The Historical Uses of Comment Threads

I’m nearing the final stage of an article about the political implications of “amalgamation” and “miscegenation” in the North during the Civil War. Race baiting and elections apparently never grows old, as Sidney Kaplan’s article on the 1864 flare up argued in 1949, months after the Dixiecrats deployed a similar campaign against Truman. My sources include a series of political cartoons from 1864 that essentially illustrated the Democratic pamphlets meant to parody abolitionists. The pictures essentially illustrated the words in some of the “miscegenation” pamphlets produced by Democrats during the election. They used caricatures of interracial couples as evidence of a world turned upside down — the world that would exist if Abraham Lincoln won the 1864 election and continued to execute the war until the South was defeated and all slaves were freed.

The images, created by G.W. Bromley & Co., are available at the Library of Congress.

A fair amount of scholarship exists on these sorts of racist caricatures. For instance, there are clear connections between these from the 1860s and the earlier “bobalition” broadsides from the days of northern emancipation. Writing about this earlier period in American history, historian Patrick Rael argues that by making black people try and fail to appear respectable (because of their clothing or the dialect in the dialogue bubbles), the creators of these images mocked “blacks’ new claims to participate legitimately in public sphere discourse” (Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest, 73).

These particular images from 1864 also contained a message about gender and sexuality (that could be found in some of the earlier images as well): emancipation would lead to sex between whites and blacks.

Significantly, the pictures do not depict the Jim Crow-era “miscegenation” discourse of sexually aggressive (and economically and politically enfranchised) black men who threaten white womanhood. These cartoons do mock African Americans for putting on airs and presuming to be whites’ social equals, but they also pillory white abolitionists – for their radical ideas and sexual deviancy (the white Republican men at the “Miscegenation Ball,” the white female abolitionists sitting in the laps of black men in the “Millennium of Abolitionism” image.) They use social (and sexual) race mixing as a way to symbolize the impending social and racial disorder that will come with the end of the war.

Much more can and has been said about this (including in my almost-finished article), but what I want to emphasize about these images and the entire “miscegenation” discussion of 1864 is that it was deeply contingent on the fact that emancipation was in play for the upcoming presidential election. While they were, of course, racist, these images (and the various Copperhead Democrat articles about “miscegenation”) were also produced to tie the Republican Party to radical abolitionists and their extremist demands for black equality on top of emancipation.

So, here’s where the title of this post comes into play. When I did a quick Google search to find the “Miscegenation Ball” image this morning (instead of going directly to the Library of Congress website), one of the top hits was from a June 2010 post on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog on the Atlantic website. [Unrelated: are people now writing "weblog" instead of "blog"? I've encountered this three or four times in the past week. Is it just historians trying to sound antiquated?]

Using these images to reflect on the persistence of race baiting in politics, Coates gives a fairly clear and short analysis – including a useful transcript of the text in the images (since it’s hard to read, even on the LOC site). My only quibble with his brief commentary is that he focuses more on how white southerners would have responded to these images, when they were meant for a northern audience. Many white Union men hated the Confederates only slightly more than they hated the radical abolitionists, and Democrats seeking to elect McClellan liked to attack the slaveholding elite as well as abolitionists. Calling out both white slaveholders and radical abolitionists as “amalgamationists” killed two birds with one stone.

What is most interesting to me, as a historian and a history teacher, are the comments. Some of the comments clearly demonstrate the readers’ scholarly knowledge (shout-outs to Edmund Morgan and Kathleen Brown, a mention of Bacon’s Rebellion, Sally Hemmings, etc.). Another thread addressed the depiction of black women in these images and links to an “anti-Michelle Obama’s clothes” discussion that took place on Ravelry, a knitters’ and crocheters’ social media site. Another thread mentions the use of dialect in The Help, and awkward book club discussions on the novel, well before the film version mainstreamed that conversation about race. There are also a  number of comments from people who are “interracially” married. Some just explain their circumstances, others point out the ongoing difficulties, while some wish that they could be at the “miscegenation ball” because it looks like a rocking good time. Many of the comments add biographical details about where people have lived, and how views towards interracial marriage have changed over time.

The comments totally derailed my morning writing.

First, they provide the answer to a future historical question: What kind of reaction do these “miscegenation” images provoke in the 2010s? They lead to mini-histories, a small (and self-selecting) sociological sample of American attitudes toward race and interracial marriage. The comments also reveal thoughtful analysis of the images and how these images relate to other depictions of black Americans.

Yet at the same time, with a few exceptions, I was struck by the absence of historical awareness. Yes, the origins of slavery and the complex racial and gendered politics of colonial Virginia and the class dynamics of Bacon’s Rebellion are undoubtedly important to the history of race in the United States. But they are probably not the best way to approach the racial dynamics in the Union North in 1864. Nor did many commentators note the Civil War, the fact that emancipation happened during a war, and the understudied dynamics of race in the North.

While I would love to parse these 108 comments more (and find other times when historical evidence and widely read blogs coincide), other business calls me to other matters. I’m left with a few questions and conclusions:

On a meta level, I wonder if and how historians will deal with these kinds of sources in the future. They offer a window onto a kind of conversation (Will usernames be like pseudonymous handles of yore? Will future historians comb through blog comments looking for “marcelproust” or “socioprof” as historians now might seek “Africanus” or “Cicero” in nineteenth-century newspapers?)

On a more practical and immediate level, these comments offer insight into my students and, possibly, reading audiences. Often the reaction people have to artifacts of cultural history (especially images like these) are deeply personal. People who see them think about them in terms of how they relate to their own lives and personal histories. Yet it is vital also to understand historical artifacts as embedded in a particular time and space. Racism is not universal and unchanging; it was used differently at different times for different ends. The Democrats behind these caricatures were less concerned with white abolitionists marrying freed people than they were with smearing white Black Republicans. This isn’t to say that the commentators’ reactions about their own marriages are wrong or misplaced, but it is problematic for the takeaway message to be: “Wow. People used to be racist. I’m glad we can marry whomever we want (in New York State, at least) now.”

Finally, since I am immersed in the early 1860s at the moment, this one comment did provoke an exasperated sigh:

“Miscegenation” appears to have originated in the U.S., and coincidentally, the first entry in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an 1864 New York article, reprinted in England. It is defined as the “mixture of races; esp. the sexual union of whites with negroes.”

Weeelllll . . . not exactly. It was a pamphlet from David Goodman Croly and George Wakefield published in December 1863 in New York City. The (pro-South) London Times picked up the story, as well as some other British publications, but it was a very American debate! But rather than be frustrated, I should just get back to work on my article on it, right? Right.

“We have different languages for what the truth means.” – Mike Daisey

In January, I started to write a post about objectivity, “bias,” fact-checking, and the differences between journalism and history. (Phew).  I was inspired in part by the now-infamous “This American Life” episode featuring Mike Daisey’s visit to electronics factories in China – particularly the last 15 minutes when Ira Glass fact-checked the story with other journalists. While this final segment of the original episode hinted at some exaggerations on the part of Daisey, it struck me as an illustrative example for students. When I heard that Glass retracted the story this past Friday, I decided to revisit my post. While comparisons to other recent-ish fact/fiction debacles (Michael Bellesiles, James Frey, Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, etc.) may be apt, I’m not getting into those here.

Then: What I Wrote in January

My high school journalism teacher showed us All the President’s Men in order to teach us how dogged and determined journalists like Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman had to get two sources to confirm every piece of information they printed. We learned that they weren’t biased, and they didn’t report unsubstantiated information. They reported the facts.

[Fact Check! (All the President's Men)]

More recently, I listened to the “This American Life” episode adapting Mike Daisey’s one-man show, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” about Apple’s Chinese factories and suppliers. I found Daisey’s performance to be somewhere between effectively moving and over-the-top. But, of particular interest was the last portion of the show — a fact-checking exercise in which Ira Glass interviewed several other journalists and writers who had also covered the story. Was Daisey’s story sound? Was he a biased observer? He didn’t pretend to be a real journalist, after all. It turns out that his story did hold up, although his claims about the amount of child labor at Foxconn appear to be somewhat exaggerated.

I’ve been thinking about assigning this episode to my classes to spark a conversation about sources. As I’ve taught research seminars, I’ve thought more about the differences between journalistic research and historical research, and my sense is that students don’t always understand the distinction. If one of the Chinese workers whom Daisey interviewed lied to him, and he reported it as truth, what does this mean? What kinds of evidence do we trust, and which do we question, and why?

I find that students often have this backwards. When they read scholarly articles and books, they will accuse the authors of being “biased” because they are pursuing an argument instead of “just presenting the evidence.” Well, yes. She is “biased” because her article has an argument. While quick to find “bias” in scholarly articles and books, students sometimes have a very hard time identifying “biases” when they read primary sources. If the source said it, and the source lived in 1745, then it must be true!

My pedagogical strategy at the moment is to point out examples of evidence and analysis in every reading we do in class. I also use lots of primary sources, and I have students write short analyses throughout the semester so they become used to the language of introducing and analyzing quotations. Even with these exercises in place, I still find that learning how to gauge evidence is often the hardest skill to teach and to learn. It requires a breadth of knowledge that students’ frankly don’t have. How do they know that the New York Herald was a Democratic newspaper during the Civil War when it just pops up as another article in a keyword search? They don’t. The best I can do is teach them that they should always inquire and always ask: is this source “biased?”

Rethinking all of this after the Retraction . . .

Finding Patterns in the Wilderness

While recently re-reading Chandra Manning’s terrific book, What This Cruel War Was Over (Vintage Civil War Library, 2007), I was delighted to find the detailed discussion of her research methods in the book’s introduction. Manning’s ambitious book seeks to examine what Confederate and Union soldiers thought about slavery, and she concludes that the slavery question was indeed at the “center of soldiers’ views of the struggle” (11). She uses the letters and diaries of over 1,000 soldiers — that’s 1,000 distinct characters, and many, many more documents.

Rather than delving into Manning’s nuanced argument about what Confederates and black and white Union soldiers thought and how their thoughts changed over time, I wanted to highlight two of the passages where she writes about her methods.

First, how did she keep track of those 1000+ soldiers?

p. 8: “For every soldier whose writings I read, and for whom I could obtain sufficient biographical detail, I created a data sheet that recorded such information as birth date, home, occupation, marital status, regiment, rank, battle participation, and experiences, such as capture, wounding, or death. These 477 Confederate data sheets and 657 Union soldier data sheets helped place soldiers’ words in appropriate social and demographic context, and also helped ensure that my cross section of soldiers resembled the actual makeup of the enlisted ranks as closely as possible.”

Second, and this is most interesting to me at the moment, how did she organize the topics discussed in the letters and diaries? If you’ve ever read or written a letter, you’ll know that people’s thoughts jump around quite a bit. When you excerpt a quotation, you need to think about a) the content of the quote, b) the context of the quotation within the document, and c) the relation of that quotation to other larger events in the person’s life and in the world. As any professor who has graded research papers can tell you, an uninformed researcher can more or less find “evidence” for anything. Without keeping context and tone in the mix, a sarcastic comment in a letter can become genuine, a parody in a newspaper can become heartfelt.

Manning’s solution:

p. 10-11: “To determine the direction of prevailing winds, I built a series of gauges in the form of long complilations on each of the topics that soldiers themselves identified as important, including patriotism, politics, slavery, and race. Each compilation was organized chronologically. For instance, every time a soldier made a remark about politics, I made a new entry in the politics compilation. If the letter dated from May 5, 1863, I transcribed the relevant portion into the politics compilation between any remarks made by any other soldiers on May 4 and May 6, 1863.”

I’ve done something similar – enormous Word documents – but usually I don’t start these until I begin writing. I’ve never processed my sources this way during the first encounter, but this is something to think about.

She continues:

p. 11: “I used one font for Union soldiers and another font for Confederate troops, which permitted me to compare men from the two armies and still distinguish between them at a glance. The chronological organization of these gauges allowed me to chart change over time, while the topical nature of each compilation enabled me to measure the relative strength of each position taken on an issue.”

And to keep the context of the letters in the mix:

p. 11: “As I used quotations to write chapters, I reread each soldier’s excerpt in the context of the entire letter, diary entry, or camp paper article in which it appeared, which helped adjust for any unusual stimuli or circumstances. In order to conclude that any one position dominated among Union or Confederate soldiers at a particular time, I stipulated that expressions of the prevalent view had to outnumber expressions of the dissenting view by a ratio of at least three to one.”

I really appreciate how Manning incorporated her research methods into the text of her book instead of pushing it into an appendix or a long footnote. Reading her book reminded me of how different topics and sources require particular methods (notecards or Zotero do not fit all!), as well as how much methods shape the arguments of the final project. I know that this book is a frequently assigned text in undergraduate classes, and in addition to teaching students about the Civil War and social history, it would be an ideal way to enter into a discussion about creativity and functionality in research methods.

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.

Teaching Research: Slave Narratives

For the second meeting of my research seminar, Defining Marriage, I assigned Patrick O’Neil’s article, “Bosses and Broomsticks: Ritual and Authority in Antebellum Slave Weddings,” Journal of Southern History (March 2009).

I assigned this alongside Joan Scott’s “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” and two other articles about marriage in early-antebellum America (Richard Godbeer, “‘Love Raptures,’ and Jan Lewis, “The Republican Wife”). The goal for class was to discuss the different sources and methods for each article, as well as how the three articles illustrated Scott’s definition of gender.

In addition to being a way to talk about gender, paternalism, and ritual, “Bosses and Broomsticks” offered a bonus: a perfect teaching moment about digital sources, research methods, and the need to question evidence.

O’Neil uses digital archives, including the North American Slave Narratives collected at Doc South and the Library of Congress WPA Slave Narratives. While this is not in and of itself unusual, O’Neil also cited the URLs of each source in his footnotes. This changed the way my students read the article: they could go find and read these sources themselves, and they were excited to hear that the LOC also had audio files that they could listen to because they were curious about the use of dialect in the transcribed interviews.

This seems like a pretty good reason for scholars to be more explicit about the digital nature of our research.

Additionally, O’Neil’s method (he used keyword searches and folded together a textual analysis with his statistical analysis) also led to a conversation about how digitized sources can open doors to new and different approaches to research. Hopefully these early idea seeds will grow into research papers in a few months.

The WPA slave narratives also presented an opportunity to talk about the limitations of primary sources. I hadn’t planned to go in this direction since this wasn’t really the point of this week’s seminar, but I’m glad we did because we’ve now established a set of questions for later discussions about the quirks and complications of sources.