What's History: Scrapbooks Old and New

I get excited about teaching history when I have the opportunity to dig into the strangeness of the past and make it seem more familiar. The more banal details of the past can seem completely strange when you think too hard about them-- for example, many of the details from Nancy Tomes' The Gospel of Germs, which describes the process by which Americans came to accept the germ theory of disease through public health campaigns and advertising pressures, and the ways in which the knowledge changed the way they lived. 

A child drinking from a common cup.

One of her chapters highlights the backlash against the "common cup," a shared vessel used at public drinking fountains and religious communion ceremonies. While some congregations still use a shared communion vessel, the public fountain cup has disappeared. The cleanliness crusades Tomes describes have eradicated the practice of the common cup so effectively that it is difficult for the modern reader to conceptualize it as ever feeling natural to anyone to drink out of a cup that a hundred other people have used just this morning. It seems mystifying to try and understand the past when you sit down to think about how many of the elements of daily life for the people we study, whether a hundred or a thousand years, a mile or four thousand miles separate from us, seem so far from anything we would do.

Scrapbooks and commonplace books have raised similar questions for me about daily habits (though with less of an "ick" factor). Scrapbooking in the modern day is a fairly conservative, family -oriented practice-- it is widely considered the province of middle-class women who create souped-up photo albums, with borders and accents so adorable they make me wish I remembered to take pictures of anything. Scrapbooks have an entirely different history, however. The practice of keeping a scrapbook or commonplace book was fairly ubiquitous, particularly in the nineteenth century. Ellen Gruber Garvey posits anywhere from tens to hundreds of thousands of nineteenth-century USians were scrapbookers, crossing class and racial lines. I've also found a plethora of early- to mid- twentieth century volumes while conducting my own research. Kept by mothers and doctors and actors and writers and philanthropists and children, scrapbooks were a common part of life, consistently updated by many of their compilers. 

In one of my proudest witticisms to date, I once quipped while interning at an archive that "'Miscellaneous' means 'I don't feel like describing it.' 'Ephemera' means, 'I don't know what it is, and I don't feel like describing it." Scrapbooks have often been categorized as one of the larger examples of this ephemera (other examples I've stumbled across: racy greeting cards, ticket stubs, and-- my favorite-- a leaky jar of hair gel and a comb). Unlike a diary, there is a collaging aspect to scrapbooks and commonplace books. Pictures, advertisements, quotations, cards, and other scraps of life are assembled within their pages to create a picture of a whole: either a person's life, or a particular experience, or the things that inspired someone intellectually, or an event or subject they wished to study or recall in depth. 

There's kind of a murkiness as to the differences between the commonplace book, the diary, and the scrapbook-- some examples blend aspects of all of them. Generally, I think of a diary as for one's own thoughts and experiences; commonplace books as for writing down snippets read somewhere; the scrapbook connotes a more visual presentation of artifacts like photos, clippings, cards, et cetera. Even beyond these distinctions there are a wide variety of scrapbooks; Garvey's book Writing With Scissors focuses mostly on assemblages of newspaper clippings, while the anthology The Scrapbook in American Life features articles on a variety of different types of scrapbook contents from paper dolls to trade cards made by advertisers to children's memorabilia.

I've been interested in the concept of these compiled works for a long time-- I first began thinking about them after attending one of the two keynote lectures at the Gender, Race, and Representation in Magazines and New Media conference at Cornell in 2013, in which Garvey discussed how African American scrapbooking served as a tool of resistance. Yet it remains hard for me to grasp how people have diligently applied themselves to keeping such a centralized record of the things they read and treasure. I have no such centralized methods in my own life-- I write things down in one of a hundred different places. I have four different cloud accounts with a multiplicity of hiding places for things to be, my browser tabs and favorites are out of control, and my Kindle just got replaced and with it all of my saved quotations (which Kindle calls "My Clippings") from the last six months. Then again, the collections of many scrapbookers reveal a similar disorganization, with dates and materials out of order, files full of items that never made it in the scrapbook, different books picked up and put down at various times in the complier's life. At the end of the day, even the most beautifully organized scrapbooks are only, as the editors of The Scrapbook in American Life write, "partial, coded accounts-- very small tellings of memory." (3) 

Obviously, I’m not the first to think about how these formats translate to a modern day approach. Garvey suggests in Writing With Scissors that "Scrapbooks are the direct ancestors of our digital information management." (10) She writes that much like we currently often feel overwhelmed by the wealth of digital information floating around us without end, so too did nineteenth-century readers when faced with the printing and newspaper boom after the Civil War-- both scrapbooking and digital management and curation methods like indexing, blogrolls, and Pinterest help the compiler make information easier to find and understand. Others have written about bringing back relatives of the scrapbook such as the commonplace book. This Thought Catalog piece, among others, argues for today's writers to use commonplace books (interestingly, though "some of the greatest men and women in history" have used them, only men warrant direct mentions, and Thomas Jefferson and Bill Gates get a cool two each). 

So how does all of this relate to teaching? Talking about scrapbooking is a great way to talk about how historians make history through the analysis of documents and materials.  Obviously it's easy enough to throw out a comment about how "Facebook and Pinterest and your Kindle notes are modern scrapbooks! Maybe even your hard drive could be considered such!" This may or may not be a useful connection for student, particularly if your example is dated (I barely remember blogrolls in action, so I doubt my students do; there are rumors that even Facebook was pretty much abandoned by teens in 2013 , so… maybe start talking about the 'gram?  This is a problem you'll have to solve in your own way).

In short, I'm not sure peppering the lecture with hip social media lingo is the most useful way to use this information. I'm dreaming up an activity instead, one which asks students to determine for themselves what serves as their closest approximation to a scrapbook or commonplace book. They could choose to reflect on their Facebook or Twitter feed, their Snapchat story, or their OneNote notebook; maybe they even keep a physical scrapbook themselves.

Students will identify five aspects (tweets, links, pages, items of any kind) of their resource that deal with a particular theme or couple of themes, things like Religion, Family, Politics, Health, Recreation, Friends, Current Events, Identity, Sport, Location, Motivation... there could be others. They would then answer the following questions on their own time: 

For each theme chosen, determine what the text in question has to say about it, whether directly or subtly, and frame this as a coherent thesis statement. Do your tweets suggest an avid attention to all political events, or do you tend to be interested in one particular theme or region? If you make Kindle highlights or save quotations in some way, do you choose things that you think will be of practical use, or do you select based on inspirational or aesthetic qualities?

How is the medium you chose different from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scrapbooking? What does one make possible that is impossible in the other?

Garvey says that "Like nineteenth-century scrapbook makers, the present-day scrapbookers engage in what I call performing archivalness, acts and gestures of preservation, they express the will to save, organize, and transmit knowledge through a homemade archive." (20) What does it mean to "perform archivalness"? Do you "perform archivalness" in this resource?

The editors of The Scrapbook in American Life suggest that scrapbooks hold a wealth of interpretable meaning, but "at the same time, they are but partial, coded accounts-- very small tellings of memory." (3) What does your resource leave out about your life or the times in which you have lived?

Were there any of these themes that were entirely or mostly absent from your resource? What might that lead a historian to conclude about you, that topic, or that resource? 

Once completed, students could compare the resources they chose in class and discuss their findings, particularly regarding the historical interpretations that could be drawn about each. This activity could be really useful for a methods or intro to historical interpretation course; it could also be useful in a Gilded Age or US survey course depending on the books and primary sources you chose to go with it. It's a good reminder that sources always tell a story, but never the whole story, and that someday, we'll all be living in the mystifying, distant past. 

Related Links:

A fun article on individualized communion cups with some commentary from Tomes.

An introduction to commonplace books and links to commonplace books at Harvard. 

Shorter Garvey discussions of her approach to scrapbooks in these articles from Lambda Literary and CBS News. 

A discussion about the archival preservation challenges scrapbooks present, along with some lovely pictures of scrapbooks from the National Museum of American History's Archives Center. 

Books: Writing With Scissors; The Scrapbook in American Life