The Height of Modernity: Newspapers and the Now of Then

We live in the height of modernity—the newest and most sophisticated of everything. But guess what? Just about every generation who has ever lived could say the same. And future generations will look at the world of 2020 with bemusement at our backwardness and pity that we lived without their comforts. It is a tale as old as time.

Even now, I find myself looking back at movies I loved in my youth, cringing at what now seems to be terrible acting and insensitivity to the bulk of the human population. I felt modern, on the cutting edge then. I laugh now, though, to rewatch the movie “Soylent Green”—a futuristic 1973 movie—where Charlton Heston changes channels on the television of the distant future by turning a knob on the device. No remote and certainly no voice activation.

Nothing is more amusing, mystifying, and sometimes unsettling to the genohistorian in me than to read old newspapers. The jokes, the prognostications of how a war will turn out, the advertisements for cure-alls to everything, and the runaway slave ads keep me studying the old print in wonder. Few resources can take us more fully into the world of our ancestors than reading their news.

It was NEW to them. The latest. Cutting edge. The height of modernity. The NOW of then.

If we want the greatest possible return on the investment of our time, we need to look at those newspapers through the eyes of an average person reading the paper when the ink was barely dry on it. It is not our nature to do this, for we all read through the filters of our moment in time. We are searching for what is odd to us.

Instead, we need to look at what was normal to them. And, we need to know what was new and exciting to them. It requires a conscious commitment to change your filter—seeking the now of then.

As my experiment to write this, I thoroughly read a newspaper for an average day in an average town. It was the Jacksonville Republican (now Calhoun County, Alabama), Saturday, October 2, 1849. What did an average Jacksonville Joe or Jill (JJ) get from this? What did it mean? And what can I learn about them from reading it?

It appears, from the four pages of content, that JJ was curious about the world far beyond Jacksonville, with its population of around 700. The paper gives little space, if any, to local gossip. After two columns of advertising and a poem on death (which seems to be a staple in mid-nineteenth-century papers), the rest of the front, virtually all of the second, and half of the third page are dedicated to the affairs of the larger world. Readers learned of General Artúr Görgei’s (spelled “Georgey” here) surrender to the Russian and Austrian alliance. The provisional French government was refusing passports to Germans. Counterfeiters were wreaking havok in Texas. Gold hunters were violating Indian women in California. And a steamboat had exploded off the coast of Tampa, Florida.

Many of the stories make little immediate sense to me because I’m jumping into them in progress and at a level of detail that later history books would not offer. They assume JJ knows what came before, which tells us something about what JJ absorbed, knew, and understood about the world.

As an editor myself, though, I also suspected the paper’s editor, J. F. Grant, was publishing what interested him and what he could get access to easily. He undoubtedly subscribed to numerous papers around the U.S. and Europe. As those papers landed on his desk, he had voluminous copy to draw from—and most of the articles do cite another paper. Naming the paper the Republican tells us that the paper was likely intended to inform citizens with a political objective in mind. Many papers of this era were founded by political parties to promote a particular agenda. If there was only one paper in town, it might not reflect what a particular ancestor wanted to read.

To test the hunch, I took a peek at the Alabama Reporter in the town of Talladega, only thirty-three miles away, as the crow flies. In a paper published within days of the one above, I found that the editor, Daniel Sayre, had focused on entirely different things for his front page. He wrote editorials concerning morality,  the wonders of Thackeray, and the beautiful sound of church bells. He was a literary man, and his paper reflected it. On page two, he took readers further afield, but with less attention to Europe—scarcely a paragraph on the troubles in Austria—and many news tidbits from around the American South.

This exercise was my cautionary tale not to assume that my ancestors wanted precisely the news their editor gave them. If they lived in Jacksonville, they got European news in detail. If in Talladega, they got literary editorials. They might have skipped right to the ads. The one thing we can know by studying a newspaper’s content is what information our ancestors had access to.

Both the articles and the ads can tell us what was new on the horizon in technology, fashion, the sciences, and any number of other categories. Throughout this 1849 Jacksonville paper, the words “Rail Road” appear frequently, usually in celebration for another road opening or planned. Ancestors reading such a paper would be questioning the effect of railroads on the future of their own business. Surely railroads skewed the competition for agricultural markets in favor of those who lived near them.

We can tell what mattered in our ancestor’s world by advertising, in particular. For the marketing world then, as now, chose words that would trigger a response. Well-chosen marketing terms excite the passion for something or tap into a fear. In the Jacksonville Republican, numerous ads promoted warehouse space at seaport towns like Savannah and Charleston. In these places, Jacksonville cotton planters could deposit their crops, awaiting shipment to European or upper Atlantic seaboard markets. In these ads, the phrase “Fire-Proof Warehouse” loomed large or italicized, determined to catch the eye. This tells us what our planting ancestors feared, loss of property to fire, and what the era considered cutting edge: fire-proof warehouses. And it raises my curiosity about what made a warehouse qualify as fireproof.

In the advertising of doctors and pharmacists, an interesting phrase also appeared more than once. D. B. Plumb & Co. wrote, “We are determined to sell only Genuine Medicines.” Dr. W. W. Anderson promised “a fresh and well assorted stock of Genuine Thomsonian Medicines kept constantly on hand.” I can only imagine the expression “genuine medicines” intends to discourage people from being led astray by other types of medicines. These might be “Jew David’s, or Hebrew Plaster,” which promised to remedy pain just about anywhere in the body, including “Female Weaknesses.” Or, maybe it was “Mistar’s Balsam of Wild Cherry, The Great American Remedy,” which offered healing to “lung complaints,” everything from a common cough to “the first stages of consumption,” which we now call tuberculosis. It is valuable to note that the advertisers of the suspicious remedies have much more expensive ads than the professionals who promise genuine medicines. This suggests that people, perhaps including our ancestors, were buying the non-genuine wonder drugs.

Two advertisements have me wondering what my ancestors felt as they contemplated seeing a dentist. C. C. Porter advertised his services with the large (and to 21st-century eyes, impressive) phrase “SURGEON DENTIST.” Not just a dentist, but a SURGEON. Surely he must have been the most elegant of Jacksonville’s social elite? But you read on from Porter: “I want it distinctly understood by all those who may wish my services, that I will operate as cheap as any other Dentist, and you may rest assured that any one saying to the contrary, is all humbug, for I am determined that no one shall take my business by underworking, or lower prices than common rates. The proof of the pudding is in eating it. TRY ME.” Another surgeon dentist, R. E. W. McAdams, promised “all operations on the teeth performed in the neatest and most durable manner.” Durable? Did he mean “endurable”? Or was he saying the work would hold up to stresses? Either way, I have to believe a trip to the dentist in 1849 was dreaded by my people, when the advertising emphasized that it was cheap and durable.

I could go on and on from just these four pages. Almost every paragraph adds color and questions to my pursuit of my ancestor’s world as they knew it. Imagine what can be learned by reading papers one by one, in the order they did. The unfolding of news tells us something that hindsight never could. We see events described before the writer knew the outcome, which can explain a world of things about why certain actions or failures to act occurred. Anecdotes tell us what amused or entertained them. Ads tell us what they wanted and needed.

Newspapers truly put us about as close as we can be to the now of then.

Call to Action

Pick a newspaper in a time and place of interest to you. Use Newspapers.com, if you have access. Or use the Chronicling America website. Read the entire thing from cover to cover, asking yourself what it reveals about the people who read the same words when they were fresh. See if you do not, after this exercise, feel that you have tiptoed into the place just a bit.

As always, I would love for you to comment on your experiences with historical newspapers. And if you have a friend who would enjoy this discussion, pass this link along. If you are not receiving emails from me to let you know when each new issue of Genohistory on Purpose has been posted, sign up, using the form at the bottom of this page.

Syncing to Your Zotero Web Library

I hope that most of you have already made use of the syncing tool in Zotero. It allows you to send a copy of your Zotero data to Zotero’s cloud environment. This allows you to always have the data as it last was when you arrive at a location without your computer. It also allows you to keep a copy of your data on multiple computers, always having an up-to-date version in each place.

Here are several important things to know about syncing:

–You will need to register for a free Zotero web account at https://www.zotero.org/user/register, then go to the Sync tab in your Zotero Preferences to sign in.

–Your account stays free as long as you keep your attachment data under 300 MB. They do not count your citations or most notes against this 300 MB. It is your attachments that use up the data. If you keep your attachments on your own hard drive with links from Zotero, this storage space can last a very long time.

–Zotero’s syncing is only taking a single snapshot of your data at the moment of syncing, for the convenience of accessing your data in multiple places. It does not store multiple copies as a protective data backup. If you corrupt your data in Zotero on your hard drive, the corrupted data will sync to your web library at Zotero.org, writing over that copy. You need to back up your Zotero data with another tool. (I use AOMEI Backerupper Standard, which is free.)

–You can work on Zotero in your online web library at Zotero.org, changing data. When you open Zotero again on your desktop, your changes will be written from Zotero.org to your desktop files.

It is a wonderful feature, and I hope one you have all activated.

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