History Vs. Historical Fiction

I have been researching a historical event for some time now, and I think I can make a book of it. However, I was having trouble coming up with a way to do it: do I write a non-fiction book using truthful historical facts, or do I turn it into a historical novel where I can make a better, but untruthful, narrative? Guy Vanderhaeghe has an essay on how history and fiction fit together, which has given me more to think about.

Review: The Irish In Dakota, by David Kemp

The upper Midwest is usually considered the domain of Norwegian, German, and Swedish immigrants, but it turns out the Irish had far more impact on the settling of Dakota Territory during the late 19th century than I had ever realized.

The Irish in Dakota, by David Kemp, is a fact-laden chronology of the movement of Irish families into Dakota, but doesn't extend much beyond that. The book is short, and only rarely diverges into analysis or storytelling, but I can see why genealogy websites list it under Irish ancestry resources. The book moves quickly through the late 19th century, a cascade of names and dates and places, providing its own context while lacking much breadth. I'd also say that the book focuses more on the parts we now call South Dakota than the entirety of the territory. Since the author relied heavily on South Dakota's historical societies, it is to be expected.

I checked out the book from the public library because of my recent fascination with the Fenians, and the book devotes a large part to the Fenian presence in this area, which was more than I had even thought before. That's the book's strongest feature: it contains a lot of information that I hadn't read or heard before, so it did open my eyes to a facet of my region's history. The amount of information makes me feel there's a much larger book in there that hasn't been written, making this book short of what it could have become.

The Irish in Dakota, by David Kemp
ISBN 978-0962459313
144 pages, 5½" x 8½"
Rushmore House Publishing

Acquisitions: The Dakota Maverick

Governor "Wild Bill" Langer was probably the most colorful politician in North Dakota's history once Teddy Roosevelt moved away. Langer notoriously called up the National Guard to prevent himself from being removed from office — he locked the doors, barred the windows, and issued declarations, one of which I've heard sounds a lot like assertion that North Dakota is a sovereign state immune from national laws, which may or may not be true. That's what I'm hoping to learn more about in this book, The Dakota Maverick: the Political life of William Langer. It's not a common book, having been published and printed right here in Fargo, so when I was recently at BDS Books, browsing their North Dakota section, I bought a copy with highlighting inside and missing its dust jacket, because the better copies were all running in the $15 to $30 range. Two weeks later, I'm at the thrift shop and run across the one pictured to the left: clean interior, with dustjacket, seventy-five cents. Oh well, now I've got two, one with the important parts already isolated for me, and one for the bookshelf.

George Orwell Writes A Novel

Click the image for the rest of the comic:
By this person (who organizes their blog poorly, hence the jpeg link), found via these people.

The Linotype Machine

Above is a hundred-year-old illustration depicting a Linotype text compositor: an amazing machine that creates entire lines of text, molded in a lead-alloy, compiled as a single block. Type text on a keyboard and then the molds, called 'matrices', drop into the mechanism and are lined up, until the line is finished and the text is molded. The line of text is dropped into the galley to cool, and the matrices are returned to their homes. All of this was done mechanically — some power source had to turn the driveshaft, which was eventually electricity, but it could have been steam-powered or water-powered. The machines were assembled with a watchmaker's precision, and many of them were still running, in use, in newspapers until the 1960s and 1970s and electronic typesetting became cost-effective for an upgrade from a machine that had been paid for many, many years before. Several of these machines are still running today, at the Western Minnesota Steam Thresher's Reunion in Rollag, Minnesota. This is one of them, connected to a tape-reader, which allowed text to be sent electronically over telegraph wires or even by mail:



You can see the tape at the far right, in front of the orange thing in the background. They looped the paper around and taped to itself. On the tape was "WELCOME TO ROLLAG WMSTR", encoded (most likely TTY) in a way the Linotype machine understands, finished off with a line-end (see detail here). The machine ran, unattended, creating text slugs from that tape. When the tape got to the end of the loop, the line feed told the machine to cast the text, and then the loop repeated, starting a brand new line. The 'galley' is at the bottom of the image with dozens of slugs ready to go to the printing press. This is where we get the term 'galley copy' for pre-press review copies sent out by book publishers. It was cheaper and easier to have a Linotype machine quickly typeset a manuscript and print off several hundred copies than to typeset an entire book by hand. As the Linotype operator casted line after line after line, the galley would fill, and when there was enough to print a page of text the galley was taken to the press and the Linotype operator started on the next page with an empty galley.

The Orwell Diaries

George Orwell, prolific writer and political philosopher, kept a diary, which is online, being republished day-by-day exactly 70 years after it was originally written. In late 1938, Orwell was establishing a household for himself in northern Africa, and learning how to get milk out of the African goats. I'm unsure whether this is engaging because of the writer, or if the writing is actually interesting. I think I'm riding on the belief that, since it's Orwell, things will pick up and something amazing will happen. In reality, probably not so much.

(via: via)

The 200-Year-Old Mystery Book

A Londonderry man was cleaning out an attic and discovered a 200-year-old first edition of Thomas Moore's The Odes of Anacreon translation. Some people have all the luck! The mystery is, the finder of the book wants to know how the book ended up in his attic -- in his research, he could find no reason for the book to have ended up in Londonderry, although the bookplate has some clues that it wasn't a new transplant to the area but had been there since the start.