Writing History in the Digital Age

Creating Meaning in a Sea of Information (Sklar & Dublin)

Creating Meaning in a Sea of Information: The Women and Social Movements Sites (2012 revision)

by Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin

See 2013 final edition from the University of Michigan Press

See 2011 open peer review version, many more comments

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 In 1997, funded by a small grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, we set out to give U.S. Women’s History a more substantial presence on the World Wide Web, then a rather modest and marginal new domain for history publishing. For six years we focused on work with undergraduates at the State University of New York at Binghamton and then with faculty and students at a dozen colleges and universities around the United States.¹

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 In this first stage, we published more than forty document projects that constituted original research about the history of women and social movements in the United States. These document projects consisted of 20-30 primary documents complemented by an interpretive essay and other scholarly components, organized to answer a central historiographical question. Document projects have questions for titles because our goal is to generate more focused scholarship than a topical framework might create. We sought in this way to combine new historical interpretations with the publication of valuable and often inaccessible primary sources. In launching this effort, we were struck by the way primary documents and interpretation supported one another and provided a distinctly richer combination for students and scholars than typically emerges from the scholarly article format.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 It was not simply a matter of the conjunction of the two kinds of resources; the electronic medium itself dramatically shaped and enriched our undertaking in important ways. The document project format was a felicitous combination of what historians do(analyze documents) with the Internet’s spaciousness and hypertext capacity. By publishing documents in their entirety and arranging them in document projects that are much more monographic than is economically feasible in print media, and by providing a robust database and search engine, our format and research tools permit readers to evaluate the evidence and arguments much more fully than is possible with a traditional journal. For example, our first document project, published in 1997, “How Did African-American Women Define Their Citizenship at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893?”  is by far the most extensive monographic treatment of that topic. Bringing together 27 documents, including all the speeches of African-American women at the World’s Congress of Representative Women, accompanied by an interpretive essay that analyzes the documents, it makes a substantial historiographic contribution to U.S. women’s history, African American history and U.S. history.²

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 We immediately recognized the power of this innovative but labor-intensive format and, with the support of NEH grants, taught courses and employed graduate students that together produced dozens more. But since we wanted to produce authoritative rather than student work, we also began to involve a small group of colleagues in U.S. women’s history. In 2003 we came to a crossroads when we anticipated running out of grant funding and the modest support of SUNY Binghamton. That year we solved our financial crisis and entered a new stage of growth by partnering with Alexander Street Press (ASP) and becoming a peer-reviewed, online journal: Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000. ASP distributed our journal/database through subscriptions and purchases by academic libraries. Along with financial stability that permitted us to pay our staff, we acquired access to much more powerful database and search technology.³

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 Innovative in its format and medium, the journal has grown remarkably in seven years. Because our partnership with Alexander Street Press made it possible for us to use database functionalities and a powerful search engine, we decided that we would publish “full text” scholarly collections of primary sources, often with accompanying interpretive introductions, as well as our signature “document projects.” Before long we also added book and website reviews, teaching tools, and news about U.S. women’s history from the archives. We also created another new format, the “document archive.” Bringing together a distinctly larger collection of primary documents — typically 60 to 80 in number — the document archive combines a brief interpretive introduction with a more extensive collection of documents. Document projects seek to “prove” a scholarly interpretation. Document archives provide a minimal interpretive framework for a larger group of documents.

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 These gains came at a price — our site was no longer freely accessible. Our initial concern on that score was alleviated when the number of subscribing libraries grew and we were soon accessed by more users than had visited our smaller SUNY site. By early 2012 almost 400 libraries provided access to the site for their students and faculty, about the same number of institutional subscribers as many print media journals. While subscription access imposes limits on our site’s use, we work with an online publisher that is highly respected by librarians for maintaining high standards in their online publications. So we consider ourselves part of a process by which libraries gain access to high-quality online scholarship even though it is not funded by foundations or major research universities.

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 Women and Social Movements in the United States has steadily expanded over the years because faculty and librarians have thought well enough of it to fund it with library subscriptions. We hold ourselves directly accountable to those subscribers. In that regard there is a more democratic aspect to our funding structure than in freely accessible sites that are designed at and funded by well-endowed institutions and foundations but are not accountable to end users.

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 Our primary goal is to create new knowledge. We do so by integrating documents with the interpretation of documents. Sites that contain only documents predominate in U.S history. Particularly notable among these are the American Memory site at the Library of Congress and Ed Ayers’s The Valley of the Shadow site, which includes documents from two counties in the Civil War period.⁴ The documents on these wonderful sites are very valuable for students and scholars of U.S. history, who can use them to create new knowledge off site. Our goal is to generate new knowledge on our site — with the publication of document projects and with extensive database functionalities that permit users to organize the data in new ways.

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 To generate new knowledge we take very seriously our responsibility to be authoritative with the documents and interpretations we publish. Our goal of being authoritative makes our editorial process extremely labor-intensive. Space prohibits us from describing it fully here, but a few examples will show what we have gotten ourselves into. First our interaction with authors is extensive and complex. Scholars are not familiar with the document project format, so we need to help them navigate a steep learning curve. Each project presents unique challenges and new frontiers. We begin by asking authors to pose a historiographically meaningful question and then prepare an annotated list of documents that address the question and a brief essay that shows us how the documents can be read to interpret the question. This stage of the process often takes about a year and a half, with frequent communication between us and the author to address historiographic issues or gaps or redundancies in the documentation. Then our peer review process evaluates the result, almost always suggesting more work, sometimes clarity of interpretation based on the documents, frequently calling for different or more documents. After authors accommodate peer review suggestions, the next stage of the process involves our SUNY shop working with authors to provide authoritative citations and headnotes about the documents’ provenance. We and our authors contact archives to secure permission to publish online and verify that we have accurate metadata. We transcribe the documents because scanning and OCR does not produce sufficiently accurate data for our database. Our SUNY shop carefully compares our transcriptions to the original documents. Our authors provide annotations for the documents and footnotes for their interpretative text as well as bibliographies. The journal is indexed in America: History and Life and the “Research Scholarship Online” section of the Journal of American History, the two leading bibliographic resources in U.S. History, so WASM publications enter ongoing historiographical debates.

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 Our search engine and database functionalities are central to our purpose of providing users the opportunity to create new knowledge by organizing the documentary data in new ways that are meaningful to them. We are constantly developing and enhancing the database functionalities. We began our site by key entering documents into HTML so that they could be more effectively indexed and made full-text searchable. With our partnership with Alexander Street Press, we shifted to standards in the text encoding initiative, TEI-SGML and then TEI-XML.

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 In addition to our goal of creating authoritative new knowledge, we also want to facilitate use of the site by scholars who are not historians of American women. The stream of scholarship published about American women in the past forty years is underrepresented in the mainstream of U.S. history. Perhaps scholars who are not able to explore the wide range of secondary writings about American women might be able to read and use in their research and teaching primary documents about women, especially if they relate to the scholars’ own research interests. Thus, for example, historians of the American Revolution might be interested in the writings of Esther Reed and other elite Philadelphia women who raised funds to support the patriot army during the war. Or they might want to explore Woodrow Wilson’s reimposition of segregation in federal offices in 1913.⁵

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 In the document project format these topics invite the exploration of historical methods associated with cause, effect, periodization, audience, power, and, of course, class, race and gender. But they can also be used simply to supplement what readers already know.

¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 We have a third goal of drawing scholars in U.S. women’s history (and women’s history generally) into greater dialogue across specializations. Like other historical fields, women’s history has developed subfields that often make it impossible for scholars to learn about work outside their own precincts. Thus scholars in the history of women’s health in the antebellum era might not know about recent work in women’s labor history in the Progressive era, or the history of African American women in the civil rights movement. It might be easier for scholars to learn about fields outside their own specialty by having the opportunity to access primary sources. Secondary works sometimes require a considerable commitment of time and familiarity with related historiography to digest. Primary documents offer a more direct route to learning.

¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 One brief example can show how a document project in U.S. Women’s History might contribute to all three of these rationales: to generate new knowledge; to influence other fields of U.S. History; and to facilitate more communication among historians of American women. Carol Faulkner’s document project, “How Did White Women Aid Former Slaves during and after the Civil War, 1863-1891?” analyzes the gendered construction of power in the freedmen’s aid movement during Reconstruction.⁶ She offers documents that demonstrate women reformers’ opposition to the policies of leading men such as General Oliver O. Howard, head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, or Horace Greeley, noted editor of the New York Tribune. These men supported the early closing of the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1869 because they feared that assistance to freed people would create economic dependency.  Eric Foner, the leading historian of Reconstruction, has described the dominant ethos in the Bureau as reflecting “not only attitudes towards blacks, but a more general Northern belief in the dangers of encouraging dependency among the lower classes.”⁷ Faulkner’s exploration of correspondence between General Howard and freedmen’s-aid advocate Josephine Griffing shows that this group of women reformers sought to provide more generous long-term aid to freedmen and challenged Howard’s concern about dependency. Thus Faulkner’s document project alters our understanding of the possibilities during this major period of American History. And by offering the full text of the sources on which its interpretation rests, it invites scholars and students to use those documents in their own work of interpreting American history.

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¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 Our partnership with Alexander Street Press allowed us to expand each issue of our journal to include extensive full-text sources that are not part of document projects. This enhances the site’s resources and the meanings that can be derived from the site’s database.  We now publish about 5,000 pages annually of full-text sources. Our first group in the fall of 2003 included about 30,000 pages of books, pamphlets and convention proceedings related to the struggle for woman suffrage in the United States, 1830-1930. There we brought together for the first time the published proceedings of the three women’s antislavery conventions of the 1830s and the proceedings of fifteen women’s rights conventions that were held between 1848 and 1870. These resources enable scholars to analyze change over time in the women’s rights convention movement, viewing that movement much more fully than ever before the database permits the retrieval of new knowledge in response to new questions. For example, researchers can identify the number of speeches or letters in convention proceedings that mentioned married women’s property rights, or education or health. By exploring topics addressed, speakers named, and rhetoric employed at these conventions, historians can explore change over time much more systematically.

¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 Thus Women and Social Movements offers the advantages of a database as well as a journal. Another example is our indexing of the six volumes of The History of Woman Suffrage, totaling some 5,800 pages.⁸ These volumes were largely compilations of published and unpublished documents and the database indexes these works in ways that permit scholars to search for the authors and titles of hundreds of separate documents included in the volumes. The database reveals more than 800 individual documents in those volumes, including 152 speeches, which users can further identify by author, race of author, date, and place (among other variables).

¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 As full-text sources we also reprinted works by the national and state branches of the League of Women Voters originally published between 1920 and 2000. This collection consists of 660 items totaling 8,000 pages and provides a valuable resource for exploring women in American public life after suffrage was achieved.

¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 We also took on a big project of compiling all the publications that we could find by state and local commissions on the status of women between 1961 and 2005. This database, fully integrated into Women and Social Movements in the United States, dwarfed our earlier efforts, including almost 1,900 items with some 90,000 pages. In a practice that we began to follow increasingly for the website, we also commissioned scholarly essays to explore various dimensions of the state commissions’ publications. We have published eight essays in all, exploring such issues as economic security, race, sexuality, labor feminism and conservatism as they can be found in the publications by commissions in the WASM database.

¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 The combination of these two threads — the work of scholars in document projects and the publication of full-text primary sources — means that Women and Social Movements is much more than a journal whose articles are accessible online. This is a lot of work and we fully understand why most websites in U.S. history do not weave together interpretation and documentation and those that do usually focus on one historical actor, event, or time period. But now that the World Wide Web offers a sea of information, we wish there were more sites that took the next step and helped scholars construct meaning within that sea.

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¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 0 Like other venues for scholarship in U.S. history, we have witnessed and promoted the expansion of the field to include more international perspectives. Our authors have increasingly brought us projects pertaining to U.S. women and international social movements. Nancy Hewitt and her students at Rutgers University prepared a document project on the relationship between the mid-nineteenth-century women’s rights movement in the United States and contemporary British and European feminism, which we published in 2003. Colonial themes also added an international dimension to the website as Tracy Leavelle explored the interactions of seventeenth-century French explorers and Jesuit missionaries with Illinois women and Patricia Cleary researched women’s sexual, familial and public roles in eighteenth-century St. Louis, successively an outpost of Spanish and French empires.⁹

¶ 23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 0 As we saw this focus emerging, we actively sought to nurture it with two collaborations. First, we established a “Canadian initiative,” aimed at encouraging document projects for a special issue on Canadian women and social movements that we published in September 2009. Second, we organized a collaborative project with Japanese and American historians, encouraging the submission of document projects that explore the interaction of women reformers from Japan and the United States since the Meiji Restoration of 1869. From this collaboration we have already published three bilingual document projects, beginning March 2009, and see this project as a model for how we can contribute to the internationalization of the history of women and social movements in the United States.

¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 0 In 2007 we began to create a new, complementary online archive, Women and Social Movements, International—1840 to Present.¹⁰ For this project we have drawn heavily on the international community of historians of women, on archivists around the world, on our talented SUNY graduate students, and on the technical and editorial skills of Alexander Street Press. The project went “live” in January 2011 and should be complete by July 2012.  We hope it will greatly enhance scholarship about women and social movements internationally by providing a wide range of systematic sources, including the proceedings of more than 500 women’s international conferences.

¶ 25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 0 If WASM was “born digital,” WASM-International was “born digital database.” But it was constructed by scholars with a view to creating new knowledge. With a self-imposed limit of 150,000 pages of documents, we knew we needed to be thoughtful in our selections. We assembled an international advisory board of scholars who assisted in the selection of resources for the archive and met with forty of them at the Berkshire Conference on Women’s History at the University of Minnesota in June 2008. They helped us move beyond our U.S.-centric beginnings and construct a truly international resource.

¶ 26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 0 As the work of the project progressed, the international advisory board grew dramatically, reaching more than 130 scholars in 2011, the project’s last year. Another women’s history conference, at the Aletta Institute in Amsterdam in August 2010, gave us a second opportunity to present the project-in-progress to an international group of women’s history scholars. Their comments and assistance has been enormously helpful. Throughout our work we shared bibliographies with members of our advisory board and received excellent recommendations for additions to the archive. We also expanded the archival dimension of the project over time; by 2011 we had secured extensive materials — scanned or digitally photographed — from the Sophia Smith Collection, the Schlesinger Library, the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, the Library of Congress, Hollins University, the Aletta Institute, the International Institute of Social History, and the National Library of Australia.

¶ 27 Leave a comment on paragraph 27 0 All our work on WASM International was shaped and facilitated by the electronic revolution that had taken place since we first worked in 1997 with Binghamton students on Women and Social Movements in the United States. For example, we relied from the outset the powerful database program, Zotero, which allowed us to download online catalog records in WorldCat to our own database.¹¹ This ensured the accuracy of our metadata and permitted us to construct intermediate bibliographies to view how the archive was taking shape. We relied on the new media and posted our topical bibliographies on the website of the Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender at SUNY Binghamton, which our editorial advisors accessed on the Internet.¹² We also downloaded Zotero entries to spreadsheets that permitted us to keep track of our work, particularly the major effort involved in securing permissions to publish copyrighted materials. With these spreadsheets we could analyze the contents of our archive as it grew—analyzing it by dates, geographical regions, and topical coverage so that we could periodically take stock of our work and identify areas that remained underrepresented in the archive. This work permitted us then to contact our international scholarly advisors and ask them for help with our coverage in their areas of expertise.

¶ 28 Leave a comment on paragraph 28 0 The electronic revolution assisted our work in still other ways. From the outset we had decided that a focus on organizations would help us identify a core of publications relevant to the history of women’s international activism. Drawing on scholarly writings and using keyword and corporate author searches in WorldCat permitted us to identify the publications of about a hundred organizations that had emerged as key players in promoting women’s networks and activism from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

¶ 29 Leave a comment on paragraph 29 0 As we worked we became aware that library catalogs provide a biased vision of women’s international organizing. Established organizations with North American and European memberships and long histories were much more fully represented in library holdings than groups founded recently in the Global South. To complement resources found in major academic libraries, we searched the World Wide Web for online publications of contemporary non-governmental organizations (NGOs). In this way we identified 15-20 particularly important organizations, found compelling samples of their online publications, and worked with the organizations to improve our coverage of their activism.

¶ 30 Leave a comment on paragraph 30 0 In the course of constructing the online archive, our work took on preservation dimensions. For example, when we could not find in library catalogues a good run of the annual proceedings of the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WWCTU), we contacted (at the suggestion of a colleague in Australia) the national WCTU office in Evanston, Illinois. The WCTU library in Evanston no longer maintains regular hours, but a volunteer addressed our request and soon sent us a duplicate set of the WWCTU proceedings for scanning and future donation to an appropriate research library. Thus our project unearthed rare copies of proceedings that were not really available to the public and we were able to publish the proceedings online for scholarly use.

¶ 31 Leave a comment on paragraph 31 0 We have had a similar experience with the International Women’s Tribune Centre in New York. As our work progressed, a professor at Hollins University who had heard about our work told us that an important international activist, Mildred Persinger, had donated her papers to Hollins. Focusing on the UN World Conferences on Women from Mexico City in 1975 to Beijing in 1995, her papers constituted an international gold mine. We visited the archive and arranged to photograph more than 3,000 pages of manuscript and published documents.

¶ 32 Leave a comment on paragraph 32 0 A preservation project emerged, when, anticipating our archival trip, we met Mildred Persinger at her home in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.  From her we learned that the International Women’s Tribune Centre, which she had founded and directed for many years, was closing its office and moving its files to storage. She mentioned that we should try to get copies of slideshows that the IWTC had produced for each UN conference and find a way to include them in our archive. After months of intense effort, we eventually secured copies of slides for three of the conferences and scripts and cassette tapes of the audio portions of the original slideshows. The resources dated back to 1980, 1985, and 1995 — despite much international effort, we could not find the slideshow produced for the 1975 Mexico City conference. The slides were discolored with age and the cassette tapes were uneven in quality, but we had everything digitized and student workers at SUNY Binghamton skillfully restored the slides. A skilled videographer off-campus then melded together slides and audio for each slideshow, following the scripts that IWTC staff had originally created. From the aged and deteriorating slides and cassettes of an earlier generation of activists, we now have produced three high-quality videos of the original slideshows that should be useful to scholars and activists for decades to come. This success was only possible because of the networking that was a part of our project, the cooperation of IWTC activists who wanted the history of the conferences to be widely disseminated, and the skills and resources we were able to mobilize at our university.

¶ 33 Leave a comment on paragraph 33 0 Our experiences with the WWCTU and IWTC materials were repeated with other resources. Many of the published works we have included in the online archive are available at only one or two of the libraries whose collections are recorded in the WorldCat online catalog. By borrowing resources through interlibrary loan, scanning them, and securing permission from the original copyright holders to publish the works online, we have made these rare works accessible at what we anticipate will be hundreds of research libraries around the world. Similarly, we are including hundreds of online publications of contemporary NGO’s, most of which cannot be found in academic or public libraries. These documents will have brief lifetimes on NGO websites, soon to be displaced by more recent publications that better fit the organizations’ changing programmatic and fundraising priorities. We have created an online archive that presents a slice in time documenting the priorities of women’s international activism between the mid-1990s and 2010 as expressed on these NGO websites.

¶ 34 Leave a comment on paragraph 34 0 Finally, the preparation of an online archive dramatically expands the potential audience for the rare and fugitive materials we have chosen for inclusion. We have included about 30,000 pages of manuscript and published materials from archives in the United States and Europe, selected to provide depth of coverage of significant international women’s organizations and events. In each case we secured permission from the archive and from copyright holders and then made arrangements for digital photography or scanning to produce electronic copies of the documents that best seemed to fit the selection criteria we established for the archive. These materials do not circulate and it is difficult in many cases to determine that the archive actually owns the items in question. Previously users would have had to visit the archive and conduct research onsite; now these resources will be accessible in hundreds of academic libraries around the world. While the number of subscribers at this point is quite small, what is striking about early trends is the fact that about a third of early subscribers or purchasers are libraries outside of the United States. Institutions in Canada, Iceland, Norway, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, China, New Zealand and Australia are among its early subscribers.

¶ 35 Leave a comment on paragraph 35 0 Although the site’s resources are not freely available on the Internet, they could never have been created without the subscription plan that funded the four years of work that produced them. Access is limited, but access is steadily expanding over time as more libraries subscribe. We expect that WASM International will eventually reach as broad a base of subscribers as WASM. Users who are not students or faculty at subscribing institutions can access the databases by visiting a subscribing library and using the resources there. This is the best we can do right now. We are still at an early stage in the evolution of this subscription model, and we continue to consider how we might better serve the needs of scholars and students at non-subscribing libraries.

¶ 36 Leave a comment on paragraph 36 0 A related issue is the concern about how access might be affected should Alexander Street Press decide to stop supporting the databases. Two provisions in the contracts related to the databases anticipate this possibility.  First, we, as editors, hold the copyright in the documentary content of the databases, while Alexander Street Press holds the copyright in the software that provides the user interface, the search engine, and the associated database. If Alexander Street Press went out of business we would be free to try to find another way to keep the sites’ content on the Internet — for example, by approaching a large research university or foundation and securing the needed funding to create a new site for our documents and document projects.  Second, many academic libraries that provide access to the databases have purchased them from Alexander Street Press. The Press supplies purchasing libraries with a copy of the database, thereby ensuring its availability in the future. For Women and Social Movements in the United States, more than 180 libraries have purchased the database assuring its online availability, whatever might happen to Alexander Street Press.

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¶ 38 Leave a comment on paragraph 38 0 What conclusions can we draw from this survey of our work on the Women and Social Movements websites since 1997? How does our work illuminate the emergence of electronic resources for historians in the past fifteen years? While our topic might be perceived as narrow — women and social movements — it actually cuts a broad swath through all of women’s history as well as U.S. and world history, and speaks to broad issues of social reform that have shaped the mainstream of other national and international histories. So it models how meaning can be constructed in the oceans of information flowing on the Internet. Second, our document projects on Women and Social Movements in the United States point to the crucial connection between historical interpretation and primary source documents, permitting historians to share their methods with others and permitting readers to examine historians’ primary sources and reach their own interpretive conclusions.

¶ 39 Leave a comment on paragraph 39 0 Third, both projects draw on the participation of a broad community of scholars. At the same time these sites help build and reinforce that community. The electronic revolution — supplemented by face-to-face meetings — has enabled us to involve hundreds of historians of women in the United States and elsewhere in publishing Women and Social Movements in the United States. And we have relied upon the editorial advice of hundreds of historians, librarians, archivists, and activists internationally to construct Women and Social Movements, International. The electronic revolution has made this kind of collaboration easier and we hope that our example might be useful to others who set out to create collaborative projects.

¶ 40 Leave a comment on paragraph 40 0 From our reliance on WorldCat and other online catalogs to our use of the Zotero database program, WASM and WASM International have been “born digital.” Only with the electronic circulation of email messages, attachments, bibliographies, and document scans have we been able to mobilize the women’s history community in the construction and use of these resources. The Digital Age is especially meaningful for historians. It is an exciting time to be working in circumstances so different than those we encountered when we first acquired the tools of our craft.

¶ 41 Leave a comment on paragraph 41 0 About the authors: Kathryn Kish Sklar is Bartle Distinguished Professor of History at the State University of New York at Binghamton. She is currently completing Florence Kelley and Progressive Reform, 1899-1932. Thomas Dublin is Distinguished Professor of History at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is the co-author (with Walter Licht) of The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century.