Intro text

Before I sign off for the night, I thought I'd post the intro text here even though I emailed it out the other day...just in case.

SM


Welcome to Craigflower Connections.

This website details the lives of five people living in and around what is now Victoria, British Columbia, Canada in the 1850s and 1860s. All of these people were somehow connected to Craigflower Farm, an operation run by the Puget Sound Agricultural Company, which was a subsidiary of the famed Hudson's Bay Company. Each person represents a theme or institution which we consider key to understanding the processes by which the British Empire was built.


How to Navigate:

Craigflower Connections uses an 'image map' navigation system. By clicking on the 'Explore the Farm' [LINK] button, which will remain at the top of the screen, you will open a window which shows a portrait of our five subjects superimposed on a painting of Craigflower Farm. Simply click on the image of the person whose life you wish to find out more about. The pages are also accessible through the more conventional navigation bar along the bottom of the window.


Twice the Windows, Twice the Understanding [sorry this is really corny, but I couldn't resist - you can change it if you want]:

Craigflower Connections' pages are configured to use two different windows. Our guiding manifesto for the use of these two windows has been simple: 'Story on the left; History on the right.' Therefore, in the left window, you will find what we hope to be a highly readable, smoothly flowing account of the life of the character. In the right window, we present supporting materials: images, historical documents, and sometimes technical/academic writing which would interrupt the flow of the story were it placed in the left window. When you see underlined text on the left, just click it to open up the related materials on the right - try it now! [LINK TO BELOW TEXT CONCERNING THE RIGHT WINDOW]
RIGHT WINDOW: Congratulations - you have just opened your first right window link! Our goal is for you, if you should so desire, to be able to read through the entire site without ever opening anything in the right window - though we certainly think that it enhances the experience to take advantage of everything that we are offering you! In any case, you can experience as much or as little of these materials as you feel is enjoyable or useful.


Character selection:
Our five 'characters' were carefully chosen - click here to find out how.
[LINK TO BELOW TEXT ON RIGHT]
RIGHT WINDOW: These five people have been chosen for two reasons. Firstly, each of them seems to represent and illustrate well particular ideas, themes, or institutions which was key to the construction of the British Empire in Victoria and perhaps around the world as well. Secondly, we must of course admit that, as in all historical work, the boundaries of our project were also delineated by the availability of sources. Therefore, these five people were chosen too because the existence and availability of sources on them allowed us to present a sufficiently informative, illuminating, and entertaining webpage about them. In constructing a website, the visual element comes to the fore, and we were lucky enough to find a fair number of images (we have good images of all but one of our characters) and historical documents related to our characters from which, thanks largely to the kindness of the British Columbia Archives, we have been able to reproduce images. We hope this adds to the visual appeal of the site.


Historical Approach:
This website's theme is based on the Historical concept known as Microhistory, a diverse field which, generally speaking, rejects a conception of History as based on the pseudo-scientific analysis of large-scale societal trends based on statistical data. Microhistorians seek to reconstruct the experiences and interactions of individual people (and especially 'average' people, that is to say, those not within the powerful elite at a given time) and, by 'reading between the lines' of what they have left behind, hopefully find out something more about not only what their lives were like (including how they conceived of their own existence), but also about the basis of larger societal phenomena at the level of everyday life.
If you're curious to find out more about Microhistory and the philosophy behind this website, click here. [LINK TO TEXT ON MICROHISTORY BELOW]
RIGHT WINDOW:
MICROHISTORY AND CRAIGFLOWER CONNECTIONS
Microhistory has been defined by Edward Muir as "a genre...devoted to social relationships and interactions among historical persons who, in contrast to analytic categories, actually existed and who experienced life as a series of events."1 In order to distil evidence of this type into the deepest possible insights about the past, care should be taken to construct as fully as possible the intellectual outlook of historical figures at the time they lived with little to no reference to the outlook of the author's time.2 In this process, writes prominent microhistorian Carlo Ginzburg, we should not be deterred by the so-called lack of objectivity of a source - he reminds us that a historian should be skilled enough to glean useful insights about a past person's intellectual world from documents left by them which show their process of evaluating the world from their unique point of view.3 We should add here that it is the Italian school of microhistory, of which Ginzburg is probably the most prominent representative, whose ideas are most salient in this website. Also notable is the microhistorical approach to what we should consider a 'typical' person or incident in the past, and even whether or not typicality is required of a particular subject in order to be useful. In fact, some microhistorians argue, we can often learn much about a 'normal' or 'average' experience by examining that which is considered abnormal, and asking why it was so.4 On this website, for example, we might posit that the unruly behaviour of blacksmith Peter Bartleman illuminates clearly that the typical HBC servant was expected to be obedient and to do as the company dictated; Bartleman reveals this expectation not by embodying it, but rather by shunning it, and leaving us with the evidence of how his abnormal behaviour was perceived and dealt with.
In any case, the fact that microhistory concentrates on individuals, and even 'atypical' individuals, does not mean that it has nothing to say about the wider world. A microhistorian may discover much that he believes can be applied to past societies as a whole from his explorations of a few individuals. Microhistory simply argues that there must be an exchange between the wider scene and the world of the individual, and that the stories of individuals should not be buried under a mountain of hypotheses and statistics about societal trends.5 Furthermore, microhistorians also stress that in looking at small-scale data, we often reveal ruptures in history between settings and times - indeed, this difficulty in generalization based on masses of data was partly responsible for Microhistory's emergence!6 Our website follows this philosophy - we hope that our characters demonstrate ideas and institutions that were important and widespread elements of the British Empire during its heyday, but at the same time we emphasize that the study of the lives of our characters as individuals generates useful data, in its own right, about the experience of living during the 1850s and 1860s - regardless of what they may or may not tell us about Imperial processes in a wider sense.

Notes:
1. Edward Muir, "Introduction: Observing Trifles," in Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, eds. E. Muir & G. Ruggiero, translated by Eden Branch (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), ix.
2. Muir, "Introduction: Observing Trifles," xii.
3. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, translated by John and Anne Tedseschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1992), xvii-xviii.
4. Muir, "Introduction: Observing Trifles," xv-xvi; Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, xxi.
5. Georg G. Iggers, "From Macro- to Microhistory: The History of Everyday Life," in Historiography in the twentieth century : from scientific objectivity to the postmodern challenge (Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 104.
6. Iggers, "From Macro- to Microhistory," 112.



About Us:
Craigflower Connections was researched, written, and constructed by three undergraduate students at the University of Victoria - click here to learn more about us and how you can get in touch. [LINK TO APPROPRIATE STUFF]