I finished a chapter of my thesis. Finally. I realized last week that what I thought of as one chapter was really two. So I split it in half. The good news is of course that I ended up with a completed chapter, completed by my self-imposed deadline. The better news is that this means that I’m also more than half-way towards finishing the next chapter.

I’m thinking of posting the text on the site to get feedback from who ever will read it. We’ll see. The chapter is entitled “A Brief Social History of Tourism in the Bahamas 1740 – 1967″ I’m trying to give background information for the Fergusons of Farm Road. It’s impossible to understand what is going on in the scripts without first understanding their context. Chapter three is tentatively title “A Brief History of the Bahamian Courtesy Campaign 1955 – 1970.” To the best of my knowledge no one has written about this before. I’m pretty sure there is no Bahamian literature on it. The most I see is a sentence that describes “a friendliness campaign” that happened in 1970, this thing goes quite a bit deeper than that. (Well at least I think so anyway )

Good news to report to on what will happen with all of this when I graduate. I got a grant from the Cable Bahamas Cares foundation to get the scripts published. I hope to do a great deal more than just publish them too. Big plans. We’ll see if they become reality soon enough. First the thesis!

I’ve also fixed up the website a bit, as regular visitors will know. (Who, pray tell, are these regular visitors?) It now looks good enough and works well enough that I can post-pone the major surgery that I had intended for it. The essays are gone from the page list and they live in their own little parallel universe away from the blog posts. The home page has gotten a nice little picture. (With unintentional symbolism no less, thorny problems, and a thorny fence!)

I still need to fix up the blog page and get some air on the page, and I think something is wrong with the sidebar in archives view… I guess the main thing I want to do is to get a projects page going, one that outlines my evolving Fergusons work and let’s you know what’s going on. I guess this blog will still serve that purpose.

When I started this dot info site, I didn’t realize how much content I had to put up here. And it looks like much more to come…

This is a sort of correction to the info-graphic that appears in the powerpoint presentation, the “Look up, Move up, The World is Watching” Courtesy Campaign began January 4, 1968 and not mid-1967 as the slides suggest.

Update: The slides have now been corrected.

Larry Smith has written a great column on the Fergusons of Farm Road at his blog at Bahama Pundit. Check it out.

A correction came in from Larry Smith:

I note the following on your website: “The creation of the Progressive Liberal Party (PLP) by black activists in 1955 ushered the Bahamas into the era of the political party.”

My understanding is that the PLP was formed in 1953 by mixed race (or conchy joe) activists like H M Taylor and Cyril Stevenson, although the party’s support came mostly from black Bahamians.

He is of course quite correct.

I will have to double check the original source that I used (Doris Johnson’s Quiet Revolution (which should have had the correct date) ) to get to the root of the problem, but for now I have changed the text and the citation to point to Saunders and Craton’s Islanders in the Stream vol 2 and used their “non-white” nomenclature instead of my previous “black activists.”

Thanks Larry!

So. Where am I? It’s been two weeks in beautiful Nassau and what do I have to show for it so far?

Let’s see. Thus far, I have done no interviews. I sent my appeal for interview subjects in to the Nassau newspapers but as yet, I don’t even think that they published it. Even if they did… I made an appeal for interviews at my talk/lecture (more on this later) and again, nothing. I will have to draw up a sample.

The talk (and TV interview) coincided with a week when I was quite sick. So I was going to the archives for far less hours than in the first week. I’m on the mend now and I’m hoping to get more done. My schedule will still entail me going to the Archives during the day but I guess I have to start scheduling some interviews in the evenings. This should not be too difficult. Three interviews this week?

The talk itself was quite useful in getting me to think about the information that I had already collected. I was able to fill a few gaps in my knowledge that I didn’t know needed to be filed and I can see some areas that I need to work on. I was surprised at the positive reactions to the work. A bit disturbed at the shallow nature of the questions afterwards, but overall I’m pleased with the response.

Coming up I need to get into the ZNS archives. There may be a Ministry of Tourism “archive-of-sorts” that I can call about. The Counsellors on Collins Avenue also have some kind of archive and a quick glance through their “archives” might also be helpful. I doubt that looking through government records will be useful, but I can check that at the archives tomorrow.

Questions that need answering at this point are:

• Why did ZNS pick up the Fergusons in 1974? There doesn’t seem to be a clear rationale for them to have done so. Yet they did.
• When did the first “Courtesy Campaign” begin in the Bahamas? This was Pindling’s “Look Up, Move Up, The World is Watching campaign.” I just need a date and some details…

I have a lot of information on the Friendliness through Understanding campaign, and I don’t think I need information on campaigns that came after, unless one of them was running when the Fergusons returned to ZNS…

Anyway. This is where I am. I’ve seen a lot of stuff so far, and unfortunately I just came off of a slow week. I have two weeks left. That’s it. Before I know it I’ll be back in the cold and I’ll have to start writing.

No time to waste.

Here is the powerpoint of the presentation that was given last night at the Bahamas Historical Society. The paper will most likely come sometime in February…

Just to let you know that I’m giving a lecture at the Bahamas Historical Society Museum on the northwest corner of Elizabeth and Shirley Streets, at 6:00 pm on Thursday January 15, 2009. (This happens to be tomorrow)

Thursday, January 15th, 2009 – Ward Minnis: “National Identity, Tourism and the Fergusons of Farm Road, 1970-74.”

This is the presentation that I gave at the end of my 5001 “Historical Practice” class, April 2008. I think it gives you a good idea of where the project came from, how it evolved and where I was at the time.

Enjoy.

News ladies and gentlemen. I have a presentation to prepare for. I’ll be at the CERLAC Graduate Student Research Conference on Latin America and the Caribbean 7-8 November 2008, York University, Toronto. I’m presenting on the “Fergusons of Farm Road”, a.k.a. my research to date. Research that I will be sharing with you here as time goes on. So basically I have a month to prepare. The sound you hear is me hyperventilating.

This week went well as far as work was concerned. I went through 3 episodes, note taking and annotating. TA duties took away a good deal of my moxie this week. I severely underestimated the time it was going to take me to mark a map quiz. Thank God that another TA is now working with me. I was quite glad and grateful to give her half of the stack.

Going through the episodes this week, what stood out to me was that the character archs could be a source of meaning. For instance, there is a character named Samuel, and he develops from an irresponsible carouser into the assistant manager of the hotel where he works. Remember that while the show was running the Bahamas was going from a colony to an independent nation. Could that Character’s story have any greater meaning? Could he be a metaphor for the country’s development? I have to read more to find out for sure. But this angle looks promising.

I’m also working on a thorough redesign of the site. Should be done in a couple weeks. I’m trying to get it done before the conference. Hopefully the work on that doesn’t interfere with me getting my presentation together. Just a hunch, but I think that is more important.

(Although a redesign would be so very nice.)