The Ranney Letters Are Going Online

Dan Allosso

As I was doing research toward my dissertation in Ashfield, Massachusetts, last year, I came across a series of family letters written by a set of eight brothers (they had one sister, but she apparently wrote no letters).  The Ranney brothers were all born between 1812 and 1833 in Ashfield, but all of them except the third son Henry went west—some farther than others.  They wrote each other regularly for more than fifty years, and over a hundred of their letters are preserved at the Ashfield Historical Society.  The collection probably includes most of the letters Henry Sears Ranney  received from his brothers (he was apparently a very meticulous record-keeper, and served as Ashfield’s Town Clerk for fifty years!), but not all.  For example, there is no mention of the death at age 25 of younger brother Lyman, who was working for a merchant in Tahlequah and had written several letters home with interesting observations of the South and the Indian Nation.  And unfortunately the collection does not include copies of letters Henry wrote.  That’s unfortunate, but not unexpected.  Although blotter-books were widely used in this period to make copies of handwritten letters, this practice was usually reserved for business correspondence.

   

A collection of a hundred family letters spanning half a century is treasure for a historian interested in the lives of regular people.  Because the writers were all brothers, there is very little time wasted on empty formality—they get right to the point and write about what’s most important to the family.  Reading the letters, we get a rare glimpse at the interests and concerns of a fairly normal American family, as they experienced life in the nineteenth century.    

The Ashfield Historical Society has been great about letting me transcribe and post these letters, which I have begun to do at www.ranneyletters.com.  In the long run, I hope they can become a resource for teachers looking for primary material on the Yankee Migration to the northwest, and for anyone interested in the voices of regular Americans in the nineteenth century.  When I’ve completed the set (something over a hundred letters and several background essays on local history, research, etc.), I’m going to self-publish them into a paperback volume.  As I prepare the material, I’m hoping to get feedback from people on what is useful and interesting; I’ll use this when I prepare the final version for print.  So if you get a chance, please take a look or tell people you think may be interested.  And stay tuned, letters will be posted more or less daily. 

The story begins in May, 1839, with a three-page letter from twenty-four year old Lewis George Ranney to his younger brother Henry.   Lewis begins with the most important news: “our folks are well as usual.” Their parents had moved most of the family to Phelps New York in 1833.  Henry, sixteen at the time, had stayed behind in Ashfield.  In early 1838, George Ranney bought 105 acres in Phelps for $5,000; a year later he bought another hundred acres for $2,800.  Eldest son Alonzo Franklin Ranney had a two acre house lot in town, worth $500, and Lewis was living at home in 1839 when he wrote to Henry—but he had already decided by this time that he was going on to Michigan.  

The contents of the letter reveal the topics that interested Lewis, that he knew his brother would want to hear about.  First, news of both the immediate and extended family.  In response to Henry’s letter, Lewis lists the birth dates of all the siblings.  Their mother, Achsah Sears Ranney, had eleven children in the 21-year period between age 23 and 44, and then lived to age 80.  Nine of the children were alive in 1839.  Lewis goes on to mention a couple of Ashfield acquaintances, and then tells Henry that their father wants him to send money.  Funds will be tight in Phelps until the harvest, several months away, and their father “has had none from Michigan.”  This is a very interesting point, because it shows that the family is not only in contact over half the continent, but is financially connected as well.  Money and information (and, as we’ll see later, merchandise) flows in both directions between family members all over North America.  We’re mistaken if we assume that when people moved west, they cut their ties with family and went on their own.  This web of continuity and connection is one of the most interesting aspects of the collection.

Singing the News in 18th-Century Paris: An Interview with Robert Darnton

Randall Stephens

Over a month ago I interviewed Robert Darnton at this blog on the ongoing discussions about a Digital Public Library of America. Of course, in addition to being a spokesperson for a national digital library and director of Harvard libraries, he is also an accomplished historian. He's written or edited a variety of books, including The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979); The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Basic Books, 1984); Berlin Journal, 1989-1990 (W. W. Norton, 1991); The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France (W. W. Norton, 1995); and The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). His most recent book, Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), examines how songs sung on 18th-century Paris streets "provided a running commentary on public affairs . . . during a period of rising discontent. He uncovers a complex communication network, illuminating the way information circulated in a semi-literate society."*

I spoke with Darnton back in April about his research for the book, the surprising story he found, and the importance of oral sources for the study of history. (Thanks to Carissa Schutz, my admin assistant for transcribing the interview.)

Stephens: In Poetry and the Police you write about the transfer of information and the spread of news and gossip in the 18th century. What do historians know about literacy in France during this age?

Robert Dartnon: Yes, of course, it’s very difficult to know exactly what the literacy rates were 250 years ago, we have dubious sources, notarial archives, registers of people signing baptisms and marriage, that sort of thing. On the whole we have rough estimates. Urban France was more literate than rural France. It turns out that northern France was more literate than southern France, and so on. But the fact is that this was a society where people were largely illiterate, and those who could read often had only a primitive capacity to do so.

So, think of Paris around 1750. How did people know the news? How do they get information about current events? Well, they did so through oral means. There are certain places where they’d go to gossip about what was actually happening. And there were no newspapers in the modern sense of the word. The Gazette de France was heavily censored. All periodical literature actually was censored. So you could say for printed versions of the news, it hardly existed.

What I argue in this book is that they found out about current events through oral exchanges and in particular through songs. Paris was full of street singers, many were beggars, they had fiddles. They would set up shops, so to speak, at a street corner, fiddle away and ball out a song. The songs that they sung were news essentially. That is to say Parisians were improvising new words to old tunes every day. It’s astonishing what the production was. And it wasn’t terribly difficult to compose these songs. They were very simple ballads mostly. There’s some intrigue in the government, or the king has a new mistress, or the price of bread is shooting up, or it might just be the weather. People were discussing this in music through new verses to old tunes. And I came upon a wonderful run in the archives of manuscript, little sheets of paper, on which people jotted down the new verses and then carried them around in their pockets, traded them for other bits of paper, on which there were other verses.

Stephens: It was like an underground press in a way?

Darnton: It was like an underground press, but the fascinating thing is that they were then sung. Not just by the beggar and then street singers, but by ordinary people in market places, sometimes in cafes, often in public gardens. I mean, Paris was full of song. And of course historians haven’t paid much attention to this because oral information doesn’t get recorded by and large. What I did was to try and figure out what the messages were so I went through vast collections, hundreds and hundreds of these songs and I have statistical estimates of how many there were. I could prove, for example, that there were at least three new songs composed every week around 1750, but that’s just from the evidence that has survived in the archives. I would say that we’ve got a dozen new songs almost every day being composed.

The question then is, what did they sound like? Because the music, the tunes, could’ve actually reflected the meaning of these songs and when you see the references to them in the archives, there are scrapbooks called Chansonnier that you can go through. This notes “sung to the tune of” and name of a tune that I, at least, had never heard of such as “La Béquille du père Barnabas,” or, in English, “The Crutch of Father Barnabas.” Well no one has ever heard of that tune I think today. And then I found that in the music department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, they have keys to the tunes. So I can look up “The Crutch of Father Barnabas” and there I get the musical annotation.

A friend of mine Hélène Delavault is a cabaret singer in Paris and she agreed to record the songs. Therefore, the book I wrote has the texts of a dozen of these songs as examples of what was actually flowing through the streets of Paris around 1750. The reader can read the original French and then my translation of it and at the same time tune in to Hélène Delavault recording online which is available free of charge. (Listen to them here.)

Stephens: That’s available on the Harvard University Press website?

Darnton: That’s right. There’s a Harvard Univ. Press website but it’s open access, it’s free, and it’s a way of , so to speak, hearing the past. I mean, recovering sounds from the past. Not perfectly because this cabaret performer Hélène Delavault has quite a beautiful voice actually and the street singers were pretty coarse, but still you can get at the way tunes carried meanings, which were largely political.

In fact in April in 1749 the government fell. There was a big political crisis and all the contemporaries agreed about the cause of the crisis. In one word: songs. It sounds strange, and that’s a little too simple, but in fact there’s lots of evidence that the government fell because of a particular intrigue that took the form of a nasty song about the king and Madame Pompadour. So there’s no question that songs could actually be a factor in political crisis.

Stephens: Could royal authorities do anything about that? Could they squelch the singers? Was there an official attempt to do so?

Darnton: There was, yes, because this was such a powerful political force that the royal authorities paid attention to it. And actually I begin the book with a sort of detective story because the head of the Parisian police received an order from the top person in the government: Find me the author of the song that begins with, and they just had the first line: “Monstre dont la noire furie” (Monster whose black fury). That’s all they knew. The monster was Louis XV. They had to somehow find the author to this song. So they had spies in cafes and they fanned out and eventually one of the spies actually found a student who had recited this song/poem and he is arrested through a kind of ambush. It’s very amusing to see how they staged the arrest, because they didn’t want the word to spread that they were cracking down. They wanted to find accomplices, other people who were connected. So his name was François Bonis. He was interrogated in the Bastille. He said where he got the song. That person was arrested; so A got it from B, B got it from C, C got it from D, then D says “yup, I got it from E,” but meanwhile I got three other songs or poems from X, Y, and Z. And they’re all arrested. And they got poems and songs from other people so soon the police were trailing six poems and songs through overall networks of diffusion in Paris. And you can map the way the songs work into Parisian society with tremendous precision. So it’s possible, thanks to this police force, to actually do a very serious sociological study of oral diffusion.

Stephens: It sounds like one of the lessons of this is that even if a state pursues censorship, there will be ways that people will communicate, gossip with one another.

Darnton: Yes that’s one of the things I find fascinating because the state around 1750 could definitely control the printed word. If gossip escapes from their control, they crack down on it. They understand that it’s important, but they can’t stop it. So they really do have spies in all of the major cafes. In a separate run of documents I found reports of police spies that are written in dialogue. Now whether the dialogue is perfectly accurate, I don’t know. In the document X says to Y and Y responds to X, and you can reproduce the dialogue that occurred there according to the police spies. Now I don’t know if the spies touched up things in order to ingratiate themselves to their superiors. Police archives have to be read with a lot of skepticism, but still you can find the subjects that are being discussed and it’s clear that the state is very concerned about oral means of diffusion, even though this is in principle an absolute monarchy.

It’s a fascinating moment in which you see an old form of absolutism going back to Louis XIV and the 17th century confronted with a growing sense of participation in public affairs, if only by discussion. So you could say this is an example of Jürgen Habermas’s work on the public sphere. I’m not totally convinced by Habermas’ thesis, although I think it’s an important one. Certainly it is possible to reconstruct the way political acts and ideas, public affairs are being discussed and disseminated throughout a very large public.

Stephens: And this happens at a specific point in western history when this was possible? It sounds like it was almost a transitional point before the press has more freedom and influence.

Dartnon: That’s right I think this does indeed represent an intermediate phase. It’s quite a long phase. How can you precisely date it? But certainly around 1750 in big cities, even smaller cities, but especially Paris, there’s a huge interest in public affairs. It often accompanies war so from 1740 - 48 you’ve got the War of the Austrian Succession and then 1756 - 63 the Seven Years War. People follow the war and they want information. But you could get it somewhat from the official newspaper, especially when there were victories. But when things go badly you get it by going to certain benches in the Luxembourg Gardens where gossips gather. There’s a tree in the garden of the Palais-Royal called the Tree of Cracow and everyone who was interested in what was really happening would go to this tree where people were just gossiping about politics nonstop. It reached such a level that some foreign ambassadors actually sent servants to plant gossip or to pick it up because people wanted to know what was happening. And you couldn’t do this through the printed word.

Stephens: It seems too that there’d be other examples of this in other cities. I don’t know how far back the Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park dates.

Darnton: It is fascinating to compare London and Paris. It’s not just Hyde Park but the London coffee houses and the Parisian cafés were doing very similar things. But of course working class people didn’t go to cafes so much. They went to drinking establishments, guinguettes some of them are called, which are different in character but that didn’t stop them from gossiping.

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.

On Footnotes and Doing History

Lisa Clark Diller

I recently picked up Anthony Grafton’s The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard University Press, 1999) in an attempt to find more coherent ways to talk to my students about citation and research. I have somehow never managed to read it before now, and I’m finding Grafton’s overt connection between what we are “doing” in history and how we document that work, to be extremely useful. As I think about what I need to do to prove to my reading audience that I know what I’m talking about, I have forgotten what a thin tissue evidence rests on—our assumptions regarding footnotes. The Footnote also contributes to the discussions we’ve been having on this site about conversations between generations of historians.

Grafton reminds us that “in documenting the thought and research that underpin the narrative above them, footnotes prove that it is a historically contingent product, dependent on the forms of research, opportunities, and states of particular questions that existed when the historian went to work” (23). The genealogies of scholarship so neatly mapped out by Dan Allosso last week can also be seen in the footnotes and bibliographies of individual works of scholarship. Who we think it important to cite, what range of sources were important (or available) at the time, and the family of historiographical ancestors we choose for ourselves all reveal our location in time and situate us on an ideological map.

Footnotes reveal our technical proficiency, but they do so within a particular context. While in grad school, I can remember discounting entire volumes of historical research because the footnotes were so “thin.” And one of my advisors at the University of Chicago would warn us to look with grave suspicion on any early modernist who cited too many printed sources. I’m less puritanical in my standards now. And Grafton has reminded me that: “No accumulation of footnotes can prove that every statement in the text rests on an unassailable mountain of attested facts. Footnotes exist, rather, to perform two other functions. First, they persuade: they convince the reader that the historian has done an acceptable amount of work . . . . Second, they indicate the chief sources that the historian has actually used” (22).

We sometimes still operate under the assumption that if we have all the “original sources” our argument will be solid. But what makes history interesting is all the various interpretations that we can develop from the same sources. It is part of why we revisit the same problems over and over again. Interpretation as well as sources give each of us our originality. This is decidedly not the same thing as saying that any interpretation of the documents is as good as another, but it is what keeps me from reading a scholarly tome and thinking that because the footnotes took up 37% of each page I read, no one need any longer do research on that subject. Grafton also reminded me to be careful in judging the scholarship of an earlier generation by the type or quantity of footnotes.

As I sweat through proper citation of digital works and decide how much to include or exclude from my own footnotes, I am glad to remember that this process isn’t simply about showing off my guild credentials. It’s also a way to “out” myself regarding my priorities and methods. The evidence I use won’t be considered equally sufficient for all time; but then again, I don’t expect to answer historical questions and decide their significance once and for all.

The footnote reminds me of the time-laden nature of my queries and verifications.

Digital History Roundup

Randall Stephens

Patricia Cohen, "Analyzing Literature by Words and Numbers," New York Times, December 3, 2010

Victorians were enamored of the new science of statistics, so it seems fitting that these pioneering data hounds are now the subject of an unusual experiment in statistical analysis. The titles of every British book published in English in and around the 19th century — 1,681,161, to be exact — are being electronically scoured for key words and phrases that might offer fresh insight into the minds of the Victorians.>>>

Robert Darnton, "The Library: Three Jeremiads," New York Review of Books, December 23, 2010.

When I look back at the plight of American research libraries in 2010, I feel inclined to break into a jeremiad. . . . I hope that the answer to those questions will lead to my happy ending: a National Digital Library—or a Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), as some prefer to call it. Google demonstrated the possibility of transforming the intellectual riches of our libraries, books lying inert and underused on shelves, into an electronic database that could be tapped by anyone anywhere at any time. Why not adapt its formula for success to the public good—a digital library composed of virtually all the books in our greatest research libraries available free of charge to the entire citizenry, in fact, to everyone in the world?>>>

Ann Blair, "Information Overload, Then and Now," Chronicle of Higher Education, November 28, 2010

Feeling overwhelmed by too much information? What else is new? The amount of digital data available on the Web every day reaches records of mind-boggling proportions—now more than a zettabyte (1021 bytes) and presumably accumulating at an ever-increasing rate, estimated at 30-percent growth per year from 1999 to 2002.>>>

Daniela Forte, "In Watertown, History Archive Is on Website," Litchfield County Times, November 18, 2010

WATERTOWN—The past is coming alive once again, as the Watertown Historical Society announced last week the unveiling of the Watertown Digital History Archive, now available on its Web site. The archive features newspapers, yearbooks and scrapbooks from the 19th and 20th centuries. . . . The society encourages residents who have old newspapers, yearbooks and scrapbooks beyond the dates the society already has archived to contact it by calling 860-274-1050, or logging on to the Web site at www.watertownhistoricalsociety.org.>>>

"Google Editions: a history of ebooks," The Telegraph, December 5, 2010

Google has confirmed that its own ebook store, Google Editions, will be up and running by the end of the year, potentially transforming the ebook landscape. Here, we look at some of the key milestones in the digitisation of the printed word. [See the e-book/digital history timeline.]>>>

The It Gets Better Project

Heather Cox Richardson

I am fascinated by the It Gets Better Project, a video project started by Seattle writer Dan Savage, who decided to take a stand to stop the frightening rate of suicide by gay teenagers. Desperate to do something to save these endangered kids, he and his husband made a film assuring desperate teenagers that no matter how bad high school seemed with its taunts and

hatred, “it gets better.” They asked others to tell their own stories, also on video, to let students know they were not alone.

That first video has been followed by hundreds of others and has gotten widespread national attention, although the project itself is only weeks old.

The videos are touching and smart, and, I hope, comforting. The people who have made them assure LGBT high schoolers that their lives will get better. Eventually, the films promise, they can hope to have the wonderful lives the videographers enjoy.

But for a historian, the videos are also culturally fascinating. The ones I have watched—and this includes all those selected by Mr. Savage himself to be highlighted on his blog—have a very clear message aside from reassuring youngsters about their ability to survive the jungles of high school, although the second message appears to be an unconscious one.

The life the IGBP promises to young viewers is strikingly conventional. The videos promise college, and an excellent college experience at that. They promise fulfilling careers in a field in which the student excels. They promise supportive friends. And they promise marriage and children. Far from being the call to riot and revolution that opponents of gay rights might expect, these are calls to conventional middle-class respectability.

Those filming the IGBP videos reinforce their verbal message. They are uniformly articulate and smart—who else would record a video?—wealthy enough to have laptops with webcams, and technologically savvy enough to know how to use them and how to cut a clean video. They are also widely enough read to know of the IGBP.

The IGBP is designed to reassure LGBT children that they are valued and have a future, but it also seems to have within it an unconscious call to mold upwardly-mobile, family-oriented professionals. (A parodist has caught this with his own “It Gets Worse” video, purporting to be the story of an uneducated, single, poor, lonely assistant night manager of a Ladies Foot Locker who longs for the days of junior high school when he could make himself feel good by abusing gay students.)

This raises fascinating questions about social change. What effect it will have on a specific population to have such attractive role models calling its members to a wonderful life of education, professional jobs, stable marriages, and children? Would such calls work with different populations who perceive themselves as out of the mainstream of American society? To what extent are these sorts of videos capable of changing the lives of young LGBT people who view them? How will they change the attitudes of straight viewers? (The reaction of the Fort Worth City Councilors to the IGBP video of Joel Burns suggests that observers find the personal appeals in the IGBP profoundly moving in a way they may not find abstract questions of gay rights.)

There is much concern over videos that recruit terrorists. But if it is also possible to use the internet to move individuals for other ends, that also has the potential to change the world.

This revolution is indeed being televised . . . or at least podcast. How it plays out is of great interest to scholars of social movements, as well as to American society.