Howdy folks!
I'm here. Sorry been away. Yes, I'm back from Afghanistan. You may recall that I went to Iraq in 2007 and then peace broke out in 2008 (until Obama pulled us out), then I went to Afghanistan in 2017 and in 2018 we had 2 ceasefires and the Taliban opening serious talks to end the war for the first time. I'm not implying anything, just sayin... Been busy for a bit. Kind of strayed into the land of football boards in the last few weeks of the season, then business and family, etc. blah blah.
I've finished the first draft of my book on the Gutierrez-Magee Expedition (although I don't really like to characterize it as just that. The reason is that the expedition is a key element, but not the totality of the story. A few teasers:
1. There's a lot more Burr in the story than any previous historian has ever admitted, and that has a huge implication on the central question American historians are concerned about: the supposed U.S. government role in sponsoring it. I pretty much deflate that premise. My approach was to look at the expedition members and from this have built up a lot of connections that have been missed by others who kind of saw the forest but ignored the trees.
2. I do a really thorough read of all the primary sources. Previous histories have perpetuated inaccuracies that sort of run around in an echo chamber. Part of the reason for this is the paucity of sources, but this is exactly why you have to read what you have carefully and troll wide with your net for more stuff. Which leads me to:
3. This project is very much tech-heavy, which is the supreme irony because I'm basically a luddite. However, the Internet and digitized archives open up lots of new possibilities for research.
A few examples of No. 3 in action:
- Since most historians are writing in the pre-computer era, they were limited to physical archives. Not only is that a huge time suck and your chance of stumbling on something useful you WEREN'T looking for is almost impossible, even how you treat your documents is limited. It's reading letter A. and putting notes down on a card, then six months later reading letter AAA65 and putting notes on another card. My approach is to simply digitize everything. I didn't waste time reading the documents (or not very deeply) while in the archive. I simply photographed thousands of documents and put them all in a giant folder.
Take the letters of U.S. special Agent William Shaler. I have this whole collection of his letters from 2 different archives, plus the letters he sent to the Sec. of State from the National Archives (again, purchased digitally, since I bought them while I was in Afghanistan). I transcribed EVERY single one of his letters from 1808-1814. Then I put them in a giant Excel doc, with fields for sender, recipient, text of letter, source citation, date received (if known) and other notes. I merged these letters with all my other letters from all of my other people (some transcribed, some fortunately available digitally already). I color coordinated them by author, and then simply stepped back and looked. Boom! An insight. Do a little math and I discover that Sec. of State James Monroe has gaps of 4, 6 and 8 months between responses to his agent on the frontier, which goes a long way to blowing the myth of Monroe somehow orchestrating something. Of course, that's just one data point, but then I combine with others. Shaler, for instance, kept his own letterbooks with his copies of letters. This was not discovered until the 90s I believe, and many older authors simply relied on the National Archives copies. They're poor quality and you need to interpret the handwriting. I got the sent copy and received copy and put them side by side. In my database I noted changes. There were few, and none changed the meaning, which is important, because there is kind of a presumption that there was a side conversation going on that was suppressed or something, but if so, Shaler didn't even keep any notes on that. No, the letters are what they say they are, and that has the effect of further weakening the claims of collusion by the Americans to start the Gutierrez-Magee filibuster.
At this point, I feel like I'm living with a giant inside joke because I have all of these details swirling around in my head like the numbers in the matrix and few people seem to understand how maddeningly complex this is.
- Google, of course, is an innovation, as I've noted before, and simply being able to toss a few terms onto a search and drop them in the ocean like bait to get a Mako shark is pretty powerful.
- Digitized records are word-searchable. When you can word search multiple 400 page volumes of the Bexar Archives, you can find really cool stuff. Even then, you might miss a nugget here and there, but when you drop your info into your spreadsheet and can cross reference, you find cool stuff. I found hidden Tejano heroes who they're definitely going to want to build statues of one day.
But with the digitization comes the danger of taking shortcuts. I also READ all of those Bexar Archives pages, because you find unexpected gems. I discovered that the Nacogdoches commandants were sacked repeatedly for complicity in smuggling. I found a TON on smuggling, which has ultimately revised my understanding of the motives on the Hispanic side: they were not simply sitting there and they got invaded. They actually (or some elites, to be more correct) ASKED to be invaded. I found out who was doing this, how they were smuggling info into the U.S. and from this made the important discovery that the expedition was already being organized before the later leaders, Augustus Magee, Bernardo Gutierrez de Lara and even the American agent William Shaler were on the frontier. This further deepens my thesis that the expedition was primarily frustrated Mexicans making common cause with former Aaron Burr aficionados. The Mexicans wanted trade with the U.S. (freedom was secondary) and the Americans wanted land, the right to mine silver, etc. and for some - but not all (very clearly not all, since many were downright hostile to the idea) - there was the hope of U.S. annexation.
So I finished the first draft on my way back from Afghanistan and since then have been filling research holes I had identified while I was over there. Hit a few archives, got on some digital research sites you can only get to from a university, etc. Photographed a ton of new documents, particularly a big file of old newspapers. Now going through those and starting the first tenuous steps for a rewrite. As I went through the first draft, I learned more about my topic in the process of writing, and that's changed some assumptions and focuses, which I'm building into a new structure for the second draft.
On the one hand, I really want to push through and get this done. But I also want to take my time. I know what I've done and I really do feel like the guy in the Matrix who sees the numbers when no one else does. For this reason, I don't really expect there's anyone breathing down my back stealing my idea. There was a book that came out in 2015, but it was very much the same story that's been written in the 3 other books in 1939, 1942 and 1985. I think that book probably sopped up any interest by a "real" (PhD as opposed to my mere MA) historian for a while, so I feel I have space to write. And I don't mind sharing some of my secrets here because I've put in thousands of hours on this research and I feel pretty safe that no one can sneak in and steal my tradecraft. If they do, they still have 2-3 years work in front of them, because that's what it's taken me. And I probably still have at least 6 months to a year to go.
