What ever happened to...

[wilber6150]

Re: What ever happened to...

On the topic of approved vendor list, I know when I was shopping for my kit some approved vendors were really good on some items but had a quite shoddy reputation on some of their others.For example, I had quite a few pm's saying this vendor sold quite autentic sacks but stay away from his leathers and so on.. So these people asking questions about approved vendors aren't being stupid or ignorant, they are playing it smart by not believing just because a vendor is approved that everything he makes would be correct...

[Charles Heath]

Re: What ever happened to...

Bernie,

I told you not to tell everyone our little secret. Darn. Now others will know, and we won't be able to giggle at their big misteaks.

Ahem.

[flattop32355]

Re: What ever happened to...

Bernie,
I told you not to tell everyone our little secret. Darn. Now others will know, and we won't be able to giggle at their big misteaks.
Ahem.

Alas and alack, once again I am undone on the AC! Woe is me!!!!!!!!
Now I must struggle to regain my lost credibility, that I may participate in these august discussions without being dismissed as a common, well....commoner.

Please forgive me, one and all, for my transgression. Sackcloth and ashes shall be my lot until I have repaid in full. Oh, lamintation, lamintation, lamintation!

[Silvana Siddali]

Re: What ever happened to...

I'd like to address Emmanuel's important research question. I believe that his question about the approved vendors calls other issues into discussion (such as a new reenactor's budget, etc.) so I'll leave that alone.

Setting aside the question of laziness for the moment, I do think it's important to examine the reasons & root causes behind those questions and to try to address them in a practical way, as several other posters have suggested.

I say this because it's what I do for a living -- as an educator I try to teach people how to do basic research in primary sources, and more to the point, how to interpret that research. I know that there are lots of excellent primary source materials available on the internet, but I feel that most beginners don't have the training or know-how to interpret those images & sources. Typically, the beginner looks at an image and wonders, is this what people looked like? is this what they thought? e.g., take a controversial issue like the secession crisis. If a beginner reads one editorial from a Massachusetts newspaper on secession, she'll get one point of view. So she says to herself, "oh, so that's what Northerners thought." Then I give her an editorial from a New Jersey paper, and suddenly the picture has changed; not drastically, perhaps, but enough so that the point of view is no longer quite so clear-cut.

As folks on this forum know, it takes lots of reading -- background reading, specialized reading, and everything in between -- to form anything like a clear idea of what went on and what people really did & believed.

So the question becomes, how does one inspire a new researcher with enough interest and motivation to begin doing some of this reading? Ideally, the love of history and the curiosity about what really happened has already begun to take root by the time someone comes to a forum like this, and the researcher only needs to be pointed to some good sources to get going. I'm saying, specifically, that internet research can only take you so far -- it can give you some crucial details, but without the context & secondary study, it won't give you any tools for interpreting what you're seeing. The interpretations can come out a little wonky or just plain wrong, and it can sometimes be difficult to explain why or how.

To take it another step further, I'd say that folks who come here and post the same old beginning questions over and over -- now bear with me for a minute -- they're actually heading in the right direction. They know that there's something better out there, and they know that they've come to the right place to learn. What these folks don't know is just how enthralling real research can be. I'd suggest a beginner folder, maybe? I know there's a "Camp of Instruction," but that's not quite the same thing. Maybe a trial folder for folks who want to ask the right questions but who simply haven't learned how? I find that what sometimes appears to be laziness is just a lack of preparedness or background. The hardest thing about teaching history can be convincing people just how complicated the subject is. I always tell my students that when they're feeling overwhelmed and confused, they're starting to "get it."

I do realize that the idea of a beginner's folder would be controversial here, since as people have said, this forum is for people who've already come a long way and have a deep love of reading & research. I do think, though, that handling the basic questions somewhere else may lead to more in-depth discussions in the substantive folders & possibly to more rewarding interchanges.

I'd also really love to steer people away from internet research. I've been bothered about this for years and don't seem to make much progress either in my real job or in my hobby -- internet sources can only take you so far. One really does have to read print sources. I won't keep belaboring that, but who knows, it may be a fruitful source of discussion in another thread.

Furthermore, I don't believe that most new researchers even realize that they can access original documents and materials at local historical societies. After all, how would they know that unless they've been in touch with someone who's more advanced in research and has explained how to do that? This is another topic that could easily be opened up in a beginner folder -- e,g., 'here's what you do when you want to look at original artifacts.'

I'd say that steering people toward print sources, helping them answer their questions in a more reasoned and thorough manner, and teaching them how to ask the right questions in the first place would be the way to resolve this problem. I think what's going on here is that you have the equivalent of high school history students attempting to enter into discussions with public historians. That's not going to work. Either the students are going to be frustrated, or the historians are going to be irritated, or both.

Finally, I do think it's a shame that so many excellent posts and threads have disappeared in the recent crash. Would it be possible to give some of the more useful ones a permanent home? That way the new folks will always find them in their searches, no matter what happens with the forum in future.

[Hank Trent]

Re: What ever happened to...

Since we're not getting many responses from those actually asking the questions, I'll play devil's advocate. I'm not a newbie to Civil War reenacting, but I'm a newbie to salt water fishing, and I just went through the typical newbie frustration. (Some of this is a repost of what I posted elsewhere, so bear with me.)

I had specific limitations on what I needed to learn about: what can be caught by a beginner without a pole or boat in December on the Gulf Coast of Alabama? It also needed to be something that could be caught in the 1860s as well, and I needed to use documented methods, but as Silvana says, context is the hard part, specific research is the easy part.

I spent about three hours searching the web. I could have avoided internet research by checking out basic Gulf Coast fishing books from the library or looking in fishing magazines, but honestly, I don't think the results would have been much different.

Lots of pages on fishing the gulf, fishing for beginners, etc. I'd see something like, "Sportsmen like to fish for xxxxx close to shore in the winter." So I would read a bit about xxxxx, until I discovered they meant in a boat close to shore, but not as close as a pier. Or "in winter" meant starting in January. Or they liked to fish for it because it was such a challenge and a newbie would never stand a chance. Or it was dangerous when caught and you needed gloves and pliers and experience to handle it safely.

So I would quit reading about xxxxx and start over on the next hopeful lead, and after another ten or fifteen minutes reading about it, I'd hit another stumbling block.

Finally, I decided life was too short, and it was easier to take the "dumb question" ridicule, so I asked on the OTB. In a day, I got several good specific leads, including crabs, which I hadn't even thought about. Then I could narrow down my search to actual historic information, and within a few days I found several detailed primary-source descriptions on how to catch crabs in the 1850s/60s.

So the "dumb question" got me where I needed to be much, much quicker than trying to look it up on my own from scratch, even though I'd been trying to do my own research.

I don't know how that applies to most Civil War newbies, but honestly, it is pretty confusing at the beginning, and it's hard to filter out the noise from the signals, when you're preparing for something very specific yet there's so much information that's either specific for things you don't need, or too general.

There's also the problem of triage. For many reenactors, the goal is not the research as an end in itself, but the application of it during living history. I see myself as primarily a living history interpreter (in the Tilden, ALHFAM, NAI sense of the word), not a researcher, even if the people I'm "interpreting to" are only other reenactors.

So it's a balancing act. To take another example, the man I'm portraying at Immortal 600. The previous best published biography of him that I know of was Mauriel Joslyn's thumbnail bio in The Biographical Roster of the Immortal 600, published at the dawn of the internet era. But thanks to the massive data and search capabilites now available, and some helpful people volunteering to do look-ups, I was able to actually cover new ground, finding a California connection and a different military service record.

On the other hand, it's time for triage now. Yes, I know the next step in writing a definitive biography would be to fly to California and look at Cave Couts' voluminous unpublished journals, since Couts and my guy's paths crossed several times in California. And then to drive a few hundred miles to Norfolk to look at court and property records, in the hopes of catching some non-online references while he was living there. But really, if the primary goal is not writing a definitive biography, but interpreting his life for two days in Georgia, is that necessary? Not to me.

So it's only a matter of degree. As Silvana says, for a beginner to find out the context of which Federal coat, from which arsenal (not to mention reproduced by which modern vendor), will be PEC for the most reenactments, is a question requiring hours of research before purchasing. Or which dress, out of the multitude in Godey's, in images, and at museums, is PEC for a Virginia farmer's wife while cooking. It's honestly quicker to find out the details of one particular surviving coat or dress.

Multiply that by every single item of clothing and gear, and it's a massive undertaking, equivalent to asking me to fly to San Diego and Norfolk before attending one event. Which is why most reenactors, myself included, unfortunately buy wrong and slowly upgrade.

For someone truly new, it's not even as simple as just asking a dumb question someplace and following the advice. We know we can trust the advice here (most of the time :p ), but how do they know an AC "approved vendor" means anything more than when their unit-approved vendor assured them that a $60 coat was "really authentic"?

So I can't really blame reenactors for both seeking shortcuts and being skeptical of the first few recommendations they receive, hence the motivation behind questions like, "Who makes the best ----?" or "Do you think Approved Vendor X's Widget is really good?"

Hank Trent
hanktrent@voyager.net