Roy Rosenzweig

Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past

History is a deeply individualistic craft. The singly authored work is the standard for the profession; only about 6 percent of the more than 32,000 scholarly works indexed since 2000 in this journal’s comprehensive bibliographic guide, “Recent Scholarship,” have more than one author. Works with several authors—common in the sciences—are even harder to find. Fewer than 500 (less than 2 percent) have three or more authors.1 Historical scholarship is also characterized by possessive individualism. Good professional practice (and avoiding charges of plagiarism) requires us to attribute ideas and words to specific historians—we are taught to speak of “Richard Hofstadter’s status anxiety interpretation of Progressivism.”2 And if we use more than a limited number of words from Hofstadter, we need to send a check to his estate. To mingle Hofstadter’s prose with your own and publish it would violate both copyright and professional norms. A historical work without owners and with multiple, anonymous authors is thus almost unimaginable in our professional culture. Yet, quite remarkably, that describes the online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia, which contains 3 million articles (1 million of them in English). History is probably the category encompassing the largest number of articles. Wikipedia is entirely free. And that freedom includes not just the ability of anyone to read it (a freedom denied by the scholarly journals in, say, jstor, which requires an expensive institutional subscription) but also—more remarkably—their freedom to use it. You can take Wikipedia’s entry on Franklin D. Roosevelt and put it on your own Web site, you can hand out copies to your students, and you can publish it in a book—all with only one restriction: You may not impose any more restrictions on subsequent readers and users than have been imposed on you. And it has no authors in any conventional sense. Tens of thousands of people—who have not gotten even the glory of affixing their names to it—have written it collaboratively. The Roosevelt entry, for example, emerged over four years as five hundred authors made about one thousand edits. This extraordinary freedom and cooperation make Wikipedia the most important application of the

Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior, and Swearing in American History.

The vast majority of Americans have, at one point or another gotten drunk, smoked, dabbled with drugs, gambled, sworn or engaged in adultery. During the 1800s, respectable people struggled to control these behaviors, labeling them bad and the people who indulged in them unrespectable. In the twentieth century, however, these minor vices were transformed into a societal complex of enormous and pervasive influence. Yet the general belief persists that these activities remain merely harmless bad habits, individual transgressions more than social problems. Not so, argues distinguished historian John C. Burnham, in this pioneering study. In Bad Habits, Burnham traces the growth of a veritable minor vice-industrial complex. As it grew, activities that might have been harmless, natural, and sociable fun resulted in fundamental social change. When Burnham set out to explore the influence of these bad habits on American society, he sought to discover why so many good people engaged in activities that many, including they themselves, considered bad. What he found, however, was a coalition of economic and social interests in which the single-minded quest for profit allied with the values of the Victorian saloon underworld and bohemian rebelliousness. This combination radically inverted common American standards of personal conduct. Bad Habits, then, describes, in words and pictures, how more and more Americans learned to value hedonism and self-gratification--to smoke and swear during World War I, to admire cabaret night life, and to reject schoolmarmish standards in the age of Prohibition. Tracing the evolution of each of the bad habits, Burnham tells how liquor control boards encouraged the consumption of alcohol; how alcoholic beverage producers got their workers deferred from the draft during World War II; how convenience stores and accounting firms pursued profits by pushing legalized gambling; how swinging Playboy bankrolled a drug advocacy group; how advertising and television made the Marlboro Man a national hero; how drug paraphernalia was promoted by national advertisers; how a practical joker/drug addict caused a shortage of kitty litter on Long Island; and how the evolution of an entire sex therapy industry helped turn sexual experience into a new kind of commodity. Altogether, a lot of people made a lot of money. But what, the author asks, did these changes cost American society? This illustrated tour de force by one of the most distinctive and important voices in social history reveals John C. Burnham at his provocative and controversial best.

History museums in the United States : a critical assessment

Fifteen scholars and museum staffers critically review American history museums. They note exhibit form and content, social and political contexts, and suggest improvements. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Digitizing the past: a history book on CD-ROM

This paper describes a pioneering effort to create an «electronic history book». Roy Rosenzweig of George Mason University and Steve Brier and Josh Brown of the American Social History Project at the City University of New York have joined with the Voyager Company of Santa Monica, California, to produce a CD-ROM, Who Built America? From the Centennial Celebration of 1876 to the Great War of 1914. Unlike a conventional print book, this electronic book includes audio and film clips along 5,000 pages of text documents, more than 700 pictures, and extensive, computer-based search features

Web Site Reviews

The Journal of American History, in collaboration with the Web site History Matters: The US. Survey Course on the Web , publishes regular reviews of Web sites. The reviews will appear both in the printed journal (and its online companion at ) and at History Matters. History Matters provides an annotated guide to more than eight hundred Web sites for teaching U.S. history. The goal is to offer a gateway to the best Web sites and to summarize their strengths and weaknesses with particular attention to their utility for teachers. The Web reviews are edited by Roy Rosenzweig; please contact him at if you would like to suggest a site for review or write a review. We also welcome comments on our review guidelines, which are available at .

Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920

Acknowledgments Introduction Part I. Context: 1. Workers in an industrial city, 1870-1920 Part II. Culture: The Working-Class World of the Late Nineteenth-Century: 2. The rise of the saloon 3. Immigrant workers and the fourth of july Part III. Conflict: Struggles Over Working-Class Leisure in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: 4. The struggle over the saloon, 1870-1910 5. The struggle over recreational space: the development of parks and playgrounds 6. The struggle over the fourth: the safe and sane july fourth movement and the immigrant working class Part IV. Culture, Conflict, and Change: The Working-Class World of the Early Twentieth Century: 7. The commercialization of leisure: the rise of a leisure market and the persistence of the saloon 8. From rum shop to Rialto: workers and movies Conclusion Abbreviations used in notes Notes A note on sources Index.