pretty well in the
introductory matter......and then virtually ignores until the conclusion,
beginning on page 295. It looks as if she had no confidence at all in her
thesis and only pasted some crap in at the end because she was afraid that
someone would remember it from the beginning. Oh well, everything in
between is pretty good.

We read so many books for that class, I may have read this one. They all
became the same thing -- women who were 'uppity' got hung. Starkey, Godbeer,
and, IMO most importantly Karlsen all pretty much say the same thing, but
with varying geographic and/or social twists on the motivation. I didn't
take a ton from the class, but the Karlsen book, _Devil in the Shape of
Woman_ (or somesuch,) really made a great case that essentially the squeaky
wheel got the noose.


Dan
....No comments on the 'pageantry' thing? :-)

"Daniel-San" wrote in message
. com...

"Wolfgang" wrote...

snip stuff about old stuff

. And, speaking of expositions, somewhere in
that mess of aerial views is a stunningly detailed rendition of Chicago's
1893 World's Columbian Exposition.

I have it somewhere (??) as well. A left-over from the history of Chicago
class, different semester. Maybe not the _same_ map, but an intricately
detailed one, almost down to Olmstead's placement of various plant types.

Wish I could tell you exactly where, but
I changed the file names when I downloaded them. I could email it to you
if you like. It's a 14 megabyte file, and you'll need a MrSID file
viewer. Don't know if you're familiar with the story of the exposition,
but it's an interesting one. The Museum of Science and Industry is the
only original structure remaining.

Only structure, yes, but much of the Hyde Park area still shows the fair's
plan. When SWMBO graced the U of C, we walked around the area quite a bit,
with a copy of the aforementioned map in hand. It's amazing how much of
the planning, if not the structure, remains.

If you're in Chicago on a warm summery day, I highly recommend the walk.

It's been a while since I was down there. It would be interesting to look
at it again with a different eye. Can you recommend a good tour guide?


Then....take a walking tour of Pullman or the stock yards area. Not as
much evidence remains (well, more does exist in Pullman than the yards,
but either way, not too much) of the 'original' footprint, but there's
enough left to get a feel for what was happening just a few miles away
from the White City's beauty.

There's also a map of the stockyards in that aerial view collection. I
didn't download it myself, but I saw it a while ago when I was checking for
the Columbain Exposition file.

..."The Devil in the White City" ....

Read it and agree, tho the Holmes (IIRC that was his name) character made
the story a bit more ...hmmm...what's the word? Dunno. Was gonna say it
made the story more titillating, but the letters from Burnham to his wife
were positively scorching (by Victorian standards anyway). I think Larsen
was trying to show two very meticulous men in Burnham and Holmes, in the
same city, at the same time, but with diametrically opposed goals. Or
maybe not? Either way, a good book that kept me company on an Isle Royale
trip.

I think that if Mr. Larsen could choose between us for a blurb he'd probably
pick you.

..."In the Devil's Snare" ....

We read so many books for that class, I may have read this one.

Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Um.....when did you say you did your undergrad work?


They all became the same thing -- women who were 'uppity' got hung.
Starkey, Godbeer, and, IMO most importantly Karlsen all pretty much say
the same thing, but with varying geographic and/or social twists on the
motivation. I didn't take a ton from the class, but the Karlsen book,
_Devil in the Shape of Woman_ (or somesuch,) really made a great case that
essentially the squeaky wheel got the noose.

All of that is true, but there's no denying that those who did the hanging
DID believe they were hanging witches. The peculiar social structure of the
time and place played a large role in determing WHO was executed (as it
always does), but it wouldn't have been possible without the
credulity/religious fervor of the comminty at large in general, and the
essentially ecclesiastical courts in particular. And thus far no one has
yet offerred a really satisfying explanation for such a sudden,
concentrated, deadly, and prolonged outburst in an age in which witchcraft
was, after all, rather commonplace.

Dan
...No comments on the 'pageantry' thing? :-)


Well, you didn't have any, so I thought I'd wait.

Wolfgang

"Wolfgang" wrote ...


If you're in Chicago on a warm summery day, I highly recommend the walk.

It's been a while since I was down there. It would be interesting to look
at it again with a different eye. Can you recommend a good tour guide?


Recommend? Well... I knows dis guy. Loves Chicaga, and likes to tawk
fishin', but don't seems tah bee much of a fisshermin.... :-)


Then....take a walking tour of Pullman or the stock yards area. Not as
much evidence remains (well, more does exist in Pullman than the yards,
but either way, not too much) of the 'original' footprint, but there's
enough left to get a feel for what was happening just a few miles away
from the White City's beauty.

There's also a map of the stockyards in that aerial view collection. I
didn't download it myself, but I saw it a while ago when I was checking
for the Columbain Exposition file.

..."The Devil in the White City" ....

Read it and agree, tho the Holmes (IIRC that was his name) character made
the story a bit more ...hmmm...what's the word? Dunno. Was gonna say it
made the story more titillating, but the letters from Burnham to his wife
were positively scorching (by Victorian standards anyway). I think Larsen
was trying to show two very meticulous men in Burnham and Holmes, in the
same city, at the same time, but with diametrically opposed goals. Or
maybe not? Either way, a good book that kept me company on an Isle Royale
trip.

I think that if Mr. Larsen could choose between us for a blurb he'd
probably pick you.

Probably true. One of my many faults is that if I find a book entertaining
(for whatever reason) I tend to think highly of it, notwithstanding any
faults it may have. Something I try (and frequently fail) to be cognizant of
when reading academic work. Probably cost me a few grades here and there.



..."In the Devil's Snare" ....

We read so many books for that class, I may have read this one.

Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Um.....when did you say you did your undergrad
work?

Well... I have a feeling I'm about the youngest guy around these parts, but
no, I ain't _that_ young. Most of the books we read had some use of the word
"devil" in their titles, and as I said, I was paying attention to studying
the women (and maps) more than I should have, so they all got a bit muddied.


They all became the same thing -- women who were 'uppity' got hung.
Starkey, Godbeer, and, IMO most importantly Karlsen all pretty much say
the same thing, but with varying geographic and/or social twists on the
motivation. I didn't take a ton from the class, but the Karlsen book,
_Devil in the Shape of Woman_ (or somesuch,) really made a great case
that essentially the squeaky wheel got the noose.

All of that is true, but there's no denying that those who did the hanging
DID believe they were hanging witches.

True, and disturbing. Amazing what religiosity can do to a person. Or
perhaps more importantly, to a society governed thereby. No parallels to
present day Murricah intended, of course.

The peculiar social structure of the
time and place played a large role in determing WHO was executed (as it
always does), but it wouldn't have been possible without the
credulity/religious fervor of the comminty at large in general, and the
essentially ecclesiastical courts in particular. And thus far no one has
yet offerred a really satisfying explanation for such a sudden,
concentrated, deadly, and prolonged outburst in an age in which witchcraft
was, after all, rather commonplace.

Dan
...No comments on the 'pageantry' thing? :-)


Well, you didn't have any, so I thought I'd wait.


Nah... :-)

Dan