Some Reminders for Spokane Historical Text

I mostly really liked what I saw tonight. I do have a few reminders though:

• Remember that the reader will, theoretically, be standing in front of your site. Be sure to connect the reader to the experience with a phrase or two. "This striking building is the Cebula mansion..." or "If you look on the east side of this building you will see a ghost sign for..."
• Limit your editorializing. Don't tell the reader what to think about historical events.
• Brief quotes from primary sources are great.
• Begin your paragraphs with short declarative sentences.
• Do not write in the first person.
• Balance your interpretation between people and architecture. "The Cebula Mansion was built in 1908 by Bushrod Ebenezer Cebula, who made his fortune teaching dogs to whistle." Then have a paragraph about Bushrod. The second paragraph might begin: "The Catalonian style of the Cebula mansion is exemplified in the elaborate corbels of the second story balcony..."
• Use all available sources! Research your location, its owners, and your architect.

Finally, be very careful not to plagiarize--accidentally or on purpose. When working from only one or two sources it is easy to fall into the trap of paraphrasing too closely or even copying word-for-word. Double check your writing and compare it to your sources and make sure what you are writing are your own words. If you are unsure, ask before you submit. 

Image Sources

Sources for Images of Spokane History

Digital history requires images, and this may be the most difficult challenge of creating your tour stops. The problem is complicated by copyright and the multiple possible sources for historical images of Spokane. Here are some tips to get you started:

The Washington State Archives, Digital Archives has 20,000 photos of Washington history, including quite a few of Spokane. Check out in particular the Expo ‘74 collection and the Spokane Bridges collection.

The Northwest Room of the Spokane Public Library has extensive photographs of early Spokane. Start with their online collections but keep in mind that only a fraction of their images have yet been digitized. Follow up with a visit in person, bring your digital camera and a flash drive and if the archivist is not too busy she will allow you to scan the images you need. The Spokane Public Library has a progressive policy of allowing the public to use their images, but they do ask to be credited, so make sure you do so.

Washington State University Digital Collections

Penny Postcards - USGenWeb Archive has thousands of historic postcards including some from early Spokane.

Sanborn Maps: These colorful, detailed, block-by-block maps of early Spokane are a great source of images. Sanborn maps are not available online but can be found at the Northwest Room of the Spokane Public Library and also at the MAC.

Birds-Eye View maps were popular from the 1880 to the 1910s were often colorful and richly illustrated. The Library of Congress has an online collection that includes an 1884 map of Cheney and a 1905 map of Spokane.

Metskers and Olgive Atlases: These detailed county atlases show every road, house, and building in county and who owned the property. There are useful for any site outside of the city limits. Available at the ERB, NW Room, EWU Archives, and the MAC.

Newspaper headlines from the Google News Archive can be an arresting source of images for dramatic events. Here is my how-to video on capturing them.

Property record cards from city or county assessors often include historic images. The PRCs for Spokane are available at the Eastern Region Branch of the State Archives in Cheney. They are not digitized, but you can get a sense of what they look like from those for King County.  

   

Online books: Google books has digitized volumes for early Spokane, as does Archive.org and a few other sources. Use the advanced search features to find images. The best digitized books websites are Google Book Search, the Internet Archive, the Washington State Library, and the  Hathi Trust. Here are a few to start off with--and please let me know if you find more:

• Beauties of Spokane is an 1895 picture book of Spokane landmarks, some of which are no longer in existence.
• The City Beautiful: Spokane Washington (1890) is similar to above but with more street scenes.
• A History of Spokane (1911) by Nelson Wayne Durham is the most comprehensive (if biased) history of early Spokane and contains some excellent images. Unfortunately the quality of the scans on Google Books (linked above) are poor, if you find an image you want to use you might be better off to find it online and then scan or photograph the same image from a physical copy of the volume, which is available at the EWU archives as well as the ERB and the Spokane Public Library. The book came with a a two volume “biographical and pictorial supplement” that is online in a very usable format at Archive.org (Vol. 1, Vol. 2). These two volumes are fawning biographies of the wealthy Spokanites who supported the publication of the book. They should not be considered definitive but do come with great portraits that may be used. (Someone needs to do a stop at the downtown statue of John Robert Monoghan!)

For a modern photograph of a site, take a look at Flickr. Use the advanced search for Creative Commons licensed images. If your site is a place that tourists tend to go, there probably will be images on Flickr, some of them really spectacular.

And don't forget to do a Google Image Search for your topic. Make sure though that what you find is free of copyright. If you are not sure, ask the owner of the website for permission to use the image.

Finally, remember to think outside the box about images. They do not all have to be of the building you are talking about. If for example you are talking about a hotel created to house workers from the mines, you could also have images of mining, workers, street scenes from Spokane in that time period, newspaper headlines (from the Google News archive) of related stories, pictures of the architect or owner of the hotel, images from the city directories listing the hotel, and pictures of the building that you took yourself--full images of the building, close-ups of details, a peek into the lobby (if open to the public), ghost signs on the walls (if present), etc.