Let’s begin with a [not so] fun fact. Did you know that the Washington Post doesn’t give free subscriptions to those who work for their Made By History section? Weird, right? This unfortunate system also extends to MBH interns. So before jumping in to my project I had to subscribe to the Washington Post. A small, yet annoying hurdle.
After paying for a year-long subscription (which I use every day and will probably continue to pay for beyond this year) I got to work creating my database of MBH pieces. Using my expert tech skills, I opened up a Google Spreadsheet and got to work. The process was tedious. For more than a week I spent my time copying and pasting each piece’s title and subtitle, the name of each author, and the date of publication in the hope of being able to search for relevant keywords within the collected data. Then all I had to do was categorize each piece into one of the selected topics (American Revolution, World War I, Cold War, etc.). While this process worked in theory, it was difficult to get results due to the nature of headlines in news publications. While a published article in a historical journal may have a title that could put Hayden White to sleep, titles of MBH pieces are often flashy and leave you wanting more. They pull you into the work with a ‘less-is-more’ attitude that forces you to stop scrolling and click on that piece. While this style hindered my process it taught me a valuable lesson in the difference between writing for a scholarly audience and writing for a public audience. Luckily, I had an alternative method of categorizing these pieces.
MBH is partnered with bunkhistory.org, an online collection of writing on American history. The staff at Bunk work meticulously to find historical writing on the United States and tag each piece in order to help those interested in American history find what they’re looking for. While I was able to find many relevant pieces using my Paleolithic method, I wouldn’t have been able to finish this project on time without the help and support of those at Bunk.
After weeks of searching I had a small collection of MBH pieces within each selected topic. Now we needed to figure out what this project would look like in its final form, and how we would get this into classrooms around the country. While the Washington Post has web developers on staff, it was not clear that they would spend time creating a page dedicated to this project. In order to avoid the corporate bureaucracy, the team decided to host this project on Bunk using their collection tool that allows users to group works into a larger theme. The decision was also made to focus on only one of the suggested topics in order to have a finished product that could serve as a model for all subsequent topics. Given its presence in current news cycles, and the availability of pieces focused on the topic, Civil War Memory was chosen as the first topic to perfect.
All of the work and decisions that went into creating this project up to this point were time consuming, but relatively simple. Everything was within our control, or could be easily maneuvered around. But here, near the end of this process, we realized that the biggest challenge remained back at the beginning: the entire library of MBH pieces lay behind a paywall. With the current state of local political affairs - where school boards are banning books they don’t agree with - it is likely that a subscription to the Washington Post may be too much of a hurdle for schools where these pieces are needed most. The tragic irony of this project - based on the idea of helping educators and students gain access to ideas regarding our shared past and how they shape our current affairs - lies within the current constraints of the newspaper industry, and the continued fight for truth.
The team at MBH continues to deal with this issue. In the meantime, other interns will continue to create more topic collections in order to have them available for those who do have the means to subscribe to the Washington Post. Hopefully the Post will realize the importance of this project and find a way to allow educators to access these collections for free.
In my next post I will discuss my work editing with Dr. Brownell, and share some overall thoughts on my internship experience.
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