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.

Media and Messages

Dan Allosso

Long before I ever thought of going into the history game, I worked in the computer industry. “Long before” is an interesting issue of periodization. It was about twenty years ago: less than a human generation, but ten or fifteen computer generations of Moore’s Law. In that time, transistor counts on the central processors of computers have risen from a few hundred thousand to a few billion. What does that mean to historians?

I think the biggest change for me as a historian is that content has really become king. The ability to store and move huge volumes of data cheaply and effortlessly has changed the game for people who want to communicate their ideas with others. Network bandwidth and processing power have very visibly led the way, but storage technology has improved just as incredibly. And it’s the ability to store information that makes the whole thing work.

When I started building “clone” computers in the late ‘80s, we were putting 32 Megabyte Seagate hard drives in them. The ST-138R was a physically small drive by the standards of the day, measuring just 3.5” by 1.66” by about 5.25” and weighing a couple of pounds. An OEM could buy them for about $150, making them an attractive entry level drive. We also sold higher capacity drives, but the 32 MB drive and its 65 MB big brother were the “sweet spot,” the best deal on a dollars-per-megabyte basis.

32 Megabytes would hold a lot of text. Average word processor files used a couple dozen kilobytes per page, as they still do today. So you could write to your heart’s content. But there wasn’t a lot of room to store your research. A text-only copy of a decent-sized book (say James Joyce’s Ulysses on Project Gutenberg) took up a Megabyte and a half. So you’d only get about twenty of those on your disk—how you’d get them there was another issue, but we’ll skip over that. And if you were able to get your hands on high resolution images, you’d be lucky to store half a dozen.

Since that time, hard disks have gotten faster, smaller, and cheaper. It’s now possible to spend the same type of money that once bought an ST-138R, and get a disk that’s smaller in size but nearly a million times larger in capacity. Or, if you prefer the ultimate in portability to the ultimate in capacity, you can dispense with disks entirely and store your data on chips. For less than $50, you can carry 32 Gigabytes of data on your keychain.

I recently moved my dissertation project to just such a device. I now carry a 32 GB flash drive that holds all my writing, as well as all my research. In what would have taken a thousand ST-138Rs (that late-80s drive), I can store ten thousand high resolution photos or scans, thousands of books, and all the writing I’ll ever do on this project. Think of a thousand hard drives. Think of the electrical current they drew. They would have filled a room and heated your home. I carry this thing in my pocket (it’s backed up at home and at the office), and it allows me to always have the most recent versions of my work at my fingertips. It plugs into the USB port of whatever computer I happen to be sitting in front of, and transfers my data so fast I can’t tell it’s not on my local drive.

As I’m researching and writing, I can’t help thinking, although I want this work to come out as a regular, old-fashioned, paper-and-cardboard book, my writing and all the supporting primary evidence in its original form fits on a chip. I can’t help but believe that in the long run, this will change the way we do our research, write our histories, and communicate them to other people. The only question in my mind at this point is, will that “long run” be measured in human years, or computer generations?

Reading Primary Sources: Indentures

Dan Allosso

One of the most exciting and interesting things we do as historians is look at old documents. Exciting because we get to use all our “detective” instincts, and we’re never sure what we’re going to find. Interesting because along with the data we’re looking for, there’s often a lot more. Sometimes this additional information takes the form of a surprise that completely changes our idea of what happened; more often, it broadens and enriches our understanding of the setting, the people involved, and the times they lived in.

I recently had an opportunity to look at nineteenth-century land deeds, or “Indentures” in upstate New York. My goal was to establish when the people I was studying had arrived in the region. I went to the county records office and got permission to use their computerized database of indentures. This saved me the trouble of pulling a dozen old books off the shelves, since deeds were recorded in the order they were executed, so you need to find them in the index and then go to the appropriate “Liber” and page.

As I expected, the pile of documents I was able to find and print for a nominal fee, told me a lot about when my subjects had arrived in the area, but also a lot more that I hadn’t expected. For example, I found an 1842 record of an agreement between one of my subjects, Roswell Ranney, and Spencer Hildreth and Elijah Bement, “and Julia his wife.” Ranney bought a 106.25-acre parcel of land from these two men, “for the sum of Ten Dollars to them in hand,” as well as “payment & satisfaction of twelve hundred and fifty dollars being a part of a mortgage heretofore executed by Samuel H. And Henry Baggerly and their Wives to the New York Life Insurance and Trust Company for twenty seven hundred dollars.” The location and dimensions of this land were described in great detail, which allows me to not only plot it on a map and know where Ranney lived, but suggests that an acre of prime farmland in Phelps was worth about $12 in 1842, if this sale was at the market price.

But I don’t know that for sure, yet. Because, reading on, I find that there had been a previous mortgage, dating from 1838, between George Ranney, Roswell’s brother, and the late Russell Bement, whose exact relationship to Elijah I don’t yet know. George and Russell, I already knew, both came to Phelps around 1833 from the same town in Massachusetts. George Ranney died about six months after this indenture was recorded, so this land sale may have been part of an attempt to put his affairs in order. But now, to understand the sequence of events, I’d like to know why the Baggerly brothers had a mortgage with New York Life. Actually, until I saw this indenture, I wasn’t aware that the New York City company was involved in real estate lending in this small upstate village—so that’s definitely worth finding out more about.

In a footnote to the indenture, the county official appended a note witnessing the signatures and stating that in a private interview, Elijah Bement’s wife Julia “acknowledged that she executed the within deed freely and without any fear or compulsion of her said husband therefore let it be recorded.” It’s an interesting glimpse at the changing status of wives in 1842 New York, that although she clearly does not have the rights of the men, society is concerned about Julia’s willing participation in this sale.

Visualizing Historiography

Dan Allosso

As a grad student preparing for Oral Exams, I spend a lot of time in a library carrel with piles of books. I’m trying to keep track of the connections between them, and simultaneously wondering how to think about historiography, for my particular project. Does it make more sense to trace the development of sub-disciplines like new social history? Or to group labor historians, regardless of the techniques they used? This question becomes even trickier, since the subject I’m exploring (American rural history) has much fuzzier edges than labor, or even than its own counterpart: urban history.

Nerd that I am, I naturally look to the computer for tools. I love Endnote, but it doesn’t really give me the note-taking and visual elements I want. So I’ve started using Tinderbox. It lets me extend the “post-it note on the plate-glass window” metaphor to extremes. But looking at the historiography visually has advantages.

I thought I’d draw American historiography as a tree (click image below to enlarge), so I’d be able to see how the different topics I’m tracing emerge like branches from a less differentiated body of earlier work. My reading list also includes a lot of iconic authors in the “trunk” area, but more single texts in the “leaves” area at the top. Time will tell, I suppose, which of the historians of the last three decades will emerge as “trunk” material. Or whether some of our current sub-disciplinary divisions will become permanent, leaving us without a single trunk at all.

The inclusion, placement, and arrangement of the authors and titles is completely arbitrary, of course, and represents my evolving ideas not only about how this material fits together, but about how it becomes meaningful to me. One of the interesting things I noticed, as I began building this list, was how much historiographies reflect the interests of their makers. The crowd of red on the left, for example, represents labor historians discussed in Francis G. Couvares, et. al., Interpretations of American History, which was one of my initial sources. I assume that, as I look at each of these authors, some will fall out of my tree. Similarly, as I continue reading environmental histories, I’ll be able to add more blue leaves to the tree, and make the appropriate connections between them.

The hidden advantage of Tinderbox is that all the content is XML, which means that it’s live and searchable. That means I can create agents that will sift all the pages behind these leaves, where I’ve attached my abstracts and reviews of these titles, ideas for my own writing, and even random notes. So it will be easy to see all the historians who’ve responded to Charles Beard or Frederick Jackson Turner, or all the books that discuss free banking or the agrarian myth.

The output side of this process is still a little sketchy in my mind. In the long run, I’d like to post something that would allow readers to navigate through the tree, and explore some of the material behind the leaves. But that’s several steps farther than I’ve gotten in exploring the software and refining my ideas. Thinking about output helps me grapple with the differences between learning this material myself, and communicating it to others--with taking what I’ve picked up on a personal journey through this material, and finding what’s relevant and interesting to other people.

Index cards are so 1985

Jonathan Rees

Today's guest post comes from Jonathan Rees, professor of history at Colorado State University - Pueblo. He's the author of Representation and Rebellion: The Rockefeller Plan at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, 1914-1942 (University Press of Colorado, 2010). He also blogs about historical matters at More or Less Bunk.

I’ve never taken a poll on the subject, but I strongly suspect that many of my fellow historians first encountered a college library the same way I did: as a member of their high school debating team. If by chance you weren’t a debate geek like me, let me briefly explain the way the system worked (and still does). The National Forensics League, the big national high school debate group, would give all students in the country a big, broad topic. The one I remember most fondly from my years in high school was court reform. You would research a more specific reform to propose when you were taking the affirmative. My partner Ahmed and I proposed a federal reporter shield law that year. You had to have a case for reform with plenty of specific factual evidence ready before the summer was even over if you were going to compete successfully on a national level. That’s why you had to go to a college library, to find lots of relevant information fast.

The harder side to argue was always the negative. While you could prepare your affirmative case in advance, you never knew what reform the other team would propose until their first speaker started talking. That’s when you had to make a mad dash to your file box of index cards to prepare a crash course on just about anything so that you could convince the judge to shoot their case down. Speed was of the essence. If you couldn’t gather your evidence before it was your turn to speak, you might very well stand up there with no experts to cite, and who’d believe you then?

When I went to graduate school, I took my debate-ready research habits with me. My dissertation was like a big affirmative case with loads of index cards covering every aspect of my subject and huge piles of copies replacing the debate briefs that some firms sold in order to make arguing anything easier. Lucky for me, there was no time limit. I’m not talking about the overall project (which I got done in what was a very reasonable time for a history PhD, if I say so myself). I’m talking about finding individual quotations from sources that I’d copied or transferred to index cards. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent digging through cards and papers looking for something I knew I had read, but couldn’t exactly remember where.

When I started my second book in 1999, the one after my dissertation, I decided to rectify this problem. I bought an early-computerized notes program. After writing a different book in the interim, I just finished almost all of the manuscript from that earlier project in a major writing tear over this last summer. As a result of my delay, it took me ten years to realize how great computerized notes programs really are. It was hard enough back in graduate school to find things that I’d read only a month or a year before. Try finding things that you wrote down over a decade ago! Even the program I bought way back in 1999 allowed me to search my notes by individual words. This not only saved me time, it made it possible for me to quickly regain intellectual control over a huge amount of information.

Recently, I asked two separate historians whose work I greatly admire what notes program they used. In each instance, they looked at me like I was speaking Greek. I tried to explain to them the advantages that I’ve described here, but they were both of the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” school of research. Certainly using pen and paper for notes won’t prevent them from doing more great work in the future (albeit slower than it would otherwise have to be), but I figure my students might as well keep up with the times. I’m teaching both the undergraduate and graduate history research classes this semester, so I’ve required them to use the newest generation in notes programs: Zotero.

Unlike the hundred dollars I plopped down in 1999, Zotero is free. It was created by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and it’s really quite an incredible program. It not only allows you to search through your notes by word or by category the same way my decade-old notes program did, it allows you to pull in PDFs or screenshots from the web and search through those too. Suppose you find a full-view book on Google Books that you like (a common occurrence for those of us who work on American history before 1923). Zotero will record the entire lengthy, complicated URL automatically so that you can get back to it easily. Furthermore, you don’t need a web connection to use Zotero, so you can enter information manually and search through that the same way that you find material in these easy-to-record web items.

Until very recently, I would have said the one pitfall of using Zotero is that it only worked through the Firefox browser, a browser that has looked less and less useful to me the more I experiment with other choices. It turns out they just took care of that problem. Indeed, you can now get Zotero as a stand alone program so that you don’t even need to use a browser at all.

With the introduction of Google Books, newspaper databases like Chronicling America from the Library of Congress and comprehensive journal databases like Jstor, history research has changed forever. You don’t need to be near a great library to have access to scads of excellent primary sources. The main problem that students and historians alike now face, if they want to write about the last two or three hundred years, is not too little information, but too much. In the future, the quantity of sources will tell us little about research, it’s the ability to find the right information for any given point that will matter the most. You can still write history using methods that stood in good stead back in 1985, but if there’s a new way to manage gobs of information faster, why wouldn’t you want to try it?