Hayley G. Brazier shares with us how she’s been using Historic Oregon Newspapers in her dissertation research!

Hayley G. Brazier

Can you tell us a little about your project and yourself?

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Oregon. My primary research field is environmental history, which means I study the history of human exchanges with the environment in past times. We understand that all human history has an environmental context. I came to this field with a long-standing obsession with American history coupled with an environmentalist’s passion. For my dissertation, I am focusing on marine environmental history, in particular, how the development of deep-sea infrastructure has influenced larger stories of politics, diplomacy, and capitalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition to my research, I currently work as the program coordinator for the Digital Humanities @ UO (dh.uoregon.edu), so incorporating digital research from Historic Oregon Newspapers into my dissertation is a nice marriage of both of my interests.

What led you to Historic Oregon Newspapers?

I am using Historic Oregon Newspapers to find any mention of the installation of submarine cables both in the Atlantic and the Pacific in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In those results, I am first looking for articles that provide historical data on which companies landed those cables, on which dates, and in which locations. Once I have collected that data, those names and dates can guide me to additional archival collections. Searching historic newspapers can be a great method for getting a sense of a historical topic and an important stepping stone for further archival research. I am also using Historic Oregon Newspapers to gauge how Oregonians, and Americans in general, felt about the deep sea and submarine technologies; were they discussing it? Was it part of a common imagination, like outer space came to be in the mid-twentieth century? So, Historic Oregon Newspapers is helping me gauge a regional interest in a larger American trend.

How do you perform research on Historic Oregon Newspapers?

Historic Oregon Newspapers is definitely one of the better databases I have used. Other digital newspaper collections can be difficult to access, particularly if you live in a different state and they require a library card. Also, many databases charge expensive subscription fees, and that’s a real difficulty for graduate students like myself who are usually low on funds. So, I really appreciate that there are no obstacles to begin researching on Historic Oregon Newspapers. I can see accurate search results within seconds of arriving to the site without logging in, submitting advanced search criteria, or choosing between various catalogues or collections.

Because Historic Oregon Newspapers encompasses articles from a broad date range (1846-2017), the database results can reveal interesting trends. For example, if I search “submarine cable” and get a ton of articles from the 1910-1930s, but almost no articles for the 1880s-1900s, then those result could indicate that submarine cables were finally becoming a household topic in Oregon by the 1910s-1930s, even if the first submarine cables were created in the previous century.

On Historic Oregon Newspapers, there is a keyword search function that very helpfully populates a list of pertinent articles and then highlights that word in red within the article (my goodness, what time saver!). From that list, I can choose the newspaper article that has the most highlighted keywords, which helps me narrow in on an article that will be most relevant to my research.  I have found this keyword highlight function to be good at catching words even when the original document’s text has faded with age. Another helpful feature the database provides is the option to save articles as a PDF, which I use often. I can save the PDF directly to my primary source folders in Zotero. This PDF functions eliminates the needs to take screen shots of the article.

Today’s project highlight is on Kimberly Jensen and her research focus on women and gender in the early 20th century.

Kimberly Jensen

Can you tell us a little about your project and yourself?

I am Professor of History and Gender Studies at Western Oregon University in Monmouth. My research focuses particularly on women and gender in the early 20^th century United States, including Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War (2008) and Oregon’s Doctor to the World: Esther Pohl Lovejoy and a Life in Activism (2012). My current research investigates Oregon women, citizenship, civil liberties, and the surveillance state from 1913-1924. My work would not be possible without historic newspapers because those newspapers carried information about women’s activities and ideas not available in archival collections or other sources. Historic newspapers are research tools for my students examining the history of woman suffrage in Oregon with our community partner the Oregon Women’s History Consortium. I particularly want to thank my colleagues Jan Dilg and Linda Long, who serve with me on the OWHC board, for their support for the students and this project.

What interested you in this topic?

Anniversaries draw public attention and interest to historical events and processes. Oregon women achieved the right to vote in 1912. I was lucky enough to be part of a great group of scholars and activists who participated in Century of Action: Oregon Women Vote 1912-2012, a project of the Oregon Women’s History Consortium. Woman suffrage in Oregon is a topic I researched for my study of activist Esther Lovejoy, and my students at Western conducted additional research to create documents projects for the Century of Action website. The 100^th anniversary of the 19^th Amendment, which placed votes for women in the federal Constitution, will be August 26, 2020. Students at Western are again researching historic Oregon newspapers to provide materials for an online exhibit on the OWHC website related to Oregon2020.

What did you use in Historic Oregon Newspapers online? How did you use the site and which titles were useful to you?

In winter term 2018, students in my honors seminar at Western conducted research with Historic Oregon Newspapers online to examine what diverse Oregon women were doing in the period around 1920. They also investigated ideas about women, gender, and citizenship expressed by newspaper editors, editorial cartoonists, and reporters. They were able to narrow their searches to 1920 to hone in on specific events relating to the ratification. They also used the keyword search to examine articles relating to a particular activist or organization. Some students wished to search a particular city paper for events relating to that community. The student documents projects in the online exhibit feature context and analysis with the newspaper articles and editorials embedded for readers to examine. This introduces the public to the importance of historic newspapers in a direct, visual way. Students shared their research at a public event at the State Capitol on March 20, 2018. Western’s videographer Deborah Rezell interviewed them about the experience and featured highlights of the evening in a brief video.

What’s your next project?

This upcoming academic year 2018-2019, I will be working with students on two more elements of this online exhibit with the Oregon Women’s History Consortium. One group will research Oregon’s ratification of the 19^th Amendment in the special state legislative session in January 1920. The other group will investigate Oregon suffragists who picketed the White House in 1919 and 1920 and were arrested for their activism.

King Con: The Bizarre Adventures of the Jazz Age’s Greatest Impostor will be released on August 7th! Read more about the Oregon connections author Paul Willetts discovered while researching below:

Copyright Doralba Picerno.

Can you tell us a little about your publication and yourself?

I’m a U.K.-based writer of nonfiction, most of which has focused on true stories set against a twentieth-century London backdrop. Probably the best-known of these in my home country was a book called Members Only, which has adapted into The Look of Love, a lavish and quite stylish movie starring Steve Coogan.

My books are often described as “novelistic.” Without embellishing the verifiable facts of a story, I try to shape my research into a dramatic narrative that conveys a strong sense of place, character, and period. I suppose I’m instinctively drawn to tragi-comic stories, to stories that give us an insight into the wider society in which they took place. That’s certainly true of my latest book, King Con: The Bizarre Adventures of the Jazz Age’s Greatest Impostor—which is the first of my books to be published in the U.S.A. Spanning the period between 1917 and 1929, it’s about Edgar Laplante, a handsome and extraordinarily charismatic Rhode Island-born vaudeville singer and con-man, who was a bit like a cross between Jay Gatsby and Tom Ripley (with a dash of David Bowie’s blurred sexuality and shapeshifting theatricality).

In search of attention and acclaim, Laplante reinvents himself as Chief White Elk, leader of the Cherokee nation. He ends up traveling to Europe to meet the British king. While he’s there, he captivates a pair of fabulously rich Austrian countesses who bankroll his “royal tour” of fascist Italy, where he becomes a darling of Mussolini’s regime, routinely greeted by thousands of adoring fans.

But this isn’t a straightforward con-trick story. Over just a few months, Laplante gives away his ill-gotten-gains—equivalent to as much as $58 million in 2018 currency!

What interested you in this topic?

Absolutely everything—the period; the intriguing and very strange personality of the man at the center of it; the various settings, which range from First World War-era America to 1920s Paris and the French Riviera. Immediately I came across the Edgar Laplante saga, I knew I had the ingredients of a book that’d generate a good advance from a U.S. publisher and that would, more to the point, be fun to research and write. Edgar Laplante’s often absurd antics certainly kept me entertained.

At that time I was keen to find a specifically American story and use that as a means to switch to a U.S. publisher, partly because your country has a stronger tradition of novelistic nonfiction, and partly because I love American books. Not just the contents, but the way they’re designed and produced. To me, they always feel far superior to their British counterparts.

One of the lovely things about writing nonfiction is that you learn so much when you’re working on it. As with my previous books, I’ve gone to great lengths to comprehend the world within which my protagonist pulled his various cons. Understanding the nature of communications between cities at that time was key to understanding how an impostor like him could keep conning people and then just moving on to another city.

What resources did you use for your research?

I drew on a vast amount of material that generated about half-a-million words of notes. The central thread of the story relied upon old files from Scotland Yard and the Bureau of Investigation (the precursor of the F.B.I.); letters held at Washington State University; a smattering of obscure memoirs; along with a staggering number of newspaper and magazine stories published in America, Canada, Belgium, France, Italy, Switzerland, and the U.K. I was pleasantly surprised at how these enabled me to put together such a detailed portrait of the life of someone so transient.

For my depiction of the countless places through which Laplante moved, I used vintage travel guides, newspapers, photo archives, architectural floorplans, and the work of recent historians. I have, of course, done my best to synthesize this into a book that aspires to be as readable and entertaining as possible. Whether I’ve succeeded, though, isn’t for me to say…

What did you use in Historic Oregon Newspapers online? How did you use the site and which titles were useful to you?

I mainly used your digital newspaper collection, which features eight stories about Laplante, a.k.a. Chief White Elk. These appeared in publications such as The Morning Oregonian between 1918 and 1920 when he made two forays into Oregon with his first wife—a genuine Native American, who is herself a fascinating character. Born Burtha Thompson, she was a bright and beautiful proto-feminist who styled herself Princess Ah-Tra-Au-Saun. That’s a name familiar to people who are interested in the pioneers of American photography, because she repeatedly modelled for the great portraitist, Emma Belle Freeman. But I digress…

Getting back to your original questions, your digital archive renders the research process much, much easier than it used to be. Paradoxically, this sort of digital technology makes it possible for writers like me to evoke the pre-digital world. For instance, I routinely use word-searches in order to obtain information about such things as weather, specific streets, and sartorial fashions. The only trouble is, such textural detail tend to lead misguided readers to assume I’m fictionalising the past.

Where can we purchase/access your book?

It’ll be available through Barnes & Noble and independent bookshops, as well as websites such as Amazon and Indiebound.

What’s your next project? I’ve just put together a proposal for a new book, though I haven’t yet shown it to either my U.S. or British agents. It’s for what could be described as a nonfiction thriller—a label that is, I know, frequently applied to books that are less than thrilling. Well, I hope this’ll buck the trend. Like King Con, it focuses on a bizarre and dramatic story that hasn’t, astonishingly, generated masses of previous books.

For more information about Paul and his work, visit www.paulwilletts.com.

John Riha, Ashland-based author, discusses the historically-rooted inspiration for his latest novel!

Can you tell us about your book?

The Bounty Huntress is an historical novel set in southern Oregon in the early part of the 20th century. It tells the fictionalized story of Iris Greenlee, Oregon’s first female bounty hunter. Iris is a young farm girl from the Applegate Valley whose father—a game warden in Jackson County—is murdered when she is very young. She grows up tough and rough-hewn, and learns many practical survival skills, including hunting deer in the nearby mountains. When she and her small family—her widowed mother and autistic brother—are nearly overwhelmed with setbacks, indignities, and the threat of the loss of the family farm, Iris is determined to make money by using her backwoods knowledge: She’ll hunt wanted criminals for money.

Tell us about yourself.

I’m a longtime media executive from the Midwest with a professional history that includes writing and editing for many national publications. I was the Executive Editor of Better Homes and Gardens and the Editorial Director for Meredith Corporation’s Special Interest Media, a group of more than 120 magazines and seven websites. After raising our two boys in Iowa, my wife and I decided to move back to the West, to Ashland, where we had met in 1984. I now freelance write and edit for national magazines and websites, and I’m slowly turning my career toward writing books, especially historical fiction and humor.

What interested you in this topic?

The part of the story about the murdered game warden is true. I ran across one of those “100 Years Ago Today” articles in the Medford Mail Tribune about the crime, and I became intrigued. I was especially interested in the fact that the murderer was acquitted in a raucous trial, even though there was a reliable eyewitness to the crime. Also of interest was the fact that the warden had two small children at the time of his death—a four-year-old girl and two-year-old boy. Add to that the fact that the accused murderer himself was murdered 16 years later in an unsolved crime. I began to wonder, “What if those kids grew up and took their revenge?” That classic revenge theme was the genesis for the novel. The part about Iris Greenlee becoming a bounty huntress is fiction.

What resources did you use for your research?

The archives available through Historic Oregon Newspapers online were invaluable. In researching the murder, I was able to follow the crime from the shooting all the way through the trial in great detail. Many small observations and nuances noted in the historical articles were a great help in adding color and authenticity to the novel. I was able to corroborate facts in other local newspaper accounts and the Oregonian. Other period articles and even advertisements were extremely valuable in setting the tone and creating language appropriate to the period. I also spent many hours at the Southern Oregon Historical Society Library in Medford, researching details such as the construction and floor plans of the county jail and courthouse in Jacksonville, and viewing historic photos depicting the towns and rural locations of Jackson County.

Where can we purchase/access your book?

The Bounty Huntress is available through Amazon and any book store can order copies. Locally, it’s at Bloomsbury Books in Ashland, rebel heart books in Jacksonville, and Reader’s Guide Books in Salem.

What’s your next project?

Travelling along the coast last year we stopped at the Coast Guard Lifeboat Station in Port Orford. Although it’s decommissioned now, they had an extremely treacherous and dramatic launch point for rescue operations in the 1930s. That definitely got me thinking, so we’ll see if that manifests into another book.