Create strong passwords!

If you use your computer to research, write, publish and promote your historical fiction, you have probably created a lot of accounts for which you need a password.

Tech experts tell us it is a good idea to change our passwords from time to time. You do that, right? How safe is your password? Microsoft offers tips for creating strong passwords at http://www.microsoft.com/security/online-privacy/passwords-create.aspx. The site recommends that you create strong passwords based on four variables: length, complexity, variation and variety.  At the site is a password checker tool that rates the strength (or not) of your passwords.

Where to find primary documents for historical research

The Wilson Center Digital Archive recently published a new set of 73 collections of declassified historical documents. Sets include Chinese Foreign Policy, Berlin Wall, Intelligence Operations in the Cold War, and Cuban Missile Crisis documents. Writers of historical fiction looking to strengthen their settings by adding event details might find these documents useful.

In celebration of Patriot's Day

Yesterday was Patriot’s Day in the U. S., so as I was browsing sites about the American Revolution, I stumbled across the Museum of the American Revolution site, a project under grants from The Lehrman Institute and The Hertog Foundation. One of the features at the site is an interactive timeline that allows viewers to explore important objects in American history. For example, at 1776 on the Timeline, I was able to view American currency and firearms of the period. A writer of historical fiction might find this site useful when describing objects used in an era. At the collection link on the site, viewers can observe art, manuscripts and printed works assembled by the Museum over the past century.

Search engines to maximize your research results

Technology tip: Although Google is a great search engine to use for your research, different search engines often return different results.  Why not use a meta search engine (a search engine that queries other search engines and then combines the results) to maximize your search results? Here are a few of my favorites:

http://Dogpile.com

http://mamma.com

http://ixquick.com

Discover the history in your neighborhood

Want to find historic places in your neighborhood—or in some other specific geographical location? The site Historic Places: All Historic Places in North America lets the user browse and locate historic places in a favorite location. Simply type in a location in the search box and the interactive map shows pins of historic buildings, objects structures and sites in the area. Click for more information about each of the pins. This site would be great for tourists, but it is also a great site for writers of historical fiction who need a general overview of the history in a particular region.   The site contains about 100,000 North American historic places listed in its database.

This afternoon I went on a field trip to the Smithsonian’s Museum of National History—a virtual field trip, that is. The 22-minute video tour of the site is introduced by author David Baldacci and divided into four sections:

1.       Welcome; Lewis and Clark Compass

2.       Star Spangled Banner

3.       David Drake Pottery

4.       Lincoln’s Pocket Watch

The field trip is designed for K-12 students and their teachers who want to explore historic objects and connect them with American history. Anyone can take the free field trip and download the supplementary materials and activities at the site, however.

As a writer of historical fiction, I often use objects (such as a compass, a flag, a pot, a watch) as symbols for something going on in my plot. Exploring the objects on the virtual field trip reminds me that I should do more of that in my narrative text.

Free Online Historical Dictionary

Today I discovered a free online historical dictionary at History Today. According to the website, “The dictionary is a compendium of facts, figures, mini biographies and definitions of historical terms.  It covers people, places, key events and epochs. “

To access information, simply type a term into the search box. I typed in “Battle of
Gettysburg,” and got a 100-word article of basic information about that event. Although the site is not very useful for in depth research, it might be good for finding quick information about minor events that occur in the time period about which you are writing. You can also browse the site by period, location and themes. This site is a companion to the magazine History Today.

What can we learn from reenactors?

Technology tip:  Living historian and reenactor groups, like good historical novelists, try to be as honest as they can in portraying their characters, and we can learn much from them.  They have studied everything about the period of history they portray, right down to the material from which their buttons are made.

The web page of a group devoted to the Middle Ages can be found at http://www.sca.org/

The Civil War Reenactors home page is

http://www.cwreenactors.com/index.php

Reenactor.net at http://www.reenactor.net/

is a site that includes reenactor groups from ancient times to the present.

Avoid anachronisms in dialogue

A couple of weeks ago, someone on one of my historical fiction listservs asked if anyone out there knew when the term “smelling himself” as in “full of oneself” came about. The writer was afraid of an anachronism in a piece of dialogue she was creating for a historical novel. Someone on the listserv suggested that she try putting the phrase into Google’s N gram viewer.

According to the website, when you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., "British English", "English Fiction", "French") over the selected years. You can find plenty of examples at the sites info link.

This free tool strikes me as useful for writers who want to be sure their idiomatic expressions used in dialogue are authentic to the period about which they are writing. Or perhaps you are wondering what year a certain object came into use. I tried an experiment with “seatbelt” and found that the term came into use in print (at least in the books Google searched) about 1960. You can run your own experiment at the site.

Researching for authentic historical details

Authentic details help to develop historical characters in the minds of readers. Sometimes, for example, my historical characters need to have dialogue about what is happening in their world. At other times, they may need to be reading a book or listening to music.  

I have a pretty good nondigital source for finding cultural details in history, called The Timetables of History: A Horizontal Linkage of People and Events, by Bernard Grun, based on Werner Stein’s Kulturfahrplan. The source begins with the year 5000 BC and progresses to 1978. In table form, it gives snippets of important people and events in the categories of History and Politics; Literature and Theater; Religion, Philosophy and Learning; Visual Arts; Music; Science and Technology; and Daily Life. So, if I have a character living in 1863 who loves to read and listen to music, I can very quickly determine what the literature and musical trends of that year would have been.

But wait!  This blog is about writing historical fiction in the digital age.  Here is a link to the U.S. Library of Congress site called This Day in History that gives information about events and people of the past according to exact date.  There are even links for “yesterday” and “tomorrow.” Of course, this source is limited to recorded history from the Library of Congress, but here you will find links to the primary resources (images and documents) associated with U. S. history.  For example, on this day in 1778, the Treaty of Alliance between the U. S. and France was signed in Paris.

Finding images for your historical fiction

Recently, I was looking for some public domain images in the National Archives that I might be able to include in my book about Marie Peary, daughter of the Arctic explorer.  There, I stumbled across a tool called Pathways Challenge that allows a registered user to create posters or videos of material in the National Archives digital vaults.  The free tool was probably created for educators and their students to teach and learn about primary resources and history, but writers of historical fiction (and nonfiction) will find the tool useful as well. Users can search by title or tag and they can make lists of their online collections.  I found the tool a useful portal for discovering images of the people about whom I am writing .

Documentaries as research

I must admit that I am a big fan of documentaries, which can be great informers of historical events.  Recently I found a rich source of free documentaries on the web. DocumentaryZ  is a portal for documentaries on a variety of topics, including biography, science, health, military, and history.  At the history link, I found videos about U. S. and World history, including a great documentary on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, which yielded some useful information for a post Civil War novel I’m working on. The site has a search bar, but when I entered the term “Lincoln,” I only got the one result.  Nevertheless, the site could be useful for a researcher who prefers a multimedia approach to historical research rather than straight print.

Use Google Alerts for Research

Is there a topic, person or location that you frequently search for when you are writing?  Create a Google alert for the search term.  When your search term appears on the web, Google will send you an alert to your choice of email or RSS feeder. 

Think this isn’t useful to a historical researcher?  Think again.  Most local newspapers carry columns from historical societies.   I entered a regional search term into Google alerts, and I regularly receive emailed links to articles written by local historians.  It is true that Google alerts might be more useful if you were, say, trying to keep up with the news on your favorite athlete or monitoring a developing news story.  But every historical researcher knows that the best info sometimes comes from unlikely sources.  As a historical researcher, cast your nets wide and see what you can haul in!

Beware Anachronisms

A writer friend of mine recently told me that one of her readers called to tell her she had mistakenly used a word in her historical novel that was not in usage in the particular place and time about which she wrote.  Of course, she was embarrassed.  We all would be.  Her anecdote put me in mind of a warning I included in my book, Writing Historical Fiction: Digital Age Advice.  It appears in chapter 3:


 Be wary of anachronisms.  Anachronisms place people, events and things in the wrong time. Would your character have a wrist watch in 1800?  Was Maine a state in 1820? How many prisoners did General Robert E. Lee take during the incident at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia in 1859? (None. Lee was not yet a General in 1859; he was a Col.  Also, Harper’s Ferry was in Virginia in 1859.  West Virginia broke off and became a state in 1863, taking Harper’s Ferry with it. See how easy it is to make mistakes when doing historical research?)

Researching historicaL fiction details

Looking for a fast way to find out what happened in a particular year in history?  Want to add more authentic time-specific detail to your historical novel?

For example, what novel would your protagonist have been reading in 1888? What was the latest technology in 1666? To what play would your London villain have taken his mistress in 1750?

The Timesearch website allows you to search the web through timelines.  Although it is a bit awkward to use at first, the tool does allow you to search by date, area and theme.  Themes include arts, literature, performing arts, politics, religion, science, technology and war.  Clicking on a theme for a particular year and area doesn’t give a whole lot of information, but is useful for finding tidbits of info that can help flesh out the historical time period about which you write.

Icons on the web tool allow a user to find text as well as images, linking to Google and History World. Interesting tool for researchers and writers of historical fiction.

Need a historical map?

Need a map for your historical fiction?  Trying to get a fix on a historical location for your setting? The David Rumsey Map Collection Data Base and blog web site features historic maps for many geographical areas and timelines. 

According to the site, “Popular collection categories include antique atlas, globe, school geography, maritime chart, state, county, city, pocket, wall & case, children's, and manuscript maps.  You can browse map categories: What, Where, Who, When. The collection can be used to study history, genealogy, art, explorations, local and family history.”

The data base includes over 12,000 searchable maps.

Protect your computer and your information

Keeping your information secure on the internet is important in the digital age.  Google Good to Know gives you five tips for making sure your information stays safe and your computer virus free.  The site reminds you to:

1.      Create safe passwords and change them twice a year.

2.      Enable 2-step verification of password accessed sites.

3.      Update software when prompted because updates often contain important security fixes.

4.      Beware of suspicious sites that resemble authentic ones.

5.      Scan your computer regularly for viruses and malware.

Watch a video on how to perform these five tasks at http://www.google.com/goodtoknow/online-safety/

Civil War research tool

Do you write about the Civil War?  Do you use primary source documents as research for your historical fiction?  If so, the interactive Civil War poster found at http://teachinghistory.org/civil-war

might be a great tool for your research—or use it to inspire you to explore primary documents on your own as a basis for your research. 

According to the site, “As explorers of the past, we can look at a variety of sources—maps, letters, diaries, objects, music, images, and more—to piece together a sense of the Civil War’s complexity. The images and related resources from this poster are designed to get students thinking about how primary sources can help uncover stories about the past.”  Although this tool is designed primarily for teachers and students of Civil War history, it certainly has applications for researchers and writers of historical fiction. How do you access primary source documents for your research?  Share your tips he

Researching old newspapers and the American old West

Recently I found a great website that is a product of the collaboration between journalists and scholars. Stanford University’s Rural West Initiative is a goldmine of credible research information for writers of historical fiction about the American West.  According to the site’s home page,

“The Rural West Initiative aims to create a unique collaboration between journalists and scholars to investigate the forces transforming the rural west.  We are generating reports and stories ourselves and will commission more from reporters, scholars, researchers, and students across the West. Our work uses extensive data visualization as well as text, video, and still photography to tell our stories.”

One of the links I found useful is the interactive map of the growth and decline of U. S. newspapers. So if you are wondering what your historical American characters were reading as early as 1690, you can find out at this site.

Learn by watching rather than reading

Recently I found a wonderful tool for research at snagfilms.com.  You can access free documentary films to view from this site.  I downloaded a free app that allows me to view films on my iPad, but you can view them on a computer as well.  I tried the site tool “movie matcher” that allowed me to narrow my search.  I was interested in the history of the “go green” environmental movement in the U. S. (you can also find Canada, UK and international documentaries using this tool), so I clicked on “go green” and “history” and the tool located six results for me.  This might be a hit or miss way to research something you want to write about, but if you like to get your information via film rather than via reading, it might be worth a try as a research aid.