The Ageless Protestant Work Ethic

Eric Schultz

In March of 1895, a reporter for The New York Times visited with “Aunt Betsey Saunders” on the occasion of her 105th birthday.  Her husband and sisters long dead, Saunders had sought refuge at the Norwalk Almshouse many years before.  (The more or less appropriate description for the resident of an almshouse was “inmate.”) The planned birthday celebration included a “generous dinner” and peppermint drops which, the reporter assured his readers, would satisfy old Betsey as much as if she had received a diamond-studded coronet.

Born in Saugatuck (part of modern Westport), Connecticut, in 1790, Betsey was still mentally sharp, had good hearing and carried on a lively conversation with the reporter.  In a year when Babe Ruth, Buckminster Fuller, and J. Edgar Hoover were born, she remembered the death of George Washington and announced optimistically that she expected to live to be at least 106.

Where the Newspapers Were

Randall Stephens

My friend Leslie Graham just sent me a link to a wonderful map resource: "Data Visualization: Journalism's Voyage West." Part of Stanford University's Rural West Initiative, the site tracks the spread of newspapers into the American interior and the West. "With the American newspaper under stress from changing economics, technology and consumer behavior," notes the introduction, "it's easy to forget how ubiquitous and important they are in society. For this data visualization, we have taken the directory of US newspaper titles compiled by the Library of Congress' Chronicling America project--nearly 140,000 publications in all--and plotted them over time and space."

Foxed Paper and the Slight Smell of Mold: Reading, Browsing Actual Print Periodicals

I cross-post this modified bit on archives and the work in the paper trenches, which is at Religion in American Culture.

Randall Stephens

Last week I visited the Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary Library in Gladstone, Mo, just north of Kansas City. The staff was terrific and a bonus was an enormous collection of discarded books for sale--$1 or 50 cents/ea. I picked up Tim LaHaye's Battle for the Mind, and, oddly enough, a copy of Gordon Wood's Empire of Liberty.

Ideally, I hoped to browse through some denominational magazines and periodicals from the 1950s and 1960s for my next project on Christianity and rock/anti-rock. I was pleasantly surprised. The library had loads of Baptist and SBC serials dating back to the early years of the Cold War. Some of the titles I browsed through: Baptist Quarterly Review; Home Life; Baptist Training Union Magazine; The Student (A Baptist-style Jesus People-ish magazine, which Sam Hill actually wrote in). In addition to all that there were extensive runs of Christianity Today and Christian Century, along with quite a few other gems.

The Southern Baptist Periodical Index was a real help. But blast the indexers for not cataloging what I wish they had! (Page after page after page on "Missions.") I have seldom used the Index to Religious Periodical Literature (Chicago: American Theological Library Association.) But it's a tremendous resource for work on post-war American religion. And it gives a pretty good indication of the more popular magazines and journals that circulated at the time. See below the first page of the edition for 1971, listing a range of publications. (Click to enlarge.)

So, here are a few questions for all the HS blog research nerds and archive troglodytes out there: What do you suppose were the largest circulating and/or most influential denominational or public opinion periodicals of the 1950s and 1960s? Which ones are the best for getting a sense of what men, women, and children in the pews, suburbs, and cities were thinking? Why?

There’s Something to Be Said for Love

Dan Allosso

Archives or online? Thankfully, we can have both. As Heather has mentioned recently, the fact that a lot of archival material is finding its way onto the internet means that it will be more accessible to researchers with families, who can’t spend months away from home. And to people in remote locations, who may have different points of view. And to people who can’t quit their “day job,” but want to learn about a particular aspect of the past. And to amateurs: people who do history for the love of it.

Since we’re talking about archives and amateurs, I thought I should mention an amateur archive that has been invaluable to me, but that may not be well-known to people who haven’t done research in upstate New York. It’s a multi-terabyte database of historical newspapers from New York state, that goes by the unintuitive name “Old Fulton NY Post Cards.” I was told about it by the Records Management Officer in Ontario County. She said, “you’ve searched Fulton already, of course.” And I, of course, said, “what?”

Run by a former IT professional named Tom Tryniski, the site has grown from a small collection of digitized post cards, to a collection of over 15 million newspaper pages, covering 342 newspapers, spanning the entire nineteenth and twentieth centuries (1797-2004). The largest collections are from Onondaga and Cayuga Counties; Oswego County (where Fulton is located) has 25, Oneida 27, and other western counties are well represented. But so is Manhattan, with 17 papers including the New York Sun (1843-1945).

The site is free. On the instruction page, there’s a link to a page where you can donate via Paypal, complete with a snapshot of the website’s staff, which consists of Tom wearing four different costumes. The newspapers have been scanned with “production grade Wicks and Wilson Microfilm scanners,” from films obtained from the State of New York Newspaper Project. The instruction page also announces “More Data Is Added Every Sunday Night,” which based on the volume of material here, must be true.

The interface is whimsical, but the search functions are state-of-the-art and powerful. And you can download the newspaper pages as pdfs. The instruction page describes the use of search terms, wildcards, and more complicated issues like phonic searching, stemming, and variable term weighting. There’s also a graphic, clickable index of newspapers, which can be downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet complete with date ranges. Old Fulton NY Post Cards is clearly a labor of love. We’re very lucky there are people who love doing this kind of thing, both professionally and also nights and weekends!

Seward Was an Upstate Lawyer

Dan Allosso

I was looking through the materials I photographed on my last trip to the American Antiquarian Society. This trip was mostly about acquiring background on the places where the people I’m researching lived. Although there are a LOT of old newspapers now available online, as Heather has recently pointed out, there are many that are not yet. The American Antiquarian Society has a huge collection of early papers, as well as broadsheets, political pamphlets, and books.

I photographed a lot of material, which is my strategy when I go to archives like this. Whenever digital photography is allowed, I focus on locating and recording as much in the archives as I possibly can in the time I have. There’s never enough time, but this strategy allows me to go home with more material than I’d ever be able to read, sitting at the desk in the archive. It amazes me that just a decade or so ago, people had to sit in these places for months and months—and then in many cases they still only managed to scratch the surface of what was available.

That’s not to say that past researchers haven’t done fabulously, getting to the meat of an issue and finding the relevant material. But I suspect it limited the time they had to look around the information they were seeking, to see, for example, what else might have been on people’s minds on the particular day a specific newspaper article they were looking for was printed. Not to mention, what might have been in the advertisements on the edge of the page.

For example, I was looking at a table of New York Bank Note discounts, in the Lyons NY Countryman for Tuesday, March 2nd 1830. The table was in the fifth column of page four. After I photographed it, I noticed there was a notice about the sale of a defaulted property in Lyons at the top of column six. So I shot a quick photo of it and moved on. It wasn’t until I reviewed my photos at home, that I read it through and found that, in addition to being an interesting example of a notice, complete with a detailed property description and a little more background information to add to my knowledge of people in Lyons, the final line answers an unresolved question from my earlier research.

As I was putting together all the legends that surround my subjects in upstate NY, I ran into a story that claimed they had spent a lot of time trying to build a ship canal around Niagara Falls. There were obviously good precedents to support the idea of an additional “internal improvement” in upstate New York. But it would take government money to build it, so they needed a patron. There was a brief mention of a long, late-1850s carriage-ride one of my subjects had with New York Senator and former Governor William Henry Seward, during which my guy bent Seward’s ear about the project and received the response that it would never happen until there was a change in administration. Which he took to be Seward’s way of saying “when I become President.”

I liked this story, and had always planned on using it. But the accidental newspaper discovery makes it much more plausible. The 1830 lawyer handling the default sale in Lyons, whose name appears at the bottom of the advertisement was none other than “Wm. H. Seward, Att’y.” A reminder that my guys, even though they were merely upstate businessmen, had a completely credible connection with the man who went on to become a key member of Lincoln’s “Team of Rivals.” Too often we forget that many of the “great men” who stride through the big histories, started somewhere as regular people. Unexpected material from the archives can not only provide background for a narrative, but from time to time, it can provide unexpected clues about meaning and context.

The New York Sun and other Newspapers at the Library of Congress

Heather Cox Richardson

Source material is springing up on the web so quickly that I find I miss important things. Still, how I missed this one is beyond me.

The Chronicling America project at the Library of Congress is putting American newspapers on-line. The collection so far has clearly been determined by something other than historical significance, but its quirks will be godsends for some historians. There are a host of papers from Arizona, for example, as well as Kentucky. Sadly, there are currently no newspapers from Maine—a pet peeve of mine, since Maine was a pretty crucial state for nineteenth-century politics, and the Kennebec Journal was an important newspaper that tends not to show up in libraries outside of Maine.

Anyway, some of these papers may not get much traffic, but there is at least one major draw. The project has put up much of the New York Sun. Edited by Charles A. Dana in the late nineteenth century, this paper was enormously important, but has been quite hard to find, at least on the East Coast.

The website is: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/newspapers/

It’s worth a look.

December 2, 1859 (for example) in the Classroom

Heather Cox Richardson

Randall’s post on the most boring day in recent history reminded me of a very popular research assignment for high school or early college students. The assignment is to take one day’s newspaper from nineteenth-century America and draw a portrait of the time based on that document. Students can use other primary and secondary sources to learn about the subjects discussed in the newspaper, but their focus is on that one day.

This accomplishes a number of things. First of all, it requires the students to learn to use microfilm and to figure out the difference between primary and secondary sources. It also teaches them how to interrogate different types of primary sources, since a little prodding will help them to realize they can use advertisements, as well as news stories, to make inferences about society.

It’s also a good way to help them understand that people living in a time do not necessarily recognize the importance of the same things that historians do. A nineteenth-century newspaper is a jumble of political stories, opinions, the doings of local notables (whom nobody has ever heard of today), stories about the potential for human settlement on the sun, and so on. Often the newspaper will also disrupt what kids think they know: American newspapers in the early 1870s are chock full of calls for war with Spain over Cuba, for example, although textbooks generally miraculously produce the Spanish-American War in 1898.

The assignment also demonstrates that events, literature, science, fashion, and so on, existed together, rather than being separated out as they usually are in textbooks. In the New York Times for December 2, 1859, for example, students would learn about that day’s execution of John Brown, but not in the measured tones of a textbook. The newspaper reported the ejection of several Northern reporters from the railroad cars on their way to the site of the execution, thanks to an arrangement between the governor of Virginia and the president of the railroad. It noted that wild stories of invaders into Virginia were keeping people riled up, and that any local citizens who left his home after dark faced a ten dollar fine—which a student would note was a high fee, considering that the same newspaper offered steamboat travel from New York City to Bridgeport for fifty cents.

But the paper did not focus only on the upcoming execution: it also noted the recent discovery of a mastodon jaw in Alton, Illinois, and that, after killing his wife in an alcoholic rage, Frank S. Wright claimed that the murder was her own fault, since—according to Wright—she had been sleeping with his brother.

This assignment gives students a window into history that they already have some tools to use. Most of them have some familiarity with a newspaper, and recognize the difference between an advertisement and legal news. They seem to approach this project with less uncertainty than they do documents or even photographs from the same era.

They also seem to enjoy the assignment.

I should state that this project works very well for nineteenth-century America because newspapers were quite short then—usually no more than eight pages. I’ve done this with earlier American newspapers, too, although they’re a bit harder since they often have a narrower range of stories. Twentieth-century papers would be harder, of course, since they’re much longer. I’ve had no experience with newspapers from other countries, so can’t say how this would translate to other countries.