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The @TxRunawayAds account tweets excerpts from advertisements related to runaway slaves in nineteenth-century Texas newspapers, along with links to the page images of the ad in the Portal to Texas History.

The tweeted excerpts come from ads identified and transcribed in the spring of 2014 by students in two digital history courses at Rice University and the University of North Texas, taught respectively by Caleb McDaniel and Andrew Torget.

The excerpts and links are composed and tweeted automatically with Python scripts written by Caleb McDaniel. Once a day, the feed posts a random ad from our data set. Occasionally, the feed also posts an ad that appeared "on this day" in history.

For more information about this project, please visit o

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<style xmlns="http://purl.org/net/xbiblio/csl" class="note" version="1.0" demote-non-dropping-particle="sort-only">
  <info>
    <title>Chicago Manual of Style (full note, no Ibid.)</title>
    <id>http://www.zotero.org/styles/chicago-fullnote-bibliography-no-ibid</id>
    <link href="http://www.zotero.org/styles/chicago-fullnote-bibliography-no-ibid" rel="self"/>
    <link href="http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html" rel="documentation"/>
    <author>
      <name>Julian Onions</name>
      <email>julian.onions@gmail.com</email>

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import os
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

files = os.listdir('.')

for file in files:
    html = open(file, 'r').read()
    soup = BeautifulSoup(html)
    url = soup.find(rel='canonical')['href']
    open(url.split('/')[-1] + '.html', 'w').write(html)

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"""
This script ingests a CSV exported from Library Thing and
returns the percentage of author last names that begin with
each letter of the alphabet.

Based on original script by Andrew Pendleton for analyzing
U.S. Census data: https://gist.github.com/apendleton/2638865

"""

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#!/usr/bin/python

import random, twitter # https://github.com/bear/python-twitter
from OAuthSettings import settings

log_file = '/home/wcm1/.e3m'
api_key = settings['consumer_key']
api_secret = settings['consumer_secret']
access_token = settings['access_token_key']
access_token_secret = settings['access_token_secret']

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From forthcoming review of Lewis Perry, Civil Disobedience: An American Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), in Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

[...] Activists in the Progressive Era also accelerated the "Americanization of civil disobedience" by self-consciously claiming to be heirs of the nation's democratic traditions and by exhibiting a general reverence for American institutions and laws; they usually accepted the legal penalties for their disobedience (143). With inventive new legal strategies designed to create test cases in the courts, Progressive Era reformers helped join the threads of a distinctively American civil disobedience---active, but peaceful, confrontation with authorities, combined with a willingness to suffer whatever legal penalties resulted from such noncooperation. Yet in doing so, they also bequeathed to later generations an American tradition of differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate forms of civil disobedience. That process of dif

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Course Description

In this class, we will be exploring the history of the United States over the last 165 years or so. But this will not be a typical history "survey" of the sort you might be accustomed to from high school. It will be different in at least three ways:

Big Difference #1

We will not even attempt to "cover" everything; instead, we will "uncover" what historians do.

Instead of attempting to cram every person, place, and thing that was important in this period into your head, I want to introduce you to what U.S. historians actually do. So instead of organizing our study around the question of "What happened next?" we will be considering bigger questions, like these:

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1. Narrativity

Craft complex historical narratives that answer a question or solve a problem using sophisticated understandings of causation, continuity, and change over time.

Emerging practice: Historical narratives written by beginning students of history are often simple, sequential accounts that tell readers "what happened" without indicating why the narrative matters. To beginners, one way of telling the story is as good as any other. It is difficult to tell why certain topics or things are included and others are not; obviously relevant issues are ignored, while tangential issues are included. Attempts to tie events together as cause and effect, or as evidence of change or continuity, are weak, simplistic, logically fallacious, or non-existent.

As you begin to develop competence, you will begin to write narratives that are oriented towards solving a problem or answering a question, though the stakes of the problem or question may be unclear and the answer attempted by the narrative may not y

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2. Evidence

Thoroughly support and revise your claims about the past using critical approaches to the best and most relevant available evidence.

Emerging practice: As a novice historian, you may assume that the number of claims about the past still needing specific, empirical substantiation is relatively small. You will often make claims without giving specific evidence to support them, or you may give evidence that is over-general, under-examined, or not sourced. At this stage, you may use only a small portion of the evidence available to you from course readings and classes. Evidence is often accepted uncritically by beginners, who show little awareness of source problems or the differences between primary and secondary accounts. Sources are treated as straightforward bearers of information that give unfettered access to their creators' thinking.

As you begin to develop competence in dealing with evidence, you will make sure that claims needing substantiation with evidence always receive it, tho

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3. Empathy

Look for the potential strengths and insights offered by alternative points of view on or in the past, even or especially when they conflict with your own or conventional understandings.

Empathy is an intellectual and imaginative skill that is required both when reading sources created in the past and when reading secondary sources created by other historians. Though often confused with "sympathy" or "positive feeling," empathy means understanding and entertaining even those points of view with which you disagree; it does not require or necessarily imply agreement.

A novice historian who lacks this skill tends to judge the decisions and ideas of historical actors according to his or her own present-day opinions, which are sometimes conflated in the novice's mind with "common sense" or "just the way it is." Beginners are typically not very interested in seeking out multiple perspectives on an issue; they identify the actor or historian whose perspective they most agree with, and then disco