Martha Ballard Case Study

Dear Seminar Members:

The preparation for our Case Study is in two parts, and it most likely sounds and looks more complicated than it is. Part One gives you an opportunity to explore the online version of Laurel Ulrich's book based on Martha Ballard's diary, while Part Two asks you to do some mediated reading. I'll ask each of you to informally present (as in, talk us through) your responses to this activity on Tuesday.

Part One
From the main page, click on “A Midwife’s Tale: The Book,” and read "About Laurel Thatcher Ulrich," read pp. 3-12 and 34-35 of the Introduction, and read the Epilogue to her book on the diary. Allow yourself some time to adjust to reading in this online format if you aren't completely comfortable. Please do the following in your Research Journal Log:

1. Summarize what you think is the (or are the) justification(s) for preserving and digitizing this diary.
2. Note Ulrich’s description of past assessments of the diary on pp. 8-10. What clues does she give about the reasons why she saw more of interest in it than past researchers had seen?
3. Choose one of the passages from Ballard's diary that Ulrich quotes in her Introduction. Read around the passage and consider how the abstraction of this one passage helps create historical meaning, that is, how does separating a particular entry from the mass in which it is embedded help researchers reconstruct a historical narrative?

Part Two
Next, read one half of the account called "One Rape, Two Stories,” which is on the “doing history” section of the Martha Ballard website. Amanda, please read only “the official story.” Kasey and Vincent, please read only "Martha Ballard's Story." It is a long account, so feel free to skim for just a sense of the event.

(The actual account is in the left text bar, while the archival documents used for the account are in the main window. To read any of the archival documents, click on "view image.")

1. Considering only the half of the account you have been assigned, summarize the events and list the main characters involved, as best you can. Discuss the credibility of the charge as you understand it.
2. Then, read the other half of the account (Amanda would read "Martha Ballard's story" while Kasey and Vincent would read "the official story"). Given your initial introduction to the story, what was surprising or intriguing about the second version? Did your assessment of the credibility of the charge change after that second reading, or remain the same?
3. Now, beginning at the diary's main page, locate the full text of the quoted passage that you read for step 3. above. You can use the "go to a date" search feature to find the entry you need. Read the entries for a week before and a week after your choice. Does your response to step 3. above change, or remain the same?
4. What questions does this activity raise for you if any, about the nature of online archives, about historicizing lesser-known documents, about diaries as archival record (or as archives), or about archival methodologies? Alternatively, what answers do you feel this activity has provided, if any, to questions that have been lingering for you so far this semester?

Feel free to let me know if questions come up as you prepare.

--Professor Graban

Blouin's Social Mediation and Suffrage Timelines

Hi, everyone.

As promised, here are links to the timelines we examined in class today, along with some of the questions that guided our critical examination of them. I'd like to continue this discussion at the beginning of Thursday's class, as a segueway into Steedman and Jarratt. I have also included the preparation suggestions I made for Thursday's reading.

Today's Activity
Locate and compare the following timelines of Suffrage history:

Laurie Mann’s Timeline of Women’s Suffrage in the United States
“One Hundred Years Towards Suffrage” (hosted by NAWSA)
“A History of the American Suffragist Movement”
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000

Discuss some of the explicit and implicit differences between the timelines and how they represent the movement. Note any interesting patterns or dissonances between them.

Critical Examination Questions
Blouin's key claim seems to be that "'Archives,' ... is beginning to emerge in ... cultural and historical studies as an object of study, not simply as a place where study occurs" (103). How do these timelines reflect that claim?

Following that claim, Blouin cites Jacques Derrida to ask how one can "'prove the absence of archive?'" (104), by which he means "reconcil[ing] deeply held historical beliefs when existing archival evidence seems to point to the contrary or ... to reveal nothing at all" (104). How could the timelines -- or more specifically, the patterns and gaps we notice between them -- prove the absence of their larger archive? What larger gaps or questions do they raise for us?

An alternative question is this: In what way could these timelines -- or more specifically, the patterns and gaps you notice between them -- represent Blouin's "power relationships," "mediation," or "social memory"?

Preparation for Thursday
As you read Jarratt's article and Steedman's first chapter, try to do the following to help you read:

1. summarize the main point of each essay and list the major sources, voices, evidences they use to construct that main point (i.e., how does each author "build her theory," so to speak?)
2. write a brief response to each author in which you tell her (directly) how her essay has either enhanced or complicated your understanding of "history," "historiography," "modernism," or "feminism."

As always, any of the above makes great fodder for your research journal log, as do the questions below.

I look forward to hearing your responses on Thursday!

-Professor Graban

Problem-Solving Questions

Dear Seminar Members:

Today marks the halfway point in our first Archival Problem-Solving Exercise, so I thought I should offer a set of questions that has been building from our reading and discussion the past few weeks. Several of these questions came to fruition for me last week, while watching you investigate the Mary Hatt papers and the Dames Club Records and while talking about how those collections formed. I offer them here, as a kind of interpretive lens onto what we are doing, and I encourage you to take up one or multiple of these in your Research Journal or your Problem-Solving Report (as you wish):

• For all of these writers (Mattias, Sharer, Bradsher, Hunter), what is at stake in “collecting” something, i.e., if we were to stop collecting, how bad would that be or what effects would that have?

• How many of those assumptions/beliefs do you see reflected in the scope and arrangement of the Mary Geraldine Hatt collection or in the Dames Club collection?

• How does gender seem to get represented in this archive (or these collections)? What about race (if at all)? What about class (if at all)? What about other things?

• What assumptions might a researcher make about gender, race, class based on this archive (or these collections)?

• Was it provenance or original order that determined its arrangement? How might each system (provenance or original order) cause certain items to be more visible than others? Or less visible?

• Does the collection represent what you think is “full” or “fair” coverage of the subject? If so, why? If not, why not? What drives your expectations of “full” and “fair”?

• In what ways does/could this collection carry intellectual value (i.e., what questions does it raise or processes does it make possible, or concepts does it complicate or disrupt)?

• Would this collection equip us to think about archiving more as literary investigation, or cultural interpretation, or civic engagement, and why (i.e., does it appear to hold more literary value, cultural value, or civic value)?

Good luck and have fun with this,
Professor Graban

Who owns the "past"?

Hi, everyone.

I was reflecting today on some of the discoveries you made in the Archives during Thursday's class, not only about Mary Geraldine Hatt's whereabouts on campus while she was a student here, but also about the kinds of information you were able to easily discern from the boxes and about the ways we are accustomed to looking for information, even if the boxes don't provide it. That called to mind one of Hunter's powerful (I think) implications about archives and manuscripts in his "Introduction" -- the implication that in most cases, history would never be known (or be understood as a "history") if someone had not gone out to deliberately gather it.

I take this impression from the text box on page 14, in which Hunter cites a 2002 article from the Twin Cities Pioneer Press on the first public consciousness of the 1929 stock market crash. It is possible that we might not have understood it as such a "crash" had we not had access to the 1930s census data showing how home values and rent costs increased so exponentially in such a short period of time. Hunter doesn't go so far as to say that histories are constructed, but I think there are strong implications in that direction. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that events may not readily take on historical significance in our minds until we have some way to organize them, measure them, and valuate them. Either way, it sparked a new question for me: What characterizes "past histories" and how can we know the "past"? Who owns the "past"?

I'm still chewing on this notion -- I offer it up to you as journal fodder, as you finish the first step of your Problem Solving Exercise, and as you begin to assign meaning to (or see meaning in) what you are doing. It seems integral to Hunter because he chooses to introduce us to archives (and to differentiate them from other kinds of repositories) by outlining a typology of manuscript collectors, which in turn assumes that this typology is tied to questions of power, control, and interests. You might think about whether and how much these same assumptions are reflected in the work you are doing or the way you are approaching the primary documents at IU.

Next week, when Professor Kellams and I guide you in the second part of the Exercise, we will be demonstrating some online resources and archival research tools. In the meantime, feel free to begin browsing our resources and to see what may be there for you. Please use the weekend to puzzle over your tasks and remember to send us any questions by 9:00 a.m. on Monday 9/13.

Yours in making meaning in the archives,
-Professor Graban