Several years ago, I took a blogging journey through the American Civil War.  Each day, I posted material from the corresponding day in a specific year of the war.  I started with the fall of 1860, the last several months before the war started

At first, the material was from news articles, including images, from both sides, with a semi-regular entry from the diary of a Washington, D.C. clerk.  Over time, a couple of more diarists were added with fewer and fewer news articles. 

On of the things I was trying to do was to – like so many others – “make money online.”  While I was making virtually nothing from the civil war chronicles, I was making a couple of hundred dollars a month on another website.

With another year until the diarists would reach the end of their war, I made the decision to abandon the civil war chronicles and concentrate on trying to capitalize on the success of the other site.

Two years later, that site is still earning money – a couple of hundred dollars a month. 

I keep getting distracting off into other things that interest me more.

That being the case, I’m taking a step back to the beginning – a new civil war based blog. 

It’s called Diaries of the Civil War, though it will also include letters and other narratives.  Most posts will be for the corresponding day 150 years earlier. 

The blog is organized as though there is a community of authors. Each diary, letter, and journal writer will appear in the blog as a contributing author.

And, yes, it is already live. 

The main events don’t begin until later in 1860.  Until then, I will be populating the blog with material, for the most part, that occurred before the current date in 1860.

It is at http://dotcw.com.  Please come visit.

It’s pretty plain right now.  I will be adding graphics later and links later on.  Yes, there will be advertizing, but the ads will not intrude into the content. 

I’m already learning new stuff – and, it’s hardly even started.

I’ve started work on a blog project which will use the WordPress scheduling feature.

I’m returning to working with material written at the time of the Civil War.  Next year, 2011, will be the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the war.

I will be publishing material day by day associated with the same day 150 years earlier.  The material is coming from a number of sources – all from the time of the civil war or written by people who lived during that time.

So far, I have 127 posts scheduled.

Right now, the earliest post is for December 17, 1860 – which will be published December 17, 2010.  (Tensions are escalating between the North and the South.  South Carolina is on the verge of seceding from the Union. )

The latest post, so far, is for May 19, 1861, and will be published one year from today, May 19, 2011.  (The nation is split asunder.  Five weeks ago, South Carolina forces under Confederate General Beauregard opened fire on United States troops in Charleston Harbor’s Fort Sumter, reducing it to rubble in the 34 hour bombardment.  Miraculously, there were no Union soldiers killed during the battle.  A Confederate soldier bled to death from wounds resulting from a misfired cannon.)

(click on image for larger version)

Built by William H. Duncan, a miner and mail-carrier, circa. 1879.

(click on image for larger version)

Irwinville Farms, Georgia

1938 May.

Vachon, John, 1914-1975, photographer.

photo information based on neighboring file image

Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress)  hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8a03422

The Mariner’s Museum, Newport News, Virginia, May 10, 2009

Unable to build or buy enough warships to contest Northern control of the seas, the South purchased several fast cruisers in Britain and sent them out with orders to raid Union shipping. The most famous of these vessels was the Alabama, commanded by Raphael Semmes. Prowling the seas from the West Indies to the Indian Ocean, the Alabama captured 63 vessels in just 22 months.

The Alabama was caught by the Kearsarge at Cherbourg, France. Although his ship was worn out by many months at sea, Semmes chose to meet the Kearsarge in battle. The Alabama was sunk within two hours. Semmes and many of his crew were rescued by the English yacht Deerhound and escaped captivity.

Gallery: The Mariners’ Museum, Newport News, May 10, 2009

See more of our Image Galleries at Haw Creek.

Mountain Farm Museum
May 6, 2009
near Cherokee, North Carolina

The Mountain Farm Museum is a unique collection of farm buildings assembled from locations throughout the park. Visitors can explore a log farmhouse, barn, apple house, springhouse, and a working blacksmith shop to get a sense of how families may have lived 100 years ago. Most of the structures were built in the late 19th century and were moved here in the 1950s. The Davis House offers a rare chance to view a log house built from chestnut wood before the chestnut blight decimated the American Chestnut in our forests during the 1930s and early 1940s. The museum is adjacent to the Oconaluftee Visitor Center. – National Park Service website

Great Smoky Mountains National Park,
Tennessee and North Carolina

Gallery: Great Smoky Mountains National Park

See more of our Image Galleries at Haw Creek.

Typical farmer group of Prairie City, Missouri, in Mississippi County

1936 Mar

Mydans, Carl, photographer.

Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress)

http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8a01759

The only program that I’ve found so far that I wasn’t able to install on Windows 7 was my OmniPage 14 OCR program.

For those who don’t know the term, OCR stands for optical character recognition – in other words, a program that recognizes text in a scanned image and turns it into editable text.

For Christmas, I received a copy of OmniPage 17.  I plan to use it in a long range project that involves old public domain books.

Like any other processing software, an OCR program will to some degree be limited by the quality of the data, or, in this case, images, that is provided as input.

For my first test of the program, I loaded a pdf file of a 440 page book published in 1913.  OmniPage 17 was able to load and process the entire book, unlike previous versions of OmniPage and other OCR software that I have used, though  I’m sure that, at the time, they had also been somewhat limited by the operating systems and computers.

During the processing, OmniPage 17 flags text that it is not “certain” of and provides the user with the opportunity to correct or ignore the text.  The percentage of flagged text is far lower than I expected.

After the book was processed by OmniPage, I saved it and proofed it in Microsoft Word.

The proofing was, by far, the hardest part of the process.  I read the entire book, with much more attention to detail than I would have if I had just been reading it for pleasure, in order to correct any errors that the OCR might have made as well as to italicize words that were in italics in the book.  Again, the number of corrections needed were far fewer than I expected.  I suspect that there were be very few corrections needed when converting modern documents from image to text.

What was the book that I converted, some might wonder?

It’s part of the long term project, so I don’t want to be too specific at this time other than to say that it was a diary of a lady who had been raised in privilege.

September 15, 2009 – Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado

On our last full day in Colorado, we toured the six-mile Mesa Top Loop Drive, visiting most of the archeological exhibits and overlooks.

Pithouse – For thousands of years, native peoples were living in the surrounding areas before coming to Mesa Verde.  As with people all over the Southwest, Ancestral Puebloans lived in modest dwellings  — shallow pits dug into the ground, covered with pole and mud roofs and walls, with entrances through the roofs.

In this excavation (above), what appears to be one pithouse is actually two.  The larger one, built first, around AD 700, was destroyed by fire. The smaller one, which looks like an antechamber to a larger room, is actually a second pithouse built soon after the first one burned.  It contains a new feature, a verticle ventilator shaft in one side, which appears in pithouses from then on — innovation!

Above is an Ancestral Puebloan kiva – an undeground religious room.  The small circular hole in the floor is a sipapu, a symbolic entrance into the underworld – the Pueblo place of origin.  This early kiva design was continued in the Mesa Verde villages and cliff dwellings.

Many fires have swept across Mesa Verde over time.  Recent fires have exposed previously undiscovered Puebloan sites.

At our campsite on our final afternoon in
Colorado, 2009.

Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado — September 12, 2009

We arrived at Mesa Verde early enough to relax for a while before heading further into the park.

(click on any of the following photos to view a larger image.)

Knife’s Edge, location of the old pre-1950s harrowing route into the park.

Evidence of past wild fires can be seen throughout the park, some quite recent.

Spruce Tree House is the third largest cliff dwelling at Mesa Verde.  Unlike other cliff dwellings in the parks, Spruce Tree House can be accessed without a ranger guided tour, though rangers will be on duty at the ruin when the trail is open.

Spruce Tree House was opened for visitation following excavation by Dr. Jesse Walter Fewkes of the Smithsonian Institution. Dr. Fewkes removed the debris of fallen walls and roofs and stabilized the remaining walls.

It was discovered in 1888 by two local ranchers searching for stray cattle.

__________________________________

Commentary and images from the road

image and information from September 12, 2009

This post is being simultaneously published
on Exit78 and Haw Creek Out ‘n About

Spruce Tree House information is from National Park Service web page — Spruce Tree House

Mesa Verde, Colorado

Copyright 1898 by Photochrom Co.

Library of Congress Photochrom Print Collection

http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.17995

Daughters of a Tygart Valley homesteader.
House and factory in background.
West Virginia

June 1939

John Vachon, photographer

Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection
(Library of Congress)

http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8a04289

Drinking fountain on the county courthouse lawn, Halifax, North Carolina

April 1938

John Vachon, photographer

Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection
(Library of Congress)

http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c00414

Street scene, Washington, D.C.
November 1937

John Vachon, photographer

Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection
(Library of Congress)

http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8a03094

Twelve-year old girl of family of nine living in one-room hut built over the chassis of abandoned Ford truck in open field on U.S. Route 70 between Camden and Bruceton, Tennessee. Near backward Tennessee section. View also shows one of the small boys in family; the girl is dressed in a meal sack

1936 March

photographer: Carl Mydans.

Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection
(Library of Congress)

hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8a01638hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8a01638

]]> http://exit78.com/eyes-of-the-great-depression-036/feed/ 1 http://exit78.com/dust-storm/ http://exit78.com/dust-storm/#comments Sun, 30 Aug 2009 03:00:00 +0000 Mike Goad http://exit78.com/?p=2399

April, 1935
Prowers County, Colorado.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8e03000

Farmer at the auction. Oskaloosa, Kansas
1938 Oct.

Vachon, John, 1914-1975, photographer.

Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress)

hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8a03786

The Sun has Lost it’s Spots (continued)

Today, it reached a count of 700 days.

On average, a solar minimum has 485 days where the surface of the sun is blank, with no sunspots appearing.  The solar minimum is the period in a sunspot cycle where the number of observed sunspots  is at its lowest. Sunspot cycles  average 11 years from beginning of minimum through maximum and back to the beginning of the next minimum.

The current solar minimum began in 2004 and was predicted to end late in 2007.

Since the minimum began, there have been 700 days with no sunspots.

The last observed sunspot disappeared 47 days ago.  If there are no sunspots by this time next week, this will have been the longest period without any sunspots during this minimum.

Long solar minimums have been observed in the past. However, this is the first long minimum where we have had sensitive instruments that can monitor the sun.

The jury is still out on the meaning of this extended minimum.

Advocates of the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming discount any significant change in the energy received from the sun.  Others, however, point to previous periods of low sunspot and solar activity, which, by chance, happened to roughly correspond to the cold times of the Little Ice Age and the Dark Ages.

(to be continued in about a month or so)

Note: Previous posts on the sun were The Sun Has Lost Its Spots (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) and The Sun Has Found Some Spots. I will be posting a continuation update about monthly.)

[between 1898 and 1905]

Detroit Photographic Co.

Library of Congress Photochrom Print Collection.

The Photochrom Print Collection has almost 6,000 views of Europe and the Middle East and 500 views of North America. The richly colored images look like photographs but are actually ink-based photolithographs, usually 6.5 x 9 inches.

Found in photos of cherry pickers,

Berrien County, Michigan July 1940

John Vachon, 1914-1975, photographer.

Part of Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress)

hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8a06841