I came across an interesting Washington Post story:
I’m pretty sure these guys were writing in English. Does every fucking word have to be explained and put in context so we dumb modern Americans can appreciate them?
I’m guessing that a lot of this stuff is personal correspondence and the like, right? I mean, anything they meant for public consumption was published back when they were alive. So what we’ve probably got here is lots of letters from Washington to Jefferson saying, “I was thinking about what Hamilton said in Massachusetts the other day…” with little to no information about what Hamilton was saying, or where, or when. So they’ve got scholars pouring over other documents, trying to find out when Alexander Hamilton was in Massachusetts and what he might have said that would have been of interest to Washington and/or Jefferson, and then it turns out he was talking about some other Hamilton altogether. And they’ve got to do this thousands of times over, sifting through the same enormous stack of historical references over and over. And some of the stuff they’ll never be able to figure out, because the referents have been lost forever. Frankly, those dates strike me as optomistic.
Also, Button Gwinnett had horrible handwriting, so that’s going to slow them down, right there.
Nitpick: It’s “poring over,” not “pouring.”
No, I meant that the scholars are very clumsy with their beverages.
I LOLed.
[Library/archival experience geek hat on]Having worked on some digitization projects over the years (mostly old government documents but also some Flannery O’Connor letters and a couple of Andersonville diaries), I can attest that it’s VERY time consuming work. It’s not just a matter of scanning it and mounting it online- without annotation it’s pretty much useless to anybody as basically you’ll only find what you’re looking for by chance. Just typing in “John Adams” “shopping list” “19 July 1804” doesn’t do much at all to accession it: the metadata is very very important, and it really does take time.
The main reason it takes time of course is money. Digitization can be bloody expensive (in fact the Andersonville diaries are offline due to cutbacks), and for things like this it’s almost all non-profit. There just aren’t enough history profs and hardcore history buffs out there who are going to pay to access the original documents online to devote employees to the task full-time, which means it’s usually done by librarians or archivists or what-not who already have full plates and can’t devote more than a few hours per week to this.
Now true, you can use student workers or volunteers, but there you get into other problems. It’s a lot of training that’s required to use these documents- in fact you don’t handle them with kid gloves because leather’s too dangerous. These items are irreplaceable and most minimum wage work-studies or even well meaning volunteers just aren’t trustworthy enough, plus by the time you get them trained they’re outta there.
So, while I’ll admit it doesn’t sound complicated, it really is very complicated.
(Check out the website footnote.com, incidentally, if you’re interested in some great primary sources. They’re for-profit [which usually means “better quality”]but their content (Rev War papers, military maps, pension info, long narratives, etc.). Almost all of their content comes from government archival materials that have never been and probably never will be fully digitized, and most of the annotation is done by users (which is a great idea).
For a bad example of for-profit digitization, check out ancestry.com. HORRIBLE in the annotations and accessioning and some of the simplest things you can’t do (Just one example: I can tell you if there was a John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt in Shelbyville Tennessee in the 1880 Census but I can’t tell you what the population of Shelbyville Tennessee is without counting every damned person on the Census.)
Another problem is that Census takers usually spelled phonetically: the above might be under Jengalhimer or Jangelhumer or Smith or Schmitt or Smit- and even then their handwriting might be illegible, so the digitalization on ancestry might ultimately read Jubalhimmler Smut and no combination of keywords will access it.
It’s true that this is very time-consuming work.
My uncle is one of the people mentioned in that story, so I’ve been hearing about this all my life. He says that his job is to read the Founding Fathers’ mail, and that it’s hard to sort out the good stuff.
So, then the bigger question is - do we really need all this crap?
Honestly, John Adams personal correspondence isnt going to affect much of anything these days… now - if they find a few letters back and forth about the meaning of the 2nd amendment, then sure - but, a shopping list?
I always find American discussion concerning the men who wrote your original constitution slightly weird. In a couple of thousand years will there be a Book of Hamilton, and churches that read parts of his letters as parables, and pray to him? Is what a centuries dead politician thought but didn’t write into the democratically accepted words of the constitution important?
I understand that relating all this stuff to all the other contemporaneous stuff is a huge job, but there’s some new technology available since these projects started in the 1940s. Put it all online in a Wiki-like setting, have a half-million or so American history dweebs annotate to their hearts content, and the high-brow panel of historians can function as moderators and webmasters to fact check and edit the contents that are being added by the public.
Just a year or two back the US put hundreds of thousands of pages of Saddam’s Iraqi government archives on line, not even translated, in hopes that the public would help find evidence of WMDs that the government didn’t have the resources to search for. And guess what turned up? PLANS for nuclear weapons components that never should have seen the light of day in pretty much any public context.
Surely papers from 200 years ago can be put out there safely. Well, maybe not Franklin, maybe he planned for a way to electrocute a whole country with a ginormous kite…
Of course it is. It is common practice in law to defer to intent when meaning is ambiguous. Surely you know that. And even if intent ought to be irrelevant–and you can count me in that camp–what these important contemporaries of the text thought it meant is still important.
I find it very hard to believe there isn’t similar scholarship in Australia. Does your constitutional jurisprudence allow judges to just have it mean whatever they want it to mean on any given day?
[All of this is aside from the fact that most of these guys were important historical figures aside from their role in the Constitution. History studies historical figures. News at 11.]
That’s a big part of it. These people are interesting. From a historical perspective, it’s wonderful to be able to get into the head (through private documents) of someone who had a role in shaping history. I love reading letters when I do historical research. I’m just an undergrad, but it’s still fascinating.
Hell, Lyndon LaRouche and his followers do all that right now, don’t they?
Sure, if for no other reason than it gives us useful insight about what those words were intended to mean. For example, Hamilton clearly believed in the right to bear arms in defense of one’s personal honor. What lesson can Americans take from this perspective? Can our modern politicians be encouraged to publically defend their honor in the same manner? Is Cheney as good with a dueling pistol as he is with a shotgun? These are questions of great potential significance to all people.
We’ll never know, at least from the guy who got shot. He was such a pussy he apologized for getting shot. How honorable is that?
A semi-relevant aside about government info and digitization projects:
I used to be a Government Documents librarian. The government publishes MILLLLLLLLIONS of pages every year in print and or online. The latter is on the least-user-friendly sites on the net (e.g. the Census will tell you everything there is to know about America- how many gas pumps are in St. Joe Missouri to what the average housing prices are on a particular block in Vincennes Indiana or the crime rates for a specific block in Alexandria DC or the number of Asians over 80 in Ottawa KS, and it’s all online at census.gov, but try finding any of that stuff if you’ve never used it before). The quadrillions of gazillions of pre-Internet documents published in hard-copy from The Articles of Confederation to 1982 trout fishery reports from Guam is called “The Legacy Collection”- it’s easily- easily- over a billion pages, most of it not in print.
Now the vast majority of this stuff NOBODY will ever have a use for- the trout fishery reports is not an embellishment, it’s stuff like that, and reports in preparations for bills that were never introduced and were trivial to begin with, but there’s also some just incredible super-stuff.
The Bureau of Ethnology reports, for example, are a goldmine of source material on Native American cultures. There’s probably more info in there than people who are 100% American Indian know about their tribe, but they’ve never been fully digitized (and the two biggest digitization projects to digitize them have been through the U. of Oklahoma [lots of interest in Indian tribes/treaties/cultures in Oklahoma, can’t imagine why 
] and, of all places, the National Library of France). The House UnAmerican Activities Committee transcripts have never been digitized (or at least had not as of 2 years ago), all kinds of stuff related to every war we’ve ever fought in or sent troops/advisors to, Lincoln’s autopsy reports, all of this stuff- never been digitized by the government.
Each year we met with the man in charge of the Government Printing Office (GPO), the Public Printer, Bruce James, for whom the phrase “slicker than owl shit” comes to mind (unlike a lot of Executive appointees he really does have a background in non-profit publishing, but he’s a used jalope salesman in persona who won’t give straight answers about what’s being done this year with docs in relation to the constant budget slashings). Each year he told us how much closer they were to getting the Legacy Collection digitized, it was just a matter of prioritizing them and blaa blah blah. At the same conferences I met the men who were responsible for digitizing the billions of pages of the Legacy Collection.
By which I mean, I met “both men”. Super nice guys, both of them, and both with full-time jobs in addition to the digitization project. In other words, we’ll all be dead before it’s done, at least by the government. LexisNexis, ReadEx, and other for profit companies have done INCOMPARABLY more at digitizing GovDocs than the government has done or will ever do, and that’s a pity. Just in the damp musty not-up-to-archival-conditions-by-a-damned-site basements of the University of AL library I’d come across some absolutely fascinating stuff, all of it primary sources (one was a pamphlet on a super high-tech submarine based on Verne’s THE NAUTILUS and it was from about 1900) and it’s completely inaccessible. (LoC has done a tremendous job of digitization, best probably of any agency, but they’re mostly independent of GPO, which is totally the budget’s bitch- if there’s ever a major budget cut, the GPO gets slashed, which is potentially dangerous but I won’t go there.)
It’s also surprising what will stay dormant on the shelf for generations then be needed, which is why regional libraries (which get all gov print materials) can’t discard most of their holdings. When I was at the University of Alabama a company sent a rep all the way from Maryland (without calling ahead so we could retrieve it for him or even make sure it was on the shelf- stupid on their part, because a lot of these items have walked away or rotted over the years or else been misfiled) solely for the purpose of making copies of a report on graphite locations in a rural county in Alabama. The report was made in the 1930s when FDR was preparing for the possibility of WW2, and the company the man worked for was considering investing $20 million+ in that county to (mine or extract or however you take out) the graphite. It took us 3 days to find the damned thing because it had never been looked at and had been sent to one of the library’s storage facilities, probably before I was born.
Trivia: one thing that was online and distributed to every depository library was a map and descriptions of D.C.'s sewer and water systems, ca. 1999 or so. After 9-11 the web site was taken down and libraries were asked to immediately remove this from their collections due to its potential use by terrorists. Many govdocs librarians were incensed: this was censorship and we aren’t gonna stand for it and blah blah. I wasn’t in the field at the time but remember thinking "If you were being ordered to pull a Congressional Hearing record off the shelf or a presidential speech or a volume of the budget, then I’d be right there with you, but what in the hell are the chances of anybody ever walking into a depository library in Ft. Payne, Alabama (or wherever) and asking to see a map of the D.C. sewer and water lines system that they just somehow happened to know was there? Unlike the library stipulations of PATRIOT Act, I saw that one as actually pretty reasonable during those anthrax scare days.)
PS- A GovDocs geek moment: in the movie The Hoax there’s a scene where Clifford Irving (Richard Gere) is reading the hearing reports for Howard Hughes’ senate investigations (the ones seen in The Aviator). He’s super-secretly photographing the pages because he has to have copies for his book and it’s of course illegal to make copies of Senate hearings.
Watching this was one of the few times I’ve ever had a professional-knowledge “Yeah, right… cause monkeys’ll fly out of his butt!” Not only is it not illegal to copy Senate hearings, they’re available at libraries in almost every Congressional district. I think there’s even a law that they have to appoint somebody to read it aloud to you free of charge if you’re indigent and blind or illiterate and have a need for a particular one. Senate hearings have never been classified- now if it was the specs for an experimental plane or something, maybe it would have still been classified 25 years later])- and free access to all non-classified government info predates most of the John Adams’ letters (which returns us to the topic).
Woah. That yawning chasm you are falling into is an excluded middle.
I understand attempts to derive intent from historical context. However, the Australian High Court (our equivalent of your Supreme) has stated quite emphatically that the subjective intent of those who wrote the constitution is not relevant.
What I think I detect when I hear some Americans discussing those who wrote the US constitution is reverence in tone similar to that used for deities. As if it is wrong to question their intent.
And yet, they still pore over the debates that created that constitution. I don’t think you’re understanding the distinction between evaluating intent and evaluating original textual meaning. Like I said, one can disavow intent and still find the history highly relevant. See, for example, your court’s reasoning in Cole v. Whitfield (1988).
Well, there’s all kind of bullshit to be detected in the American atmosphere. You can probably detect a similar reverence for fucking NASCAR. But that has nothing to do with this thread.
You never know how an historian might be able to use the information to connect some dots. In History: A Very Short Introduction, John Arnold writes about historians use various sources. One of the sources was the Yarmouth Assembly Book dating from 1635 where in the margins the town awarded Mrs. Burdett 20 marks per year on account of her husband abandoning her and her children and going to New England. It doesn’t really seem important but an historian can use this information as part of a broader narrative on colonization of America, gender relations in 17th century England, the English Civil War (given Mr. Burdett’s strange history), etc. So what can a shopping list provide? Well, it can give me some insight into the inner workings of the Adams home.
Marc
My experience points to “yes,” at least in an educational context.* Many of my colleagues in history, political science and related disciplines must constantly try to move our students beyond the Founding Father platitudes that they pick up in high school or God knows where else. The vast majority of them are not aware of the fierce deliberation that went into the construction of the major founding documents of the US. I think that raising awareness of the debate and uncertainty is a service in and of itself, and documents like notes from the debates and correspondence are the best way to expose students to such things. However, without a professional scholar’s knowledge of the time period (and sometimes even with such knowledge) these documents, as many others have pointed out, can be misinterpreted (or even incomprehensible). Plus, as Sampiro, MGibson and others have noted, you never know when something in one of those documents will prove to be useful.
*One of my colleagues who does American intellectual history argues that the Founding Father-era period is the most difficult to teach because students think they know it because they’ve heard the Declaration of Independence recited a few times and many refuse to engage with the material in a critical manner. He says that even the Civil War and slavery are easier for him.