The Expanse Reading Order

The Expanse is a science fiction series of novels written by James S. A. Corey, the pen name for a collaboration between authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. The Expanse story consists of nine main novels and eight shorter works (two prequel short stories, one prequel novella, one interquel short story, and four interquel novellas). The final novella is set after the main book series. 

From 2015 to 2018 the Syfy network aired three seasons of adaptations of the The Expanse books, that roughly aligned with the first three books -- Leviathan Wakes, Caliban's War and novellas and short stories through Abaddon's Gate and The Vital Abyss. It is set several hundred years in the future, after humans from Earth have colonized Mars, the asteroid belt and several moons of the outer planets.

The crew of the Rocinante (left to right): Amos Burton, James Holden,
Naomi Nagata and Alex Kamal

It generally follows the adventures of the crew of a stolen Martian warship, the Rocinante, as humans deal with the discovery of a bizarre alien technology dubbed "the protomolecule," created two billion years ago by an alien civilization that has mysteriously vanished.

The protomolecule building...something...out of people on the asteroid Eros

Syfy cancelled The Expanse after three seasons, but it was picked up by Amazon, which aired three more seasons aligned with the events in the next three books and short stories: Cibola Burn is covered by season 4, Nemesis Games is essentially Season 5 and Babylon's Ashes and Strange Dogs Season 6.

These three books and the corresponding three seasons produced by Amazon follow the crew of the Rocinante after the protomolecule opened of a "Ring Gate" beyond the orbit of Uranus. This is a wormhole that connects our Solar System with over 1300 systems with inhabitable planets, and the technology left behind by the mysterious "Ring Builders." Meanwhile an interplanetary war breaks out over who will control the access to this new frontier.

Passing through the Ring Gate

The last three books -- Persepolis Rising, Tiamat's Wrath and Leviathan Falls make a leap into the future, picking up the story roughly thirty year after the war that ended Babylon's Ashes, with the reemergence of a renegade Martian faction that had escaped to an alien system with the only remaining protomolecule sample. This thirty-year shift between Books Six and Seven is a natural break in the action, and it is why the Amazon series stopped at Book Six.

The Martian corvette Rocinante

Based on personal experience, I highly recommend both watching the television series AND reading the books.

My first memory of science fiction is when I was about 4-years old and I watched the original airing of Star Trek episode "The Doomsday Machine." I was never the same after that. By the mid-70s I was a full blown Trekkie. I read and re-read every single one of the James Blish book adaptations of Star Trek: TOS, and the Alan Dean Foster adaptations of The Animated Series. At recess we played "Star Trek landing party" and launched polystyrene models of Klingon battle cruisers and the USS Enterprise out the third-story window of my friend's apartment. In 1975 it was Space:1999. Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Moonbase Alpha, a lunar nuclear holocaust on September 13, 1999 and models of Eagles and Hawks flying out the same friend's third-story window.

Then in 1977 -- the TV commercials for Star Wars. When they would come on, which wasn't that often, time seemed like it both slowed down and sped up. The movie looked like it was shot in real life compared with the cheesy special effects we were used to.

Near as I could figure, it was a world of Wookies and flying cities under attack shooting lasers.

My Uncle Bruce took me to see it that summer when it came out to wide release -- then I saw it again, and again, five or six more times that summer. Star Wars played at the Westerly Twin Cinema for over a year, only charging a buck a showing. One of my friends saw it over 100 times. Then I saw the first Alien movie the weekend it opened in theaters in 1979... By now I was reading Tolkien, Asimov, Frank Herbert and Harlan Ellison, Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land...and short stories like H.P. Lovecraft's The Colour Out Of Space and Alan Edward Nourse's Brightside Crossing.

So, yeah. By the time I was in high school I had watched and read a lot of really good science fiction. And even more that was not very good at all. I am not kidding when I say The Expanse is one of the best sci-fi series ever written, and ever adapted to the screen.

The story originally began in the 2000s as a failed MMORPG video game that morphed into a tabletop roleplaying game before taking the characters from the roleplaying game and using them as the basis of the crew of the Rocinante. The DM for the tabletop game, Ty Franck, and the role-player who developed the character of Detective Miller, Daniel Abraham, took on the pen name James S.A. Corey and started writing the first novel, Leviathan Wakes. The story, based on the characters and plot emerging from the roleplaying game, also took inspiration from Alien, Dune, Babylon 5, Frederick Pohl's HeeChee trilogy, Larry Niven, Alfred Bester... The first two books (I am paraphrasing here based on some interviews I watched on YouTube after Season Six concluded) are really a noir detective space opera with intense body horror that evolves into a political spy thriller. Books Three is a haunted house story and Four a frontier western. With death slugs. Books Five and Six are a coming-of-age story set in a disaster movie, and the last three novels are an epic fantasy trilogy ala The Tombs of Atuan. But since it is really well-written science fiction, the genre-hopping is only a means to an end. The overarching story -- human beings trying (and mostly failing) to use a nearly incomprehensible alien technology for human ends, and the intent of the Ring Builders, which was to wait millions and even billions of years for another race to come along so they could -- wait, no spoilers! -- all seen through the crew of the Rocinante. It is epic in scope with characters that develop a lived-in intimacy and a realistic sense of family over the decades and centuries that the story takes place

I started with watching the television series when it was on Syfy and then the final three seasons on Amazon. Originally I only bought the last three books to find out what happened after the end of the war between "the inners" and "the belters" at the end of Season Six. But the last three books were so rich an experience I decided to go back to the beginning. I bought and read Books One through Six even though I had already watched the television series and knew in broad strokes what was going to happen. The books are different enough from the television series to make it a worthwhile endeavor. The story in the books is NOT a word-for-word script for the television series. Some TV characters are amalgamations of several book characters, and other book characters never make it into the television series. And just because a character is alive in the books doesn't mean they will survive in the television series, and vice versa. But it is the internal dialogues of the main characters, told in first person perspectives in the books, that flesh out the character, their through processes and motivations far more realistically than how the plot was occasionally pushed forward in the television series in the interest of time, to the detriment of character motivation and story-telling.

What makes James Holden, Josephus Miller (both incarnations), Amos Burton, and Chrisjen Avasarala tick is more understandable while reading the books.

I rarely take time away from reading history associated with whatever I am currently teaching or researching. Years ago I read a LOT of sci-fi and fantasy for fun -- some was good, some was great but most was meh. I just don't have time for fiction that is not absolutely 100% worth the time invested.

These books are worthy of all the time they take. And they are relatively quick reads too. I highly recommend them, to one and all.

Also, watch the television series!

Publication order is the best order to read the series. Below is an in-universe, chronological list of all works, with the main series of novels in bold:

• Drive: An Expanse Short Story (Nov 27, 2012)

• The Churn: An Expanse Novella (April 29, 2014)

• The Butcher of Anderson Station: An Expanse Short Story (Oct 17, 2011)

• The Expanse #1: Leviathan Wakes (June 2, 2011)

• The Last Flight of the Cassandra: A Story of The Expanse - (bonus short story in The Expanse Roleplaying Game; May 14, 2019)

• The Expanse #2: Caliban's War (June 26, 2012)

• Gods of Risk: An Expanse Novella (Sept 15, 2012)

• The Expanse #3: Abaddon's Gate (June 4, 2013)

• The Vital Abyss: An Expanse Novella (Oct 15, 2015)

• The Expanse #4: Cibola Burn (June 5, 2014)

• The Expanse #5: Nemesis Games (June 2, 2015)

• The Expanse #6: Babylon's Ashes (Dec 6, 2016)

• Strange Dogs: An Expanse Novella (July 18, 2017)

• The Expanse #7: Persepolis Rising (Dec 5, 2017)

• Auberon: An Expanse Novella (Nov 12, 2019)

• The Expanse #8: Tiamat's Wrath (Mar 26, 2019)

• The Expanse #9: Leviathan Falls (Nov 30, 2021)

• The Sins of our Fathers: An Expanse Novella (Mar 15, 2022)

• The Expanse #10: Memory's Legion (March 15, 2022) - Compendium of most novellas and short stories

Digital Comic Miniseries (in conjunction with The Expanse television series)

• The Expanse Origins is a digital comic miniseries and soft-cover graphic novel that serves as a prequel to The Expanse television series,  reveals the untold origins of the four crew members of The Rocinante as well as Detective Josephus Miller. It was released between February and July 2017 and compiled into a single print volume in February 2018.

• An interquel 4-issue miniseries, set between Season 4 and Season 5 of the TV series and just called The Expanse, was released between December 2020 and March, 2021 and compiled into a single print volume in August 2021.

Finally, if anyone decides to watch the television series after reading this blog post, I also recommend watching The Expanse episode recaps by Peter Peppers on YouTube. He has produced over 60 Expanse videos, and does fantastic breakdowns, reviews, and explainers. He's read the books and uses his knowledge from them to clarify anything confusing that happened in the television episodes, but without giving away spoilers what's coming next. Good stuff!

A Lawsuit Against the Internet Archive's Open Library Project

[The inspiration for this post came from listening to Boston Public Radio's Jim Braude and Margery Eagan interview of tech writer and blogger Andy Ihnatko on July 22, 2022 "focusing on the publishing industry’s lawsuit against the Internet Archive." The interview can be heard here -- scroll down the red and white "play" triangle labeled "LISTEN 18:59 Andy Ihnatko on BPR | July 22, 2022" 

In a way, it also a follow-up to this 2016 post on this blog, extolling the virtues of doing virtual research using the resources of the Internet Archive.]

In San Francisco there stands a bright, white, defunct Christian Science church. There are big white columns out front, with pink steps leading up to iron double doors. The church houses the gigantic internet project founded 20 years ago, the Internet Archive. 

                                          The Internet Archive, San Francisco.                                          Under CC License From Flickr User Beatrice Murch

“The idea was to try to build the library of Alexandria, version two,” explains Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. “We bought this building because it matched our logo,” Kahle says.

The library of Alexandria, version one, was in Egypt. It was one of the biggest and most important libraries of the ancient world. It’s said to have housed every book or scroll ever written, until it was destroyed in a fire in the first century BC. 

At the time of this post, the Internet Archive is facing a different sort existential crisis. According to Tech journalist Viola Stefanello, 

In the early days of the pandemic, as physical libraries, schools, universities, and bookstores closed—and people were restricted from leaving their homes with very few exceptions—long waiting lists developed to access popular eBooks at public libraries.  

 To alleviate that problem, the Internet Archive launched a short-term project. Dubbed the National Emergency Library, it allowed anyone who signed up—for free—to their website to borrow digital copies of 1.4 million books in their possession without a waiting list. Most of these materials were 20th-century books that the Internet Archive had previously digitized to make up for the lack of commercially available eBook versions. 

The National Emergency Library was part of the Open Libraries initiative—a web-accessible public library containing the full texts of over 1.6 million public domain books as well as over 647,000 books not in the public domain.

In the Internet Archive’s announcement, published on March 24, 2020...Brewster Kahle said that allowing anyone to borrow these 1.4 million books without a waiting list in a time of crisis “was our dream for the original Internet coming to life: the Library at everyone’s fingertips”. 

Two years later, though, the Internet Archive’s dream is playing out as a legal nightmare.

Following public criticism from several writers, and accusations of “acting as a piracy site” by the Authors Guild, a group of major publishing houses sued the Internet Archive in summer 2020...

In this suit, the Internet Archive—represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)—argued that its Open Libraries initiative is basically equivalent to traditional library lending thanks to what is known as Controlled Digital Lending. According to this argument, the Internet Archive has been making digital copies of books that it physically owns, but only lending out the digital file to one user at a time, essentially replicating the experience of physical libraries only loaning a book to one person. 

At issue was the Internet Archive's decision to allow "students, academics, and everyone else to borrow up to five digitized books or eBooks for a two-week period" and "allowed people to access the same digital copy of a text at the same time." Publishers have long been upset that the Internet Archive digitizes the physical books in its collection and lends them out. According to an article by Aja Romano at Vox, the Internet Archive's "right to do so has been endorsed by many librarians and legal experts. But many critics of this approach, especially those within the publishing industry, have long argued that the IA’s Open Library is piracy because it distributes books as image files rather than appropriately licensing the works and compensating authors." 

The copyright infringement lawsuit was first filed on June 1, 2020, in the Southern District of New York, and is being coordinated by the Association of American Publishers. The AAP has compared the IA's scanning and lending efforts to those of the world's largest pirate sites. The plaintiff publishers are seeking damages for infringement as well as to shut down the IA’s scanning and lending program and to have any infringing scans destroyed.

According to the EFF’s Legal Director Corynne McSherry, the stakes far surpass the Internet Archive. “The publishers are not seeking protection from harm to their existing rights. They are seeking a new right foreign to American copyright law: the right to control how libraries may lend the books they own,” he stated. 

The Internet Archive maintains that its work does not actually harm writers or publishers. But because book publishers often lend e-books commercially (including to libraries), the Internet Archive could be seen as harming that aspect of publishers’ market, according to Joanne Gray, lecturer in Digital Cultures at The University of Sydney, University of Sydney, and Cheryl Foong, Senior Lecturer in Law, Curtin University. They also argue that

The flexibility of fair use is one thing the Internet Archive has on its side... There is room for the court to assess the public benefit of the Internet Archive’s lending practices which, as the National Emergency Library exemplifies, are undeniably strong. Assessing whether the public interest arguments are strong enough to overcome the weight of the market harm may be key to deciding who wins this case.

According to Publishers Weekly reporter Andrew Albanese, the plaintiffs (Hachette, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Wiley) are asking for the Internet Archive to repay financial damages for 127 copyrighted titles present in the Open Libraries. According to one estimate, if the publishers win the maximum damages they could receive, the Internet Archive would owe $19 million dollars in damages, which is about one year of the Archive’s operating revenue. The plaintiffs also seek the halt to the copying books for loan in the Open Library Project. 

In response, attorneys for the Internet Archive told the court it is seeking monthly sales data for all books in print by the four plaintiffs dating back to 2011, data the publishers are loathe to comply with.

The Internet Archive's recent motion seeking summary judgment, presented in early July, reads.

“In a copyright lawsuit against a practice that has continued for years, one would expect the copyright holder to be able to point to some metric showing that the defendant’s conduct has harmed them. Plaintiffs have failed to quantify any market harm from CDL. And there’s a good reason: because the lending, licensing, and sales data demonstrate that no such harm has occurred or is likely to occur.”

Both parties’ request for the court to proceed with summary judgment has been granted.

“Beyond the monetary damages, the publishers are asking for the destruction of 1.4 million books, many of which do not exist in digital form anywhere else. That would be a real tragedy for people who depend on us for access to information,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Vox in 2020. 

According to The Daily Dot's Viola Stefanello, 

"Considering that the print copies of these books are usually incredibly hard to access, let alone borrow, having a free, digitized copy at a click’s distance can speed up the research process significantly—and make knowledge more attainable for people who don’t work in academia."

We shall see how the judge rules in this case. A decision is expected sometime by the end of 2022 or beginning of 2023.

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Sources:

Albanese, Andrew, "Internet Archive Seeking 10 Years of Publisher Sales Data for Its Fair Use Defense" Publishers Weekly Aug 09, 2021 https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/libraries/article/87104-internet-archive-seeking-10-years-of-publisher-sales-data-for-its-fair-use-defense.html#:~:text=In%20an%20August%209%20filing,Wiley)%20dating%20back%20to%202011

Gray, Joanne and Cheryl Foong, "Publishers vs the Internet Archive: why the world’s biggest online library is in court over digital book lending." theconversation.com, July 20, 2022. https://theconversation.com/publishers-vs-the-internet-archive-why-the-worlds-biggest-online-library-is-in-court-over-digital-book-lending-187166?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=bylinetwitterbutton 

"In An Old Church, The Internet Archive Stores Our Digital History." KALW Public Media / 91.7 FM Bay Area; story originally aired in January of 2015. https://www.kalw.org/show/crosscurrents/2019-09-11/in-an-old-church-the-internet-archive-stores-our-digital-history

Romano, Aja "A lawsuit is threatening the Internet Archive — but it’s not as dire as you may have heard" Vox.com, June 23, 2020. https://www.vox.com/2020/6/23/21293875/internet-archive-website-lawsuit-open-library-wayback-machine-controversy-copyright

Stefanello, Viola "Inside the lawsuit that could upend the Internet Archive as you know it" https://www.dailydot.com/ July 13, 2022. https://www.dailydot.com/debug/internet-archive-lawsuit/

Tsuboniwa (A Little History Garden on Twitter)

When I first started this blog a decade ago, I realized that there was often information I would come across that was interesting but perhaps did not need an entire blog post to get across. Hence, "Tsuboniwa - A Little History Garden on Twitter" was born. 

A  tsubo-niwa (坪庭/壷庭/つぼにわ) is a type of very small garden in Japan, and I imagined my tweets would be smaller pieces of historical information to share with the online community. 

I was pretty excited when at some point in the last year I passed 500 followers and 4K Tweets! 😊

Twitter has changed since I first opened my account in April 2012. When I started I subscribed to the Twitter feeds of other educators and historians and most of my feed was filled with interesting tidbits of history and links to longer, also interesting articles and websites. Now my feed is mostly filled of useless and often intrusive ads, angry posts about current events and partisan bitterness, and only a tiny fraction of the cool history and education content I used to enjoy. I do not go on Twitter that much anymore unless I have something specific I want to post or I need to post something for one of the public history or educational non-profits that I operate the Twitter accounts for.

But today while I posting on the Tsuboniwa about the current lawsuit publishers are waging against libraries and especially the Internet Archive. trying to limit the lending of digital books (more about that in tomorrows post), I came across a series of Tweets from Cate Denial about the impending doom of a new school year, just around the corner.

 I will share what she wrote in the space below, and let anyone who cares to know, there is a link to her blog, CATE DENIAL, in the "Paths Through The Wood" blog rollcall in the right menu. It's good stuff!

I was already mulling over the idea of built-in "catch-up days" that could double for study prep before a major evaluation, and the idea of scheduled "grading days," especially for late work is also a good idea 

Kate's last suggestion to "schedule your lunch break ON YOUR CALENDAR" is great advice. But first it made me laugh, and then cry just a little... If I had a dollar for every time I inhaled my lunch at my desk while working. or two dollars for each time I skipped eating lunch all together because I simply didn't have the time to, and I put all that money from over 30 years of teaching into my retirement fund... I could retire already.

Epictetus, on Happiness and Freedom

"Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions."

- Epictetus, Enchiridion 1.1

Finn spending some quality time with the Enchiridion in
Adventure Time S7e23, "Crossover." 

The State of Civics Ed. in Rhode Island, July 2022

Today I put on my "President of the Rhode Island Council of the Social Studies" hat and went to a Zoom meeting hosted by RI Civic Learning Coalition.

Today's meeting included members of the RI Department of Education (RIDE), who shared some updates on the upcoming "Civics Task Force" announced back in June that was the result of a lawsuit against the State of Rhode Island by students, parents and other advocates that schools weren’t providing the civics education young people needed to be engaged citizens. Apparently an application form is being created and then once that is finished it will be sent out to those of us who are interested in serving on it and the general public, most of whom are probably not that interested. 

The Civics Task Force's first meeting is September 1, 2022, or sometime around then. RIDE is also in the process of processing all the comments they have received about the new graduation standards and the draft History and Social Studies standards. 

It was also good to hear that everything so far is just a draft, and the goal is get a lot more feedback before anything is formalized. I do have some concerns about those, but having been a member of the writing team and before the RIHSSAC committee, I agreed not to share anything publicly until the proposed standards are released by RIDE. More on all that in a future post...

Finally, Geralyn Ducady, formerly the education director at the Rhode Island Historical Society, took the position of History/Social Studies/Humanities person at RIDE. She just started two days ago, so she wasn't brought in on this meeting, as according to the RIDE folks she has a lot of info to process through to get up to speed. I don't envy her that. Before she left RIHS I had been working with her on several initiatives -- feedback on the EnCompass digital textbook, serving on the RIHS Teacher Advisory Group, and getting her feedback her on the draft of my RI History course. She is a solid addition to the RIDE team and just in time, just as the new standards, civics education task force, and civics requirements are rolling out this next year.

The other interesting part of the meeting came from the RICLC's student civics survey, which I am citing now as the source for the slide images below. The Civics Learning Coalition is in the process of compiling the data from their survey and will be releasing a formal report in August. So I am not going to be discussing everything they shared at today's meeting and I will share their final report on this blog when it comes out. 

But some of the feedback they received is very interesting, and it relates to ideas I've advocated for or for things I've suspected for some time.

A lack of professional development....

When the state eliminated coursework an PD hours as a requirement for renewing certification, it had a chilling effect on professional development offerings. The school I work at (and I suspect at other schools around the state), PD has been tailored to whatever the new district initiative is, and to whatever PD the staff is willing to provide for each other though the "unconference" model. At today's meeting the representatives from RIDE blamed the General Assembly for creating "unfunded mandates" in education legislation -- that legislators talk about funding an initiative when first developing a bill but when it comes to the final draft and passage, funding to support it is no longer in there or is so small its negligible. This is true as far as it goes, but far more destructive to the state of PD for RI educators was RIDE tying certification entirely to evaluations back 10-15 years ago while eliminating PD completely from the certification process. But I didn't say anything, because it would have derailed the conversation about civics.

But there too -- the opportunity to require a mandatory civics course for graduation is knocking on the door, but it does not look like the state is going to open that door and let it in. I was on the curriculum revision team in my district, back in 2007, I had proposed such a course. While the assistant super, who was the admin chair of the revision committee, agreed such a course would be a great idea, he said that forcing all students to take another required course would seriously impact all elective courses and especially those offered by the history department. And that was the end of that conversation. 

So I am fully aware why RIDE might not want to mandate a civics course for every LEA in the state. Requiring a course in one subject means that an elective has fewer students. But given the current political climate mandating some understanding of how government, democracy and civic virtue works may be more important to the fundamental health of our state than another STEM course.

All great questions. There was more information about survey design they discussed during the meeting; I think they did a great job on the design of the questions.

However, someone is sure to point out that while almost 1000 respondents sounds like a lot, there were 139,184 K-12 students enrolled in public schools in 2020, the most recent year for which there is data available. [1] That is less than 1% of the total number of RI students that took part in the survey (0.689 per cent, to be precise), but as it turns out, it is close to the basic sample size of 1000.  

A good maximum sample size is usually 10% as long as it does not exceed 1000

A good maximum sample size is usually around 10% of the population, as long as this does not exceed 1000. For example, in a population of 5000, 10% would be 500. In a population of 200,000, 10% would be 20,000. This exceeds 1000, so in this case the maximum would be 1000.

Even in a population of 200,000, sampling 1000 people will normally give a fairly accurate result. Sampling more than 1000 people won’t add much to the accuracy given the extra time and money it would cost. [2]

It would be nice though if RIDE added some civics questions to the SurveyWorks questionnaire they send out every year and keep them on there for a few years to check for consistency in responses... 

More data is always good! 

Finally, it is not surprising that over thirty percent of students doubt they could accurately compare how local, state or national government functions. Less than half of students have an actual civics course available for them to take at their school. And while I am not opposed to the recent (unfunded) mandate from the General Assembly that 

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[1] "Public school enrollment in Rhode Island" Kids Count Data Center, © 2022 The Annie E. Casey Foundation. https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/5664-public-school-enrollment#detailed/2/any/false/574,1729,37,871,870/any/12268

[2] "How to choose a sample size (for the statistically challenged)" tools 4 dev © 2022 https://tools4dev.org/resources/how-to-choose-a-sample-size

Presentation on Rhode Island's Strange Relationship with Democracy - July 27, 2022

When HistoryCamp was first conceived circa 2013-2014, I had heard about it somehow. I don't remember exactly where or how anymore, but I remember hearing it was going to be an "unconference." At the time I was intrigued, though since I have sat through so many unconference PD's at work they have kind of lost their luster. 

For those of you that may not know, an unconference is 

"a participant-driven meeting. The term "unconference" has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid hierarchical aspects of a conventional conference, such as sponsored presentations and top-down organization." (Wikipedia)

When I learned they were looking for people to come do presentations about a historical topic they were passionate about, with none of the gatekeeping typical of an academic history conference, it sounded like fun. Well imho, presenting at an actual conference is fun too, but this sounded like great day of people discussing history stuff, not so they could ramp up their academic paper count but because they really wanted to. 

The T-shirt from the very first History Camp. I still have this!

In the beginning, HistoryCamp was under the aegis of BarCamp, which is where founder Lee Wright first got the idea for it. It has since become it's own thing with it's own website and 501(c)(3) with HistoryCamps taking place all around the US.

What is History Camp?

History Camp is a casual conference for adults from all walks of life—students, teachers, professors, authors, bloggers, reenactors, interpreters, museum and historical society directors and board members, genealogists, and everyone else—regardless of profession or degree—who is interested in and wants to learn more about history. (historycamp.org/about)

In any event, I decided to do my presentation about a topic I found to be a bit ironic  -- Rhode Island had been so democratic it was condemned as overly so by other colonies. The seizure of the General Assembly by the farmers in the mid-1780s and their ensuing antics with paper money was one of the incentives for the Constitutional Convention and the drafting of a stronger central government that would curb such excesses of populism and democracy. 

Yet by the nineteenth century the refusal of Rhode Island's ruling elite to abandon the Charter of 1663 -- a government established by BRITISH KING that continued to be state's system of government nearly SEVENTY YEARS AFTER THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION -- made Rhode Island more than an anachronism. The landowners refused to open up the franchise to non-landholders, something every other state had done by 1840. This led to a revolution known as the Dorr Rebellion, which resulted in an actual constitution being drafted to replace the royal charter that only partly addressed the lack of democracy and voting rights for propertyless workers in the state. 

So in a general way, that was what my first HistoryCamp presentation, on March 8, 2014, was about.

A flyer for the very first History Camp!

I have not given that particular presentation since, though I took elements from it to create a "History of the General Assembly" slideshow that I review each year with at the first leadership meeting for students in RI Model Legislature. 

This spring when the Western Rhode Island Civic Historical Society took a poll of its members for what they wanted the society to do this year, there was a "great interest in history lectures." As the Society's historian, I was asked if I could do some history lectures for the members and the interested public. So I am dusting off this presentation from 2014 for the first lecture of the summer, which I am giving it next week.

Facebook promo

This evening I met with one of the organizers of the "Movie Night" that the society is hosting, so we could figure out the best place to set up the presentation. It had been mentioned at the last meeting that maybe I could deliver out on the lawn. That would be fine if this were only a lecture, but the images from the slideshow are intrinsic to the talk. 

My first thought was to give the presentation outside on the east wall of the Paine House Museum, when the sun would shining on the direct opposite side of the building, but it was fairly obvious that it would still be way too bright at 6:30 PM when my talk is scheduled to begin. (Note: the images below were all taken in the morning, circa 10 AM)

The first thought was on east side of the building on the windowless span at the top of the stairs to nowhere... but at 6:30 PM it would still be too bright here.

The slope of the east lawn would be problematic as well. The projector would
need to be on some kind of a platform at least five feet off the ground so the projection would not be trapezoidal...

After looking at the other options inside the museum, we settled on using the "tavern room" (images below). 

The entrance to the Tavern Room following "the loop" from the front door.
The light-filtering shades are drawn in this photo and with the camera lens "zoomed"
all the way out, the lowness of the ceilings are emphasized. 
This section of the house likely dates to the early-to-mid 1700s

We will need to rearrange the chairs and tables. The wall in the top center will
make a great surface to project onto

 The right-hand area directly ahead is where I will set up a folding table for my
laptop and projector. 

See you all a week from tomorrow!

Episode IV: A New Hope - Light Saber Duel Remake

On this, the seventh anniversary of Freedom Day, I want to share some Star Wars Episode IV love. 

George Lucas has made many edits and re-edits of the the original Star Wars trilogy, and nearly of them I would happily do without...

Of course Han shot first; he didn't want to get killed!  

But the best revision to the original Star Wars movie in my humble opinion wasn't made by Disney or by George Lucas, it was FXitinPost's Star Wars: SC 38 – Reimagined, the 2019 fan remake of the 38th scene in Star Wars (1977), of Obi-Wan and Vader in their lightsaber duel on the Death Star. 

Enjoy!

                                                                                                        Playback is best on Full screen ↑

My fave part of this scene is when the red and blue lightsabers are reflected in Vader's eyes, symbolizing of course Anakin's internal strife between the light and the dark sides of the Force...