Needles and Geese

In the process of revising an article on the “miscegenation controversy” of 1864, I found myself on an archival goose chase. In November 1863, the anti-abolitionist New York Herald printed an article accusing its rival paper, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, of publishing ads in which black volunteers in Arkansas sought white abolitionist women as correspondents who would become their wives. Unfortunately, the Herald couldn’t be more specific than saying that these appeared “the other day” (“The Tribune Philosophers Promoting the Amalgamation of the Races,” New York Herald, 27 Nov. 1863).

My instinct was that this was a fake story about made-up advertisements. Throughout 1863 and 1864, the Herald published rumors about race mixing with a particular focus on black soldiers, and this seems like another iteration. But unlike the usually unsubstantiated rumors, this article included quotations from the supposed ads published in the Tribune.

Using the America’s Historical Newspapers database, and focusing my search on October and November 1863, I did some searches for those quoted phrases that seemed most likely to have appeared in the Tribune: “matrimony,” “Arkansas,” “correspondence,” etc. After about an hour of this, I had yet to find the original ads in the Tribune or any other paper included in the database except for the original Herald article. I feel confident enough to include this incident in my article as a rumor rather than a reality, at least with the proper qualifying words in a footnote.

A page from the New York Herald, 1/28/1863

But — and here’s where the delight of the research goose chase comes in — in the process of seeking out those specific phases, I stumbled upon the fascinating world of the want-ads from the 1860s. So many “Strangers to the city,” “respectable gentleman,” and soldiers looking for potential wives! Like personal ads today, nineteenth-century folk also tended to be very specific when it came to age, as the last ad above (“not over 19 years old”). I wonder what the story behind this southerner in search of a Yankee wife might have been.

I knew that nineteenth-century newspapers had tons of these short ads, but I’d never looked at them closely before except for using runaway slave ads in teaching. Now, I’m filing this away as a source for some future project. Lost items, personal ads, cryptic communications, and even the nineteenth-century version of missed connections. It reminds a bit of Found Magazine: mysterious and intriguing, fleeting, and very human. Some other intriguing samples:

“The sister of Phillip Tynan is Troubled by his silence. Direct to 117 Houston Street, NY.” [NY Herald, 1 Oct. 1863]

“Will the young lady who was last Tuesday in a Twenty-Third Street stage from 11 to 12 o’clock send her address to the gentleman she recognized in another stage? Address E.P. Station D.” [NY Herald, 1 Oct. 1863]

“MATRIMONIAL: Two young ladies wish to make the acquaintance of two Spanish or French gentlemen of wealth with a view to matrimony. Address, enclosing carte des visite, Lorini and Evangeline, Box 123, Herald office.” [NY Herald, 9 January 1863]

“Florence, — Will you give me the opportunity to explain my conduct Monday evening? Yes? When and where? –J. New York Post Office.” [NY Herald, 28 January 1863].

The Art of the Timeline

Somewhere in a file box in a storage unit in Texas lies the master timeline for my dissertation and book manuscript. I wish I had a picture to post on the blog (because it is awesome), but these pens will have to do.

My dissertation/book looked at an American mission in Jamaica from the 1830s through the 1860s. I had a lot of people and a lot of events to track, and I also wanted to keep the local concerns of the mission in the same frame with bigger historical events in the United States, Jamaica, and Britain.

To construct the timeline, I made a vertical line across four sheets of taped-together printer paper. (I can’t remember why I didn’t go and buy a big sheet of art paper which would have made much more sense . . . ). I used different colored pens for each main missionary. I marked their arrival and departure, and I drew a colored line parallel to the timeline for the time each person was on the island. I could easily see when someone was there or when they were back in the United States — for a year or permanently. I also could easily see who overlapped.

Next, I marked the major events within the mission — the personal and public traumas and successes of the mission. All of this “history of ordinary people” is tracked alongside larger events within the abolitionist movement, American history, Jamaican history, and British colonialism, marked with a separate color scheme. My timeline became a visual representation of “ordinary” history blended with the major events of British emancipation, the American Civil War, and the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica. Just as personal and public history had been woven together in the missionaries’ letters, the supposedly small events of the mission (a land purchase by freedpeople, an excommunication, the birth or death of a child) stood alongside the world-changing events that may or may not have directly affected the men and women up in the Jamaican mountains.

In a way, the timeline is the visual equivalent of my book. I suspect that if a person who had some familiarity to the history of the Jamaica Mission looked at it for long enough, the book’s arguments would be visible. Taped to the wall of my office, it became functional art that I consulted on a daily basis.

But — and this is really important — the timeline wasn’t really for others, it was for me. I think this points to an critical distinction between the kinds of visual work (often in the form of digital humanities) that we consume and have students consume and that which we create ourselves. If I had happened to find this exact timeline in a textbook or online, it wouldn’t have helped me very much. The timeline mattered because I made it myself: I had to make all of the different drafts (spacing is hard), I had to decide what to include and what to leave out. These decisions and the process of putting it together is why it became so dear and so useful.

The timeline took me a long time to make, but it was completely worth it. For one, by the time it was finished, I had a much better sense of the big picture of the mission. It’s often a difficult stage in research when you have to move from the minutiae of hundreds of documents to try and grasp the larger sweep of your time period. The timeline helped me to see everything at once (much like how Scrivener or the Navigation Pane in Word allows you to visualize all of your chapters and sections of chapters).

The visual aspect of the timeline also proved a collegial companion to my chronologically arranged notecard box. When I was revising my dissertation, I would often become immersed in one section of the text for several weeks. Then, when I would need go back to an earlier time — say, the 1840s — I could quickly walk over to the timeline and familiarize myself with who was in Jamaica at that time and what major issues were in play. Just like flipping through the notecards from the missionary letters and newspaper articles in the 1840s section, the timeline would remind me where I was and what I was doing.

The other thing that I really liked about the timeline, and why I’m about to embark on another one for my new research, is that it made writing more fun. In case you can’t tell, I was incredibly proud of my timeline — I would nerdily show it to people when they came over to my house (which is why I’m surprised I didn’t take a picture of it!). It was art! It showed others that I was actually doing something with my time! In contrast, during the early stages of writing, nothing seems very pretty or artistic: there are half-finished paragraphs with bracketed notes –[More here.] or [Fix.], partial footnotes, and arguments are not always evident. To paraphrase sacramental theology: the timeline served as an outward sign of an invisible dissertation.

One of the advantages of digital humanities is that tools now exist for scholars to create visual representations of scholarly argument. I’m not very well-informed in what all is out there, and I’d be curious to know what artistic and visually helpful versions of digital archives and digital scholarship exist. The example that leaps to my mind is the Valley of the Shadow Civil War history project. Looking at and interpreting other people’s timelines, maps (of geography and ideas), diagrams, and word clouds can be useful, but I would argue that researchers gain much more when they create these projects themselves. While never a complete substitute for written work (at least in my opinion), creating visual representations of research can shake you out of a rut and give you a new tool to think about old material in different ways.

If you’ve used visually oriented techniques to think through your research or you know of innovative digital humanities things along these lines, please share!

Victorian Popular Culture

I’ve decided to post occasionally on interesting archival finds, including the ever-expanding world of online collections. Unfortunately, many of these online collections are restricted to library users of those library’s who hold subscriptions to these collections, including today’s post, but free trials are often available.

Wondering how to engage students who would rather be re-reading Harry Potter than listening to your amazing lecture on the transformative effects of technology during the post-Civil War era of industrialization?

Try out the Victorian Popular Culture online archive! This collection was spotlighted on Columbia’s library website today, and I was sucked in by the blurb:

Spiritualism, mesmerism, psychical science and secular magic
together define the cultural fields presented in this collection.

Secular magic? Who can say no to that?

The main page is divided into three categories:

1) Spiritualism, Sensation, and Magic

2) Circuses, Sideshows, and Freaks

3) Music Hall, Theater, and Popular Entertainment

The collection includes handbills, books, pamphlets, photographs, programs from the shows, the original printed scripts from popular plays, and audio files of songs from the early 1900s ,and the documents come from the US, Britain, and Europe. They range from famous performers like Buffalo Bill and Barnum and Bailey’s circus, as well as lesser-known acts like the Central American Wonder, M. Samayoa the Great. I once taught Louis Warren’s Buffalo Bill’s America in a US Survey, and this archive would have worked perfectly. Transnationalism, racial ideology, mysticism, religion, gender, popular entertainment . . . it’s all there.

The site is very well organized, and you can download the documents as PDFs as well as read them online.

Post script: if you’ve read this blog before, you’ll notice I changed the template because I wanted a sidebar for recent comments and posts. I think the change is a good one, and I like the file folder-esque design of the title, too!

Writing About Letters

In my Defining Marriage seminar this week, we are reading two collections of letters: Theresa Strouth Gaul’s To Marry An Indian, an edited collection of the letters concerning the marriage between Cherokee Elias Boudinot and the white New Englander, Harriett Gold, and selections form the Barnes and Dumond edited collection of the letters between Theodore Weld and Angelina and Sarah Grimké.

In my experience, students who are not well-practiced in history writing (and even some who are) can become lost when they approach primary sources like this. There’s a lot to take in: the historical context, entering into lives already in progress, the inside jokes and intimations, the language, and in the case of the Weld-Grimké letters, the Quakers’ use of “thee” and “thou.” The students in my seminar this semester have a well-developed set of skills for reading literary texts, and they all wrote wonderful analyses of passages from Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok last week. I’m curious to see how they approach these letters, and what questions and arguments they bring to the table. I hope to have a discussion with them about the different kinds of questions literary critics, religion scholars, and historians ask of these sources, and how these questions turn into theses and essays.