A Day in the Life: Art and History

Heather Cox Richardson

Everyone knows the iconic image of John, Paul, George, and Ringo from the cover of Abbey Road. That image launched deep investigations into its hidden meanings—“Paul is Dead,” anyone?—and into the stories it might be telling about the Beatles.

There was a story behind the image, too, and it’s one in which art and history intersect. As with any photo shoot, at the August 1969 session with the Beatles, the photographer Iain Macmillan took a number of different shots. They swept in bystanders, cars, different expressions on the musicians’ faces, different interactions.

What can these photos tell us about history?

I wonder, not only because it’s Friday, but because of another treasure trove of images recently discovered in Chicago. Vivian Maier was an emigrant from France in the 1930s and worked as a child in a New York sweatshop. When she was older, she worked as a nanny in Chicago. She had few friends, apparently, and interacted with the world largely through her camera. She left her photos, largely unseen, in a storage locker in Chicago, which put them up for sale when her payments became overdue after her death. John Maloof, writing an Images of America book about a Chicago neighborhood, bought them.

What he found was, to my mind, incredible. These are simply stunning pieces of art, chronicling the world of the streets in Chicago, primarily, as well as New York and distant countries. Her use of line, light, and texture is extraordinary.

Her photos are works of art, but they are also unusual snapshots of life in the mid-twentieth century. What can they tell us about the world in her era?

The historical reading of photographs intended to tell a societal story is straightforward compared to reading the Abbey Road photos or the Vivian Maier collection. Jacob Riis was making a point about urban poverty; Nick Ut was making a point about the Vietnam War with his 1972 image of Kim Phuc. A recent article honoring the late Tim Hetherington suggested that the key to successful war photography was an understanding of the complexity of the conflict and the ability to capture images encapsulating that story.

Artists, of course, have a different imperative. Their stories are not, necessarily, driven by current societal concerns. But if art historians can use paintings to interpret the world in which the images were made, shouldn’t historians be able to use artistic photography to interpret the modern world? And if so, how?

What can the Abbey Road photos tell us about their era?

Using Primary Sources: Credit Reports

Dan Allosso

Unlike many of the records that I’ve been using so far in my research, credit reports like the R.G. Duns collection at Harvard’s Baker Library are a primary source that seems to stay much more in the background of many research projects. Partly this may be due to the Baker Library’s rules: no photography of the materials, no direct quoting of the reports without prior approval. But a much more reserved, qualified use of these credit reports probably also comes from the mediated form of the information in them.

As Christopher Clark described them in The Roots of Rural Capitalism, reports like those in the R.G. Duns books began to be used after the Panic of 1837, and became much more extensive after the Panic of 1857, to provide a way of evaluating the credit-worthiness of (mostly rural) borrowers for the benefit of (mostly urban) creditors. This geographic distance is key to the value of the reports; since the credit agencies employed local correspondents who reported facts, opinions, and rumors about their subjects that would have been common knowledge in the local business community. But we don’t know much about these reporters: the correspondents identified themselves in the bound volumes by code numbers, so the sources of these judgments are not at all transparent. This anonymity and the use of coded language (which as Clark points out, tends to apply contemporary “moral principles to business”) adds to the appearance of unanimity, authority, and consistency of judgment. But a closer look at the reports, especially those of long duration, casts some doubt on this supposition.

I’ve been to the Baker a couple of times to look at the R.G. Duns books. The librarians are very helpful; they bring the books out to your work table, one at a time, and can get additional volumes quickly, if your research takes an unexpected turn. One of my subjects, in Michigan, for example, did not turn up in the Kalamazoo book when I expected him to be there. Going back to the book for St. Joseph County (south of the city), I found reports of his business activities in his home community long after the “official story” of his life had him moving to the big city. The Duns reporters also wrote about him being involved in businesses that never came up in the other materials I’ve looked at, which gives me a whole new trail to follow in my investigation.

But while they are helpful for pointing to holes in my information, I think the Duns reports are most interesting for the way they describe changing attitudes toward the behavior (or “character”) of businessmen in these rural areas, and the expectations of urban creditors. It’s important to remember, when reading reports like these, that the correspondents were writing from the point of view of their distant clients. Tensions over the relative power of the local and distant parties to these credit relationships, as well as changing standards of personal and business conduct, are a central element of these narratives.

The contrast between the two brothers I’m studying in upstate New York is dramatic. They lived in adjacent towns, but in different counties covered by different Duns correspondents. They had been partners for decades, but later in life they became competitors. The younger of the two became the richest man in his county, and developed a reputation for credit-worthiness and stability that was amply recorded by his local Duns reporter. He set up his son as a banker, guaranteeing the young man’s credit with his own. When the son became an alcoholic and needed to be institutionalized, his father made good all the bank’s investors and depositors, and transferred the business to his younger son and two daughters. All these details are recorded, with very little personal judgment, in the Duns book.

In contrast, this man’s older brother seems to have pioneered the borders of financial respectability, by continually crossing them. The Duns reporter who covered his file for many years stressed the fact that the older brother was “fond of litigation,” tended to pay only after an “execution” by the court, and “cannot be trusted out of sight.” Like his respectable younger brother, this upstate businessman also started a bank, which he used primarily to finance his own business. This business was ultimately successful in a competitive national and international market, in part because its owner was willing to take substantial risks and go much farther out on a financial limb than his Duns correspondent was comfortable with. These conflicts of interest between the businessman’s activities and the standards of the Duns reporter suggest a changing dynamic of rural and urban financial power. As, I think, does the increasingly adversarial tone taken over time in several accounts. After a while, many of my local subjects seem to become less compliant with demands for information by their local Duns correspondents. It may even be a mark of financial success for them that some are able to completely stop cooperating with these reporters. In that case, the negative personal tone of the later entries in some of these credit narratives might be read as evidence of rural financial independence, rather than failure to conform in an increasingly urban credit regime.

Primary Sources: Actual Books

Dan Allosso

Project Gutenberg, Google Books and the Internet Archive have been incredibly valuable to historians. I’ve personally downloaded hundreds of old books in pdf form, that I’ve been able to read, highlight, annotate, and link to my own documents, to enrich my research and improve my understanding of the past. Google's team has been places I can’t afford to go, and has scanned books that 25 years ago I probably wouldn’t have known existed. And the ability to “mine” all these old texts with keyword searches means that I can use a wide variety of sources for a project like my search for all the Massachusetts Darwins, that I’d never have had the time to look at one by one for each individual.

But sometimes there’s no substitute for seeing and touching the actual book. In addition to the antiquarian coolness of handling something old, the physical properties of old books are sometimes very meaningful. I learned this lesson well when I saw a little book recently at the American Antiquarian Society.

I’ve been interested in Dr. Charles Knowlton (1800-1850) for a couple of years. A lifelong resident of western Massachusetts, he is famous for publishing The Fruits of Philosophy, the first American book on birth control. Between 1832 and 1835, Knowlton was fined in Taunton, imprisoned in Cambridge, and then dragged into court again in Greenfield. A further illustratation of the radical nature of Knowlton’s birth control message and the social forces that opposed it: Over fifty years later Londoners Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant were tried by the Queen’s Bench for republishing Knowlton’s book!

There’s a full text copy of The Fruits of Philosophy available on Google. Printed in San Francisco, it’s an 1891 edition of Bradlaugh and Besant’s reprint, suggesting that Knowlton’s material remained interesting for generations after its initial publication. I thought this text had already told me all I needed to know about Knowlton’s book, so I asked to see the originals at the American Antiquarian Society out of a purely geeky desire to hold something that Knowlton might have once handled himself.

The Society’s two copies of The Fruits of Philosophy arrived at the librarian’s table in small cardboard boxes. As I carried them back to my desk, I thought they might contain fragments of the books or torn pages. When I opened the first box, I was surprised to find inside it a complete, palm-sized book in a blue cloth hard cover. In an “aha” moment of clarity, I remembered that when Knowlton was released from prison in Cambridge in 1833, he made a speech in which he referred to the Fruits as his “little book.” Later, in his 1835 article on the “Excitement in Ashfield,” he again said he had been persecuted for publishing a “little book.” It had never occurred to me that he was speaking literally.

The Fruits of Philosophy was contraband when it was published. Knowlton was fined, imprisoned, and continually harassed for several years after its printing. Abner Kneeland was tried and imprisoned for blasphemy, but people familiar with his case at the time understood he had been targeted for his role in publishing of the 1834 edition of the Fruits, and for advertising it constantly in The Investigator, his free-thought newspaper. It is completely obvious, in this context, why buyers of the book would have wanted it to be little, pocket-sized, easily concealable. But that obvious fact had never occurred to me, looking at the Google scan of the 1891 reprint.

The threadbare blue cover of the Society’s 1832 edition, and the low production quality (the title page has a faint double-strike) also tell us about the way the first edition of the The Fruits of Philosophy was produced, and about how it was probably passed from hand to hand secretly, by women who had decided by the 1830s that they ought to have some say in their reproductive lives. It’s easy to imagine women (and sometimes maybe their husbands) palming the little book, and handing it off literally under the noses of church and civil authorities who sought to suppress it. The 1834 “Kneeland” edition used higher quality type, paper, and binding, but it significantly retained the tiny dimensions of the original.

We’re very lucky that a few of these books have survived, to tell the story that surrounds, but is not included in the printed words.

Reading Primary Sources: Bank Notes

Dan Allosso

We don’t think much about our money. We may worry about how much of it we need; but we’re not concerned about what it looks like or where it came from. Rarely do we remember that this is a modern phenomenon. Until the Civil War, Americans were very aware of the origin and relative safety of their money.

The best money in early nineteenth-century America was gold, but there was a limit to how much of it you could conveniently carry. And there wasn’t enough of it to go around, especially in towns and villages far from financial centers like New York and Philadelphia. So local people exchanged promissory notes that were basically IOUs stating, for example, that Miller Jones owed Farmer Smith $50 for his wheat harvest, payable sixty days after Smith delivered the bushels of grain to the mill. If Farmer Smith needed to pay someone else sooner than sixty days, he had several options. He could write his own promissory notes (if people trusted him), endorse the Miller Jones’s note to a third party (if people trusted Miller Jones), or take Jones’s note to the bank for cash. The banker would exchange the note for cash, at a “discount” representing interest for the sixty days he would have to hold Jones’s note before he could redeem it. The “cash” the banker would give Farmer Smith could include gold coins if Smith insisted on it, but if the banker had his way it would be—and this is where it gets interesting—bank notes.

Bank notes were initially just like promissory notes, except that they were issued by the bank. They were usually written to a named recipient for a specific amount. But they were much more easy to endorse to a second party, because in most cases everyone knew and trusted the bank. Over time, banks were able not only to write a lot of these types of notes, but to begin writing general notes for smaller denominations, that were immediately payable to anyone “on sight.” Of course the details of how this developed varied from place to place, but these small denomination sight notes became “circulating currency,” or what we think of as money.

When banks gained the ability to issue their own notes, they basically began creating money. In many states, there were laws requiring the bankers to invest in a state insurance fund, or to deposit securities (government bonds or mortgages) with the state comptroller in order to issue notes, but very rarely was there a substantial specie requirement. In other words, the money these state banks printed was usually backed by something other than piles of gold in the vaults of the banks, because there were no piles of gold.

Confidence in the banker issuing a note was crucial to the note’s acceptance. This confidence was naturally greater in states that had a “safety fund” or that required securities to back note issues. Everyone knew that there was never enough gold at the bank to pay all the notes. The expectation was rather that there would be enough to conduct regular business, and pay the notes brought in for redemption on any given day, rather than all the notes outstanding. This differential between everyday redemptions and all the notes outstanding was all-important: this was how the bank literally made money.

The money-making ability of the local bank was not only profitable for the banker, but was essential to the community. Without the money printed by local banks, farmers and millers would have had a much more difficult time doing their business. Especially in remote areas, which was where most of the farm products destined for city dinner tables were grown. Most of the “real money” (that is, gold) was hoarded in the big eastern cities, or after Andrew Jackson’s 1837 Specie Circular was used to buy land at the frontier Land Offices. Very little was available in the settled farmlands that made up the middle of the country. Local banks provided the cash and credit that allowed farmers to plant, tend, and harvest their crops, at a time when 90 percent of Americans were farmers.

All this changed during the Civil War. The Lincoln administration first issued their own notes, called Greenbacks because they were printed with green ink, to help pay for the war. Between 1863 and 1865, Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary, Salmon Chase, led a campaign to centralize control of American banking by creating a system of national banks and by taxing the notes of local banks, to make them too expensive to use relative to the new national notes. Chase and his supporters claimed that local banks were unsafe, and that the extreme variety of notes floating around in the economy (it has been claimed there were over 9,000 different types in circulation in the early 1860s) provided too much opportunity for counterfeiters. While both of these arguments were valid up to a point, Chase’s solution wasn’t the only possible response. Our current system of national currency was not inevitable; by nationalizing the power to make money, Chase added a nearly immeasurable new source of revenue for the central government. This aspect of the change to national notes has gone largely unrecognized, and we now treat our national currency as a completely natural and inevitable part of our national economy--except in a few places like far western Massachusetts, where local people have taken advantage of changes and loopholes in the banking laws, to once again begin making their own money.

Reading Primary Sources: Estate Inventories

Dan Allosso

One of the things that fascinates me about doing historical research, is that it doesn’t always involve long trips to exotic archives or well-known historical sites. For example, wills and estate inventories going all the way back to the earliest days of settlement are often kept in the county records office. Whether you are trying to find information on a particular family or individual, or looking for background material to help you rebuild the world your subjects lived in, probate documents can be a really interesting window into the material culture of the past, and into the attitudes and values of people long ago.

I went to the western Massachusetts town of Northampton a while back, to look at estate information for the town of Ashfield. Hampshire County encompassed the area which is now Franklin County until 1811, so I went to Northampton expecting to find Ashfield documents up to that time. In fact, I found several later than 1811, suggesting that people in the habit of going down to the Northampton Courthouse to conduct their business were not turned away. Sometime soon, I’ll make a similar trip to Greenfield, and see what they have in their files.

Wills are public records, so you don’t have to provide any credentials to look at them—but I don’t imagine they get a lot of use. In Northampton, there’s an old-fashioned card catalog where you can find the names you want to ask for, and a simple form you hand to the records clerk. The January 3, 1811 will and April 10, 1811 inventory of Joseph Clark is typical of what I found. Most of the old documents are folded into palm-sized packages, often bound with string. The inventory, taken by Clark’s executor Japhet Chapin, lists everything of value that Clark owned. First and most important, of course, are “Fifty acres of land including the buildings valued at $800.” Everything else Clark owned was worth about $159, including six cups and saucers valued at 12 cents, a vest worth 42 cents, and seven sheep and two lambs whose $13.50 value suggests they may have been newly introduced Spanish Merinos.

In his will, which Clark executed four months before his death, he first specifies “I would have all my just debt paid.” Next, Clark orders the division of his remaining assets. He specifies cash settlements to be paid “within one year after my decease” to his five daughters; fifty-five dollars to each of the unmarried, and five dollars to the married woman, who had probably received the fifty when she wed. He gives fifty dollars to his son Otis, and “to my dearly beloved wife” Clark orders “she should have a comfortable maintenance out of my estate so long as she remains my widow then the income of one third of my estate during her natural life.”

Clark’s widow’s income and maintenance would come out of the balance of his $959 estate after the $275 in cash bequests and whatever went to pay his debts. This balance was to be split equally between his two remaining sons, Joseph and Loring, who would presumably either work the farm together, split it into reasonably equal halves, or find a way for one to buy out the other’s equity. There was a practical limit to how small a farm could be and remain viable; if all fifty acres were “improved” cropland, they may just have been able to split the property. On the other hand, one or both of the brothers may already have owned other property, before their father’s death.

The will and inventory raises several questions that can help direct my further investigation. I can check the town’s Vital Records book (there’s one for every town in Massachusetts, covering births, deaths, and marriages up to 1850), to determine the ages of the family members in 1811. Town “valuations” (tax lists) will tell me what land the sons may have owned already, if they lived in town, and possibly whether either of them had cash on hand to meet the “within one year” requirement of the cash bequests. Since Clark left no cash and I believe he had no large sums owed him (I don’t know for sure, but I assume there are none because the two notes he held were crossed out at the bottom of the inventory list, suggesting they had been settled), the brothers would have needed to raise over three hundred dollars relatively quickly, to satisfy their siblings’ and provide for their mother.

In addition to these particulars of the Clark family, the documents tell me several things about Ashfield, that I can check against historians’ understanding of similar places at this time, to get a better sense of the town. Clark writes affectionately of his wife and leaves her not only a widow’s maintenance, but a third of the income of his estate, suggesting that he valued her contribution to the family's fortunes. The inventory is witnessed by Ebenezer Smith Jr., son of the Baptist minister and grandson of the town’s first settler, suggesting Clark (who was a member of the Congregational Society) was on good terms with neighbors outside his denomination. The will itself is witnessed by Polly Chapin and Margaret Wood, who signed their own names, suggesting that among Clark’s friends, both men and women were relatively well educated. It would be interesting to know exactly where the farm was, what type of land it was on, and how many buildings were on it; since the $800 valuation makes up the majority of Clark’s estate and seems a little high for the times. Finally, the list of items Clark owned is very valuable, not only for the relative values of the items, but as an inventory of the items that surrounded him during his life. The combination of indoor and outdoor tools, the three cows and three heifers, four dining chairs and four pewter plates, all help set the scene and give us clues about Clark’s life. They also suggest ways he may have been connected to extended family and neighbors. Ten “cyder barrels” but no press: so who pressed his apples? No plow and team: did one of his sons have one? One axe: how much of Clark’s land was cleared? This will and inventory give a fascinating glimpse into both the physical and social world in which Joseph Clark lived and died in 1811.