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ROCORStudies.org

Historical Studies of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad

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1 month ago
by Webmaster in ,

One of our advisory board members, Deacon Andrei Psarev of Holy Trinity Seminary in Jordanville, NY, operates the excellent church history website ROCORStudies.org. As the name suggests, the site is devoted to studying the history of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR). Recently, we asked Deacon Andrei to provide a summary of the site for our readers. He offered the following:

Our Website,  Historical Studies of the Russian Church Abroad, is a meeting place for people concerned with the past and present of the ROCOR.

  • Posted materials are in English and Russian.

Website Navigation:

LIVES OF BISHOPS
Hitherto unpublished biographies by Michael Woerl and photos of all bishops who served in the ROCOR, however briefly (e.g., Archbishop James Tooms of the American Orthodox Mission)

ARTICLES
Serialization of ROCOR history by Dr. Gernot Seide, bios of clergy and laity, canon law issues, relations with non–Orthodox. Your comments are welcome!

INTERVIEWS
Sister Vassa Larin on theology and education, interviews with historians and witnesses to key developments in ROCOR history

AUDIO RECORDINGS
Excerpts from liturgical services of Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, NY

GALLERY
Photographs, including archival and rear images, documenting the history of the ROCOR

ARCHBISHOP LEONTII OF CHILE  (1904-1971) 
Photos and documents pertaining to a man who was a confessor of the faith in the USSR and became a controversial bishop of the ROCOR 1904-1971 in South America

The Web site is updated once a month. Subscribe to our free newsletters!

A variety of opinions is encouraged as long as academic standards are upheld: claims should be supported by evidence and controversial views must be couched in an inoffensive tone.

Web Administrator Deacon Andrei Psarev
rocorstudies@gmail.com
www.rocorstudies.org

The 1940 Census Release: American History Moves Up a Decade

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1 month ago
by Aram Sarkisian in ,

For those of us historians who work in the early twentieth century, one of the major sources of our work (and indeed a lot of what we’ve done here at SOCHA) are public records.  We heavily depend on things like marriage and death certificates, government documents, voter registration lists, and, most especially, census schedules.  As mandated by the Constitution, every ten years, the government is required to count its population.  What ensues is a series of snapshots of the population at that moment in time, recording names, addresses, places of origin, occupations, literacy and work status, and various other tidbits of information that we as historians can use as launching points for our research.

While the United States Bureau of the Census produces raw statistical data on the findings of the census in the immediate aftermath of the enumeration, specific, personal information (basically, the individual schedules recorded by enumerators) is kept under confidential seal for a period of 72 years.  For historians, this means there’s an artificial barrier on how far we can go with this vital information.  With the exception of the 1890 census (which was almost entirely destroyed in a fire), we’ve been able to utilize federal census information going all the way back to the first count, in 1790.  With the advent of the internet, it’s become easier than ever to conveniently search for detailed, personal information and compile large amounts of material in relatively little time from fifteen of the twenty-three censuses.

Yet for the last ten years, we’ve been stuck at the composite picture of the United States as it was in 1930, in the early throes of the Great Depression, and the immediate aftermath of significant restrictions on immigration.  Monday, however, that picture changed quite a bit, as the National Archives released the records for the 1940 census, bringing us past the Depression and to the brink of the Second World War.

The release date was an interesting day, to say the least.  The record set covers some 132 million people, 3.8 million pages of records, coming in at about 18 terabytes of digital data (and, if you’re truly interested, it comes out to 4646 reels of microfilm, which would set you back a cool $580,750).  This was all released as raw image files, with no indexing done aside from the separation of schedules by their enumeration districts.  That’s where the public comes in.

After the unveiling at 9AM EDT, a mad flurry of researchers and volunteers from throughout the country flocked to the official website to begin downloading and indexing millions of pages worth of census schedules, many of them working in conjunction with FamilySearch.org, a rather comprehensive genealogy website operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  Immediately, all of the major genealogy sites started a de facto horse race to get files downloaded, indexed, and uploaded to their sites, a process estimated to last well into the summer.

By noon, the website had received almost 23 million hits, and was almost immediately rendered useless.  (According to the genealogy blog Ancestry Insider, the NARA’s contract with webhost Archives.com called for accessibility for 10 million hits and 25,000 concurrent users for the release date, with overflow handled by Amazon.com).  I spent all day furiously attempting to download several enumeration districts I was interested in perusing, and in several hours of work, somehow managed to download exactly one district, some 29 pages covering several blocks in midtown Manhattan.  By the late afternoon, it was impossible to get even a preview image to load.  By all accounts, the release was a general failure, with the demand far outweighing the anticipated threshold of interest.

Clearly, the release of the 1940 census was something anticipated by many, and it will be interesting to watch as the millions of schedules are indexed state-by-state in the coming months.  Slowly, we will see a more personal picture evolve out of this rich archive, indeed a much more personal picture than we’ve seen out of census documents in quite some time.  It is estimated over 20 million people who appear in these documents are still alive today.

For us here at SOCHA, it means we will be able to move a lot of our stories ten years into the future, and opens up a number of new avenues for research.  I’m excited to see where these documents will take us, and how we will be able to better tell the story of Orthodoxy in America as a result.

Fr. John Kochurov at Holy Trinity Cathedral (Chicago Daily News, Library of Congress)

Photo of the week: St. John Kochurov preaching in Chicago

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3 months ago
by Matthew Namee in ,

Starting up another potentially regular feature here at OrthodoxHistory.org…

Fr. John Kochurov at Holy Trinity Cathedral (Chicago Daily News, Library of Congress)

This photo, dated 1905, shows Fr. John Kochurov preaching from the pulpit in the newly-constructed Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Chicago. It’s one of several great shots of Holy Trinity to be found in the Chicago Daily News photo collection, available online via the Library of Congress website. We’ll post more of these Chicago photos in the future.

SOCHA, American Orthodox History, and the Digital Humanities

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3 months ago
by Fr. Oliver Herbel in , , , , ,

In the last several years, the discipline known as the “Digital Humanities” has come to the fore.  Digital Humanities is basically the intersection of the humanities and digital technology, for all the breadth that can mean, but often involves meta-data (data about data, if you will).  One of the sub-disciplines in the digital humanities field is digital history.

Digital history has generally meant using digital tools to help analyze historical source materials, though this can be done in different ways, from digital archives and interactive maps to text mining (assessing a text for patterns, perhaps of place-names or certain verbal structures).  By virtue of this blog and our associated Journal of American Orthodox Church History, SOCHA is certainly involved in digital history.  Furthermore, we intend to establish an online digital archive that will be searchable.  It will take time for this to occur, of course, but it is our full intention to work toward that.

That said, there are some areas of caution that one ought to have when thinking about digital history.  This recent blog post by Stanley Fish gets at one way in which text mining can be problematic:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/23/mind-your-ps-and-bs-the-digital-humanities-and-interpretation/

Essentially, Mr. Fish notes the problem of omitting contextual considerations.  It is too tempting for people in the digital humanities to perform their search, find some pattern of something or other and then make a bold claim.

I think he’s spot on, and even more so when applied to digital history.  It is a temptation in history generally.  It is difficult sometimes for historians not to confuse trivia with history.  Already, historians, especially new (young) historians, find a unique little snippet only to be faced with the challenge of confronting that initial excitement with the prospects of context.  That is, what is the ultimate significance of that snippet?  What does it tell us about American Orthodox Church history, for instance, or religion in American more generally in the nineteenth century, etc.?  That is, the contextual questions are there to keep the historian honest and avoid a myopic vision.  Text mining, though, as noted by Mr. Fish, is already beginning to make the temptation of mistaking trivia for history all too real.  The larger contextual and theoretical questions are sometimes pushed aside all too easily.

So, are we at SOCHA part of the problem?  I don’t think so.  I realize any singular blog post, taken on its own, could certainly seem to be analogous to the context-less argument from text mining, but I think if one realizes that the blog entry ought to be seen within the context of the blog as a whole, and really in the context of SOCHA’s work as a whole, all is well.  Matthew Namee and I have both written on early jurisdictional issues.  We also have JAOCH, which often deals with larger American-Orthodox historical concerns.  It is true that JAOCH is “narrow” in that it is concentrated on certain ecclesiastical histories, but it still requires the articles to be grounded in the larger histories of those various churches.  Also, when we do finally, some year down the road, unveil our digital, searchable archive, the intention will be to further the use of source material and not simply to encourage “pattern finding.”  There is much that digital history has to offer, but in keeping with the concerns raised by Mr. Fish, it is our hope and belief that SOCHA will be part of a creative but historically honest and grounded use of digital technology.

Click the image to order a copy of Nicholas Chapman's lecture on Philip Ludwell III.

Nicholas Chapman’s new lecture on Philip Ludwell now available

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3 months ago
by Matthew Namee in , , ,

Click the image to order a copy of Nicholas Chapman's lecture on Philip Ludwell III.

Nicholas Chapman recently gave an hour-long talk on Philip Ludwell III, the first Orthodox convert in American history. The lecture is now available for purchase, and you’ve got two options: an MP3 download for $4.95, and a boxed CD for $9.95. The boxed CD includes a newly-discovered portrait of Ludwell as a young man, and also the Ludwell family book plate. Both options — MP3 and CD — are available through Orthodox Christian Recorded Books, which features this summary:

Recent research has brought to light the existence of an Orthodox presence in colonial Virginia more than half a century before the arrival of the Russian Orthodox missionaries in Alaska. The Virginian believers were centered on Colonel Philip Ludwell III, who was the largest landowner in British Virginia. How did he come to the Faith and what did he do to bring others to the Church? Why is his story important for us today, and what can we learn from it to inspire our own love for God and desire to serve Him? Nicholas Chapman addresses these questions and others in this presentation, using materials from his upcoming book on the subject.

To order the MP3 for $4.95, CLICK HERE.

To order the boxed CD (with the Ludwell portrait and book plate) for $9.95, CLICK HERE.

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