March 25, 1999
Treasures of the American Experience
The Library of Congress: Eyes of the
Nation.
($39.95 for CD-ROM,
Windows 95 and 98, Power
Macintosh. DVD-ROM, $44.95.)
By DAVID M. OSHINSKY
am no expert in the field of history CD-ROM's.
In truth, I have
consciously shied away from
them, seeing digital tools as a frivolous assault on scholarly standards.
After spending a week playing with
The Library of Congress: Eyes of the
Nation, a new CD-ROM exploring the
American experience through documents selected from the world's
largest archive, I've been partly converted, much like the wayward Puritan of the 1650's who made a ""halfway covenant"" with his faith. Used in
conjunction with more traditional
methods, the CD-ROM may well revolutionize the way we teach history.
The Eyes of the Nation CD-ROM is
divided into five parts.
All provide a
glimpse of the treasures to be found
in the Library of Congress's fabulous
special collections. (The DVD-ROM
version has 19 additional exhibits,
more than 1,000 additional images
and three hours of full-screen video.)
Part One introduces the viewer to
the world of rare books, maps, prints
and photographs, including the first known slave
narrative published on
American soil (1760), a
detailed sketch of the Gettysburg battlefield by a
Confederate topographer
(1863) and a poignant
photo of two black women
on their knees, decorating
the grave of a black soldier in the segregated Arlington National Cemetery (1943).
Parts Two and Three
divide the 3,000 images on
this CD-ROM along
chronological and thematic lines.
Following a
concise and beautifully
designed overview of the
American experience by the historian Alan Brinkley, the images are
placed into categories like Arts, Entertainment, Transportation and
War.
Each category contains a time
line covering the course of American
history. A journey into the African-American Experience, for example,
elicits a dozen images from the years
1947 to 1957, including those of Charlie Parker playing the alto saxophone, Marian Anderson performing
with the New York Philharmonic,
Rosa Parks being fingerprinted by
the police in Montgomery, Ala., and
the social psychologist Kenneth
Clark performing the doll study that
swayed several Supreme Court justices in Brown v. Board of Education.
All the images are accompanied by
crisp commentary.
Part Four, my favorite, contains a
series of multimedia exhibits created specifically for Eyes of the Nation.
These include things like the
step-by-step construction of the United States Capitol and the satirical
cartoons of the Gilded Age (1875-1900), in which politicians, capitalists, immigrants and reformers are
savagely lampooned, in lavish color,
by a rising class of American artists.
Carefully narrated, these exhibits
demonstrate the ability of archivists
to create a powerful sense of time
and place through the creative use of
primary sources.
Part Five links the CD-ROM to the
Library of Congress's American
Memory Web site, providing instant
access to hundreds of thousands of
historical documents.
Eyes of the Nation is billed as user-friendly, and it partly succeeds. All
the images can be individually retrieved, filed
in portfolios created by
users, and printed. All
contain a written commentary.
The viewer
can also enlarge the image and zoom in on the
contents -- a good idea
when reading an old letter or studying battlefield maps.
Yet the search function is confusing and incomplete.
While including all the images, it
does not search the
larger text.
So my attempts to locate J. Edgar Hoover, Barry
Goldwater and Donald
Duck turned up nothing.
Are they
somewhere on this CD-ROM? I have
no idea.
There also appears to be no
cross-referencing. Using the word
""tennis,"" I could find no match for
Billie Jean King. She is categorized
under ""feminism, women's liberation,"" and a viewer seeking more
information about her is given the
image of that noted athlete Bella
Abzug.
Worse, my search for Dwight
D. Eisenhower turned up a single
image, although I'm certain from
my own browsing that there were at
least two.
There are other problems. After
1970, the project clearly loses momentum. The scenes become predictable: space shuttles, Presidents
and First Ladies, Michael Jackson
performing ""Thriller."" There is little
about the major changes transforming the nation, like the extraordinary
influx of immigrants from Asia and
Latin America.
At certain times, the project veers
down a slippery political road.
You
could easily come away from the
images and commentary on Vietnam
with the feeling that every single
American, with the exception of the
Pentagon planners, deeply opposed
the conflict.
Nine images appear on
the time line for War between 1970
and 1991.
One covers the shooting of
student protesters at Kent State; another focuses on ""Apocalypse Now,""
the ultimate antiwar film.
A third
shows a C.I.A. map of South Vietnam,
but the commentary ignores that image in favor of a diatribe against
""the military-industrial complex.""
There are five separate images of
the Vietnam Memorial, emphasizing
heartache and loss. The ninth image
takes on the Persian Gulf war. It
shows a wall of death at the University of Rochester, representing the
thousands of Iraqis who were killed
in the conflict. There is no mention of
how the war began or who bears
responsibility for the carnage.
Given the extraordinary scope and
beauty of this project, however, these
are minor quibbles. Eyes of the Nation is not meant to be a textbook.
It
is a compendium of sights and
sounds, celebration and protest, pop
culture and seminal ideas, reminding us of the richness and diversity of
American life. On that level, it is a
stunning success.