Following the lamentable events in the town of Amherst last night, and as the community awaits an estimate of the damages and the full list of casualties, we felt that it would be appropriate to take a look back at the history of Emily Dickinson related violence in Amherst.

The earliest destruction associated with Emily Dickinson is, alas, confined mainly to conjecture. Following a series of mysterious nocturnal fires in the town of Amherst in the late 1870s and early 1880s, rumors began spreading of sightings of a white clad figure in connection with the blazes. The complete destruction of the college’s Walker Hall on the night of March 29, 1882, one of this series of fires, was linked with Dickinson some decades later. In a deathbed confession, mathematics instructor Fred A. Gaylord revealed that he had been maintaining a passionate correspondence with a mysterious and poetical local lady with dreadful penmanship; days before the blaze he had threatened to publish her letters if she continued to refuse to meet him in person. Her letters were, of course, completely destroyed in the conflagration.

Burned out shell of Walker Hall, 1882

Some fifty years later, in 1925,  Amherst College students were holding their annual declamation contest in the College Grove. Unrest began during the event when factions supporting Arthur J. White, who recited Wordsworth, and Elmer P. Hurst, reading Emily Dickinson, began to deride one another’s literary discernment. Violence erupted after the judges unanimously chose White. The brawl quickly spread through the crowd leaving a large portion of the student body nursing injuries to body and dignity.

President Olds remonstrated the students the following day and officially banned both Dickinson and Wordsworth from campus.

President Olds addressing students in front of College hall

In April of 1956, as news of Millicent Todd Bingham’s donation of her Emily Dickinson manuscripts to Amherst College spread throughout the town, a large group of passionate supporters of Amherst’s Jones Library gathered on the town common. Already nettled by the donation of Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s manuscripts to Harvard, this latest news was unbearable insult to the loyal library patrons who felt that Dickinson’s works belonged at the public library. Torches were lit and as the angry mob grew, groups of torch bearing citizens roamed the campus terrorizing undergraduates and professors alike. Late in the evening the mob reconvened in the town common and burned both institutions of higher learning in effigy while chanting, “Emily for the People! Emily for the People!”

In 1989, the renowned expert in early photographic portraiture, G. D. Anderson, offered a rare opportunity for the public to bring possible daguerreotypes of Emily Dickinson to him for assessment. Much to his astonishment, 126 individuals attended the event, held in the Masonic Lodge in Amherst. In order to keep the crowd amused during the long wait for individual consultations, Anderson made the short-sighted suggestion that attendees form small groups to discuss the merit of the images they had brought. Tragically, all 126 daguerreotypes were destroyed in the resulting melee. Following the incident, Anderson removed himself entirely from public life and is rumored to now be a llama farmer in northern Vermont.

In 2008, in a carefully hushed incident, Amherst College Physics Professor Dr. Johanna Ehrikson pursued her Emily Dickinson research to the near annihilation of the planet. Dr. Ehrikson was exploring the hypothesis that Emily Dickinson had embedded the Theory Of Everything (TOE) in her written works (specifically the fascicle books). Intending to publish the TOE in a paper jointly authored by herself and Dickinson, Dr. Ehrikson fed Dickinson’s works into a secret algorithm to begin the process of decoding. To her astonishment, the overwhelming weight of the profundity of Dickinson’s poetry caused a very small black hole to form. It was only the quick action of student assistant Emma Rahlsten, who recognized the danger and quickly hit the kill switch, that stopped the black hole before it became large enough to be self-sustaining. The black hole evaporated, life on earth continued as we know it, and Professor Ehrikson decided to pursue other avenues to tenure.

Most recently, as I’m sure we’re all aware, was the pub fight at the 2011 Emily Dickinson International Society conference. A heated debate between opposing camps of scholars on the meaning of Dickinson’s dash lengths escalated to nose tweaking and ear pulling and quickly developed into an all-out brawl that caused significant property damage to the now defunct Groan & Quail and changed the course of a number of scholarly inquiries.

All of us at the Amherst College Archives and Special Collections offer our sympathies to those affected by last night’s incident and our sincere hope that we can finally all come together and stop the violence.

Edit: Happy April Fools Day!

With gratitude for the research assistance of Dr. Theresa J. Brandt and Margaret Dakin.

Thanks to funding from the British Columbia History Digitization Program, we’ve recently completed a project to digitize over 2100 maps and plans and made them available online for you to use and re-use. We’ve tried to digitize these maps with enough resolution to support future types of re-use and processing, including optical character recognition and feature extraction.

These maps and plans hold quite a variety of information. We have put a small selection of images on flickr as a sample.

Want to see how the city was reshaped? You can see the before and after of a section of Point Grey in 1925, before it was part of the City of Vancouver.

Plan of government subdivision at Point Grey, B.C. Reference code AM1594-: MAP 359.

Here’s a plan for an airport built out into the sea at Spanish Banks, with a proposed airfield and mooring mast for airships (this was before the Hindenburg disaster), a 20,000-seat stadium, night lights, winter gardens, swimming pool, and a children’s protected swimming channel.

Vancouver airport plan, 1928. Detail from reference code AM1594-: MAP 377-: 1972-568.2.

Here’s a 1969 plan for Jericho Park which includes an ice palace, miniature train and tennis.

A preliminary proposal for development of Jericho Park, 1969. Reference code AM1594-: MAP 965.

This one shows Cable TV service areas in 1964:

Cablevision : Vancouver, B.C., Canada, September, 1964. Reference code AM1519-: PAM 1964-185

We have a number of plans that show the development of Vancouver’s water works. This one shows proposed extensions and improvements, including reservoirs in Stanley Park and Little Mountain. Here’s a detail of one section. Note that False Creek still extends well past Main Street at this time, and the City of Vancouver does not go further south than 16th Avenue.

General plan of proposed extension & improvements, circa 1907. Reference code COV-S371—: LEG1153.092

This map shows which businesses were operating on False Creek and where, in 1952. This image is a detail from the Main Street end of the Creek.

False Creek development survey occupation plan, September 1952. Reference code AM738-F1-: MAP 913.

You can see how the City used land in 1984.

City of Vancouver Land Use 1984, published by City of Vancouver Planning Department. Reference code PUB-: PD 1984.

From the Leon Ladner fonds, this map shows Shaughnessy Heights in 1912 and is annotated with the names of the property owners. Here’s a small portion:

Map of Shaughnessy Heights, 1912. Detail of reference code AM641-S8-: LEG1363.01.

We’ve digitized some of the non-map materials that go with the maps. For example, on the other side of a map of Greater Vancouver in 1911, there is “What the man who comes to Vancouver wants to know”, listing hotels and room rates, the first-class (and merely good) restaurants, tea rooms, clubs, theatres and the baseball schedule for the Vancouver Beavers.

“What the man who comes to Vancouver wants to know”, 1911. Reference code AM1594-: MAP 749-: LEG1277.7.

In the coming weeks, we will make the maps available as TIF files, as we have for our other maps. Please let us know how you are using these maps and plans!

This digitization project was made possible by funding from the British Columbia History Digitization Program at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, University of British Columbia.

The Federal Music Project (FMP), was one of several programs under the Works Progress Administration (WPA) aimed at finding employment for thousands of Americans in the arts. The FMP primarily produced symphonic and orchestral music, however, the project also employed musicians and researchers involved in regional and marginalized forms of music such as Western, Creole, Mexican Orquesta típica and so called “Negro spirituals.” 

The WNYC and Municipal Archives contain several FMP recordings of African American choral groups singing spirituals and other traditional songs. Through the cracks and pops come expressive vocal arrangements and breakout solo performances. Click on the listen button to hear a mixtape, featuring highlights from these recordings. This is just a cross section of the variety of genres, intricate harmonies and emotional intensity that set these songs apart from other FMP productions.

Though the program created a platform for marginalized performers, they were subjected to the same discrimination typical of Jim Crow America. Music groups were segregated along racial and ethnic lines despite playing to large, integrated audiences. Most were subjected to discriminatory practices, such as unequal wage classifications and performing stereotypical music associated with the idealized antebellum south and minstrelsy.

The spiritual, originally used as a form of slave resistance, echoes the singers’ contemporary struggles. The announcer introduces Sit Down Servant, by the Juanita Hall Choir (Program No. 4), as “…the story of an old colored woman who’s not allowed to sit down in this world, but looks forward to her golden chair in the next.”

Since most of the arrangements hail from the spiritual tradition, Christian faith is the predominant subject matter. An unusual exception, however, is an arrangement of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be…” soliloquy, by the Los Angeles Colored Chorus (Program No. 79), in which the performers sing a harmonic backdrop for a spoken word recitation of the famous monologue.

An unidentified Los Angeles based choral group.

(New Deal Network/National Archives and Records Administration)

The recordings frequently invoke modern forms of popular music such as swing and blues. These genres are most apparent in Program No. 79 in which the standard Swing Low, Sweet Chariot is reinterpreted as a “swing spiritual” in The Chariots’ Done Come and Swing Low. This program contains another swing spiritual Someone Stole Gabriel’s Horn and finishes with W.C. Handy’s St. Louis Blues.

Announcers, speaking as if to an all-white audience, emphasize the otherness of each group when introducing a song. In a recording of the Negro Melody Singers (Program No. 4) the announcer suggests, “You may never have witnessed the Negro folk dance but the lively music of Shortenin’ Bread will give you a vivid picture of the gaiety of such a dance!” The intention seems to be ethnographic study, evident on Program No. 16, as the Negro Melody Singers perform a series of vendor street cries heard in neighborhoods across the east coast. In Program No. 52 the announcer describes the song Dark Water as a “modern spiritual with negroid characteristics”, espousing essentialist attitudes towards African Americans at this time. 

In spite of the WPA’s tokenism of marginalized artists, the Federal Music Project helped propel the careers of some performers, most notably the musical theater actress Juanita Hall. Furthermore, historian, David Woolner points out that the WPA,

“…hired and featured the work of hundreds of African American artists; and from the New Deal’s educational programs, which taught over 1 million illiterate blacks to read and write and which increased the number of African American children attending primary school.” (African Americans and the New Deal: A Look Back in History)

In his book Sounds of the New Deal, Peter Gough sums up the conflicted legacy that these recordings leave:

“These events—and the growing Anglo fascination with jazz, blues, and the spirituals—did not directly translate into improved economic situations for black people living in the United States. African Americans suffered disproportionately during the Great Depression, as black unemployment remained nearly twice as high as that of whites. Yet, the decades-long upsurge in violence against African Americans dropped significantly by the mid-1930s and into the 1940s, and the influence of the Ku Klux Klan, which had expanded alarmingly during the 1910s and 1920s, also began to wane. Further, while the ideas of the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro movement failed to eradicate negative racial stereotypes, there did emerge during the 1930s a growing public awareness of African Americans and an increased interest in their culture—though often predicated on romanticized notions of the Old South of the nineteenth century.”

Track List

1. Way Over in Beulah Land – Juanita Hall Choir
2. Raise a Ruckus Tonight – Los Angeles Colored Chorus
3. Joshua Fit The Battle of Jericho – Los Angeles Colored Chorus
4. To Be or Not To Be – Los Angeles Colored Chorus
5. Ezekiel Saw the Wheel – Negro Melody Singers
6. In That Great Gettin’ Up Morning – Negro Art Singers
7. Steal Away – Los Angeles Colored Chorus
8. Hallelujah Chorus (Handel’s Messiah) – Los Angeles Colored Chorus
9. This Train and Same Train – Negro Melody Singers
10. Dark Water – Los Angeles Negro Choir
11. The Chariots’ Done Come and Swing Low – Los Angeles Colored Chorus
12. Joe Brown’s Coal Mine – Negro melody Singers
13. Little David – Los Angeles Negro Choir
14. Street vendor cries – Negro Melody Singers
15. Scandalize My Name – Juanita Hall Choir
16. Sit Down Servant – Juanita Hall Choir
17. Four and Twenty Elders – Los Angeles Negro Choir
18. Someone Stole Gabriel’s Horn – Los Angeles Colored Chorus
19. Go Down Moses – Los Angeles Negro Choir
20. I Been in the Storm So Long – Negro Melody Singers
21. Poor Mourner’s Got a Home at Last – Los Angeles Negro Choir
22. St. Louis Blues – Los Angeles Colored Chorus

This spring one of the treasures of our Archives and Special Collections is setting off on a journey to Paris where it will feature in a major new exhibition on the life of the Emperor Napoleon. The volume is a British military signal book which contained detailed instructions for the garrison guarding Napoleon during his exile on the island of St Helena.

The signal book is a well-travelled volume. It was first used by Colonel Mark Wilks, Governor General of St Helena in 1815. This piece of Napoleonic memorabilia passed through the hands of a number of collectors until it was purchased at auction in New York by the family of Burt Eddy Taylor in 1928. In 1969 Mr Taylor donated his collection of Napoleonic material, including the signal book, to the new university library at Stirling. Now, in 2016 it sets sail again, for the Musée de l’Armée in Paris.

Our signal book being checked by the Emperor before its departure for Paris.

The signal book will feature in Napoléon à Sainte-Hélène. La Conquête de la Mémoire, a major new exhibition looking at Napoleon’s period of exile on the mid-Atlantic island which opens on 6 April 2016. Our small, scruffy volume will take its place alongside an extensive range of items from collections across Europe which have been brought together to tell the story of Napoleon’s captivity on St Helena.

Detail from inside cover of the signal book.

The signal book highlights the lengths the to which the British went to ensure Napoleon did not escape from the island. The inside covers illustrate the flags and signals which were to be used for communication including those for raising the alarm if Napoleon was missing. To limit the chance of rescue by his supporters a garrison of 1,300 troops was placed on the tiny island. In addition four Royal Navy ships patrolled offshore. Within the pages of the book further detailed instructions were laid out in the event of Napoleon’s absence:

‘the Signal Officers of the different posts are strictly enjoined to lose no time in communicating the intelligence personally to the places nearest them where troops may be stationed to the end that patroles may be immediately sent out in every direction to insure the impracticability of any person escaping from the island.’

The procedures put in place evidently worked. Napoleon remained on the island until his death in May 1821.

Napoléon à Sainte-Hélène. La Conquête de la Mémoire

Musée de l’Armée, Paris

6^th April – 24^th July 2016

Readers will be unsurprised to learn that a fine source of historical bad children is the 1864 book Frank and Rufus; or, Obedience and Disobedience. (I was hoping for an old-fashioned version of Goofus and Gallant, but alas, it’s not really like that at all.) Its author, Catharine M. Trowbridge, also wrote the 1867 book Charles Norwood; or, Erring and Repenting, which sounds to me like Frank and Rufus was so good that she wrote the same thing again, but with a different main character.

Anyway, one of the stars of this book is the young Rufus Dean. He’s a sweet boy with lots of friends, although his impish constitution sometimes leads him down misguided paths.

Here’s Rufus slyly pocketing a dime and a half-dime that his mother left on the windowsill. Why would such a sweet boy do such a thing, taking what Trowbridge calls “a very formidable step in the downward path”? The author explains that “he had repeatedly yielded, when tempted, to disobedience and deceit; and in this way, had greatly weakened his moral power to resist temptation.”

What happens to a boy with weakened moral power? I didn’t  read all 280 pages to find the details, but I can tell you that Rufus becomes a drunk and disgraces his family name, and that his sister, when grown, even refuses to name her first-born son after him, as the name Rufus is “tarnished”. Frank, on the other hand, having learned obedience, becomes someone whose “fellow citizens honored and trusted him” and whose “faithful and judicious mother found in him the support and joy of her old age.”

Take note, dear readers: don’t steal 15 cents, or the situation may snowball until your mother looks wan, your sister hates you, and you’re forced to seek “relief in the stimulus of the wine-cup”.

Fleur and Evita; Two Strong Women Go Head-to-Head

“I’m not an author,” Fleur Cowles protests, at this 1952 Book and Authors Luncheon. The sole reason for writing Bloody Precedent, a memoir of her trip to Argentina, is to recount her meeting with Eva Perón, wife of that country’s dictator Juan Perón. Despite some rather striking similarities shared by these two ambitious, self-confident women, they did not hit it off. Cowles, then wife of the newspaper and magazine magnate Gardner Cowles, “loathed” Evita who, in turn, spoke to her “like a minion.” Much is made of Evita wearing a “colossal” diamond orchid which, Cowles sneers, must be worth “a quarter-million dollars.” (This from a woman who, in later life, owned a large residence in one of London’s most prestigious addresses, an Elizabethan farmhouse, and a castle in Spain.)

The actual encounter between the two seems to have been short, though Cowles claims Evita “let her hair down” because she had no real friends to talk to. Instead of gossip, we are treated to an analysis of the current political situation in Argentina, a country which troubled the US government because Eva Perón’s obvious support of labor unions and her interest in aiding the poor smacked of socialism. This is seen when Cowles, after painting the couple as typical South American despots, confusingly calls Evita “the John L. Lewis of Argentina.” Much is made of her being the power behind the throne and the “Petticoat Curtain” which supposedly shrouds the country. At the end, there is gruesome speculation about Evita’s cancer and what her death would mean to her husband’s grip on power.

Fleur Cowles (1908-2009) went to great lengths to hide her modest beginnings in New York City and New Jersey. A career woman almost before the term existed, she had made her way in the world of advertising before a third marriage to Cowles, owner of, among other publications, the Des Moines Register and Look Magazine, vaulted her into high society, which quickly became her natural element. She helped Cowles redesign and expand the appeal of Look (which competed with Life as the nation’s top magazine) but her greatest achievement was the short-lived Flair. A frankly elitist magazine, combining art and fashion, giving the reader a taste of the publisher’s upper-class interests, the preview issue, as the New York Times reports:

“…boasted a two-layer cover. The outside was embossed with a basket-weave pattern and punctuated with a hole, through which could be seen a picture of a man and woman embracing. The inside cover showed the couple as part of a wall layered with a collage of shredded posters. A spring issue featured the rose, a flower Ms. Cowles painted and extolled until her death. The issue was suffused with a rose fragrance, some four decades before scent strips became ubiquitous. Housed within it, bound as a booklet, was a tribute to the rose by Katherine Anne Porter. The magazine itself had a rose named after it — Flair rose — and there is a Fleur Cowles rose as well. Flair published stories and articles by W. H. Auden, Jean Cocteau, Simone de Beauvoir, Angus Wilson, Tennessee Williams, Ogden Nash and Clare Boothe Luce, among others. Salvador Dalí, Saul Steinberg, Lucian Freud, Rufino Tamayo and even Winston Churchill were among the contributing artists.”

The magazine was, to some extent, a success, doubling its readership in one year, although it also met with a fair amount of what now could be seen as sexist ridicule. But Flair lost a tremendous amount of money. After her husband shut down publication, Cowles moved on, marrying timber tycoon Tom Montague Meyer and becoming a legendary London hostess.

Eva Perón (1919-1952) remains a controversial figure. Although the civil rights abuses and trampling of democracy under the Peróns are well-documented, so too is her genuine interest in reaching past that country’s entrenched elite and attempting to empower previously ignored sections of society. As the website history.co.uk recounts: 

“In 1947, she set up the Maria Eva Duarte De Perón Welfare Foundation, which distributed money, food and medicines to those most in need. The money came from ‘contributions’, not always willingly given, from businesses and unions. The result was very popular with the poor masses, but far less popular with the elite. Evita further angered the elite with her active campaign for female suffrage. Suffrage for women was enacted in 1947, largely due to the energy and soul that Evita poured into the campaign. … She died from cancer on 26 July 1952, aged just 32. Public grief was intense, and unprecedented in Argentina. Her precise role in Argentinian politics is still hotly debated, and her supporters and enemies battle it out to write her legacy. There is no doubt, however, that she was a remarkable woman who made her mark on history.”

Viewed from a historical perspective, these two women would seem to have had much in common: a rise from humble beginnings, power wielded through a compliant spouse, resistance met because of their sex. Perhaps, though, as this talk would indicate, each diva required her own separate stage. 

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150529
Municipal archives id: LT2317

The azaleas and dogwoods are in bloom, thunderstorms have started rolling through in the afternoon, and sunbathers and hammock dwellers have returned to their regular spots on Landis Green, which can only mean one thing: spring has arrived in Tallahassee! While the weather and native plant life hasn’t changed much in the past 70 years, fashion sure has. Take a look at some FSCW Easter styles, which in true southern fashion was all about white shoes and big hats.

To see more photographs, ephemera, and artifacts related to the history of Florida State, check out the FSU Heritage Protocol Digital Collections or like the Heritage Protocol Facebook page.

In the first post in this digital preservation series, I shared some of the unique challenges digital material brings to the preservation game. In this one we will look at some of the technologies and tools digital stewards employ to protect our digital assets.

How can you tell when a computer file has been corrupted? If you try to open it funny, glitchy things might happen. How can you test whether a digital file is uncorrupted? This requires a bit more thought. Digital files are at their base-level a long string of 1’s and 0’s. This is called the file’s bitstream. Preservationists could compare one bitstream to an earlier copy of it, but this requires a lot of processing power for large files, with no guarantee that your comparison copy isn’t also corrupted.

This is where checksums can help us out. Checksums are character strings generated by a class of algorithms called hash functions or cryptographic hashes. You can try one out here: http://md5checksum.com/. Hash functions are used to encrypt lots of things. Passwords submitted to websites are hashed in your browser. Kind of like this:

Hash functions can also be applied to the bitstream of a file. Due to the nature of the various algorithms used even a single change in a one or zero will produce a drastically different checksum. If at the beginning of the preservation process a digital steward produces a checksum for the bitstream, she can now test for data integrity by rerunning the hash and comparing that output to the original checksum.

Now that we can test for unwanted changes in computer files, how can we ensure we always have a valid copy of it? A system called LOCKSS can help with this. LOCKSS stands for Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe. Similar to the idea of backing up personal files, LOCKSS will duplicate the files given to it and then distribute copies of files across several servers. The idea is to spread the system out over many servers in diverse geographic areas to minimize the risk of a single disaster (natural or otherwise) compromising the entire system. These distributed copies are then regularly hashed, and the checksums compared to test the validity of the files. If a checksum comparision fails, that server can delete it’s failing copy of the file, and ask the other servers for a new one.

Digital preservation is a rapidly developing field. New challenges requiring new solutions arise every day. In the third and final post in this digital preservation series, I’ll discuss activities you can undertake to protect your personal digital heritage.

Here at the WNYC Archives, we’re often handed mysteries – two-sided 16-inch slates with utterly unique silent spiral etchings, scans of reticent catalog cards referring back to them, and the nonce codes and illegible scrawl from 50 – 80 years past written on their custom green and cream WNYC labels. Maybe an insert, if we’re lucky. It’s our job to turn all this into something that people can make use of, by A) digitizing these recordings and making them available in house and online, and B) providing a more accurate and more thorough catalog record for each of the 1 to 121 minute recordings we’ve painstakingly shifted from one type of disc to another. If there’s little in the way of a paper trail and a speaker greets us cold, it can be a bit of a puzzle.

I’d like to invite you to help us solve one of these puzzles. I’ve already taken care of part A. Together we’ll get a start on part B. We’re going to find out just who is speaking, who he or she is speaking to, and what the heck that person is talking about. We’re going to examine the first 45 seconds or so of the recording, bit by bit, phrase by phrase. We’ll start though, with what little written record remains. 

This is the OCR’d text from a copy of the original library catalog card:

T “p
7967 Conr/urers . _ „
‘ITe^-VTctories for .or.en
1 album 2 s. 1C in. 6/b/su
Dr CRRIBELL t L’-e on the topic “The Con-sumer
IR Vre Future”

Caribbean Conjurers of the future? Probably not. Truth be told it’s a little clearer with the naked eye: As you might have guessed from the title of this blog piece, “Dr CRRIBELL” is “Dr. Campbell.” And “6/b/su” is somehow 6/6/58. Hopefully that gives you some hints, but you can typically tell a lot more from the recording itself, so let’s have a listen. Take your time to reflect on what you’ve heard and we’ll reconvene after each clip.

Whoa, easy Engels! Let’s ignore for a moment the possibly revolutionary sentiment of the phrase itself and instead concentrate on the more prosodic aspects of this clip – her tone and accent in particular. It’s calm, measured, and undeniably Australian. It’s not the Bahbie-thick Australian of a Dundee Paul Hogan, or Bond-villain Rupert Murdoch, but neither is it the placeless Australian laureate of a Cate Blanchett or Nick Cave. Come to think of it though, maybe there is a mite of R.P. dignity behind it, is there not? Perhaps it was learned in London, or cropped from the affectations of New York’s cultural and intellectual upper crust.

It is clearly a woman speaking, so we should consider the limited number of options available to women in late 1950s New York (and whether they will be reappraised), but we’ll table that for now. Whether her voice is “maternal,” “feminine,” or what-you-will is subjective, but I think there’s an undeniable presbyphonic dip in pitch that comes with age. I’d say she’s somewhere in the 50-65 range.

Some people temper their political opinions as they advance in years. Others don’t. Based on her rather subdued tone I’d suspect that if she is planning an insurrection, it’s more of a Fabian sort than a Marxist one. And her speech can’t have been that revolutionary, it did air on WNYC after all, still at the time closely allied to the municipal government. Nevertheless, it’s quite an introduction, and it hints that the speech with call some of those “values and attitudes” into question.

So we have a well-traveled, if not cosmopolitan, late middle-aged woman, originally from Australia, giving a speech on an as-yet-unknown subject to two audiences: one as-yet-unknown – the assembled crowd (can you hear the “room” reverb?); and a known audience – WNYC listeners (like you!). As sharp as her words are on paper, the edge has been rounded by her age, temperament, and (probably) a learned pragmatism in life and in politics.

I think we were wise to note the tone ahead of content in the first snippet, but let’s reverse the process for this second one.

“For one thing” is the sort of phrase that keeps a speech’s steady pace, but is otherwise basically meaningless. We can safely ignore it. What’s interesting is the use of two phrases which on their own imply something close to certainty – it will…, I believe – now nested to imply doubt, a reasonable acceptance of uncertainty. I think it’s telling. “It will” is pure force; “I believe” tempers it, opens it up. “I believe” becomes at once a hedge, an implicit statement of a belief in autonomy and human agency, and an explicit statement of, well, belief. It’s not the cold, dead conviction one gets from ideologues, for whom it is less a question of belief than of truth or falsehood. For a Marxist, for instance, the coming rise of consumerism would be closer to a certainty – small degrees on history’s established arc, any “belief” to the contrary an easily dispelled example of false consciousness. The same might be said of a rabid capitalist, communism’s uncomfortable obverse. Our speaker seems to be saying “this is what I expect of the future, but I’m not sure. Other people believe other things.” Or as one of my favorite professors was fond of saying, “reasonable people can disagree.”

The topic of the speech is coming into focus, and in just the first 11 seconds. Efficient, she is. Her speech will apparently be about the coming shift to a more consumer-minded future. Whether this is good, bad, bad-then-good, good-then-bad, or vanilla-bean-neutral is yet to be seen.  She strikes me as someone who will leave such value judgments to the side though, tacit, if anything.

Pausing to take stock, we can feel more confident in her pragmatism and we know that the speech will have an economic focus, on a coming consumer culture. We also can be confident that her beliefs, while strong, are not set in stone, and are open to light of evidence.

I think it’s time to mention briefly the limitations placed on women with professional aspirations in late-1950s America. There isn’t space to elaborate here, other than to say they were often severe, unfair and unfortunate, and as much as she pushed hard to get where she is at the time of this record – a “Dr.” – those limitations undoubtedly pushed back. From this clip we can tell that she is enough of an authority on the subject of consumerism to be asked to speak about it by a person or persons for whom the traditional definition of the word “authority” might be a more literal fit – a man or men in a position of power in the municipal or state government, or a university, less likely a businessman. There is of course a chance that one of the prominent women’s groups of the time – League of Women Voters, Women’s City Club, etc. – or perhaps an Eleanor Roosevelt, noted consumer advocate, might have brought our speaker in, but I wonder how often they drew crowds as obviously captive as this crowd seems to be. I’d suspect not as often.

So we now know that our speaker is likely a trained specialist in the topic of consumerism, a Ph.D holding economist, speaking at the behest of powers that be to a group likely not there to see her specifically, more likely required to listen to her speech for their edification.

Disappointment. In two senses.

Most obviously in the fact that the values and attitudes to be reappraised do not involve greater opportunities for women. But it’s a retrospective disappointment, and maybe we’re reading too much into it – she is speaking at the behest of others, which probably constrains her rhetorical options. You can’t blame her for having missed the social and economic advances made by women as they have transpired in the present day, but you can’t help but wish she hadn’t, especially for the benefit of her in-person audience – young women, probably college aged. Perhaps our speaker, reflecting on her own difficult path to achievement, likely met with that time’s biases and aggressive sexism, was reasonably pessimistic. It’s hard to say. 

The other disappointment – for the archivist, the listener, the detective – is that as the mystery is revealed, the narrative is constrained – the listener’s inherent interest in the subject starts to matter more and more, the story less and less. Sure, anything could happen, but we can’t deny that some things are more likely than others – particularly in a prepared speech, as opposed to, say, a debate, a talk radio tête–à–tête, or even a Q&A sesh. Each new word, new phrase, new paragraph reveals progressively less new information. Authors have written of chasing the “incipit” for a book’s length, where no word … is [in]significant. Can a speech, especially one as muted as this, be expected to do the same? It is asking a lot. Still, for those on the hunt for information on the role of women in an incipient consumer society in 1950s New York, this will probably be a veritable gold mine.

From this snippet we can tell our speaker, in spite of having opened up a challenge to the era’s values and attitudes, has actually retained a few in her prediction. Though she’s unwittingly missed a prime target, it’s unclear just how wide of the mark she is in general. I think it’s reasonable to agree that she is at least partially correct in seeing a rise in consumerism, even if she isn’t as prescient about the socioeconomic place of women in the future.

Again a hedge, this time against the implicit assumption that the assembled women’s primary economic role will be “homemaker.” In fact it could be read as code, though that might be generous. But I’d imagine some members of her audience read it as exactly that, while others let it slip right through. It is a mistake to imagine passive listeners and I think it’s important to recall that the audience isn’t us. It isn’t even 1958 WNYC listeners, though many undoubtedly heard it. It’s a group of young women, probably navigating their first few years of adulthood in 1950s New York. A prediction in this atmosphere isn’t really a pure prediction, it can also be a call to action, an invitation for these women to reflect on their agency in creating their own future. From that perspective, her accuracy or lack-thereof is beside the point. 

In this section we can reaffirm her faith in agency and her faith in her audience, even if one does get the sense she still has a point to make about the homemaker’s role in the coming consumer society… 

…And there it is. Our late middle-aged female Australian economist is speaking in front of a group of young women, asking them, in so many words, to reflect on their place as homemakers (and maybe more) in a society in which the way money is spent on consumer goods will grant them a power not wholly appreciated in 1950s America. The rest of the speech will elaborate on this theme. 

I think at this point there is more than enough information to start trawling the web. Using a popular search engine (and a depersonalizing “&pws=0” tag), a search of “consumer economists New York 1958 Australian” yields this excellent capsule biography as 2nd result on the 2nd page. It would have been first if we’d added the name “Campbell,” which we knew from the catalog card, but where’s the fun in that? It is through this short bio that we can test our interpretations, and you can move on to listen to the rest of the recording, while I dutifully complete our catalog entry of this speech on “the Consumer in the Future” by the Australian-American economist, professor, and civil servant, Persia Campbell.

Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.

WNYC archives id: 150239
Municipal archives id: LT7967

The Archives will be closed for the long weekend and open again on Tuesday.

Two girls looking at rabbit on table, Pacific National Exhibition, 1952, detail. Reference code AM281-S8-: CVA 180-1765.

Since 2010, we have made significant accomplishments in open government at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). We have published 3 plans and accomplished more than 120 commitments. NARA commitments are even featured in the U.S. National Action Plan on Open Government.  But we still need to do more and we need to hear your ideas on how we can improve.

Please join me for a webinar with other NARA executives on Tuesday, March 29 from 2:00 – 3:00 PM Eastern Time. We will provide an overview of the agency’s next Open Government Plan and related topics and seek your ideas, suggestions, and feedback on what we can improve.

Register for the webinar today.  

Do you have ideas on how to improve the researcher experience?  Do you have suggestions for better ways for NARA to collaborate, encourage public participation, or innovate? How can we provide greater transparency to our records or our processes? Let us know!

Learn more about our efforts by reviewing our previous Open Government Plan and visiting Archives.gov/open.

Share your suggestions or questions in advance and during the webinar on History Hub, our pilot collaborative platform, or email opengov@nara.gov. You’ll also be able to make suggestions by chat or phone during the webinar, but we’d love to have your contributions on History Hub.

 Agenda:

• Introduction – David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States
• Open Government Plan Process – Pamela Wright, Chief Innovation Officer
• Innovation – Pamela Wright, Chief Innovation Officer
• Research Services – Ann Cummings, Access Coordinator
• Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) – Gary M. Stern, General Counsel and Chief FOIA Officer
• Declassification – Sheryl Shenberger, Director of the National Declassification Center
• Records Management – Laurence Brewer, Acting Chief Records Officer for the U.S. Government, and Director, Records Management Operations Program
• Ideas, Comments, and Suggestions – Participants of the webinar are asked to share their thoughts on what NARA should do to strengthen open government.