I'm in the archives at the moment--a meaningful, allusive statement to historians; maybe not so much to others. This week I'm reading a bunch of early twentieth century employee magazines, a genre many historians of the twentieth century will be familiar with. These ones are mostly from the American Northeastern states
Some random things that have been interesting, but somewhat irrelevant to my actual research questions
* The paeans to Warren Harding on his death ... If only they knew how he'd be viewed in retrospect. But compared to the current guy ol' Warren looks pretty good. Or not so bad ... depending on how you want to phrase it.
* There was, it seems, a big fascination in the 1930s with cross-dressing in amateur dramatic shows. Probably there's a book on this I'm just too lazy to search for right now.
* Frequent identification of employees as "colored" in situations where it didn't seem relevant, like reports on industrial accidents. Reliance on ethnic stereotypes about Irish and Italian people, though always in jest, was not uncommon.
* Rapid growth in personal photography in the 1920s. Vacation reports in the magazines are illustrated with several snapshots.
* The amazing change in women's dress and hairstyles from 1910 to the early 1920s. The bob, and other short hair styles, was very common in the 1920s on young women, and older women. You compare it to the way women dressed and did their hair just 10 years earlier, and you can see the social change.
Whenever I'm in the archives I feel a pressure to make the most of my time there, and work nearly non-stop from opening 'til closing, with just a short break for lunch. By the end of the day I feel this odd combination of being tremendously intellectually stimulated but also tired by the volume of text I've skimmed, noted, or copied. The first makes me want to plough into the writing. Yet, when I sit down to do that, even after food and coffee, I get about 100 words written in actual sentences, the tiredness of focusing on the process of "Is this relevant to my question, how much of it should I transcribe or summarize, is it so dense in useful information I should photograph it." Eight hours of that is enough. But I have a great collection of ideas that I've jotted down to write up more fully later.
(fn1) On which topic, these older articles are still worth reading: Estelle B. Freedman. "The New Woman: Changing Views of Women in the 1920s." Journal of American History 61, no. 2 (1974): 372-393 and Martin Pumphrey. "The Flapper, the Housewife and the Making of Modernity." Cultural Studies 1, no. 2 (1987): 179-194.)
Posted by robe0419 at December 6, 2005 11:18 AM