Historians and the Preservation of Newspaper Content, Part 2

Part 1 --- Part 2 --- Part 3 --- Part 4

As I mentioned in the previous post, in the past decade or so, some large newspapers have digitized their contents. For example, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe have all been stored as digital complete runs, -- meaning every word/image of every issue ever published has been scanned into a digital “archive.”

Access to those archives are managed through a company called ProQuest, which earns revenue by licensing use of these archives. You can visit the Globe’s website, for example, and, by paying a small fee, gain access to and search the entire Globe archive. ProQuest also licenses the use of these digital runs to university and college libraries where students and faculty can access them for free. (If you need to do research of any kind, a university library is an incredible resource.)

So in theory, the content of paper newspapers have been preserved. BUT: What's not clear is the future of the electronic versions of newspapers, nor is it clear what will happen to the web contents of defunct newspapers. Remember: an online version of a newspaper is different from its print version. The ads are different. The content differs, etc.

This is important for historians in particular. In the past thirty or so years, a number of historians have studied newspaper advertising as a way of analyzing shifts in consumer tastes, in the rhetoric of advertising, and so forth. (See especially the work of Roland Marchand.) Indeed, advertisements are key primary documents for historical research.

But as I noted above, the ad content of a paper newspaper is typically quite different than that its electronic counterpart. Moreover, the ad content of an online edition is dynamic: it changes from day to day.

Think about it: If I visit, say, the New York Times website and search for an article published in 1985, it will come up with either no ads, OR with ads attached from the 2009 edition. What I won't see is the context that surrounded that article when it first appeared in 1985. For historians, that's a problem, so from historians’ perspective, how and what gets saved matters.

What's not clear to me is if anyone has pondered this problem. I perused the website of the American Historical Association, the main professional organization for professional historians. If they've got a plan,they're keeping it under wraps. (I kind of doubt they do. Their own website is astoundingly ill-maintained.)

NEXT: Preserving and archiving newspapers' paper trails, their websites, and their digital editions.

Historians and the Preservation of Newspaper Content, Part 1

Part 1 --- Part 2 --- Part 3 --- Part 4

Loyal Reader Dexter asked a couple of good questions the other day.

What, he wondered, will happen to the newspapers that are closing? Have historians thought about how to save the papers’ contents once they’re gone?

Good questions and ones of enormous importance to historians like me. For decades-going-into-centuries, newspapers have functioned as one of historians' main sources of information. Think of a newspaper as an eyewitness account of say, life, in 1880.

Nowadays, of course, we have a wealth of "eyewitness" accounts of contemporary life. Historians of the future are gonna be overwhelmed with sources.

The short answer to his questions are:

In many cases, maybe even most cases, the contents have already been saved/preserved. Here’s why: For the past thirty or forty years, the owners of many newspapers have microfilmed their contents on a regular basis. Every month, or, for some papers, every three or four months, an employee gathers paper copies and sends them off to the filming service. A few weeks later, the service ships reels of film to the newspaper.

In the 1960s and after, many big newspapers also used microfilming to create film-based archives of their contents back to day one of the newspaper’s publication. So, for example, the entire contents of every issue of the New York Times has been available on microfilm for decades. Microfilm isn’t searchable, of course, except by eye, but it’s been a valuable tool for historians for years and years.

A few years ago, the Times also began digitizing that film, so that every word of every issue is also available as a digital database that can be searched using keywords. (That, by the way, completely altered life as we know it for historians like me.)

So in theory, most newspapers have been saved. The exceptions are very tiny weeklies, of the sort found in rural parts of the country. Here in Iowa, for example, there are a still a few of these small operations that cover strictly local news (school lunch menus, deaths, weddings, town council meetings and the like). My guess is that most of those small operations can’t afford to pay for filming services, and so they likely save paper copies.

Happily, in both small towns and in large cities, public libraries also function as repositories for newspapers, either in paper form (which takes up a lot of space) or, more often, by owning reels of the microfilmed copies. So even if a small town newspaper goes under, it's safe to assume that copies of the newspaper will still exist in at least one place.

NEXT TIME: Digitization, newspapers' paper trail, and perservation.

Alexis Madrigal, "Inventing Green," and "New" History

This definitely falls into the category of "cool stuff":

Alexis Madrigal, a science blogger for Wired.com, is writing a history of "green" technologies.

So why is that so cool? Because of what he's doing while he's writing it. He's using his website to keep a running log of where his research takes him; sharing his work "process" with anyone who stops by.

Thanks to digital technology, he's able to post photos and excerpts from primary documents, comment on them, and ask for input.(*1)

Yes, you say. Yawn. So what?

The "so what" part is that until recently, historians (and other scholars) could not do this kind of thing. What's normal now has only been "normal" for a few years and sometimes seems nearly science-fictionish to people my age.

For this old historian (I'm 55; Alexis is much younger), Alexis's approach to his work is amazing.

Back when I started working as a historian, wasn't nobody sharin' nuthin' with no one -- certainly not in such a public fashion. Sure, historians working on similar topics shared notes and commiserated at conferences, but otherwise, isolation was the name of the game, and we only finally shared the results of our research when we had completed that research and written a book or article.

Obviously some isolation is still necessary. Neither Alexis, myself, nor any other scholar can accomplish the kind of work we do without long hours of isolation, concentration, and "aloneness."

But it's so. damn. cool. to watch what digital natives are doing with the historical profession. (*2)

So if you have time, take a look at his website, add it to your rss feed, or bookmark it so you can follow along, too. You'll be watching the history of doing history unfolding before your eyes.

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*1: For more on a historian's work and the difference between primary and secondary sources, see any of the posts here at my blog under the category "A Historian At Work," and especially the two entries about the "basics."

*1: I'm assuming Alexis is young enough to be a digital native or close to it, meaning he grew up with the internet and email and the whole nine yards. People my age are digital pioneers: We started using computers back in the 1980s, but by the time the internet and the wired world arrived, we were already in our 40s. Our tools for and approach to our work were shaped during and by a non-wired world.

A Historian At Work: Using Facts to Build "Stories," Part Five of Five

Part One --- Part Two--- Part Three --- Part Four --- Part Five

Finally, to return to where I started, with the question posed by the student (see Part One). She said the book read like a novel; that it, is read like fiction rather than fact.

I hope by now I've established that my work is based on facts and evidence. But what about the "reads like a novel" part of her question?

My response is this: What a nice compliment! I hope my books do "read" like a novel -- not in the sense that the contents are fiction, but in the sense that the narrative has pace, action, "characters," and a "story"-like structure, meaning it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That, I believe, is the best way for me to persuade my readers that "history" isn’t just a bunch of boring facts. Rather, I hope to convince readers that "history" is and can be fascinating, and that one way to understand historical events is by seeing them through the eyes of the people who participated in them.

For example, I opened the beer book with a real person, Phillip Best, walking through the streets of Milwaukee. I wanted to focus the events I was about to relate in the life and times of a real person. Put another way, I discussed a collection of larger historical events and trends: immigration and conflicts (including riots) between immigrants and "natives"; pursuit of the American dream; the prohibition effort of the 1850s; Americans' attitudes toward alcohol, and so forth -- but readers "witnessed" them through the eyes of Phillip Best.

But I also tried to avoid historians' professional jargon, to use active rather than passive verbs. Tried to describe the scenery and surroundings. Tried to populate the story with real people, quoting their own words whenever possible.

Obviously, it helped that I had access to what amounted to a built-in set of characters: Once Phillip exited the scene, Frederick Pabst and Adolphus Busch stepped in to take his place. When those two died, other Busch family members became the lens through which we could view events. The last two chapters of the book examined the craft beer “revolution” of the 1980s and 1990s, and I had my choice of real-life "characters" to serve as actors on my stage.

But through it all, I stuck to facts. Whenever I speculated about an event, I was careful to say that "perhaps" something happened. As in this example, again from Chapter One, when Langworthy learns that Phillip Best does not have enough money to pay for the brewvat.

What happened next is a credit to A. J. Langworthy's generosity and Phillip Best's integrity. Langworthy was but a few years older than Phillip. Like Phillip, he had left the security of the familiar--in his case, New York--for the adventure and gamble of a new life on the frontier. Perhaps he glanced through the door at the mad rush of people and goods flowing past unabated from daylight to dusk. He was no fool; he understood that business out in the territories would always be more fraught with risk than back in the settled east. But what was life for if not to embrace some of its uncertainty?

I don’t know if Langworthy actually looked out the door at the people passing by on the wooden walkway out side. So I said that "perhaps" he did so.

But the rest of it? I am confident, based on the facts I knew, that I captured the essence of the encounter: Langworthy in fact left the security of the east coast and moved to the frontier of Wisconsin Territory. In doing so, he embraced life's uncertainty. He knew Phillip's family had done the same, leaving Europe behind for the United States. I also knew that he let Phillip take the vat, and allowed him to pay the debt later.

In short, I believed, based on the facts, that Langworthy understood the nature of risk and uncertainty -- and empathized with Phillip's situation.

So to recap what has turned into a long (probably too long!) disquisition on the historian’s craft: Historians trade in facts. They learn to trust their judgment about those facts and how to use them. They employ the facts (and lively prose) to construct an engaging narrative, one that is centered around the lives of real people. If the historian telling the "story" is honest and thorough, and careful, readers will know that they can trust that the "story" is true.

That’s my story, anyway, and I’m stickin’ to it.

A Historian At Work: Using Facts to Build "Stories," Part Four

Part One --- Part Two--- Part Three --- Part Four --- Part Five

So sometimes I trust other historians’ work. But -- sometimes I don't.

Take a look at another excerpt from the book. This is from pages 102-103 of my history of American beer, Ambitious Brew. The background is the "beer wars" of the 1890s and efforts to control industry competition:

In one contest, according to Adolphus Busch's grandson August "Gus" Busch, Jr., a group of small New Orleans brewers resisted Adolphus’s efforts to control that city’s trade. A prolonged struggled drove the barrel price well below the profit zone. Finally Adolphus ended the conflict by informing the men that he planned to "control the price of beer for the next 25 years. . . whatever goddamn price I put on my beer, you go up [or down] the same goddamn price."

Gus, who claimed to have witnessed the encounter, recounted the tale years later as evidence of his grandfather’s wily ways and masterful control over lesser men. If the Busches invaded, say, Peoria, they could afford to wait out the competition; could afford to absorb the losses incurred by selling barrels at cost. Small local breweries could not. More often than not, the conqueror drove the conquered into bankruptcy.

I found this anecdote, and Adolphus's alleged quote, in Under the Influence, a book written by two St. Louis journalists, Peter Hernon and Terry Ganey. Ganey and Hernon heard the anecdote during an interview with Gus Busch. I discounted the accuracy of the tale. (Indeed, based on my reading of primary sources and other available evidence, I concluded that Ganey's and Hernon's book was an unreliable secondary source.)

Here's what I wrote in the book:

The anecdote, though it captures the brutality of the struggle, is most likely apocryphal. The most ferocious beer wars unfolded in the two decades prior to Gussie's birth in 1899. Adolphus’s health failed in 1906, leaving him frail and wheelchair-bound; from then until his death in 1913, he spent most of his time in California or Europe. Even assuming the event took place as late as, say, 1910, when Gussie would have been eleven years old, Adolphus would not have been involved and his grandson too young to comprehend the grown-ups' conversation, let alone remember it accurately some seventy-five years later. More likely the tale evolved over the years as part of the mythology that surrounded a family of successful men with over-sized personalities.

Again, this is part of my work: I can't take the evidence at face value. Instead, I examine many sources, and different kinds of evidence, and the facts (one of them, in this case, being the "fact" that Gus Busch wasn't even alive when the events in question took place), and only then do I decide which evidence is reliable and which is not.

Is this art or craft? In my opinion (based on 25 years experience), it's a craft. Historians learn how to use evidence based on experience, trial-and-error, and the wisdom acquired from that. Does that mean I'm always "right"? No. But I make the best judgments I can, using the evidence at hand.

Next time: the "story" part of the equation.

A Historian At Work: Using Facts to Build "Stories," Part Three

Part One --- Part Two--- Part Three --- Part Four --- Part Five

But how do I know which sources are reliable, and which aren’t? Most of the time, I assess the primary sources myself: I hold them in my hand, I read them, I vouch for them (my accurate reading of them).

But I don’t always rely on primary sources. Let’s look at another exerpt from that first scene:

Phillip finally arrived at the shop owned by A. J. Langworthy, metal worker and ironmonger. He presented himself to the proprietor and explained that he needed a boiler--a copper vat--for his family’s new brewing business. Would Langworthy fabricate it for them? The metalworker shook his head. No. “I [am] familiar with their construction,” he explained to Best, “. . . but I [dislike] very much to have the noisy things around, and [I do] not wish to do so.”

Here I had an eyewitness account to Best’s visit to Langworthy’s shop: Langworthy himself. But how do I know what Langworthy said to Best (the part in the quotation marks)?

Many years after the event, Langworthy himself recounted the episode. I found his account in a history of Pabst Brewing company written by historian Thomas Cochran. I don’t have Cochran’s book in front of me (and, maddening, I can’t find a digital copy), so I can’t check the source he used.

If I remember correctly, Langworthy was interviewed for a newspaper story sometime around 1890. For whatever reason, I didn’t read that newspaper report myself (could be that I was not able to find a copy). So I quoted from Cochran’s work, citing his book as my source.

I was comfortable doing that. I was familiar with Cochran’s career and his other work. I also verified for myself many of the sources he used. I knew he was a solid historian and that I could trust his work.(*1) S

o, although I did not have access to Cochran’s primary source (and I wish I could remember now what it was), I trusted Cochran’s ability to use his sources and his accuracy. I trusted, in other words, that Cochran’s secondary account (his history of Pabst Brewing Company) was itself a valid report on the primary source (Langworthy’s account of the encounter with Phillip Best.)

Yes, Langworthy was by then an old man. But he’d likely told the story many times, if only because Best himself went on to become an important and well-known man. I decided to trust his -- and Cochran’s -- recollection of the encounter.

That’s a big part of what historians do: we weigh the evidence and either accept or reject it, based on everything we know. Next time: A case where I rejected someone else’s sources and account.

_______________________

*1: Cochran had a long and respected career as an economic historian. Indeed, he was and is regarded as one of the 20th century's most important scholars in that field. He wrote his history of Pabst Brewing with the blessings, and cooperation of, the sons of Frederick Pabst, Gustav and Fred, Jr. He had access to hundreds of documents that have since been lost or destroyed. As you might imagine, I was, and am, grateful for Cochran's careful and thorough work as a historian.