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Category: Percolating Ideas

The American Revolution in the Wabash Valley

Posted in Percolating Ideas

Between 1776 and 1783, the newly formed United States was fighting for its life against Great Britain while at the same time settlers advanced into the frontier west and north, inciting Indian opposition and occasional reprisals as squatters encroached on Native lands. In 1777, George Rogers Clark, a surveyor and…

Introductory Text Analysis with Google’s ngram Viewer

Posted in Digital Humanities, and Percolating Ideas

Simple curiosity motivated the creation of these few graphs, but they will also be used in a graduate text analysis for humanists class as examples of the kinds of questions we can ask and answer with simple and accessible tools. Is there a correlation between uses of the words “frontier,”…

The Heterogeneous World of the Wabash and Ohio Valleys, 1760-1778

Posted in Percolating Ideas

In the years prior to the American Revolution, the Ohio and Wabash Valleys, along with the Illinois Country, was a world of interconnected villages characterized by face-to-face interactions. In the eighteenth century, this territory was home to semi-nomadic and agricultural Native communities, including (from east to west) Delaware, Shawnee, Wyandot,…

Visualizing Algerian history through time & space

Posted in Digital Humanities, and Percolating Ideas

The above timeline and map is my first experiment with MyHistro. While I love the way the map zooms and moves to different locations as the events of the timeline play through, I was disappointed that the photo embedding feature didn’t work. This would have made it an excellent tool…

Settler Colonialism in the US and French Algeria: A Comparative Overview

Posted in Percolating Ideas

I am not the first to make the remarkable comparison between the colonization of French Algeria and that of United States’ territories. Rather, mid-nineteenth century French statesmen conscientiously used the United States as a benchmark of progress in their Algerian endeavor. This may account for at least some of the…