Over the last two years, the Commonplace team has migrated our back catalog to a new URL and reorganized the content with a fresh, feed-based layout. While we are proud of this work, we also know that our readers have been waiting patiently for new content. I am pleased to announce that we are moving to phase two of our relaunch and will begin publishing original material this month. Look for new articles, review essays, and creative writing on various aspects of vast early America before 1900 to post every other Tuesday. If you have questions about submitting your work or want to pitch an essay, please reach out to commonplacejournal@gmail.com.

Before we move forward, it is a good time to look back on the history of Commonplace and its place in digital humanities over the last two decades. In September 2000, editors Jill Lepore and Jane Kamensky launched their new digital publication with a piece that introduced the site by answering the question, “Why a Common-Place?” (Figure 1) Aside from explaining that Common-place would attempt to walk the line between scholarly journal and popular magazine for American history before 1900, they specifically addressed their vision for one of the first exclusively on-line history journals. Even though “we have no film footage, no photographs, no videos or phonographs to load up with Real Audio or Real Player,” the editors did not want to see early American history left behind on the web in favor of modern history sites that featured a ton of bells and whistles. So, they concluded, other than “a few daguerrotypes (invented in 1839) Common-place won’t dazzle you with snazzy graphics,” but would focus instead on “bringing people together to discuss ideas” about early American history.

It is remarkable to see how many of the same concerns that publicly-facing scholarship wrestles with today informed the Common-place mission statement more than 20 years ago. How much should a digital humanities project focus on public interaction? Is this a conversation between scholars and the public or a primarily a venue for presenting an academic argument? How much and what sort of technology should be employed to disseminate research? Such questions often operate in tension as online projects are planned and executed. As Commonplace has evolved as a digital publication over two decades, it has grappled with these questions about audience engagement and the role of technology on the front and back end.

One desire of the early Common-place team was to reach out to the public and create a community to collectively engage in historical inquiry. The mission statement even introduced an online message board feature for readers to post replies to articles and “participate in an on-going discussion.” The message board, dubbed the Republic of Letters, never really got going and was retired within two years. (Figure 2) Rebranded as the Common-place Coffeeshop to serve as a welcoming place for readers to discuss articles, make announcements, or chat about anything related to early American history, the new forum likewise failed to become an online destination for community conversation. The Coffeeshop served its last cup in 2009. (Figure 3)

With these attempts to forge an online community sputtering, Common-place joined many digital publications in the aughts and created a blog. Jeffrey Pasley had been an occasional contributor to Common-place, using his Publick Occurrences column to situate his observations of contemporary politics in an early American context. His 2001 piece called “Losing one to the Gipper,” for example, discussed Ronald Reagan and Grover Norquist’s attack on the size of government to explain why Alexander Hamilton “has long been the least loved of the Founders.” (Figure 4) Little did he know what was coming a decade and a half later. Beginning in 2008 and continuing to 2015, Pasley converted his column into the blog Publick Occurrences 2.0. (Figure 5) His occasional musings covered everything from the election of Barack Obama to musical acts with historic names (such as 1990s power pop band Cotton Mather). With its more personal and light-hearted tone, the blog produced a different type of content, but also failed to generate the type of commentary or engagement to make it a jumping off point for a wider communal discussion.    

The inability to inspire a broad digital conversation about early American history between academics and the public did not lessen the quality of the site’s scholarly work, but it did stand out as an unrealized promise of the project. In her William and Mary Quarterly article reflecting on digital humanities and early American studies, Sharon Block even gently noted that Common-place “did not quite succeed in creating an online community” in the way that some high-profile bloggers managed to do during the same years. She went on to explain that “in contrast to an earlier emphasis on producing charts, numbers, or statistics,” these attempts at engagement are part of a “new digital humanities [that] is marked by outreach and dissemination,” rather than the simple application of back-end technology.

Commonplace has been proudly and explicitly digital since its inception, but it has not always been comfortable with how to use technological tools as part of its outreach and dissemination. As we saw, its mission statement explicitly declared its intent to deemphasize visual and multimedia features. Original web designer John McCoy explained in 2004 that the editors requested that the site take its design inspiration from “seventeenth and eighteenth-century broadsheets—large sheets set in an unvariegated sea of tiny columns of text . . . in many ways the opposite of Web pages.” One result of this design plan is that much of the back catalog is largely textual, with only some graphic examples used for explanatory purposes. (Figure 6)

Over time, more visual and material culture articles appeared on the site, especially after Catherine Kelly became the editor of Common-place. Kelly explained in 2011 that the approach was to take traditional research, “reformatted for a different medium and with a different audience in mind. In other words, the crucial issues hinge less on technology per se than on translation.” There were attempts to expand this model. Joshua Brown’s Flash-based graphic novel “Ithaca” is one notable example (Figure 7), as is Christina Michelon’s “Touching Sentiment,” an article analyzing the tactility of nineteenth century valentines that includes video clips of an 1875 valentine being opened and a GIF of a beehive card being pulled out. (Figure 8)

Not every plan to utilize new multimedia tools has been as successful in the long run. Nine years ago, I wrote a piece about a labor note issued by Josiah Warren’s Modern Times, a planned community on Long Island in the 1850s. Conceived as part of a new “Notes on the Text” column that featured items housed at the American Antiquarian Society, I digitally marked up the note so that a reader could interact with the item through my nonlinear narration. Using a plugin called qTip², a reader could come to the page, scroll their cursor over a section of text or image on the labor note and up would pop a paragraph that I had written analyzing that portion of the bill and its place in the history of capitalism, labor radicalism, and utopian communities. (Figure 9) This was a cool idea for a piece in late 2012. It engaged the public and allowed the viewer to control their experience with the text. However, it turned out to be hard to read and maneuver on mobile phones. The bigger problem was that the designer of the qTip² plugin stopped maintaining it in 2016 and the page became functionally inoperable on most browsers shortly thereafter. The current low-tech version of the page shows the labor note followed by explanatory paragraphs corresponding to different portions of the image. (Figure 10)

However, hoping to avoid front-end tech issues doesn’t save you from back-end problems. Publishing an electronic journal necessitates the flexibility to keep up with changing technology standards and Commonplace has been pushed to alter its platform several times in the last 20 years. When Common-place launched in 2000, John McCoy built each page individually in HTML to resemble an eighteenth-century broadsheet. This labor-intensive project solved a short-term design preference, but it also hindered the long-term stability of the site as browser and operating system updates meant that even minor issues could cause problems and lead to broken links, features, or pages. Hoping for standardization and more flexibility, the site adopted a new XHTML/CSS design in 2004 (for a reminder of how long ago this was in web years, an announcement at the time reminded Common-place users to upgrade their browsers because Netscape 4.x and Internet Explorer 5 for Windows would not render CSS properly). This technology too began to show its age and in 2015, the site was completely redesigned on WordPress by a new editorial team at the University of Connecticut. (Figure 11) Unfortunately, the plan to fully utilize this stability and migrate the pre-2015 material to the new platform was not completed; by early 2019, forty percent of the Common-place back catalog was missing or inaccessible.

Luckily, this material was not completely lost. As part of a transition to a feed-based model and a new WordPress platform in 2019, it was recovered using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and a bit of detective work. The one gap in the back catalog was Jeff Pasley’s Publick Occurrences 2.0. The blog updated sporadically and separately from the rest of the issue-based articles, so its contents were not contemporaneously preserved. Likewise, the Wayback Machine only takes snapshots, and often months can go by between those backups (May 16-Sept 13, 2008). (Figure 12) There is something of a sad irony that a feature of the site created to foster public engagement is the one incomplete part as the project shifted to a new model meant to make it easier for the public to engage with the site’s content. That tension between dissemination and technology reared its head again.

The scale of reconstructing the site, reformatting the back catalog, and remaking it with a feed-based organizational structure was so great that it also contributed to the dramatic step of moving the site from www.common-place.org to a new URL, commonplace.online. (Figure 13) Rebranding a 20-year-old digital humanities site is not a step taken lightly and it highlights the difficulty in keeping up with changing technology trends and standards. But it is more than that.

Many digital history projects are conceived and designed to utilize particular technological tools and present discrete data and analysis. As such, these projects spend ample time pinpointing the best approach to disseminate their content and considerably less time thinking about their scalability and durability. This makes sense given the narrow scope of the projects and the reality that the resources and time required to build something with an indefinite shelf life are not often available. While corporate creators of databases spend time and money to make their products scalable in the anticipation of future expansion, growth, and revenue, many scholarly practitioners of digital humanities eschew this profit motivation and don’t spend enough time planning for the distant future of their work. Aarthi Vadde notes that “few scholars working in the humanities today will immediately recognize scalability as a virtue. Some may even see it as a vice.” However, if scalability is merely, as Vadde explains, the “ability of a system, network, or project to handle growth without changing its governing principles,” it needs to be a central component of any digital project that desires longevity. Allowing a project to grow or even persist over years and decades means planning for technological realities that don’t currently exist. This is not a new concept for scholars of public-facing projects, but I do think the example of Commonplace is a useful one when considering what it means for digital humanities moving forward.

I want to close by highlighting a 2016 essay by Cameron Blevins from Debates in the Digital Humanities. He writes that many historians fall into the trap of framing “digital methodology in terms of its future potential.” Talking about what technology might soon do may seem cutting edge, but it obscures how digital projects spend so much time on their plans for data visualization, dissemination, and outreach that they sidestep academic argumentation. This is a common debate in digital humanities today, but I want to argue that Commonplace demonstrates that there is also counter narrative. Online projects with engaging subject matter also need to think more about the future. Digital Humanities is inherently material and merely creating smart front-end content won’t sustain your project in the long run. There is not one answer or model for how to best keep pace with the changing technological landscape over multiple decades, but it is vital for practitioners of Vast Early American projects to think about flexibility and scalability. Time spent preparing for evolving internet standards and a future that can’t yet be fully imagined is certainly a better option than trying to go back and retrofit a project years after the fact.  

This article originally appeared in September, 2021.

Joshua R. Greenberg is the editor of Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life. He is the author of Bank Notes and Shinplasters: The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic (2020) and Advocating the Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Household in New York, 1800-1840 (2008). He taught at Bridgewater State University for many years. On Twitter @joshrgreenberg.

Matt Kish’s Moby-Dick blog began with a sparse preamble: “Because I honestly consider Moby-Dick to be the greatest novel ever written, I am now going to create one illustration for every single one of the 552 pages in the Signet Classic paperback edition. I’ll try to do one a day, but we’ll see.” That same day, August 6, 2009, Kish posted his first illustration.

“Call me Ishmael” was the preordained choice for Kish’s page one illustration. We have seen other Ishmaels before, like Rockwell Kent’s patrician Ishmael with the slender nose and sloping brow. In contrast, Kish’s Ishmael is all head, no body: a rectangular lucha libre mask with wide-set eyes and a peaked line of blue ocean waves where his mouth might have been.

Hovering above the Ishmael-icon in the upper left corner of the image, toxic yellow clouds part to issue a single word on a rainbow beam: ISHMAEL.

Kish’s cautious introduction (“we’ll see”) belied his assiduous self-discipline. Kish carved out time for the Moby-Dick project around his full-time job as a librarian and the long commute that bracketed his work day on both ends. Nevertheless, he met each deadline, creating and posting a new drawing every day for over a year and a half on the Website One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick. He was inspired to tackle every page of the book by the contemporary artist Zak Smith, who made a drawing for every page of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Kish intended for the Moby-Dick project to be personal: in creating the images, he mined his memory for the imagery of comic books and prog rock album covers that surrounded him in his youth. Kish imagined his audience to be a small circle of family and friends interested in his work, and he did nothing to advertise the project to others. But his project attracted attention almost immediately. He received his first interview request before he completed a week’s worth of illustrations. The interviews multiplied, the links proliferated, and before long, Kish’s Website was attracting a wide and loyal group of online viewers.

Kish recreated Melville’s novel as a psychedelic dream world in which every character, creature, and ship is a monster. Rather than retelling the story of Moby-Dickthrough pictures, as if creating a graphic novel, Kish based each drawing on a short passage from each page, illustrating not just concise plot points and famous quotations but some of Melville’s most exotic figures and similes. Kish created a visual world from each textual fragment in the way that a DJ makes a song from sampled tracks, or a preacher extracts a long sermon from a single scriptural verse.

The set of 552 images is impossible to describe as a single body of work, but the illustrations cohere. Recognizable figures and graphic motifs recur and interlace through otherwise alien and disparate fantasy landscapes. The blog’s followers learned Kish’s visual vocabulary for Moby-Dick as he produced it: we came to recognize Queequeg by the azure of his intricate tattoos, and Ishmael by that laconic mask.

Ahab is a helmet—blunt, hulking, and riveted like an ironclad.

The white whale himself is never the same: sometimes he is a fairy-tale sea monster, sometimes a white mass streaked with black veins, sometimes an enormous mouth crammed with lurid human molars, sometimes a sinuous figure traced with swirls as fine and intricate as lace.

This Moby-Dick is not, to put it mildly, a work of realism or rigorous historical interpretation. Matt Kish was not thinking about the history of American whaling when he illustrated Moby-Dick. He told me that he actively avoided doing any kind of historical research at all while creating the illustrations. “It’s not that I don’t have any specific interest in the nineteenth century, but I made no attempts to be historically accurate… Rather than try to create this historically accurate version of Moby-Dick, I really wanted to go very, very internal, and create an almost symbolic and fantastic rendition.”

Kish’s Moby-Dick chronicles the kind of experiment that Thoreau tried out at Walden Pond: an experiment in living deeply within a world that is both bounded and infinitely rich in meaning and detail. The 552 pages of Melville’s book became Kish’s world. Matt Kish has a knack for locating echoes of the nineteenth century in the technology, aesthetics, and humor of the twenty-first. He brings the arcane world of nineteenth-century whaling into camaraderie with the esoterica of twentieth and twenty-first century cultures: machines, comic books, street art, and album covers. Kish even practices his alchemy on the genre of the blog itself, creating a daily marvel out of an arbitrary assignment—one drawing for every page, every day. In a blogosphere that rewards the story of the minute, Kish’s project is a monument to sustained attention, rigorous discipline, and long, old, thoroughly material books.

It is hard not to make something out of the fact that Matt Kish is a librarian. After all, it is a Sub-Sub-Librarian who introduces the “Extracts” at the beginning of Moby-Dick: “…this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions of whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane.” Before Kish started his project, he said he personally identified with the Sub-Sub-Librarian more than with any other character in the novel: “This nameless person assembling all of these mosaic pieces of information: it always seemed like a curious way of introducing the novel to me. I found it endlessly fascinating to read all of these extracts and put them together in a different order. I could see myself as that kind of explorer—not only through Moby-Dick but in general. That was, up until this project.” After the page-a-day project, though, Kish felt he had established a personal relationship with the whole novel, and not just with the Sub-Sub.

Whether or not Kish still identifies with the Sub-Sub, they have much in common. It might even be said that they share certain extraordinary library practices. The “poor devil of a Sub-Sub” who introduces the Extracts had become “hopeless” and “sallow,” but there were adventures in his past. He had been a librarian in the way that Indiana Jones was an archaeologist: he traveled worldwide to collect his whaliana. Kish is by no means hopeless or sallow, but like Melville’s Sub-Sub, he also started his project with a collection that he culled and saved over several years: a supply of found paper on which he drew most of the Moby-Dick illustrations.

Kish acquired his own trove of extracts long before he began the Moby-Dick project, and his library—like the Sub-Sub’s—is the trophy of a long and varied adventure in collecting. He worked in a used bookstore during grad school and rescued visually interesting pages from books that were doomed for the trash heap. Kish gravitated toward orphaned repair manuals, engineering textbooks, and anything that featured elaborate and inscrutable schematics. During the bookstore years, Kish did not have a purpose in mind for the growing stack of pages, but he began using them as soon as he started illustrating Moby-Dick. He told one interviewer that his earliest illustrations were done on the pages of obsolete electronics repair guides. “Something about those old diagrams fascinates me because their symbols and all those lines and drawings and letters look almost alchemical to me. Magical. So the thought of all that unfathomable information, a bit buried but lurking just beneath the paint and ink really spoke to me. It hinted at the deeper themes and mysteries of Melville’s novel as well as the mysteries lurking beneath the sea.”

Most of the diagrams are barely visible underneath the illustrations—a mumbling hint of flow-chart bubbles, arrows, tables, and numbers under boldly colored monsters that demand all the attention.

Sometimes, the found paper works in direct service of the illustrations. The image for page 94 illustrates Ishmael’s description of the foggy weather on the morning he and Queequeg boarded the Pequod and sailed out from Nantucket harbor: “It was nearly six o’clock, but only grey imperfect misty dawn, when we drew nigh the wharf.” The stylized clouds and muted sun are drawn on top of a weather map showing precipitation and pressure centers: weather illustrating weather.

More often, the relationship between Kish’s illustration and the found paper is occult. But even the most alien diagrams sometimes accrete meaning in Kish’s illustrations: flow-chart arrows and bubbles start to resemble harpoons and whales, and the flat page dissolves through the infinite regress of whales and harpoons, whales and harpoons.

For Kish, the printed matter in the background of his illustrations represents and preserves a world of print culture that is being washed away by digital information and imaging. Digitally created imagery “leaves me cold” says Kish, who cherishes analog print technologies. “My decision to use predominantly found paper from old books—most of which I have picked up at the used bookstore, but also in library discards—[was] a real overt attempt to connect the art and imagery I was creating to the world of print …. I felt it was very important that the viewer would be consciously aware of the print behind the illustrations and the relationship of the image that I was creating to that older, more hand-made approach to creating stories.”

These days, Kish sees a lot more books headed for the trash heap, as libraries work to build and shore up digital collections. He is no Luddite—he appreciates the power of digital resources—but he believes that books and analog print culture have not yet outlived their usefulness. “I see bin after bin after bin of books being sent out the back garage of the library, no longer useful. I thought it was important to do at least a symbolic gesture to this world that did exist and does still matter.”

Discarded books are suggestive and melancholy, not only as artifacts of a receding print culture, but as repositories for a kind of knowledge deemed no longer useful. The books that Kish rescued were marked obsolete not just because they were books, but because they were manuals or textbooks about out-of-date technologies. Discarded books embody the death of utility, the obviation of hard work and hard-won knowledge, but are they obsolete yet? These books raise questions: Have they outlived their usefulness—for what, and according to whom?

As objects that provoke questions about utility and obsolescence, Kish’s rescued diagrams resonate with one of the novel’s strangest qualities: Moby-Dick anticipates the obsolescence of American whaling, and serves as a premature shrine to an industry that had not yet disappeared.

Herman Melville went whaling in 1841, during the boom years of the industry. He shipped on the maiden voyage of the Acushnet, one of the whaling fleet’s newest and biggest vessels. Whaling was one of America’s first global industries and a major driver of domestic industrialization: oil produced by the American whaling fleet lubricated industrial machinery and lit homes and factories in growing cities.

The industry was never more prosperous in the United States than during the years that Melville experienced and wrote about the industry. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, only 324 vessels left American ports on whaling voyages, but in the 1840s, the United States dispatched more than 2,300 whaling voyages. But the booming industry ground to a halt around 1860, when a huge portion of the whaling fleet was destroyed in the Civil War. Confederate cruisers sank or captured at least forty-six whalers, and the United States government requisitioned at least forty more to sink in southern harbors in an attempt to blockade ports. (It did not work: the sunken ships—the Stone Fleet that Melville eulogized in his 1866 collection of Civil War poetry—actually served to deepen the channel.)

The whaling industry might have recovered from the disruptions of war, but the devastation of the fleet coincided with the discovery of the resource that would supplant whaling: petroleum. Oil was struck at Edwin Drake’s well in Titusville, Pennsylvania in August of 1859, and the petroleum boom began. By the end of the nineteenth century, the whaling industry had dwindled almost to oblivion.

Not that Melville knew any of this would happen when he wrote Moby-Dick. Technologies are made obsolete by their replacements, not by any palpable sense of doom, and in the decade between Melville’s own 1841 whaling voyage and the publication of the novel in 1851, whale and sperm oil were still considered superior illuminants and industrial lubricants. Despite that, Moby-Dick focuses on the elements of the whaling industry that were old, worn, and obsolete in their ways—as if he were describing an industry that had already entered its obsolescence.

For example, Nantucket had been the center of the American whaling industry in the eighteenth century, but by the 1820s New Bedford had eclipsed the island port as the capital of the industry. Ishmael passes through busy New Bedford, but decides to ship out of Nantucket out of a sense of nostalgia for that port’s earlier prosperity: “For my mind was made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island, which amazingly pleased me. Besides though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolizing the business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original—the Tyre of this Carthage; —the place where the first dead American whale was stranded.” Though the whaling industry loomed large in the contemporary United States economy, Ishmael treated his own whaling voyage as if it were a voyage backward in time.

The ship Pequod, too, was a vestige of an earlier phase of the whaling industry: “She was a ship of the old school, rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed look about her.” She was a ship trophied by past hunts, and named after “a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians, now extinct as the ancient Medes.” Matt Kish’s portrait of the Pequod evokes its inimitability and intricacy, but Melville’s own image is at least as fantastic.

The Pequod was a far cry from the huge, up-to-dateAcushnet Melville knew from his own whaling voyage. In creating the Pequod, Melville went far outside his own experience to dream up a ship “more than half a century” old, a ship not on its maiden voyage but on its death voyage. Melville was no soothsayer: he did not prophesy that whaling would crash within a short decade of his book’s publication. But Moby-Dick‘s peculiar focus on obsolescence forestalls any optimism about the sustainability of industrial success and imperial expansion. In bringing to light the obsolete aspects of a thriving industry, Moby-Dick offers a premature eulogy and a warning: obsolescence is always built in.

I learned about One Drawing of Every Page of Moby-Dick when Matt Kish was about halfway through his illustrations for the novel. I, too, was about halfway through my own long engagement with Melville and Moby-Dick: a dissertation on the cultural history of the United States whaling industry through its heyday, decline, obsolescence, and commemoration. I checked the Website every day, and every day I was reminded of the power of daily practice. Checking for a new illustration on Kish’s Website, in fact, became a daily habit, something like a threshold ritual. Each fresh illustration cleared the static noise of online distraction and propelled me back into my own work. The images inspired me through their beauty and insight, and they testified to the satisfaction of the met deadline.

For Kish, the production schedule was relentless, but for viewers, the experience of reading the novel through his illustrations was slow—much slower than reading online news stories that appear and disappear almost instantly, like bubbles in a pot of boiling water. In reality, I was racing through the novel out of order as I wrote and revised my own dissertation chapters. Through Kish’s Website, though, I was able to imagine reading Moby-Dick for the first time, working through the novel slowly, day by day.

At first, I thought of Kish’s project as an experiment in seriality, a thoroughly nineteenth-century publication practice. Serialized publication of novels in the nineteenth century constrained authors through deadlines, space requirements, and the calculation of suspense in service of newspaper sales. Kish built in his own arbitrary constraints: every page, every day. No one held him accountable to his own rules, but he faced those deadlines like a hardened journalist.

Kish’s project was a serial in form as well as in practice: each illustration took roughly the same form, appearing on the blog in the same place at the top of the page, but every day the illustration was completely new. The illustrations for the “Cetology” chapter brought a new whale every day for one week, during which Kish created some of his most virtuosic drawings. The seriality of Kish’s whales mirrored the seriality of Ishmael’s whimsical classification of whales into folios, octavos, and duodecimos. The whales are unbelievably intricate and individuated. The finback whale resembles a military plane in camouflage colors with fins like metal plates dotted with bolts. The thrasher whale is an unnerving green coil of intestines, and the sulphur-bottom whale is worm-like, decorated with rounded tiles that resemble cobblestones.

But it was not narrative suspense, exactly, that kept me coming back to the Website: I was transfixed by the spectacle of productivity. I suppose my curiosity to see how Kish would meet each brutal deadline was a form of narrative suspense, and it seemed to have been that way for many other loyal viewers. Kish said that he received unanimously positive feedback through the Website, and that most people remarked on the huge ambition of the project. “[Most people’s] first impression was simply stunned disbelief at the ambition… The farther I got into the project I got all this credibility: ‘This guy’s already done a hundred pages, it’s the real deal.’ That stunned disbelief would turn into: ‘he’s really going to do it; he’s really going to make it.’ “

Kish said that he began the Moby-Dick project in part because he hoped to loosen up his style and learn to draw faster. He had made intricate drawings and illustrations his whole life, but he was frustrated that each piece took him so long to make. He thought that the daily deadline would speed him up by forcing him to simplify. That strategy worked for a very short while: the first several images are simple and abstract, like the “Call me Ishmael” image that opened the project. But Kish fell quickly into his old habit of making intricate illustrations. “But my natural tendency in drawing has always been far, far too detailed, overly detailed. Horror vacui: it’s not quite a fear, but I do have a real natural tendency to fill all empty space with lines and textures and patterns. So I started the project, and things started out very abstractly and I was able to simplify things. But near the end I couldn’t control my natural tendency to overrender things to fill space with patterns and textures. And so in the last fifty pages you can see that coming back. But that’s a good thing, because as an artist it made me reconnect with that [habit]. It really is the way I like to draw and even though it’s slow and stultifying and static, it feels very, very natural to me.”

It is apt that an artist who abhors white space would choose to illustrate Moby-Dick, and unsurprising that the novel would work through him to reinforce that fear of the void. It is poignant, too, that the novel nurtured Kish’s tendency toward difficult, detailed work. Kish’s drive to fill white space is responsible for some of his most wondrous and emotionally affecting illustrations. The illustration for page 402 depicts the moment when the fearful ship-keeper Pip leapt out of a whaleboat during a chase and was abandoned for a terrifying stretch of time in open sea while the boat carried on with the hunt. Pip never recovered his sanity after those moments alone in the ocean: “The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs.”

That last sentence of this passage is excessive—too many heaps, orbs, eternities, and strange shapes—but in its overindulgence it is also beautiful. The verbal convolutions of the passage mimic the warping and twisting of Pip’s mind as he went insane on the open sea. After Pip’s ordeal, the crew of the Pequod considers him an idiot, but Ahab recognizes the note of divinity in his madness. Kish’s illustration imparts some of Ahab’s empathy, transmitting the experience of simultaneous wonder and terror that Pip experienced when the sea “drowned the infinite of his soul.” The illustration gives us Pip through the metonym of his vulnerable eyeball, beset by creeping and snarling sea monsters, some of which only come into view after you stare at the image for a long time. Kish wrote on his blog that the image took him four days to create (by this point in the project, he had begun working ahead whenever he could, so he could afford to create intricate illustrations while still meeting the daily deadline). A simple, swiftly-executed image would have conveyed neither the sublime terror of Pip’s experience nor the reader’s experience of Ishmael’s swarming narrative style. Kish’s perfectly overwrought illustration does both.

Kish finished his project in January of this year. The illustration for his last page mirrored “Call me Ishmael” with the same Ishmael-icon, but with “ISHMAEL” swapped out for “ORPHAN” to reflect Ishmael’s status as the sole survivor of the Pequod‘s wreck: “On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.”

The symmetry of the first and last page is gratifying, but watching Kish come to the end of his project was bittersweet for us viewers who had lived through the novel in concert with the project.

Partway through his project, Kish drew up a book contract with Tin House Books to publish the whole set of illustrations. The book comes out this fall, and One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick will become one of those solid, substantial books that Kish celebrates in his work. For those of us who followed the project as it unfolded, the book will be a souvenir. The voyage has ended.

All illustrations are by Matt Kish, to be published in October 2011 under the title Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick by Tin House Books.

Further reading

Matt Kish was inspired to illustrate every page of Moby-Dick by the artist Zak Smith, who illustrated every page of Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon. Those illustrations are collected in Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow (Berkeley, Calif., 2006).

For a thorough economic history of the United Stated whaling industry, I rely on In Pursuit of Leviathan: Technology, Institutions, Productivity, and Profits in American Whaling, 1816-1906 by Lance E. Davis, Robert E. Gallman, and Karin Gleiter (Chicago, 1997). The New Bedford Whaling Museum and the museum at Mystic Seaport house and exhibit the most important artifacts and archives of American whaling history.

The story of natural resource extraction continues with Brian Black’s discussion of the discovery and development of the American petroleum industry in Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (Baltimore, 2000).

Elizabeth Schultz offers an overview and trenchant analysis of twentieth-century illustrations of Moby-Dick in Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century American Art (Lawrence, Kansas, 1995).

This article originally appeared in issue 12.1 (October, 2011).

Ben Franklin’s World: A Podcast About Early American History started as an experiment. Podcasts offer an intimate form of on-demand media that satisfies the desire for oral storytelling. Historians have great stories to tell, and more than a decade of experience interacting with people at museums and historical sites led me to believe that historians could use podcasts to find and cultivate a large public audience of people who love history and who craved the chance to interact with historians. I created Ben Franklin’s World in 2014 not just as a podcast about early American history, but also as a podcast that investigates the historical process and encourages listeners to engage with it. The only question that remained: would anyone listen?

Why Podcasts?

Podcasts serve as the perfect medium for our mobile, digital age. They are downloadable and streamable audio programs you can listen to whenever and wherever you want. Podcasts emerged around 2004 when portable digital devices like the iPod came to the marketplace and the number of listeners has grown year over year since then. Edison Research estimates podcast listenership in the United States has grown from 27 percent of the American population over the age of twelve in 2013 to 40 percent in 2017. Further, the number of Americans over the age of twelve who listen to podcasts on a weekly basis has grown from 7 percent in 2013 to 15 percent, or an estimated 42 million people, in 2017.

Podcasts are popular because they allow listeners to edify and entertain themselves when they commute to work, go for a run, walk their dog, or perform household chores. Listening to a podcast is an intimate experience. When you listen to a podcast through earbuds, you invite your favorite host(s) to speak directly to you, and you alone. When you listen over an audio system, such as the one in your car, it is often because you need someone to keep you company. This intimate listening experience combined with historical storytelling, which, at its core, is about people, make podcasts an effective way for historians to humanize the past and their profession.

As for me, I discovered podcasts in 2012 when I read about them in a book. At first, I listened to podcasts about writing, productivity, and digital media. Then I looked for podcasts about history, but I could not find one I liked. No history podcast discussed my favorite period—early America—and I could not find one that offered more than a basic, Wikipedia-like article about a historical topic or a recitation of history books and articles—often with presentist commentary about those books and articles. I wanted to listen to a history podcast that offered more substance; I wanted to listen to a podcast that went beyond the basic facts and discussed history in way that told me where historians found their evidence and why they chose to interpret it the way they did. After months of lamenting the lack of such a podcast, I decided to create one.

Designing a Podcast: Format and Technique

Over a decade of experience working in public history told me that historians could use podcasts to find and expand a large audience of people interested in their scholarship and the process behind it. But how could I create a program people would listen to?

Eighteen months of research into podcasts revealed that successful shows release episodes with high-quality content, presented in a consistent format, on a regular schedule. Every episode of Ben Franklin’s World releases on Tuesday mornings at 1:30 am Eastern Time and most episodes feature the same format: a promo spot for a sponsor, an introduction to the episode, an interview with a guest scholar, a hypothetical history segment called the “Time Warp,” the guest’s closing remarks, and a brief summary of key points from the conversation.

I learned that the way you speak really matters. Listeners prefer podcasts whose hosts include them in their conversations and stories. The best hosts ask questions that acknowledge listeners’ participation. They make use of “you,” “we,” and “us” when they phrase questions and engage listeners in asides that provide the context they need to understand the conversation. I use these techniques in Ben Franklin’s World.

For example, when I interviewed Lonnie Bunch, the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in December 2016, I asked questions such as “When we spoke with Jim Horn about different historical sources, he told us about oral histories and how they can be great and also problematic. Lonnie, do you encounter any challenges, you know, using the oral histories about the documents and artifacts you collect as you create museum exhibits people can trust?” and, “As we’re talking, I get the sense that people really fascinate you. And I wonder if you would tell us about your first research project, which investigated leaders of free black communities in America prior to the Civil War. Was it the people who attracted you to this project?” As I engage listeners in asides like these, I imagine looking at one of them while I am speaking. Then I imagine turning to face my guest and posing my question to them. This technique allows listeners to feel as though they are in the room where the conversation is taking place (even though the “room” is fictive because I conduct my interviews remotely).

I also include listeners in the conversation by posing questions that they have told me they would like guest scholars to answer. Before most interviews, I post a call for questions in a private listener community on Facebook.

Working to include listeners in conversations adds to the intimacy of the podcast listening experience. My research made clear that the more listeners experience a conversation as though they are participants in it, the more connected they will feel with a podcast, its host, and with the subject matter featured in episodes. Ben Franklin’s World cultivates a sense that history is an enterprise everyone should support. By working to include listeners in my interviews, I am helping listeners forge a personal connection with history.

Ben Franklin’s World and the Promises of Podcasts for History

Ben Franklin’s World released its first four episodes on October 7, 2014. Although I had done my research, I released those first episodes wondering if anyone would listen. Much to my relief, the answer proved to be “yes.” It became an overwhelming “YES!” quickly.

In October 2014, Ben Franklin’s World received 288 downloads over five episodes. By January 2015, it spiked to 50,951 downloads. I cannot pinpoint the exact reason for the sharp and quick growth in its monthly download totals, but I observed two factors at play. First, iTunes featured Ben Franklin’s World on the front page of its “New & Noteworthy” category, first within the category of history and then for the entire iTunes store. Second, friends, colleagues, and active listeners told other people about the show. Listeners have been, and continue to be, the best promoters of the show, which now averages over 160,500 downloads per month.

The consistent release of high-quality content has played a large role in attracting and keeping listeners. Each episode of Ben Franklin’s World presents listeners with a detailed conversation about some aspect of “Vast Early America”—the idea that we need to think about early American history as a field that encompasses four centuries of history spread across four different continents—through the lens of a guest scholar’s discussion of a book, historic site, museum, or digital project. No episode summarizes a whole project. Rather, each episode explores one or two themes and some aspect of the guest’s methodology.

For example, in episode 136, I interviewed Jennifer Van Horn about her book, The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America. Three of the eleven questions I posed focused on her historical sources and how and why she interpreted those sources the way she did. These questions allowed listeners to get a sense of how Jennifer chose the objects she discusses in her book, why she focused on the objects left behind by wealthy early Americans and not poor early Americans, and how she analyzed and interpreted the objects she used. Further, the question that asked her to describe her analysis and interpretation also inquired why the work she does to recover the practical and metaphorical functions of early American objects matters today.

This focused technique, which explores both history and the historical process, provides listeners with a rich educational experience. Guests know they do not have to provide a comprehensive account of their entire project during our hour-long conversations and so are free to offer nuanced, thoughtful comments on specific themes the interviews pursue. Listeners love the detail guests provide because it allows them to leave each episode feeling knowledgeable about a historical topic.

The methodology questions I feature in each episode have prompted many listeners to send me questions about how historians work. These historical process-related questions inspired the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture’s Doing History: How Historians Work series, which debuted in January 2016.

On the last Tuesday of each month throughout 2016, Doing History episodes were posted in the Ben Franklin’s World feed in order to provide listeners with detailed explorations of how historians select research topics, conduct research, use archives, analyze sources, and how they organize and write about their research. The series began with a special bonus episode about why historians study history, and concluded with another bonus episode about the role of history and historians in the public. Like Ben Franklin’s World, Doing History started as an experiment: Just how interested were non-historians in investigating the process of history?

Between January 2016 and July 1, 2017, the fourteen episodes in the Doing History: How Historians Work series have received 196,355 downloads from eighty-one different countries. The success of the series prompted the creation of a second season, Doing History: To the Revolution! This series allows listeners to explore not just the history of the American Revolution, but also how scholars construct that history. The series offers listeners a chance to investigate both early American history and the process by which historians have come to know what they know about the past. Episodes in the series post from September 12 through the end of 2017.

More Than Just an Audio Program: Podcasts as Tools to Engage Listeners

Podcasts serve as a gateway to other media about history, serving as a tool for historians to engage with people who have an interest in the stories they tell. Listeners often contact me and guest scholars because we invite them to do so, providing our e-mail addresses and Twitter handles at the end of each episode. Listeners also have the option to join a free, private listener group on Facebook. They use this group as an opportunity to interact with me, show guests, and each other. They pose questions about history and share information about historical events, exhibits, and articles of interest.

Listeners also contact us about the stories we discuss in each episode, stories that inspire them to think historically about the world. Sometimes it prompts them to purchase a book or visit a museum or historic site they heard discussed on the podcast. In a survey I conducted in September 2015, 41 percent of Ben Franklin’s World listeners reported that they had later purchased a guest’s book or visited their museum or historic site after they had heard a guest speak on the podcast.

Ben Franklin’s World also has many academic listeners who use the podcast to enrich their teaching and study of early American history. K-12 teachers report that they use information communicated in episodes to enrich their classroom lessons and student activities. College professors assign episodes of the podcast and the Doing History series to students as a way to expose them to a wider array of historians, historical topics, methodologies, and ideas than they could otherwise fit in their syllabi. Graduate students use episodes to study for comps, and professional historians listen to keep up on the latest literature in the field.

So will non-historians listen to a podcast about scholarly history and the historical process? Yes, they will. Ben Franklin’s World and the Doing History series have proven that podcasts offer historians an important tool for reaching out to different publics and helping them understand the importance of studying history and of the work historians do. The success of these programs proves that scholars do not have to simplify their work to engage the public. In fact, a large part of the success of these programs is due to the detailed way scholars present complex ideas about history and make them accessible to non-historians.

Further Reading & Listening

Todd Henry’s The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment’s Notice (New York, 2011) introduced me to podcasts. Henry also has a podcast, Accidental Creative.

For statistics on podcast listening in the United States, see Edison Research, “The Infinite Dial, 2017,” especially pp. 39 and 44.

For the official announcement of the Doing History series on Ben Franklin’s World, see Karin Wulf, “Doing History,” Uncommon Sense—The Blog, OIEAHC, January 22, 2016.

You can explore Ben Franklin’s World for yourself here.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4 (Summer, 2017).

Liz Covart is the digital projects editor at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the founder and host of the podcast Ben Franklin’s World.

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Social media has dramatically changed the nature of contemporary presidential campaigns. In a way, that is nothing new. In the early republic, social media had its own crucial importance, although what the media employed was not the tweet, but little bits of pasteboard.

In 1830, it was sometimes called carding, and considered by one Washington diplomat to be a highly efficient invention. Gone, he wrote, was the “genuine old fashioned mode of visiting” in which one sent personal messages, knocked on doors with one’s own knuckles, or sat to tea with those one called upon. Now, with the convenience of calling card etiquette, those who wished “to inform their friends that they are still alive” or be on “visiting terms” with the others who composed capital society, needed only to circle the city by carriage, dropping off cards at the doors of people one often “did not care six pence about,” and without ever taking the trouble to inquire whether Mrs. A or Mr. B were at home.

The diplomat exaggerated when he implied that capital carding was either new or unique to Washington. Calling cards were in common usage by the nineteenth century, across America, throughout Europe, and into China. Men and women in communities large and small centered their social life on “little bits of pasteboard,” with women, particularly in America, taking on the brunt of the responsibility. But the diplomat’s focus on Washington came from a position of truth, for as he and anyone who had ever participated in capital society well knew, in no other city—anywhere in the world—was the making of calls and the dropping of cards taken more seriously or practiced more assertively than in the nation’s capital.

“Great importance is attached in Washington to the making and receiving of visits,” wrote one nineteenth-century social arbiter. “This does not arise simply from a love of punctilio or from the gregarious instinct of the human race. It has its root in the conviction that society is the handmaid of politics, especially in a capital city. A mighty game is being played there, which reaches out to all parts of the civilized world.” Washington’s women were in charge of that game. They played it well, having honed their craft in cities across the world before coming to the capital as the wives and daughters of diplomats, congressmen, and other federal officials, and they did so, there and elsewhere, wrote Britain’s Leonore Davidoff, “with the same spirit of competition which aggressive men display in business.” Davidoff, however, argued that nineteenth-century American society “did not intermesh with politics,” and so the women who ran that society had no “access to real power.” But Washington politics did not end on the congressional floor or behind office doors. Everything in the capital was (and still is) political, including its elite society. As late as 1923, one Washington newspaper was advising that the “astute” woman soon learned upon entering the capital that “if she would seek her husband’s political or official fortunes she must build her house of calling cards.”

Americans did not invent calling cards. British traveler John Barrow gave that honor to the Chinese. After an extended stay in Asia, he wrote in 1804 that “visiting by tickets which, with us, is a fashion of modern refinement, has been a common practice in China some thousand years.” By at least the eighteenth century, though, calling cards were not only prevalent in China, but a prerogative of the upper classes around Europe. In 1884, historian Horatio F. Brown discovered a cache of Venetian calling cards at a local museum, ranging in date from the end of the sixteenth century into the nineteenth century, and in the 1840s, workmen renovating a marble chimney-piece in Soho found the calling card of Sir Isaac Newton, dead since 1727.

Colonists brought the practice with them to the New World and by the Federalist period, elite American society was carding as if it had created the custom. Martha Washington used calling cards and kindly left a few for history, along with her calling card case, while New Englander Timothy Dwight found the topic prose-worthy. In 1794, the reverend penned his pity for those “dames of dignified renown” who with their “debt of social visiting to pay,” were “forc’d, abroad to roam . . . To stop at thirty doors, in half a day, Drop the gilt card, and proudly roll away.”

If gilt cards were the fashion in 1794 (Martha Washington’s visiting card was plain with her name handwritten across the middle), a century later they most definitely violated society’s strict rules of simplicity. The best cards, instructed one etiquette book, were “fine in texture, thin, white, unglazed and engraved in simple script without flourishes.” Trendy styles such as “gilt edges, rounded or clipped corners, tinted surfaces or any oddity of lettering” were to be avoided, and ornamentation or a photographic image on the card savored of “ill-breeding.”

Although the style of a card may have fluctuated over the course of the nineteenth century (at least among the ill-bred), its basic structure changed little. Women carried cards about three and a half by two and a half inches, often in a special case. Men carried smaller cards, which were better suited for a breast pocket. Younger women with shorter names sometimes used square cards. The street address, but not the city, was occasionally engraved on the lower right-hand side, although such an addition was rarely needed until the late 1800s. Those either new to the city or visiting wrote their temporary residence on the card.

A daughter of visiting age had no card of her own. Her name, instead, was printed on her mother’s card. Single women “of a certain age,” who were clearly independent and without need of a chaperone, carried their own cards. A married woman identified herself by her husband’s given name, “Mrs. George Smith,” but never by his professional title, “Mrs. Dr. George Smith.” In addition, those few women who had earned their own professional titles were discouraged from using them socially, including on their visiting cards.

A divorced woman used either her own first name with her former husband’s surname or reverted to her maiden name if no children were involved. Either way, the woman remained a “Mrs.” for life. A widow used her first name on her calling card only if not doing so caused confusion—for example, if her husband’s namesake son, John Phillips Jr., dropped the suffix after his father’s death, leaving both his wife and his mother “Mrs. John Phillips.” Otherwise, a widow clung tightly to her husband’s full name on her visiting card, partly to maintain her prestige and partly to identify herself as a widow and not a divorcée. Widows sometimes added a thin black border around their cards, although anything over a quarter of an inch tinged on “ostentation rather than affliction.”

In 1888, the Good Housekeeping Fortnightly Journal dared to question the logic of a social system that required women to function under their husbands’ names. “Why should a woman sink her personality, as in Mrs. Arthur Thorne?” wrote feminist writer Hester Poole. “She wears neither his coats, hats nor boots; why wear his name? Is not Mrs. Agnes Thorne, equally euphonious and more expressive? Does she cease to be Agnes because she has married Arthur?” It was a call for female equality that etiquette advisors ignored. A woman, they insisted, might be Mrs. Samuel Hunter Tarkington Smith or, to compromise, Mrs. S. H. Tarkington Smith, but she was never Mrs. Sarah Smith—at least not in good society. 

Timothy Dwight’s “thirty doors, in half a day” was not an exaggeration in nineteenth-century society, particularly at the start of each social season. The procedure went thusly. Armed with her well-stocked card case and her list of calls, the lady set out on her afternoon rounds (called by society “morning calls”). At each door, the visitor presented the answering servant with an exact number of cards—normally one of her own for the mistress and two of her husband’s for the master and the mistress. For many arbiters, leaving three cards was the maximum of good taste. To the servant, the lady might say, “For Mrs. B., please,” or “For Mrs. B., and I hope she is quite well,” with neither the expectation nor the wish of admittance, although one had to be careful in Washington. Except at the White House, where a card was left at the beginning of the season with no expectation of admittance, it was never quite proper, except among diplomats and those who “go out a great deal,” to leave a card without inquiring if the mistress was receiving.

Household servants were well trained to accept calling cards at the door, perhaps with a small tray in hand. Visitors placed their cards on the tray and departed, or if staying for a visit, were escorted into the sitting room. Ladies never handed their cards directly to the mistress. If a household received a card by post, an acceptable custom under certain conditions, it was removed from its envelope before being placed on a hall tray. The cards that gathered on the front table provided evidence of one’s social standing and visual reminders of reciprocal responsibilities.

It was sometimes the fashion to fold one’s card in order to indicate the purpose of a visit, particular folds indicating particular types of visits. A crease in the upper left indicated a social call; one in the upper right, a visit of congratulations; in the lower right, a visit of sympathy. If one were leaving town, he or she folded the lower left of the card. Mark Twain poked fun at the practice in The Gilded Age, warning his Washington protagonist that she had better take care “to get the corners right,” otherwise, she might “unintentionally condole with a friend on a wedding or congratulate her upon a funeral.”

Twain’s precaution was not far from the truth. Rules for card folding varied, particularly in Washington, where etiquette authorities writing during the last quarter of the nineteenth century gave their readers conflicting advice. Mary Logan subscribed to the method given above. Madeleine Dahlgren counseled those departing the capital to write P. P. C. (pour prendre congé, to take leave) on their cards instead of folding a corner and to turn down the upper right-hand corner (not the left one) to indicate a social call. DeB. Randolph Keim insisted that card folding was practical but not in general use.

Keim’s advice kept more with what was becoming the national trend by the late 1800s. In place of card folding, someone leaving town might print P. P. C. (as Dahlgren had suggested) in the lower left-hand corner of his or her card. For condolences, cards might be delivered with no folds, or if the family was on familiar terms, with a handwritten “deepest sympathy” added below the engraved name. Cards left in response to happier occasions, such as the birth of a child, might more routinely include a handwritten “hearty congratulations.” Questions, however, on what to fold or not to fold continued into the twentieth century. That century’s premier etiquette authority, Emily Post, warned her readers that the folded corner on a received visiting card might indicate that the one card was “meant for all of the ladies in the family” or it might mean that the card was left personally at the door, or she added, it might “mean nothing whatever.” Nevertheless, whatever the fold or the reason, Post commented, “more visiting cards are bent or dog-eared than are left flat.”

In any city, the leaving of cards was most hectic at the start of “the season,” when visits were made to the homes of everyone in one’s social circle. Outside of the capital, the winter social season might open with the opera, as it did in New York. In Washington, the season originally coincided with the opening and closing of Congress, most often from the beginning of December until the first week of March. By late century, DeB. Randolph Keim was describing three different seasons: one initiated in October by the families of the Supreme Court, resident officials, and local society as they returned from their summer retreats; a congressional season that began the first week of December; and an “official” or “fashionable” season that began with the presidential and cabinet receptions on New Year’s Day. Washington’s social season in any form ended, as it did elsewhere, with Lent, followed in the capital by a “little season” that lasted until “the first furnace blast” of summer drove even the most faithful to cooler climates.

One did not randomly knock on doors at the beginning of each season. Except in the capital, wealth and longevity determined the order of these initial visits. One called first on the most established, respected matriarchs, usually after a formal introduction or with a letter of introduction in hand. She then returned the call within a week or ten days. After that, no further visiting was required unless mutually agreeable; and, of course, all of this could be done through servants and cards. In Washington, official rank decided what doors were knocked on first and by whom. Prior introductions were unnecessary, and, given capital society’s constantly changing faces, impractical. A shorter turn-around time was expected, but as elsewhere, once cards were exchanged, further visits between the parties were optional.

In any city, one could drop off cards without asking to be received, although Washington was least prone to that custom. Nowhere was it proper to simply leave a card at the door if, at that hour, the mistress was conducting her weekly reception. Such days were a standard of the social season and often noted on a woman’s calling card. In many cities, women coordinated their reception days by neighborhood. In Washington, where political distinction determined at-home or “drawing room” days, vice-presidential wife Abigail Adams had struggled to figure out the best day for her drawing room, but by mid-century, a well-established rhythm had taken over. The wives of the Supreme Court and the residents of Capitol Hill opened their homes each Monday afternoon. Wives of the House reserved Tuesdays. Wednesday went to the wife of the vice president and the cabinet wives. Senatorial wives claimed Thursday, and Friday and Saturday went to Washington residents without a pre-scheduled day. The wives of the commandant and officers of the Navy Yard determined their own reception days.

The earlier first ladies varied their drawing room day according to their preference. Martha Washington and Abigail Adams gave theirs on Friday evenings for mixed company. Their husbands held separate Tuesday receptions, for gentlemen only, but attended the Friday gatherings as guests. Jefferson had no wife and no interest in a weekly reception of any type. Dolley Madison famously oversaw her Wednesday evening “squeezes” and her husband forewent a separate reception. Evening receptions soon gave way to afternoon events at which the first lady officiated without her husband, usually on Saturday afternoons. Unfortunately, as the century progressed, these events grew massive in attendance. Whereas Dolley Madison had admirably entertained between 200 and 300 guests a week, Frances Cleveland oversaw, on one such occasion, 4,000 men, women, and children, all there to shake the hand of the president’s wife. Her successor, Ida McKinley, did not have the good health needed for such a grueling routine, and her omission of a weekly “card reception” was the beginning of its demise at the White House.

Official rank ruled Washington and always determined who called on whom first. The president received first calls from everyone and did not return calls except to visiting sovereigns, a practice established by George Washington and continued undisturbed by every president after. Like their husbands, first ladies always received the first call, but unlike their husbands, the earlier ones made reciprocal visits to at least those in their immediate social circle. That ended with Elizabeth Monroe, who flatly refused to oblige. The task, she insisted, was too arduous for someone in her fragile health and, moreover, the city had grown too large in population for such an accommodation. Washington society begrudgingly accepted the inevitable, although it continued to bristle whenever other White House women, even those serving as surrogate first lady, refused to make return calls.

The vice president called first only on the president, but, unlike the president, he made return visits. The Supreme Court justices called first only on the president and the vice president. The Speaker of the House called first on the president, vice president, and justices; senators made first calls on those gentlemen and on the foreign ministers. Senators received first calls from the cabinet and the cabinet received first calls from foreign ministers. House members, other than the Speaker, eventually fell to the bottom rung of the hierarchy, ranking below senators, justices, the cabinet, and foreign ministers. They called first on everyone. Wives and daughters had the same social status as their husbands and fathers and kept to the same rules, except that the ladies of the cabinet called first on ministerial wives, and not the reverse.

Early in his presidency, George Washington established a written “Line of Conduct” for use during his administration. It explained his office hours, his intent not to return calls, and his entertainment schedule, which included the Tuesday and Friday receptions and a Thursday dinner for “as many as my table will hold.” The Adamses kept to the same protocol, but Jefferson initiated a more republican version, eliminating the weekly receptions and opening his door more widely to visits. Unlike with Washington’s “Line of Conduct,” Jefferson’s “Canons of Etiquette” established protocol not only for the president but also for those associated with his government, which in the young capital was almost everyone. The canons instructed the city on everything from the order in which to make official first calls to proper seating at dinners and public functions (first come, first served), and it aimed to eliminate what Jefferson considered monarchical protocol. “When brought together in society,” read one tenet, “all are perfectly equal, whether foreign or domestic, titled or untitled, in or out of office.”  

The city understood Jefferson’s rules as the political statement they were. They were barely followed while he was in office and mostly ignored after he left. The one tenet that Washington society did not ignore was Jefferson’s directive that “Members of the Legislature . . . have a right as strangers to receive the first visit,” meaning that cabinet wives needed to make first calls on all the wives of Congress. With the hospitable Dolley Madison as lead cabinet wife and a provincial capital that saw only a handful of congressional women each session—Jefferson counted nine such ladies in 1807—the president’s edict was not a problem, but fifteen years after the canons, Congress was 25 percent larger, the city was more inviting, and family housing was more available. With that came a major increase in the number of wives who joined their legislative husbands in Washington for the social season. So much so that Louisa Catherine Adams, wife of Monroe’s secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, refused to make first calls on the congressional wives, arguing that their number had grown too vast. The congressional wives retaliated by snubbing Mrs. Adams’s drawing room and dinners, and when John Quincy Adams followed his wife’s lead, he found himself chastised by an offended Senate.

What followed was months of public debate between the executive and legislative branches. The Senate invoked the spirit of Jefferson, telling John Quincy Adams that their insistence on first calls came not from pretension, but from their position “as strangers.” The congressional wives went to Elizabeth Monroe with their complaint and used the same logic. As strangers arriving to the capital, they were entitled to a first call from all of the cabinet wives, and Mrs. Adams had refused to oblige. In response, Elizabeth Monroe quite literally summoned the secretarial wife to her chambers. The congressional ladies “had taken offence,” she explained, and she hoped that the situation might be rectified. But Louisa Adams was unmoved. She held a weekly drawing room, gave dinners, and returned calls. To also make first visits on every lady arriving to town as a stranger, congressional or otherwise, was a massive undertaking to which she would not commit.

Unable to rely on the White House, the women of Congress dealt with Mrs. Adams by snubbing her entertainments. Even a year after the quarrel began, Louisa Catherine reported that at one of her drawing rooms, “only two Ladies attended and about sixty gentlemen.” At another entertainment, to which “Mrs. Adams invited a large party,” guest Sarah Seaton was surprised to find “not more than three ladies” in attendance. With time, though, the women forgave her, particularly after it appeared she might become the next first lady. In December 1822 she wrote that only one lady of the Congress still refused to make the first visit, senatorial wife Elizabeth Dowell Benton, whose husband was, according to Louisa Adams, the “inflexible enemy of Mr. A.”

Calling card etiquette, capital-style, was beginning in earnest. The Adams incident showed carding to be a game that the women of Washington refused to take lightly, and rightly so. This was the nation’s capital, built for a single purpose. Everything there commingled with national politics, including its etiquette. When the congressional wives pressed for first visits, they did so knowing the importance of the city’s social-political hierarchy. Who called on whom first was a direct reflection on where they stood in that hierarchy. With the right social standing came status, respect, and beneficial alliances, not only for themselves but also for their husbands, for their children, for the family name, and, in many cases, for their communities back home. Moreover, thanks to the century’s well-defined gender roles, capital society’s social interaction, laced as it was with domesticity, virtue, and civility, was the one Washingtonian arena accepted as the domain of its women. It was a responsibility that they readily accepted because with it came autonomy and an informal power. Far into the next century, these women would yield to no man their right to run Washington society as they saw fit, and no one would prove that point better than the otherwise indomitable “Old Hickory.”

In the months before Andrew Jackson’s inauguration, Margaret O’Neale Timberlake Eaton, the bride of incoming secretary of war John Eaton, left her calling card at the home of Floride Calhoun, wife of the vice president. Peggy O’Neale was the attractive daughter of a respectable Washington City innkeeper, but she carried with her a reputation for being too “willing to dispense her favors wherever she took a fancy.” At seventeen, she had married navy purser John Timberlake. When Timberlake died at sea, rumors spread that he had committed suicide after learning of his wife’s indiscretions during his absence, including an affair with widower John Eaton, a close friend of Andrew Jackson.

Timberlake’s marriage to cabinet appointee Eaton placed her at the center of Washington society, at least on paper. In reality, the women of that society balked at admitting Peggy Eaton into their circle, none more so than Floride Calhoun, who pointedly ignored Mrs. Eaton’s calling card and refused to make the customary return visit. The other cabinet wives and elite women of Washington followed in kind. No harsh words were spoken. The calling cards, or lack of them, on Peggy Eaton’s front table did all the talking. Mrs. Eaton was not welcome in capital society.

Andrew Jackson was aware that Washington gentility disapproved of the new Mrs. Eaton, but he refused to heed the rumors. The president remembered Peggy O’Neale from his days as senator and had always liked her. Furthermore, Jackson linked the current public gossip to the previous defamation of his late wife during the 1828 presidential campaign, seeing in society’s reaction to Peggy Eaton the same backbiting and malice that had followed his wife. Determined that she should be both accepted and respected, Jackson intervened in her defense by ordering his cabinet members to tend to their wives. When the secretaries refused, he wiped his cabinet clean—accepting voluntary resignations from John Eaton and Secretary of State Martin Van Buren and forcing resignations from the rest, keeping only Postmaster General William Barry, whose wife, it should be noted, had accepted Peggy Eaton into her private social circle. With that, according to historian Catherine Allgor, the women of Washington retreated into their homes, horrified by the consequences of their actions.

The women of Washington, though, had not surrendered. They may have been bloodied by battle, but they had decidedly won the war. Peggy Eaton not only left the cabinet circle, she left town, moving first to Tennessee, where her husband made two failed attempts at a Senate seat, and then to the outposts of Florida when Jackson appointed Eaton territorial governor. And despite Jackson’s blustering, the men he appointed to his second cabinet all had wives of “the right stuff,” women who were established members of polite society and pillars of virtue.

The most repeated challenge to protocol, however, came not from outside the ranks of those in charge of official society, but from inside. It centered on the recurring argument between cabinet and Senate wives as to who should call on whom first. Although the 1820s saw the ladies of the House, like their husbands, move to the bottom of the social hierarchy, Senate wives still expected the honor of a first call from the women of the cabinet (Louisa Catherine Adams aside). The logic now, according to those women, was that their husbands represented “state sovereignty,” a dignity superior to that of any appointed officer.

Since there were only a handful of cabinet wives, but dozens of senatorial ones, the ladies of the cabinet never found that argument very persuasive and occasionally attempts were made to reverse the protocol. One who tried was Kate Hughes Williams who, immediately after her husband’s appointment as attorney general in 1871, announced that she would not be making first calls on the Senate wives. As historian Kathryn Jacob observed, “After four years as a Senate wife herself, Mrs. Williams should have known better.”

Kate Williams, though, had reigned in Washington during her husband’s Senate years and mistakenly believed herself to have influence over protocol. Unfortunately, she stood alone among the other cabinet wives, and the senatorial wives refused to make the first call on her. Two years later, when President Grant nominated her husband to the Supreme Court, those same Senate women refused to protect Williams against accusations made during the confirmation hearing of her various “peccadillos.” Indeed, at least one local matron attributed George Williams’s eventual failure to win the judgeship as the direct result of “Mrs. Williams’s arrogance toward the wives of the Senate who joined [one of the committee members] in his determination to humiliate Mrs. Williams” and defeat her husband.

The fight between cabinet and Senate wives erupted again after Congress passed the Presidential Succession Act of 1886, which placed the various cabinet secretaries in direct line for the presidency. Since the secretarial wives now considered themselves possible mistresses of the White House, they asserted a claim of precedence. Not so, retorted the Senate wives. “Until a cabinet officer becomes President he is still the creature of the Senate, and his wife must make the first calls, as heretofore.” The following social season began with the two sets of women deadlocked, but on January 17, the Jamestown Evening Journal proclaimed the Senate wives “triumphant.” Mary Manning, bride of the secretary of the treasury (and a key instigator according to one newspaper), had led the way to reconciliation by beginning her round of first calls only the day before. “It was an uneven fight at best,” the Journal decided, “for it must be remembered there are 76 senators and only 7 cabinet officers.”

The capital would continue to build its political and official fortunes on a house of cards long after the system had loosened its grip on other cities, and always with its women firmly in command. There is an adage that it is not what you know but who you know that matters. Nothing was truer in nineteenth-century Washington, where one’s sources of influence were limited to reputation, political stature, and personal interaction, and no one had more access to that last form of influence than the ladies of the city. The Senate wives who continued to demand first calls from the cabinet women, the cabinet wives who refused to allow even a president to tread on their domain, and the women who daily stepped into carriages to knock on thirty doors—and then thirty more—did so out of an understanding that carding as a form of social networking was also a form of power, not only for their husbands, but for themselves.

Further Reading

The best way to learn about Washington’s nineteenth-century calling card society is through the women who built it, beginning with the Diary and Autobiographical Writings of Louisa Catherine Adams, edited by Judith S. Graham (Cambridge, Mass., 2012). Other invaluable works include Margaret Bayard Smith, First Forty Years of Washington Society, edited by Gaillard Hunt (New York, 1906), Selected Letters of Dolley Payne Madison, edited by Holly C. Shulman and David B. Mattern (Charlottesville, Va., 2003), Josephine Seaton’s William Winston Seaton of the “National Intelligencer”: A Biographical Sketch, which contains many letters by his wife, Sarah (Boston, 1871), and Mary Simmerson Cunningham Logan, Reminiscences of a Soldier’s Wife (New York, 1916). Logan also wrote Home Manual: Everybody’s Guide in Social, Domestic, and Business Life with two chapters on Washingtonian protocol (Boston, 1889). Logan was a Washington insider, as was social arbiter Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren, Etiquette of Social Life in Washington (Philadelphia, 1881), and De Benneville Randolph Keim, Hand-Book of Official and Social Etiquette and Public Ceremonials at Washington (Washington, 1889). Two other excellent late-century etiquette books are Florence Howe Hall, Social Usages at Washington (New York, 1906) and Maud C. Cooke, Social Etiquette, or Manners and Customs of Polite Society, with a chapter on Washington (Buffalo, 1896). The earliest book of its kind comes from E. A. Cooley, Description of the Etiquette at Washington City (Philadelphia, 1829). Note that some of the above nineteenth-century titles have been shortened to manageable lengths.

George Washington’s “Queries on Conduct” (May 10, 1789), and Jefferson’s “Rules of Etiquette” and “Canons of Etiquette to be Observed by the Executive” (December 1803), can be found online at the Library of Congress and in several book editions of their respective papers; the Philadelphia Aurora General Advertiser published a third version of the canons on February 13, 1804. Kathryn Allamong Jacob, Capital Elites: High Society in Washington, D.C., After the Civil War (Washington, D.C., 1995), and Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville, Va., 2000), offer additional insights into Washington’s nineteenth-century elite society, as does Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (Hartford, Conn., 1873). For a British perspective, see Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season (London, 1973).

This article originally appeared in issue 16.4 (September, 2016).

Merry Ellen (Melly) Scofield is an assistant editor with the Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Princeton University. Her research centers on nineteenth-century social Washington and includes work on Thomas Jefferson’s dinner parties, the reign of Dolley Madison, and the first ladies of the Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison administrations.

Howdy, friends! Some of you may already be familiar with the irreverent cowgirl I play at my blog, Historiann, which is my pseudonym as well as a blog devoted to “history and sexual politics, 1492-present.” If you read Historiann for a week or two, you know that she has a ranch somewhere out on the High Plains Desert in Colorado, where she keeps large animals, rides fences, and makes a lot of jokes about mucking out stalls and horses who have already left the barn. Historiann likes to tell you a little bit about her private life—but just a little. Readers know that she is a happily married heterosexualist, and that she likes to illustrate many of her posts with the sexy cowgirls drawn by midcentury artist Gil Elvgren, but that’s about all. Of course, Historiann is just a pseudonym for Ann Little, a mild-mannered History professor with a shockingly conventional life: I live in a one-story ranch house in Colorado—I don’t own a ranch, and both of my animals weigh in at less than 15 pounds. After nearly a decade in Colorado, I just bought my first pair of cowgirl boots!

Why do I bother to play cowgirl at nights and on weekends—shouldn’t I focus on something useful and productive, like writing my next book, learning to play the guitar and yodel cowboy-style, and/or training for the Slaughterhouse Derby Girls instead? (I’ve already got my Derby name picked out—Kitty Kitty Bang Bang. What do you think? Roller Derby is yet another world of pseudonymity!) I don’t get paid for blogging, my blog doesn’t accept advertisements, and I certainly don’t bother to put it on my curriculum vita, although Historiann is clearly linked to my professional identity and interests. My main interest in my blog is now the larger community of readers and commenters who connect me to a wider intellectual world and whom otherwise I’d never meet, work with, or encounter through any of the traditional networking strategies in academia. Forget what you’ve heard about supposedly cool Colorado college towns and so-called “liberal” academia—it’s lonely out here for a Marxist feminist early Americanist who writes eastern history. My (lightly) pseudonymous identity as a cowgirl probably plays a large part of my success in bringing folks together on the blog. I don’t want to burst your bubble, amigas, but Historiann is a lot more fun than I am—she doesn’t have any family or work responsibilities outside of writing about whatever she wants to write about, and acting as a welcoming host for guests who want to join online conversations about history, the academic workplace, feminism, contemporary politics, and the interesting intersections I find therein. Who knew that there would be 2,000-3,000 people a day interested in reading about my idiosyncratic and not necessarily interconnected interests? My playful pseudonymous identity helps pull it all together. (And, I think a lot of you eastern “Dudes” are pretty easy marks!)

In the crested buttes and slot canyons of the Internet that comprise the academic blogosphere, pseudonymity has been controversial. Every once in a while, a blogger who blogs under hir own name and professional identity writes a blog post about how pseudonymous bloggers are somehow dishonest or disreputable because they might engage in fabulism, or because they’re not living up to a (non-existent) shared ethic of blogging, which then erupts into what we in the biz call a “blog $hitstorm” when a bunch of pseudonymous bloggers write defensive posts about why they’ve chosen pseudonymity, or patiently explain yet again the differences between pseudonymity and anonymity. (For example, see “A Compendium of Posts about Blogging under a Pseudonym” by English professor and pseudonymous blogger Dr. Crazy.) Although I’m not truly pseudonymous, since my real life identity is clear on my blog on the “About Historiann” page, I want to speak up in defense of pseudonymity as a vital tradition in American letters, whether those letters are pixels on a screen or printed on a page. Being able to blog under my own name with only a playful pseudonym is a privilege of tenure as well as truer to my personal style—and since college and university faculty now work in a world in which fewer than half of us are even eligible for tenure, pseudonymity in the academic blogosphere is something that encourages and protects correspondence from graduate students, adjunct or temporary faculty, or untenured faculty. Pseudonymity might be a weapon of the weak, but it can play a strong role in building communities of likeminded scholars.

As many of the readers of this journal know, pseudonymity launched the career of Benjamin Franklin nearly 300 years ago. In an outrageous act of literary transvestism, the sixteen-year-old Franklin wrote in the voice of a middle-aged widow he called Silence Dogood, and under cover of night, slipped her letters under the door of his brother James’s newspaper, The New England Courant. For six months in 1722, the satirical dispatches attributed to Dogood appeared in the Courant and poked fun at Boston’s Puritan establishment. Franklin explains the elaborate ruse in his Autobiography:

But being still a Boy, and suspecting that my Brother would object to printing any Thing of mine in his Paper if he knew it to be mine, I contriv’d to disguise my Hand, and writing an anonymous Paper I put it in at Night under the Door of the Printing House. It was found in the Morning and communicated to his Writing Friends when they call’d in as usual. They read it, commented on it in my Hearing, and I had the exquisite pleasure, of finding it met with their Approbation, and that in their different Guesses at the Author none were named but Men of some Character among us for Learning and Ingenuity.

Franklin’s “young Genius. . . for Libelling and Satyr” was not the direct cause of his brother’s censure and month of imprisonment for offending Massachusetts authorities in the summer of 1722. Nevertheless, the Courant’s fame spread, and it continued to publish Silence Dogood’s missives as young Benjamin took over the day-to-day operations of the newspaper while his brother was jailed. Franklin credited the experiences of 1722 with introducing him to some of the most important work and many of the themes of his adult life—writing for an appreciative audience, courting the ire of both clerical and legal authorities, publishing a newspaper, and because of his brother James’s “harsh and tyrannical Treatment,” inculcating in him an “Aversion to arbitrary Power that has stuck to me thro’ my whole Life.”

As many Franklin scholars have noted, his decision to write in the voice of Silence Dogood was clever and perceptive. By taking on the identity of a woman named “Silence,” he underscored the absence of authority he had as a social critic in a world where outspoken women were punished for their pride, and post-menopausal women in particular were either ignored, demonized, or praised for their piety in tedious funeral sermons published only when their silence was absolutely assured. But by choosing to write as an older widow, he appropriated the voice of an old Gossip whose opinions might nevertheless be credited by her neighbors and acquaintances because of her age and experience. Furthermore, his choice of surname was an obvious mockery of Cotton Mather’s Bonifacius: or Essays to Do Good (1706). The son and grandson of legendary puritan divines and so prolific a writer as to be a one-man full employment scheme for the printers of Boston, Mather was the face and relentless voice of the puritan establishment in early eighteenth-century Boston. But the teenaged Franklin knew that Mather was getting older—a living relic of the last century, he was pushing sixty in 1722 and had been badly bruised the previous year by a vicious public controversy over his advocacy for smallpox inoculation. Satirizing his worldview in the voice of an old widow made Silence Dogood the rough equal of Mather—a shocking inversion of Mather’s view of himself and patriarchal puritan society.

Franklin’s Silence Dogood essays are a tribute to a centuries-old teenage wit that remains fresh and perceptive. His first essay opened with a comment about the importance that the reading audience places on the station and reputation of writers:

The generality of people now a days, are unwilling either to commend or dispraise what they read, until they are in some measure informed who or what the Author of it is, whether he be poor or rich, old or young, a Schollar or a Leather Apron Man, &c. and give their Opinion of the Performance, according to the Knowledge which they have of the Author’s Circumstances.

Franklin recognized that choosing pseudonymity instead of anonymity and creating a colorful backstory for Silence Dogood made for more interesting and more colorful writing, besides satisfying a reader’s desire “to judge whether or no my Lucubrations are worth . . . reading.” Dogood tells us in this first essay that she was a poor, fatherless, seaborn child who, as it happens, shared Franklin’s zest for self-improvement and upward mobility. In the second Dogood essay, we learn that she entered service to a “Reverend Master” who had never married. Dogood turned his head and by and by, dear reader—he married her. Franklin’s portrait of Dogood’s sexually ambitious youth was a beam in the eye of the senior generation of puritan ministers. Could a sixteen-year-old apprentice get away with that in printer’s ink? Probably not—but an imaginary widow just might be able to pull it off.

Franklin is notable in American letters as a writer who more often than not published his work under pseudonyms. The great game of Franklin scholars for nearly 200 years has been attributing yet another pseudonymously published work to him—but as James N. Green and Peter Stallybrass note in Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer, “the danger of this enterprise is that it obscures the lengths to which Franklin went to erase authorship.” I would add that a brief survey of some of the pseudonyms attributed to Franklin show a real commitment to writing in women’s voices. Besides Dogood, he also wrote as “Ephraim Censorius, Margaret Aftercast, Martha Careful, Caelia Shortface, the Busy-Body . . . Patience, the Casuist, the Anti-Casuist, Anthony Afterwit, Celia Single,” and of course, Richard Saunders and Poor Richard, among many others. This mixture of feminine, masculine, and androgynous pseudonyms is typical of his choice of pseudonyms through his publishing career.

Other writers for Common-place have noted in years past that the modern political and academic blogospheres resemble nothing so much as the world of journal writing and print culture in the antebellum era. W. Caleb McDaniel wrote in 2006 about how in reading the journals of reformer Henry Clarke Wright (1797-1870), he concluded that Wright “shared several traits with the prototypical blogger—his eccentric range of interests, his resolution ‘to write down what I see and hear and feel daily,’ his use of journals to ‘let off’ rants of ‘indignation,’ his utopian conviction that writing might change the world, and (not least) his practice of spending the ‘greater part of the day writing in his room,'” something that might sound familiar to a lot of bloggers. In 2007, Meredith L. McGill wrote optimistically about the spirited writing she finds on self-published blogs and of blogging’s potential to destabilize the authority of modern print culture. However, she also noted that the absence of any code of ethics or standards among bloggers can undermine the credibility of the enterprise. For example, McGill notes that blogs have “suffered from the accusation that their much-vaunted inclusion of diverse sources and of voices is a sham made possible by pseudonymity,” which may be employed by both bloggers and their commenters alike. She also quotes Charles Dickens’ complaint about the absence of redress when magazine and newspaper editors decided to reprint his stories. The author, he said, “not only gets nothing for his labors, though they are diffused all over this enormous Continent, but cannot even choose his company. Any wretched halfpenny newspaper can print him at its pleasure—place him side-by-side with productions which disgust his common sense.”

Clearly, the roots of the boisterous and frequently libelous print culture in the Early Republic and antebellum eras were planted deep in the eighteenth century with the birth of newspapers and magazines. In eighteenth-century newspapers, there was no clear and stable distinction between fact and fiction in the varied articles that might be written afresh, ripped off from other newspapers, or reconfigured for a local audience. Eighteenth-century British and U.S. copyright laws covered only books—newspapers and magazines were exempt from copyright laws, which may explain the jumble of frequently borrowed news and refashioned entertainments found in early American newspapers. Publishers like James Franklin, like many proprietors of Websites and news aggregators today, were just looking for content. He felt no ethical obligation to verify the identity of Silence Dogood or any of the other anonymous or pseudonymous writers he published.

Many users of the Internet see a great deal of value in pseudonymity, and use it variously both in blogging and commenting on blogs. As McGill wrote in these pages four years ago, “[b]loggers’ willingness to risk the credibility of their medium in order to retain the pseudonymity that fuels the expansion of the blogosphere should tell us something about the importance of concealed identities to the history of authorship.” The blog that probably makes the greatest use of pseudonymity in the great American literary tradition is Roxie’s World, a blog by University of Maryland English Professor Marilee Lindmann. Roxie’s World, like Historiann, is only lightly pseudonymous. “Roxie” is a dead dog—Lindmann’s late wire-haired retriever—and the blog is written in her voice via her “typist” named Moose (Lindemann.) Lindemann (as Moose channeling Roxie) blogs about nineteenth-century American literature while playing with different pseudonyms, voices, and literary conventions. Emily Dickinson and Willa Cather are regular subjects at Roxie’s World, and because this is a blog that channels the afterlife, that great pseudonymous American writer Mark Twain appears occasionally to have a few drinks at a fictitious local pub called “Ishmael’s” and talk things over with Roxie and her typist Moose.

So why do so many academic bloggers blog pseudonymously? Like Franklin, they adopt pseudonyms because they can publish things that they otherwise couldn’t publish under their own names. There are some bloggers for whom pseudonymity is not only preferable, it may have been the only prudent choice. For example, GayProf, who blogs at Center of Gravitas, has written extensively about being a gay academic and his painful breakup with a boyfriend, in addition to writing about American Studies and Latino history in the U.S. Other bloggers like Dr. Crazy and medieval European historian Squadratomagico have written about their professional lives in ways that would be awkward or indiscreet if they wrote frankly about departmental politics or problems with students under their real life identities. I’m sometimes envious of the range of issues pseudonymous bloggers can address, and the specific and personal ways they can address them precisely because of their pseudonymity. Because I’m not fully pseudonymous, I don’t write about students or problems in my department. As I wrote last year, for me to do so would seem “at the very least disloyal, if not predatory.” I’m sure there are academic blogs that use pseudonymity as a weapon—but I don’t read them. Bloggers who merely complain about something or someone don’t have very interesting blogs, nor do I think they acquire or sustain a wide readership. Contrary to Silence Dogood’s prankish observations, “the generality of people now a days”—at least those who read blogs—recognize thoughtful writing and interesting ideas whatever their provenance.

Pseudonymity can work in the service of community-building in the blogosphere. As I’ve noted earlier, although I often criticize public figures and many of the features of academic and American life, I’ve tried to build a community of readers and commenters who can share stories and information and perhaps use that knowledge to their own benefit. Although I’m not fully pseudonymous, my commenters are overwhelmingly pseudonymous. Nevertheless, regular readers and commenters probably recognize the commenters who appear most frequently because most of them have individual personality traits or interests that remain fairly stable. That is, they fully inhabit the names or roles they’ve chosen to play on my blog, and their pseudonymity, as well as the role I play as Historiann, is key to the kind of supportive community I wanted to build.

One example of a blogger and commenters working together in community-building is the occasional feature I run in which a reader asks for the advice of the community of readers at large. I’ve given lots of unsolicited advice in blog posts, and strangely unlike real life, that has led to more and more readers sending me e-mails asking for help with various academic career problems. (To be clear: they’re not usually asking for my personal advice, but rather for the advice of my other readers and commenters!) So, I occasionally run “Agony Aunt”-type letters that seek help from my readers on a variety of issues: applying to graduate school, the academic job market, strategies for winning tenure, two-body/family issues in academic careers, and ideas for protecting their careers in the face of unfair treatment or even harassment. In these cases, I make use of pseudonymity or anonymity in the service of helping these readers—for example, “Hotshot Harry from Tucumcari,” “Tenured Tammy,” “Busted Barry,” and “Demoralized Debby” have all made appearances on the blog—and sometimes they join in the discussion in the comments about their problems.

Only once has publishing pseudonymous or anonymous commentary on someone’s problems been even slightly controversial with my commenters. The one case I can think of provides an instructive example on a number of levels of both the uses and problems with pseudonymity and online conversations—and interestingly, includes allusions to eighteenth-century literature. Last spring, I ran a lengthy narrative by “Anonymous, an Assistant Professor in the Humanities” describing her frustrating attempts to get a maternity leave from her department. You’ll have to read the whole thing, but the long and short of it is her concluding line: “This experience can be safely filed under the heading ‘How to Alienate/Get Rid of Your Female Faculty.'” Anonymous was a reader who sent me an unsolicited e-mail about this—she was and is not known to me personally. I did not identify her university or department in any way, and before I published her story, I asked her to send me an e-mail from her institutional address so that I could verify as far as I could that her story was on the level. (At least, I could verify that she’s a real person in a real academic department.) A (presumably pseudonymous) commenter “clarissa” wrote that “something about this narrative . . . just doesn’t add up. . . The fact that her chair and dean are depicted as so clueless, malicious and out of touch adds just the right element of melodrama and, honestly, strains my credulity.” Ze commented later that Anonymous should read her faculty manual and take care of business rather than complaining anonymously on a blog: “[S]he uses the tropes of melodrama (poor young pregnant assistant professor being done wrong by villainous, likely mustachioed, administrators) and rather than acting, writes an anonymous blog post hoping that the sisterhood will save her.”

There’s a lot that we don’t know, and that even I don’t know about this exchange. “clarissa” might be entirely correct—after all, I don’t know Anonymous, and even if I did, I wasn’t privy to her conversations with her Chair or his exchanges with the Dean. Ze also makes a good point about the narrative conventions that Anonymous uses (wittingly or not) of an innocent young woman victimized by bad men. I presume that’s why the commenter chose the pseudonym “clarissa,” after Samuel Richardson’s 1748 novel about female virtue lost, Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady. (I didn’t see quite the same narrative conventions at work in Anonymous’s tale—I thought the department Chair looked inept and willfully clueless rather than evil, and I thought that Anonymous’s description of her assertive actions set her far apart from Clarissa Harlowe, but to each her own.) Here’s what I know, or think I know: the real life identity of Anonymous. I know where she teaches, and I know that lying about this kind of thing in a community of feminist academics is a really bad idea, especially when the blogger knows your name. I don’t know who “clarissa” is at all—the commenter left what appears to be an easily traceable academic e-mail address in the comment form that only I can see, but I can’t assume that the possessor of that e-mail address is “clarissa.” After all, the e-mail addresses of most faculty in the U.S. are easily located in a Google search and two or three clicks—so anyone can copy someone else’s e-mail address into the comments form on my blog.

There are 74 comments on that post—and a lot more ugly and annoying stories about U.S. academia’s continuing failure to acknowledge that there are now women on the faculty as well as on the staff. Overall that post was productive—a community of readers responded with their own struggles over their maternity leaves, and many (including Anonymous) commented about how helpful the resulting conversation was for them. That’s the best that blogs can do for their readers—make connections across geographies and time zones and create a community in which we can have conversations about things that aren’t covered in big media formats, and offer deeper conversations about issues that even academic publications like The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed can cover only glancingly. Pseudonymity is an important tool for helping those conversations happen, especially when it comes to opening up these conversations to those who don’t have their hands on the levers of power and who aren’t protected by tenure—probational regular faculty, contingent faculty, and students. (You know—the majority of people in the academic workplace, whose silence is coerced by their relative powerlessness.) Like Silence Dogood and her inventor, the young Franklin, they’re expected to perform their labors without complaint.

Silence Dogood did well for the Courant by her silence. In fact, it was Franklin who outed himself as the author, perhaps because he couldn’t stand to hear others praising the trenchant wit of Silence Dogood instead of Benjamin Franklin. He explained that “I kept my Secret till my small Fund of Sense for such Performances was pretty well exhausted, and then I discovered it.” (He was, after all, only sixteen—and couldn’t yet imagine fully everything Silence Dogood might have learned in her lifetime.) Franklin writes that his brother James “thought, probably with reason, that [praise for the essays] tended to make me too vain,” and suggests that James’s resentment of Franklin’s pseudonymous success precipitated Franklin’s decision to escape his brother’s thrall, and Boston too, to go on to become one of America’s great newspapermen, humorists, inventors, autobiographers, and statesmen.

As a blogger, I can identify with Franklin’s statement that he sustained the Silence Dogood letters only “till my small Fund of Sense for such Performances was pretty well exhausted.” I don’t want to think about blogging into the void after I have nothing of real value left to offer my readers. But I’m closer in age and stage in life to Silence Dogood now than to the young Franklin, and this ain’t my first time at the rodeo. So I’ll continue blogging so long as my “small Fund of Sense” holds out, the readers keep showing up, and the creek don’t rise and wash out my Internet connection, anyway.

Further reading:

On Franklin and his early career as a writer, see Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, edited by Leonard W. Labaree (New Haven, Conn., 1964); David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (New York, 2004); James N. Green and Peter Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer (New Castle, Del., 2006); and J. A. Leo Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, volume I: Journalist, 1706-1730 (Philadelphia, 2006). Albert Furtwangler addresses the “Silence Dogood” letters in detail as well in “Franklin’s Authorship and the Spectator,” New England Quarterly 52:3 (1979), 377-96. Meredith McGill’s essay “Copyright,” in A History of the Book in America, volume 2, An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840, eds. Robert A. Gross and Mary E. Kelley (Chapel Hill, 2010), 198-211, is invaluable for understanding early American copyright law.

For more context on the man Silence Dogood’s letters mocked, see Kenneth Silverman’s definitive biography, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York, 1985). On the Boston smallpox epidemic and inoculation controversy, see Robert V. Wells, “A Tale of Two Cities: Epidemics and the Rituals of Death in Eighteenth-Century Boston and Philadelphia,” in Mortal Remains: Death in Early America, eds. Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein (Philadelphia, 2003), 56-67; and Margot Minardi, “The Boston Inoculation Controversy of 1721-1722: An Incident in the History of Race,” William and Mary Quarterly 61:1 (2004), 47-76.

On pseudonymity among bloggers and commenters, see Dr. Crazy, “A Compendium of Posts about Blogging under a Pseudonym,” Reassigned Time (http://reassignedtime.blogspot.com/2009/06/compendium-of-posts-about-blogging.html,) accessed November 16, 2010. I have written about gender, authority, and online personae in Ann M. Little, “We’re all Cowgirls Now,”Journal of Women’s History 22:4 (2010).

The author would like to thank T.J. Tomlin and Mark Peterson for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this essay.

This article originally appeared in issue 11.2 (January, 2011).

The Web Library for this issue of Common-place features insights by four early-career scholars who work at the intersection of early American studies and the digital humanities. All four are recent graduates of or current students at Northeastern University, which is home to the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. Benjamin Doyle (@dhscratch) is a PhD candidate in English at Northeastern University. He was a co-project manager and developer of the Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA) and is currently the project manager of the TEI Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service (TAPAS). Elizabeth Hopwood (@LizzieHopwood) was a co-project manager and TEI director of the Early Caribbean Digital Archive and managing editor of Digital Humanities Quarterly; she is currently instructor in digital humanities and textual studies at the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities at Loyola University Chicago. Jim McGrath (@JimMc_Grath) was project co-director of Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive and coordinator of the Northeastern University Library Digital Scholarship Group at Northeastern; he is currently a postdoctoral fellow in digital public humanities at Brown University’s John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage. Abby Mullen (@abbymullen) is a PhD student in global history at Northeastern University, where she is also a research assistant for the Viral Texts project.

These scholars of early American literature, history, and culture were asked to respond to a series of questions about their experiences working in the digital humanities (DH), how those experiences have shaped both their research and their careers, and what faculty and administrators should understand about graduate students who work on digital projects.

What drew you to digital scholarship in the first place? What has kept you involved in DH since then?

Benjamin Doyle

I love the way the digital humanities situates me and my work in the generative space between possibility and problem. Over the past five years, I have seen time and again how the problem-posing objectives of the humanities have much to offer computational, data-driven studies. I remain anxious about rhetorically positioning DH as a “solution” to the future of the humanities. Yet, DH has also taught me that our skilled practices in identifying sites of trouble and tension can also be responsive as a matter of responsibility. In this way, I feel DH has helped me become a more mindful and effective reader, researcher, teacher, scholar, and partner. At times, DH has felt quite removed from my traditional humanities work. But it has also significantly helped me develop skills applicable to both my DH and non-DH goals. I’ve benefited greatly from the support and, in no small way, patience, provided me by faculty, staff, and colleagues at my institution as I’ve sought to restructure my relationship to English studies while “entering” DH. I probably wouldn’t or couldn’t have continued down this path without the financial, technical, and intellectual resources made available to me along the way. My program has allowed me to attend a range of workshops and institutes, in-house and elsewhere, to develop a foundation in digital work. Our faculty has actively sought funding lines to allow me to carry on in my positions as project manager and developer on two major digital projects: the Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA); and the TEI Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service (TAPAS). And my colleagues continually demonstrate to me the value of building intellectual partnerships across areas of interest and specialty while doing DH.

Elizabeth Hopwood

In 2011, when I first heard the whisper of this thing called “digital humanities” in Northeastern’s English Department, I was still struggling to use PowerPoint in my classroom. I in no way considered myself a digital native—my digital literacy peaked around Y2K—and I certainly had no experience in coding or Web development. At that time, Northeastern was beginning to offer a couple of DH courses for graduate students. As I was done with my coursework and in the beginning stages of dissertation writing, I never imagined DH would be something I’d become involved in—it was a next-gen movement. However, when an e-mail circulated around our department looking for research assistants to help on the early stages of a digital project to build an early Caribbean archive, I enthusiastically applied. As a nineteenth-century Americanist who writes about and studies literature and foodways in the Atlantic world, I saw this more as an opportunity to expand my research than to learn about digital archive building. Early on in the planning stages of the Early Caribbean Digital Archive, however, I recognized just how important this project was going to be to my field and that I had a unique opportunity to learn a new set of skills and to make contributions that went beyond my initial research interests. It wasn’t long before I found myself working at various levels across several major projects through our newly established NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. A lot of my technical training has occurred through a combination of workshops, tinkering, and trial by fire. I was fortunate to be at an institution with an investment in not only hiring DH faculty, but also in getting grad students involved in project building and management.

Jim McGrath

The first piece of “digital scholarship” I created was a fake Robert Frost Twitter account (@Robert_Frost) in the spring of 2009; I was a teaching assistant for a Special Topics course on Frost at Northeastern (where I was completing a doctorate in English), and I mainly created it to playfully tweak the poet’s canonical standing. I was an early adopter of Twitter, so I frequently found ways to work it and other social media platforms into my teaching. I thought of these sorts of exercises as diversions from my academic studies until the summer of 2012, when I met a number of “DH people” at the Futures of American Studies Institute (held annually at Dartmouth). These young, hip scholars convinced me that my interests in digital media and aesthetics were more than recreational. In the spring of 2013, I presented a paper on image macros and contemporary “Internet poetry” at a Northeastern University graduate conference, and I was (pleasantly) surprised to hear words of encouragement after my talk from Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, who supported my interests in digital media and would eventually go on to become my dissertation advisor. The most significant moment in my still-developing career as a digital humanist was being named project co-director of Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive, a crowd-sourced digital archive of stories, photos, and other media related to the 2013 Marathon bombings and their aftermath, in the fall of 2013. My work on this project (which began as a research assistant) led to an immersion in all things related to digital archives and digital humanities, and my current position as a postdoctoral fellow in digital public humanities at Brown feels like a natural progression from these scholarly investments.   

Abby Mullen

I was not particularly interested in digital scholarship when I first started graduate school, but I did have familiarity with some aspects of digital work, such as Omeka, through other scholars. During my first semester at Northeastern, a faculty member, Ryan Cordell, who knew about my very clunky and amateur experiments, invited me to lunch with him and the dean, as well as a visiting scholar, to talk about digital things. That was my first realization that maybe I really could do digital work if I wanted to. The following semester, I was assigned to be part of the NULab fellows’ cohort as part of my fellowship in the history department. During the first NULab fellows’ meeting, when the faculty members were describing the various projects in the NULab, I first heard of the Viral Texts project, a project to detect reprinted texts across the corpus of Chronicling America. When it came time to select a project to work on, I jumped at the chance to work with Viral Texts (which happened to be headed up by Ryan Cordell and David Smith). And honestly, I’ve never looked back. I’ve begun to incorporate digital tools and techniques into my own work, but Viral Texts has been what kept me involved. I did a mix of programming, research, and writing for that project, and it moved me into areas (like programming) that I never thought I’d be able to do.

How has your involvement in digital scholarship affected your experience as a graduate student? How has it affected your coursework? Qualifying exams? Dissertation topic? Sources of funding? Relationship with faculty and fellow graduate students? Networking and other pre-professional activities?

Benjamin Doyle

The digital humanities has definitely helped ground me as a scholar and as a student, even if at times it has been a challenge to align my digital work with my academic responsibilities. It was toward the end of my coursework, as I entered exams, that I took up DH in earnest. I acquired very valuable foundations in DH through a couple of courses, practicums, and workshops. The bulk of my learning, however, has occurred across my role as project manager on two digital projects. These projects provided me with a renewed sense of purpose and have given me perspective about what I can and should be doing both professionally and intellectually. They have also provided me with added funding opportunities and have allowed me to build lasting partnerships with some really wonderful people. Working on TAPAS introduced me to new professional communities and taught me how to think and work more carefully and cooperatively on large-scale projects. I have been able to build relationships with faculty and staff across disciplines and departments at NU as well as at several other institutions. In my work on the ECDA, I’ve been able to develop my skills as a researcher and my familiarity with scholarly publication while learning to design digital environments that facilitate digital modes of literary practice. Being able to travel to conferences and participate in workshops in and outside the U.S. has introduced me to new scholarly networks and has afforded me access to a diversity of academic, technical, and cultural fields.

Elizabeth Hopwood

My involvement with digital scholarship has certainly enriched my graduate student training. It allowed me to take on leadership and managerial positions that I might not otherwise have had as a student. And it led to employment opportunities that otherwise would not have been possible. Moreover, it allowed me to find my niche within my own research and scholarly interests. That said, it took some maneuvering and strict time management to balance my DH project roles and responsibilities with my dissertation-writing self. My last year of graduate school was funded in part because of grants related to my DH work, so I felt a keen sense of responsibility to those projects which, in many ways, can start to feel more “real” or at least more time-sensitive than one’s own dissertation work. That is to say, I often felt the pull of imminent deadlines (for beta launches and development in ECDA, for instance, or to authors I owed e-mails to in my work as managing editor at Digital Humanities Quarterly), and had to routinely carve out time to write in order to successfully complete my dissertation. Working as project manager of DH projects also means wearing many hats: you’re both a student and a colleague to your own advisors. As a project manager, I became the expert of certain aspects of our site: meeting with faculty PIs felt collegial rather than the typical grad-student/professor relationship. I sometimes caught myself in a funny habit of addressing the PI of my project by first name when we were in correspondence about the project, and by honorific “Doctor” or “Professor” when requesting a meeting to review my latest dissertation chapter!

Jim McGrath

I would have given up on graduate school without the digital scholarly work that preoccupied my last few years at Northeastern. In earlier iterations of my dissertation work, I struggled to articulate my interest in material sites where American poetry is read, collected, anthologized, and at times digitized; with the aid of Ryan Cordell and Julia Flanders (among others), I found project models, critical frameworks, and new avenues of inquiry that shifted my dissertation project’s focus more explicitly to digital terrains. “DH faculty” at Northeastern were tremendously supportive of my work: “stupid” questions about digital humanities were answered patiently, e-mails were replied to in fewer than six months, and visits to their offices didn’t feel like trips to the principal’s office. I was encouraged (financially as well as intellectually) to attend digital humanities summer institutes and to submit work to major conferences in the field: for example, The NULab funded a trip to DH 2014 in Lausanne, Switzerland, so several graduate students could present posters there. I was also being financially supported by opportunities to work on digital projects (though in some instances, faculty members had to justify to admins why a student whose funding timeline had ended deserved these opportunities). In addition to faculty support, I was fortunate to be among a number of supportive graduate students who were similarly finding their footing in digital humanities work: We weren’t afraid to ask each other for help, we were all excited about our various projects and research, and we were all decent human beings. Library staff were also constant supporters before and after the creation of the library’s Digital Scholarship Group (I was fortunate enough to become the DSG’s coordinator in early 2016): in addition to the guidances of Julia Flanders (who is as amazing as the legends suggest), metadata specialists Sarah Sweeney and Dan Jergovic gave me a crash course in Dublin Core during my Our Marathon work, digital scholarship librarian Amanda Rust was always up-to-date on the newest digital projects and tools, and associate dean Patrick Yott taught me a ton about digital repositories. I essentially relocated from the English Department’s offices to the library for my last three years at Northeastern. I even had my dissertation defense in the library to honor the role it and its staff played in shaping my work.

Abby Mullen

Digital scholarship was probably the single most influential factor in my graduate school experience. Because I saw the power of digital tools while working for Viral Texts, I wanted to incorporate some of those same tools into my own work. Thus, I took all the digital history courses available to me, and I was the first graduate student in the history department to have digital history as a minor field. For my own work, the digital tool I’ll be using the most is mapping. My dissertation is structured so that each chapter incorporates a very comprehensive map that I’m building to give a spatial history of the First Tripolitan War (1801-1805). Being involved in digital history has also given me huge and important networking opportunities. For example, as a graduate student, I ran an NEH-funded workshop to introduce military historians to digital tools. I brought in experts in the field of digital history to teach about network analysis and mapping. Interestingly, this workshop would never have happened except that I attended a THATCamp at George Mason University, where I met Brett Bobley—the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities—and the seed of the idea for the workshop was planted.

How has digital scholarship shaped your practice/identity as a scholar and teacher?

Benjamin Doyle

One of the most valuable outcomes for me of working in DH has been how it’s reshaped my understanding of what it means to be a scholar and the meaningfulness of scholarly contribution. I have been able to identify new and exciting areas of participation in literary studies by seeing contribution occurring not just through traditional scholarly publishing but also through bibliographic and metadata research, digitization of historical content, and other alternative modes of scholarly composition. As a result of my digital work, I have also found new focus in areas of textual media studies and book history that now complement my approaches to Atlantic world literary studies. I’m in the early stages of developing my dissertation, but what started as a general interest in human rights and narrative has been reshaped into a closer study of interface, technology, writing communities, and something I’m referring to as the personality of text. My role on the ECDA has helped me to think more carefully about problematics of language, archive, textuality, and history. And I’ve been able to bring my study of North American and British literature into closer relation to early Caribbean studies as I’ve worked at various levels in the preservation, digitization, and curation of early Caribbean materials and in my role in responding to the research and analysis needs of this scholarly community. This work has also allowed me to contribute to co-authored publications about the development of the archive and about how DH work affects our teaching in the context of the nineteenth-century American literature classroom.

Elizabeth Hopwood

As a scholar, DH has helped me think more creatively about the life of a project and the life of my own research. My dissertation is a traditional one without a digital component, but my work in DH has trained me to imagine possibilities for its eventual second life: as a book but also as its own digital project (something I’m in the beginning stages of developing). My training and research in the digital humanities has taught me to think differently, more expansively, more carefully about the possibilities of the digital in humanistic inquiry, the form and function of literary studies, and the role that it can play within and beyond the classroom.  I love the problem-solving and building aspects of DH work: project management, planning, conceptualizing, figuring out how all the parts fit together. I also greatly value the community that DH seems to engender: over Twitter, listservs, institutes, cities—the network of librarians, scholars, researchers, faculty, and graduate and undergraduate students is immensely valuable to me. Developing a digital archive has been among the most challenging and rewarding parts of my scholarship during my graduate training. It is work that requires me to think simultaneously as a humanities scholar, developer, and user, and to think at the level of the macro and the micro. DH also has attuned me to issues of access and accessibility in thinking about how knowledge is produced and disseminated. This is particularly important for me as a teacher, in thinking about everything from paywalls and open-access texts to how I might best provide appropriate scaffolding to students who might not have access to hardware and software, let alone technical know-how.

Jim McGrath

While I’ve heard that the phrase “public humanities” makes some people want to set their hair on fire, I’ve found that the investments many digital humanities practitioners place in public-facing work have been particularly important, and I try to explore the various implications and challenges of doing public humanities work in my courses and in my own projects. My work in Brown’s Public Humanities program at times might begin (and sometimes end) with digital initiatives aimed entirely at non-academic audiences (i.e. audiences who might not be looking to use materials or data for their own academic projects or publications). Or it might entail working with a range of collaborators—librarians, community organizations, undergraduates, archivists—with various ideas about the kinds of intellectual labor they’re invested in, interests that don’t always privilege scholarly monographs or the critical lenses privileged by my graduate training in, say, an English department. These digital projects require skill in project management and development, attention to design choices and interfaces and their impact on user experiences, knowledge of long-term preservation issues, and discussions about various forms of public engagement, among other factors. My interest in digital scholarship has also led me to focus more on a career in alt-ac, with positions in archives, libraries, and museums now more compelling to me as employment avenues than they were when I first began graduate school (I sometimes regret not going to library school; I’m considering a CLIR postdoc after my time at Brown is up, though it’s also been fun and challenging to do DH work outside the confines of a library). I’ve enjoyed the ways in which highly collaborative, public-facing digital work has forced me to question the value of many kinds of academic labor in various ways, and I appreciate the tremendous work that goes into defining the value of DH work to public audiences, students, faculty, and institutional higher-ups. I’ve also been fortunate to have been mentored by faculty members and librarians who are invested in the ethical dimensions of digital scholarship, as well as the idea that, at the end of the day, we’re all entitled to have lives that extend beyond our academic pursuits.

Abby Mullen

My association with digital scholarship has had two effects on my identity and practice. First, while I was doing coursework and was around my department more often, I was known as the “digital person,” so I was often asked to come and speak to classes about digital tools, or help others with their digital projects. In courses for which I was a TA, I frequently spearheaded digital projects as part of the course’s requirements. Second, it seems that my association with digital scholarship has actually pushed me down the alt-ac path. I recently started a new job at George Mason University in the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, where I’m working as a project manager on a new digital tool to help researchers manage their archival photos. It’s a really important new project, and I anticipate working on it for a long time to come.

What advice would you give to current or future graduate students who are thinking about getting involved in digital scholarship? What advice would you give to faculty who are mentoring those students? To administrators who fund DH centers? To federal and private funding agencies (NEH, Mellon, ACLS)? To professional organizations, whether DH-focused or period-specific (C19, SEA, ADHO, etc.)?

Benjamin Doyle

My advice to graduate students entering into DH is to start small and aim big. As a first step, develop ties to the community by reaching out to both new and established practitioners through social platforms or in-person at your institution and nearby institutions. Don’t be afraid to ask questions or to introduce yourself to these new communities—you never know what friends and partners await you. Contact projects and scholars that work in areas that interest you, but do as much research as you can beforehand to show you are as invested as you are curious. Also, don’t be afraid to seek out financial support from your program and institution to attend institutes and workshops, and to fund your individual research. Graduate student labor is often invaluable to the success of digital projects, so feel confident negotiating fair compensation for your labor on others’ projects. It’s highly likely you will fall in love with DH and your digital work, but it’s important to keep a level head about how much time and energy you invest in such work to ensure you don’t lose sight of the equal value of your academic/dissertation goals. Plan early and often, and take time to re-plan just as often. My advice to faculty and administrators: don’t just seek to inspire your students in DH work, but model effective and sensible approaches to doing DH so they can develop strategies for becoming independent and confident scholars of the field and one day make the transition to becoming mentors themselves.

Elizabeth Hopwood

To graduate students: Get involved, but keep an eye on your own research! Don’t be daunted by a lack of experience or technical know-how. I’ve found that on-ramps exist at many levels, particularly in the form of enthusiastic mentors within and outside your own institution. That means: get on Twitter, play around with a Website, join a listserv, go to a THATCamp (or plan your own). You will probably need to devote some of your own time outside your institution learning the tools of the trade (tinkering with Python on the weekends or the command line between classes), so be OK with that. You won’t break the Internet, so try to build or design something just to see what happens. To faculty and administrators: Think carefully about how you see the role of graduate student labor fitting into the lifespan of a project. Talk openly about project management and various ways of doing it (managing projects, I’ve found firsthand, is not an innate skill to humanists). One of the toughest lessons I had to learn when I first became the project manager on the ECDA was that it was impossible to think about, discuss, or manage a digital project in a linear way, so plan for the unexpected and think both short-term and long-term. Ongoing training and check-ins are crucial to a project’s longevity, so the importance of building a strong and communicative core team of students, faculty, and library support cannot be overstated.

Jim McGrath

Graduate students: Take your time to learn about the long history of DH (and “humanities computing,” and whatever else it’s been called), think about how collaborative work challenges the lies you’ve been sold about how academic work gets done and why people should care about it, ask stupid questions, create a professional Twitter account but don’t overdo it (we all overdo it at first), find DH models (who do you want to be when you grow up?), talk to people doing cool DH work online and at conferences, do cool stuff, talk about the cool stuff you’re doing. Faculty: Offer intellectual support as well as advice on the professional state of things in DH; if you don’t know where people are getting jobs (or if you don’t know what “alt-ac” is), try to find someone on campus who does. Listen to students when they discuss the place of their labor on your project, at your institution, and beyond. Listen to librarians and archivists: many of them know a lot about this stuff, and they’ll be able to help your students if you acknowledge their expertise. Provide students with opportunities to define the value of their contributions to digital scholarship (and encourage them to practice these attempts at definition in more public contexts when relevant). Introduce them to your cool DH friends. Admins should create spaces where graduate students can collaborate in various ways on digital projects, be ethically compensated for their labor, and be supported by an established network of colleagues and training mechanisms. Funding agencies and professional organizations should help younger scholars navigate professional terrain (specifically, the expectations that digital scholars know everything about digital scholarship). In general, don’t be a jerk.

Abby Mullen

To students, I would say: You never know what might happen until you try. If you want to try something different from your prescribed path, just ask—you might be surprised what’s possible. To faculty, I’d say: Your students need sustained support from you. If they want to start a digital project, you have to give them support for more than just a semester or even a year. Digital projects take time, human resources, and money—even dissertation-based projects. Don’t let the glamour of the digital idea obscure the very real needs your graduate student still has. To administrators: Digital scholarship can be transformative. Fund projects that give graduate students the chance to do real work, make real contributions, and gain real competencies. To funding agencies: Sometimes graduate students’ skills go unnoticed or obscured when they have to work underneath a person with a PhD all the time on grant-funded projects. As one who has been the principal investigator in all but name on a grant, I know firsthand that graduate students are capable of doing the work of a PI. Therefore, I suggest that you consider relaxing your rules concerning the need for PIs to have PhDs, perhaps not in every grant category, but in some. To professional organizations: Supporting digital scholarship is a long-term commitment. One-off workshops or projects will not have nearly the same effect as a sustained commitment to scholars who are working digitally. At your conferences, make room for digital work in all your panels (not just the “digital” ones); offer THATCamps or workshops; offer presentation formats that are conducive to digital projects, such as posters or lightning talks. Offer micro-grants or fellowships to graduate students or early faculty for digitization or travel to workshops that will enhance their skills.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.4 (September, 2016).

Hotlinks, sockpuppets, and the history of reading

I used to have a magazine habit. I subscribed to half a dozen periodicals and sometimes more. Their arrival in my mailbox was a welcome reminder of the flourishing of intelligent life outside of academia. I read magazines for pleasure, distraction, and provocation. The vividness and currency of the best periodical writing offered relief from the stodginess and slow pace of scholarship. The magazine writing I most admired bristled with the personality of the writer and drew on a wide range of dialects and argots. Unlike the literature I studied, these periodicals did not aim to withstand the test of time. They were far too busy with the pressing concerns of the day to bother with such tests. The ephemerality that went hand in hand with magazines’ responsiveness to the world made them the perfect antidote for academic self-importance. They offered a reliable source of excellent writing, which was, nevertheless, content to be discarded.

These days I find I’m turning more and more to Internet blogs for the kind of sustenance I used to derive from magazine writing. The magazines pile up unread as I spend my time hunched over my computer, checking in on my favorite academic, political, and cultural blogs, lost in a seemingly infinite sequence of Web pages as I click my way through link after link. For a while I tried to dismiss my blog habit as the latest in a series of procrastination techniques, one made alarmingly easy and seductive by media convergence. Rather than beckoning to me from the coffee table, these multimedia magazine-substitutes set up shop right here on my computer where my real work is supposed to reside.

Lately, however, I’ve begun to wonder if the time I spend lurking in the blogosphere might actually bring me back to my work, enriching rather than distracting me from my research on the expanding print media of the 1840s. Can living through a volatile period of media shift tell us something about comparable periods in the past? Will awareness of incipient changes in our own reading habits make us better students of the history of reading?

One lesson that can be drawn from the strange allure of blogs is that when new media seek to compete with established media, periodicity matters. Whether blogs focus on breaking news, a topic of concern to a particular community, or the minutiae of ordinary life, they share an architecture built on the promise of the new. Blogs are comprised of frequently updated entries presented in reverse chronological order; they give graphic priority to the most recent entry while allowing past writing to scroll slowly out of sight. While RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds now permit readers to “subscribe” to many of their favorite blogs, notifying them when these Websites have been updated, blogs have historically depended on the promise of new entries to encourage repeat visits to their sites. News-based blogs and those devoted to cultural commentary ordinarily piggyback on existing print and electronic media, excerpting items of interest for editorial reframing and reader response. In making their selections, individual bloggers and blogging collectives also reperiodize their source material, transforming the daily newspaper, weekly review—or even, thanks to “Youtube,” the regularly scheduled television show—into a sequence of smaller snippets delivered to readers at shorter intervals throughout the day or week.

The reperiodization of a medium thought to be too slow for the pace of modern life is precisely what Eliakim Littell (1789-1870) had in mind when he founded the weekly periodical Littell’s Living Age (1844-96). A veteran editor of “eclectic” monthly magazines that reprinted the best of the foreign press, Littell prided himself on repackaging selected articles from elite British quarterlies such as the Whig Edinburgh Review, the Tory Quarterly Review, and the reform-minded Westminster Review—along with essays from less prestigious monthly publications—into a moderately priced weekly magazine designed to appeal to the general reader.

The success of miscellanies such as Littell’s Living Age depended on the U.S. Congress’s repeated refusal to pass an international copyright law and on the cultural prestige of foreign periodicals. The stately publication pace of the British quarterlies helped to reinforce their authority, granting an air of thoughtful deliberation to their sectarian or partisan outlook on the world. Littell’s magazine aimed instead to be a fast-moving, broad-minded record of an always changing “living age.” From the perspective of a centralized, hierarchical periodical culture (such as London’s), the eclecticism of Littell’s verged on incoherence, but its editor saw miscellaneousness as the sign of a modern, scientific approach to general knowledge. Drawing its articles from a range of politically and culturally incompatible sources, Littell’s Living Age projected a cosmopolitan openness to the world beyond the boundaries of party, sect, and nation.

Littell’s publishing strategy also shifted authority from writers to editors, placing a premium on editorial judgment. Like many nineteenth-century British authors who achieved widespread popularity in the United States, Charles Dickens bitterly resented the free reprinting of his texts. Dickens was angered by the loss of potential revenue but also by his inability to control the mode of circulation of his writing. As he complained in a letter to Henry Brougham, the foreign author “not only gets nothing for his labors, though they are diffused all over this enormous Continent, but cannot even choose his company. Any wretched halfpenny newspaper can print him at its pleasure—place him side-by-side with productions which disgust his common sense.”

What appeared to Dickens as a fundamentally disorderly print culture was understood by American newspapermen and magazinists to signal a crucial shift in authority from authors to periodical editors and their readers. Magazines and newspapers that relied on reprinting for much of their contents courted readers through their principles of selection. They touted their ability to sift through mountains of print for the most important, valuable, or entertaining items. At one level, Littell’s attempt to appeal to (and produce) a general reader couldn’t be more different than the aggressively partisan, popular political blogs Dailykos and Instapundit. However, both 1840s reprint vehicles and twenty-first-century blogs amplify their own cultural authority through judicious acts of editorial selection. Both modes of publication manifestly rely on a more established press, but both seek to convert their dependency into a form of cultural power.

Much of this power resides in their ability to display the fact that the value of a text depends on the history of its reception. Take, for example, Littell’s 1845 reprint of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” which is, more precisely, a reprint of the London Critic’s reprint of the poem. Littell’s version comes complete with a head note that calls attention to the history of the poem’s reprinting, dubbing it “the most effective single example of fugitive poetry ever published in this country.” These nested, reiterated claims for the excellence of the poem reflect back on the reprinter’s judgment in selecting this text and also show the reader that he or she is part of a transatlantic community of discerning editors and readers. Modern literary critics and bibliographers have tended to regard unauthorized reprints as of marginal value, but blogs can help us to see the importance of these visual traces of a text’s place of origin in a literary culture keyed to the value of recirculation, not origination. Bloggers’ routine inclusion of “hotlinks” to the stories they excerpt and the prominence on most blogs of “blogrolls” indicating affiliated Websites make the awareness and cultivation of networks of citation part of the medium itself.

The prominence of these networks of citation and affiliation leaves both the blogosphere and 1840s periodicals acutely vulnerable to the charge that they have failed to deliver on the democratic promise of the new medium. Whether evidenced by the chains of citation that indicate a reprinted text’s travel between and among urban print centers or by the echo effect of firmly held opinions bounced between and among like-minded blogs, both 1840s print culture and contemporary electronic media are dogged by the suspicion that the range of voices represented in a seemingly wide-open medium is narrower than one might think.

Edgar Allan Poe spent much of his early career deriding the coteries who seemed to control the periodical press, author-editors who reprinted and “puffed” each other’s work behind the veil of gentlemanly anonymity. He then spent much of his later career attempting to manipulate this system, using pseudonyms when reprinting some of his own work as editor of the content-starved Broadway Journal, writing anonymous critical notices calling attention to the publication of his fiction in other periodicals, and playing the anonymity and formality of the editorial “we” off against individual authorship.

For instance, in his capacity as editor of the Broadway Journal’s critical notices, Poe distanced himself from a scathing, anonymous review of Longfellow published in The Aristidean, a review that he may or may not have written.

There is a long review or rather running commentary upon Longfellow’s poems. It is, perhaps, a little coarse, but we are not disposed to call it unjust; although there are in it some opinions which, by implication, are attributed to ourselves individually, and with which we cannot altogether coincide.

Literary critics who are interested in the limits of Poe’s oeuvre have argued about Poe’s authorship of this vituperative review, seeking to settle the question once and for all. Poe, by contrast, is clearly invested in preserving the distance between this anonymous text and his authorial name. Periodical culture made it possible for authors and editors to occupy a plurality of positions that could not be reduced to individual identity, to circulate opinions “with which we cannot altogether coincide.”

Blogs have similarly suffered from the accusation that their much-vaunted inclusion of diverse sources and of voices is a sham made possible by pseudonymity. In response, some blogs have instituted stringent rules against “sockpuppetry”—writing under one pseudonym to praise or call attention to writing done under another of one’s pseudonyms. Other outlawed stratagems include corporate attempts at virtual marketing through the use of proxies, or “shills,” and “astroturfing”—using multiple personae to create the appearance of popular consumer demand or grassroots political support. Bloggers’ willingness to risk the credibility of their medium in order to retain the pseudonymity that fuels the expansion of the blogosphere should tell us something about the importance of concealed identities to the history of authorship.

Literary critics have all too often viewed antebellum periodical culture through the prism of twentieth-century norms; they work hard to recover the authors of anonymous or pseudonymous writing and treat the mixed modes of attribution common to 1840s periodicals as a regrettable prologue to the triumphant emergence of the economically self-sufficient author. For instance, critics have been quick to identify a number of pseudonymous tales and sketches that appeared in antebellum gift books and magazines as the property of Nathaniel Hawthorne, rather than pausing to investigate the elaborate naming system that established networks of affinity between and among tales written “by the author of ‘The Gray Champion,’” “by the author of ‘Sights from a Steeple,’” and “by the author of ‘The Gentle Boy.’” And yet the radical expansion of blogging in the past few years, as well as the popularity of posting pseudonymous comments on other people’s blogs, should remind us of the complex pleasures of keeping writing at some distance from the self. The extraordinary amounts of time ordinary citizens spend cultivating on-line pseudonyms and avatars—including writing elaborate “GBCW” (“Goodbye Cruel World”) postings in which these personae dramatically exit the scene—suggest that authors desire to disavow their writing, not only to claim it. The popularity of blogging may well produce histories of authorship that are more attentive to authorial disavowals, histories that would respect rather than compensate for the proliferation of authorial personae.

The furious growth of the blogosphere, despite the difficulty of making a living from the practice, should also remind us of the rich range of motivations for writing that go beyond immediate financial reward. Following William Charvat, historians and critics have generally taken the professionalization of authorship to be the inevitable outcome of the nineteenth-century development of a mass-market for print. They have assumed that economic self-sufficiency was the engine that drove both authors and their publishers. But what if, in a time of media expansion, the certainty of economic reward is a minor consideration next to the thrill of participation in a new medium? What if writers (then and now) are motivated by the possibility of constituting an audience by virtue of addressing one or by the power of a more democratically distributed medium to confer new value on ordinary lives? (W. Caleb McDaniel makes this point in an earlier essay in Common-place.) Perhaps writers and readers are drawn to blogs—and were drawn to the popular print forms of the 1840s—because they offer a sense of belonging to a public, a self-organizing group of strangers without discernable boundaries, which can loosen the bonds of race, gender, status, class, age, or geographic locale. Experiencing firsthand the unsteady, uneven shift of some blogs from after-hours obsessions to full-time, profit-generating occupations may well give us new insights into the lag time between the expansion of print and its successful capitalization. It may also give us new respect for the range of aspirations that galvanize going-into-print long before publishers have standardized payments to authors.

What does it feel like to live in a time of media expansion and media shift? In proclaiming that “the whole tendency of the age is Magazine-ward,” Edgar Allan Poe took aim at the “ponderosity” of the quarterly reviews, arguing that in both tone and content they were,

quite out of keeping with the rush of the age. We now demand the light artillery of the intellect; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused—in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible.

Poe understood that new media require and promote different kinds of writing and can shift the balance of power among existing modes of publication.

I find it both disarming and exciting to watch how blogging has begun to erode the boundaries between media: while the New York Times has incorporated blogs into its electronic edition in order to prop up sales of the printed newspaper, amateur bloggers have in turn begun to seek out official press credentials, and academics such as Michael Bérubé and Juan Cole have turned to blogs to cultivate a wider audience for their expertise. While blogs haven’t yet replaced or displaced the mainstays of my daily reading—the newspaper, the books I teach, the secondary criticism, history, and theory I read for my research, the student writing I’ll turn to any minute now, the novels I read to escape all of this reading—blogging has changed the temporality and the location of my reading practices, tying me ever tighter to the laptop on which I write and, increasingly, read.

Blogging should remind us to ask of the past, not just who was reading or what was read by whom, but also when, how often, and where was reading done? In giving us the term “lurking”—with its connotations of idleness, fraud, and concealment, as well as the possibility that readerly latency might at any time be converted into discourse or action—blogging also prompts us to ask of the expanding print media of the nineteenth century: When are readers potential writers? How might the presumption that readers are potential writers have organized the world of print?

Finally, while in their timeliness and adaptability blogs appear to be ephemeral writing, they may very well surprise us by their durability. Unlike writing for antebellum periodicals, which could be both narrowly restricted in circulation and, due to reprinting, profoundly uncertain in its reach, blogs such as “Dailykos” are now centrally searchable. They have archived their contents and have indexed both postings and comments so that they can be retrieved according to pseudonym. They also offer minute calculations of daily readership based on visits to their sites. Caught up as they are in controversies over their relation to the mainstream media and the relations between individuals and their personae, blogs may end up whetting rather than satisfying my desire for writing that can be thrown away.

This article originally appeared in issue 7.2 (January, 2007).

Meredith L. McGill examines the relations between intellectual property law and literary publishing in American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (Philadelphia, 2003). She is associate professor of English at Rutgers University.

One of the most persistent myths in American history is the idea that the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 marks the first “democratic” election in the history of the United States. The dawn of the so-called “Age of the Common Man” supposedly brought forth universal (i.e., white manhood) suffrage and a truly participatory democracy for the first time in the United States.

This mythology obscures the messiness of the actual history of voting in the years following the Revolution and preceding the Age of Jackson. It reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of American voting practice that too often ignores the ways in which American democracy ebbed and flowed — in fact, was redefined and restricted — in the years preceding the Civil War. Poor white men could and did vote in unprecedented numbers in the years following the election of 1800. Free men of color voted not only in New England and Pennsylvania, but also in some southern states, including Maryland and North Carolina. Women who held property in their own right — widows and spinsters — could vote in New Jersey from 1776 to 1808.

Rather than seeing the election of Old Hickory as a landmark event in American democratization, we should recognize that it was the preceding period, from 1800 to 1824, that marked the first efflorescence of American democracy, in all its messy inconsistency. Nowhere in the Age of Jackson could any woman vote; free blacks faced increasing race-based restrictions on their voting, and in most states voter turnout in the Jacksonian elections of 1828 and 1832 never equaled the peak turnout of the preceding quarter century.

Authorized by the Jacksonian mythology to ignore the elections of the period, historians of high politics have long portrayed the history of the United States from the Constitutional Convention in 1787 to the end of the Virginia Dynasty of presidents as a bright stage upon which great men enter, deliver memorable lines, and exit. This top-down approach is understandable, given the brilliance of the group that Jefferson called an “assembly of demi-gods” at Philadelphia. It diverts attention, however, from the fact that Jefferson and his contemporaries delivered their lines to an audience of ordinary men and women. In so doing, it obscures one of Jeffersonian America’s most enduring contributions to posterity: the emergence of the first truly democratic political culture in an extended republic anywhere in the world.

Contrary to the “Age of the Common Man” myth, my research suggests that the era of mass democratization began 28 years earlier, with Thomas Jefferson’s election to the presidency. The years from 1800 to 1816 saw the most dramatic surge in voting turnout in the nineteenth century, and the greatest expansion of the voting universe until woman suffrage a century later.

Suffrage Expansion and Electoral Competition, 1800-1820

In the first years of the nineteenth century, the United States was already a highly partisan, deeply polarized political culture. The Federalists and Republicans were fiercely and increasingly competitive in state elections from the middle of the 1790s to the end of the War of 1812. Thomas Jefferson’s election in the so-called “Revolution of 1800″ was not the culmination of these electoral battles, as he asserted, but it inaugurated a largely forgotten era of intense if uneven democratization.

Many of more conservative Federalists stoutly maintained they would never degrade themselves by pandering to the masses. Nevertheless, when faced with the grim reality of campaigning for votes or facing political extinction, they responded vigorously to the challenge of expanding the voting universe. In the midst of this free-for-all competition, free men of color and women in New Jersey initially had enhanced opportunities to vote, until the institution that allowed their participation, property-based suffrage, fell victim to same democratizing trends.

Beginning in the 1790s, Republicans in the North generally supported the end of property requirements for voting, since this augmented their natural electoral base among the lower orders. In many states, even before the restrictions on voting were lifted, unpropertied white men began voting, and state suffrage property restrictions were sometimes retroactively amended to reflect the reality of “boots on the ground” (or ballots in the box). In most cases the expansion of the unpropertied white male franchise was the result of strenuous Republican and Federalist competition for votes. What followed this extension of voting rights was remarkable: voter turnout rates in many states exceeded sixty or even seventy percent of the total adult male population.

Historians of the early republic have known about these high rates of turnout ever since the pioneering work of J. R. Pole and Richard P. McCormick nearly two generations ago. The peak figures for turnout are truly astonishing. In the highly competitive election of 1812, for example, New Hampshire and Vermont turnout in the gubernatorial elections amounted to 75 and 80 percent of adult male inhabitants, respectively. That same year Massachusetts gubernatorial turnout was 65 percent of all adult males, and Georgia’s congressional election turnout was 63 percent of all adult white men. In the year 1820, the so-called Era of Good Feeling, when party competition was supposedly at its nadir, Maryland registered turnout of 69 percent of its adult white male inhabitants in state legislative elections; in Kentucky’s election for governor that year, turnout measured 74 percent of all the adult white male inhabitants.

How do these turnout figures compare with participation in the Jacksonian era? One way to gauge the significance of this pre-Jacksonian democratization is to compare peak turnout before 1824 and again in the Jacksonian elections of 1828-1832.

Table 1: Turnout in Jefferson and Jackson Era Elections (click to see table in new window)

According to Table 1, only New York, Maryland, Virginia, Louisiana, Ohio, and Indiana showed higher turnout in Jacksonian-era elections than they had in the peak races earlier. The apparent voter “surge” in Jacksonian New York, Virginia, and Louisiana is partly explained by the fact that these states, along with South Carolina and Rhode Island, were the only ones that maintained restrictive voting requirements into the 1820s.

Climbing the Peaks: Presidential Election Turnout, 1808-1828

Of course, the turnout figures in Table 1 actually compare apples and oranges: state elections pre-1824 and presidential elections post-1828. Peak turnout in the Jeffersonian-era elections happened elsewhere: party competition was focused at the state level, so the highest turnout mostly occurred in state elections. Let us then actually compare apples and apples: turnout in presidential elections. Historians and political scientists who study elections argue that 1828 was a so-called “critical” election. As these scholars have shown, most critical elections generate a spike in turnout because these elections reorient the youngest cohort of voters to ally themselves to a different political party. The elections of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, Abraham Lincoln in 1860, and Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 each saw a change in voting patterns that lasted a generation and also generated a sharp rise in turnout.

Table 2 shows that in the Northeast, the presidential elections of 1828 actually did not mark a dramatic upsurge in the levels of voter turnout recorded in the presidential elections of 1808 and 1812. Table 2 lists a sample of adult white male turnout (for consistency’s sake) in presidential elections in 1808, 1812, and 1828.

Table 2: Turnout In Presidential Elections, 1808-1832

The most striking thing about these figures is that in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, turnout in 1828 was not dramatically higher than it had been in 1808 and 1812. In the sample drawn for this table, at least, only Ohio voters surged in unprecedented numbers to the polls in 1828. Unlike other realigning elections, the presidential election of 1828 does not seem to have caused an unprecedented national surge in voter participation.

Voters did eventually surge to the polls but only after the retirement of Andrew Jackson. Table 3 compares peak turnout in the first party system and turnout in the presidential elections of 1828 and 1840.

Table 3: Turnout In Jefferson Era, 1828, and “Log Cabin” Elections (click to see table in new window)

The Age of the Lowest Common Denominator Man

It turns out that the presidential elections were democratized not by Old Hickory, but by his Whig knock-off William Henry Harrison, “Old Tippecanoe.” The Age of the Common Man was not introduced by the first “log cabin” president but by the spurious “Log Cabin Campaign,” in which Harrison, born on a James River plantation, masqueraded as the nineteenth-century equivalent of “Joe Six-Pack.” Though the country was still reeling from the aftermath of the Panic of 1837, Harrison and the Whigs never seriously addressed the critical state of the economy during the 1840 campaign. Four years earlier, when Harrison was first put forward as a candidate, Bank of the United States president and anti-Jacksonian leader Nicholas Biddle forbade “Old Tip” from saying anything at all during the campaign. Biddle issued this chilling directive about Harrison: “Let him not say one word about his principles or his creed — let him say nothing. . . .Let the use of pen and ink be wholly forbidden as if he were a mad poet in Bedlam.”

This marks the salient difference between voter mobilization in the so-called first and second party systems, as historians have designated the Federalist-Republican and Whig-Democrat eras, respectively. Ultimately, the “mature” second party system surpassed its predecessor in mobilizing sheer numbers of voters to the polls, but at what cost? The Federalists did their best to make Thomas Jefferson’s character and religious views the major issues of 1796, 1800, and 1804, but debates over foreign policy, trade policy, military spending, separation of church and state, and domestic repression clearly predominated, and almost did the Federalists in. As Philip Lampi will point out later in this series, it was Jeffersonian policy errors, especially the Embargo and the War of 1812, that eventually let the Federalists restore their electoral competitiveness.

Even in the popular political culture that was used in campaigns, the politics of the age of Jefferson seems mostly driven by the issues. The electioneering rhetoric, the rituals, and the songs associated with the Republican and Federalist parties centered on critical questions before the voters.

The Jacksonian era that began in 1828 marks a transitional phase from substantive to symbolic politics, with Jackson’s opponents smearing his staid but supposedly bigamous marriage and launching more justifiable character attacks against his record as a military commander. It was the later second party system, the Harrisonian era, that marked the nadir of serious public discussion. The high turnout in 1840 was not generated by a debate or even metaphorical battle over the issues, but by the first fully “symbolic” campaign in American history. The substantive partisan newspapers that had done much of the political heavy lifting in the Jeffersonian era were supplanted for the first time in 1840 by sloganeering campaign-only rags like the New York Log Cabin of Horace Greeley.

By examining two popular campaign songs from the elections of 1800 and 1840, we see the transformation clearly. The first election song, “Jefferson and Liberty,” was written as an attack on the repressive Alien and Sedition Acts, which the song calls the “Reign of Terror.” Here is the last stanza and chorus:

From Georgia up to Lake Champlain
From seas to Mississippi’s shore;
Ye sons of freedom loud proclaim,
The Reign of Terror is no more.
Rejoice-Columbia’s sons, rejoice!

To tyrants never bend the knee;
But join with heart, and soul and voice
For JEFFERSON and LIBERTY.

A very different form of “attack music” appeared in the election of 1840. One Democratic “hit” was a song called “Rock-A-Bye Baby, Daddy’s a Whig.” The entire song is an assault on Harrison’s personality. He is a “fake”: the song attacks his war record and his consumption patterns. Harrison exaggerated his war heroism; he would swallow the fancy liquor of his Tidewater forbears rather than drink the hard cider of western frontiersmen. In this song and others like it, the politics of identity, with references to class and consumption, have obliterated references to policy.

Rock-A-Bye Baby, when you awake,
You will discover Tip is a fake.
Far from the battle, war cry and drum,
He sits in his cabin, drinking that rum.

Our whole trajectory of American democratization has got it wrong by celebrating Andrew Jackson as the avatar of American democracy. In fact, all of the elements that we celebrate in our political culture — mass participation, popular deliberation, substantive discussion of policy alternatives — were launched and in place in the age of Jefferson. Electoral gimmickry and substanceless campaigns dominated by fake identity politics — elite men masquerading as commoners — all awaited the election of a doddering hero from a dubious battle.

American democracy has never entirely recovered from this fateful turn from issue-based to identity politics. Our form of democratic politics assumed its familiar idiosyncratic form, incomprehensible to the rest of the world, and has persisted as our other “peculiar” institution ever since.

FURTHER READING

Among the works most heavily informing the discussion above are: Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: Norton, 1970); David Hackett Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the Age of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York: Harper, 1965); Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York, Basic, 2000); Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Andrew W. Robertson, “‘Look on This Picture! . . . And On This!!!’: Nationalism, Localism and Partisan Images of Otherness in the United States, 1787-1820,” American Historical Review106 (2001): 1263-1280; Byron E. Shafer, and Anthony J. Badger, eds., Contesting Democracy : Substance and Structure in American Political History, 1775-2000 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2001); Chilton M. Williamson, American Suffrage : From Property to Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960); and Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). For pioneering examinations of early American voter turnout statistics, see J. R. Pole, Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (London: St. Martin’s, 1966), pp. 543-64; and Richard P. McCormick, “New Perspectives on Jacksonian Politics,” American Historical Review 65 (1960): 292-301.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.1 (October, 2008).

Andrew W. Robertson, City University of New York

Well, of course he was. American historical narratives have always told us so, and recent prize-winning tomes that agree on little else confirm it. Old Hickory’s fame as victor of New Orleans gave him widespread popularity, the story goes, especially with newly enfranchised voters. So when he ran for president in 1824, he came first in the Electoral College but, with four candidates in the race, did not quite win an absolute majority. When the House of Representatives broke the deadlock in favor of the second-placed man, John Quincy Adams, Jackson’s supporters screamed that the people had been cheated of their choice by “bargain and corruption” and avenged the old general with a massive victory in 1828.

But was Jackson’s “stolen” victory in 1824, the emotional heart of this tale, really quite so clear-cut? In 1884 Edward Stanwood pointed out the problem. In six states the choice of presidential electors was in the hands of the legislature and we have no direct indication of how a popular vote would have resulted. In the states where there was a popular vote, not all the candidates were on every ballot, and in some the overwhelming popularity of one candidate-not necessarily Jackson-resulted in very low turnout. All that can be reported with fair certainty is the vote in the fourteen states where there was a popular ballot, either on the district or the general-ticket system. According to Stanwood, those states gave Jackson 153,544 compared to 108,740 for his nearest rival, John Quincy Adams, who was far ahead of the other two, Henry Clay (47,136) and William Harris Crawford (46,618).

Even in these fourteen states, there is really little evidence of Jackson’s nationwide popularity in 1824. He may have won 43 percent of their popular vote, but, as Lee Benson pointed out in 1957, 42 percent of that vote came from winning four-fifths of the popular vote in just three states (Alabama, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania), which together cast 23 percent of the national vote. Local concerns explain his victories in those three states, while his success in the Carolinas followed John C. Calhoun’s decision to throw his support to Jackson in return for becoming vice-president. In other parts of the country-notably New England and New York-Jackson received negligible support in 1824, in the face of Adams’s evident popularity.

Even in some states where the electors were chosen by the people, Jackson was less popular than appears at first sight. In North Carolina, the popular contest was fought between the Caucus ticket (for Crawford) and the People’s ticket (for whoever had the best chance of beating Crawford in the Electoral College), which won by 20,145 to 15,621. The state’s electoral votes were duly cast for Jackson, and it is often assumed that they measure his popularity in that state. But in eleven counties voters followed the pre-election suggestion that they mark their ticket for electoral candidates with the name of their preferred presidential candidate. In those counties Adams men supplied about one-fourth of the People’s vote, which reconciles with contemporary estimates that about 5,000 of the 20,415 were given by friends of Adams. So we need to move 5,000 votes from the Jackson column to the Adams column.

In the case of Georgia, Philip Lampi’s research reveals a measurable popular vote on the presidential question although the decision was made by the assembly. In the election to choose the assembly, candidates were identified as friends of either Crawford or Jackson, and one ticket representing each side was run in each county. The Jackson men lost to the Georgia candidate, but still attracted (on my arithmetic) 15,478 votes, which need to be added to the Jackson column. That takes the calculation to 164,022 for Jackson to 113,740 for Adams.

But what of the other states that gave the choice of Electors to the legislature? In these cases we have to resort to informed guessing, but the number of votes involved in four of them will not greatly affect our overall calculation. In two states there was fair unanimity (in opposite directions), and that would have greatly reduced turnout. In Vermont, where Jackson was not considered a candidate, the Adams ticket was chosen “by nearly a unanimous vote.” In the case of South Carolina-inappropriate as it is to think of a popular vote for president there before the Civil War-it is clear that once Calhoun had thrown his support to Jackson, there was minimal opposition; in the legislature Jackson won 132 to 25. Contemporaneous congressional elections give some sense of the size of turnout in both cases, though we must reduce it since the presidential election was not contested. The effect is to increase Adams’s vote by about 11,000 votes, and Jackson’s by 18,000.

Delaware and Louisiana divided their Electoral College votes, reflecting an internal division of opinion that is difficult to put numerical values on. The number of voters involved is, however, very small. In the Delaware legislature there was almost no ticket voting, but the Adams candidates won 41 votes compared with 16 for Jackson, suggesting Adams was at least twice as popular. Given that only 6,550 men voted in that year’s congressional election, those results suggest Jackson would have won about 1,179 and Adams 2,947 votes. In Louisiana, Henry Clay was the most popular candidate in the legislature but could not produce an absolute majority, and so was outvoted by a Jackson-Adams coalition that managed to split the electoral votes between them, 3-2. If the original balance in the legislature reflected popular opinion and if as many folk had voted as did in the congressional election, then Jacksonians would have received about 1,693 popular votes, Adamsonians 774, and Clayites 2,371.

These penny-ante numbers make little difference to the picture of Jacksonian supremacy. They simply move Jackson to 184,894, compared with 128,461 for Adams. But we have yet to deal with the key state, New York, then the most populous in the nation, which saw a genuine uprising of the electorate, in the form of the People’s Party, in 1824. In the gubernatorial election, New York State alone cast 193,354 votes, enough to swamp the entire national vote of the leading candidates.

The presidential election of 1824 in New York has long been a by-word among political historians for Byzantine intrigue and legislative legerdemain. But what is clear is the commitment of Martin Van Buren and the leaders of the regular (Democratic-)Republicans to the Crawford presidential candidacy as representing the good old party, and the unwillingness of Republicans of New England origin-half the state’s population-to go along. Once and future governor DeWitt Clinton had his eyes on the prize at one time but his lack of support elsewhere ruled him out, leaving Adams as the only available northern candidate. When the People’s party charged to victory in the state elections, its favored presidential candidates were Adams and, to a lesser extent, Clay. The choice, however, remained in the hands of the old lame-duck legislature, which included a strong bloc of Van Buren-allied Crawford holdovers in the senate. Adams’s success in winning the lion’s share of New York’s electoral votes owed much to newspaper editor-political manager Thurlow Weed’s sly and skilful maneuvering, but Weed’s influence depended on the fact that he spoke for the largest political force in the lower house, namely the Adams supporters. In the end, the joint session of the legislature gave 25 electoral votes out of 36 to Adams.

By contrast, Andrew Jackson did not appear at all as a candidate in New York. Clinton was partial to him but could not find much outside support in the state. During the legislative maneuvering a Jackson ticket appeared one day as an attempt by some Crawford men to create a diversion, but he did not win a single electoral vote. At the meeting of New York’s Electoral College, Van Buren’s underhand machinations to reduce Clay’s final vote resulted in Jackson receiving one electoral vote, while 26 went to Adams (with five for Crawford and four for Clay). It seems not unreasonable to say that Adams probably had the support of about half the New York voters of 1824, while Jackson had far, far less than a tenth. In other words, Adams with over 96,000 votes probably outran Jackson, who at best would have had well under 10,000. Greater precision is unnecessary to make the point that the undeniable imbalance between the two candidates in New York, and the extent of voter involvement there in 1824, was probably enough to overwhelm Jackson’s advantage in the rest of the nation. We are left with a notional guess of about 195,000 votes nationwide for Jackson and at least 224,000 for Adams.

These calculations are not mere idle musings. As the Jacksonians mounted their campaign on behalf of their wronged Hero in 1827-28, their opponents in the North insisted that the congressmen who voted for Adams in the House election of February 1825 had no moral obligation to vote for whoever headed the ballot in the Electoral College; otherwise, why did the Constitution refer the election to the House of Representatives? Furthermore, these northerners claimed, Jackson’s lead in electoral votes did not reflect the opinion of voters. After all, Jackson owed the size of his lead to the electoral votes he won through the three-fifths rule, which enhanced a state’s voting power if it held slaves, even though slaves could not vote. That reduced the moral force of the argument that the most popular candidate ought to win, as did the fact that he had won some electoral votes in states where he was not the most popular candidate. In Maryland, for example, Jackson ran behind Adams in the whole state, but the vagaries of the district system gave Jackson seven electoral votes to Adams’s three. There was, they claimed, every reason for thinking that Adams had enjoyed more popular support nationally than Jackson, and that therefore Adams’s election satisfied every democratic criterion.

If these arguments mattered to contemporaries, so they should influence historians. Our view of Andrew Jackson and his presidency is still too often influenced by the assumption that somehow his candidacy uniquely expressed and exploited the impact of a new democracy on American public life. In fact, elections had long been decided by a broad electorate, and public men had long lauded the moral force of the popular will. The opposition to Jackson did not represent an old elite, even if it enjoyed some elite support in the North, just as Jackson did in the South. To say Jackson won in 1828 because he was more popular is mere tautology. He won because of a range of political forces peculiar to the 1820s, which enabled him and his henchmen to put together a winning coalition. That process deserves the proper analysis that easy generalizations about democracy and popularity tend to inhibit and obscure.

[Click here for .pdf version, with footnotes]

This article originally appeared in issue 9.1 (October, 2008).

Donald J. Ratcliffe, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford