Q&A: "Archival Profusion, Archival Silence, and Analytic Invention: Reinventing Histories of Nineteenth-Century African American Debate" -- A Virtual Discussion with Angela Ray

Extended answers from Angela G. Ray (AGR), panelist from “Evidence: The Use and Misuse of Data”, panel 1: Evidential Standards (Click here to watch)

Question: Do you connect the debating societies of young African American men to the same societies of young women (studied by Mary Kelley, among others)? Do you attribute to them significance beyond the education/experience of the participants? (anonymous)

AGR: Yes, indeed. Important scholarship like Elizabeth McHenry’s Forgotten Readers (2002), Mary Kelley’s Learning to Stand and Speak (2006), and Carly Woods’s Debating Women (2018) informs my own work and encourages an emphasis on the intersectional dynamics of race and gender.

The question of how to attribute significance to educational activity, like a debating society, is an important one. For this project I have amassed persuasive evidence of the benefits to several individuals, and I believe that broader social and cultural benefits can be plausibly demonstrated as well—especially via the members’ later contributions to racial uplift in education, religion, and government. Of course, I am also interested in what participating in a debating society meant for individuals who lacked opportunities later on, or whose lives were cut short; asking those questions gets me thinking about the importance of sociability and camaraderie, about making a supportive enclave within highly oppressive conditions.

Question: Dr. Ray, I am fascinated by the rich repository of records you explored in your transcription and analysis of the Clionian Society of antebellum Charleston. How did you learn about the existence of these proceedings? (Kerry Bryan)

AGR: I had prior experience in studying antebellum debating societies that were run primarily by young white men in the Northeast and Midwest. Once while I was reading about societies in the South, I noted two sentences in the first volume of Michael O’Brien’s Conjectures of Order (2004) that describe the Clionian Debating Society and identify the participants as free Black men. This was an intriguing reference, and when I was later at Duke University, I examined the minute book that is held in the library there. Then my search of the WorldCat database turned up the existence of the earlier minute book, held at the Charleston Library Society and reproduced on microfiche in 1981. I was hooked!

Question: How does digitization, and presenting digital facsimile, affect historians' conception of evidence? (Dominique Daniel)

AGR: I can offer some observations from my own experience: Most of the sources I used for my doctoral dissertation were available either in their original form in archives or on microfilm. As my career has developed, I am increasingly using digitized facsimiles as sources, primarily of print materials but increasingly of handwritten documents as well. I appreciate the increased access and speed that digitization, especially digital facsimile, has brought; I remember cranking microfilm copies of nineteenth-century census records, for example, and I welcome the ability to use searchable databases from my own computer. I also appreciate the possibility of checking other scholars’ transcriptions of primary sources by examining a digital facsimile.

At the same time, I have witnessed a slow evolution in the quality of optical character recognition, and I keep in mind that electronic searches, like physical searches, are imperfect. Also, especially where handwritten documents are concerned, I want to see the original if that is at all possible, especially if the source in question is important to a given research project. Being able to detect the weight of ink—reproducing the gesture of writing—is sometimes the only method for making a handwritten document legible. I’ve sometimes been surprised by the size or color of a piece of letter paper that I had viewed on microfilm, or by the bulk of a book I had seen in digital facsimile. Substantive knowledge can be gained by examining original materials, especially when our research questions involve form in addition to propositional content.

I have responded to this question by focusing on textual sources, although I would make an analogous case for visual images: digitization offers important access, and different kinds of evidence become available when encountering originals.

Question: Can you all discuss the way memory fits into the idea of evidential standards? Does memory as evidence complicate the way we standardize it? Do you think there are areas of growth needed in the field regarding using memories as evidence? (Molly Nebiolo)

AGR: We discussed this question a bit at the conference, and I mentioned Nell Irvin Painter’s Sojourner Truth (1996), an especially important example of historical study of an individual’s life and the ways that her public image was shaped by herself and others during her lifetime and afterward. Merrill Peterson’s Lincoln in American Memory (1994) is another important study that offers a deft presentation of memory practices as historical phenomena. From my own field of rhetoric and communication, Jenell Johnson’s American Lobotomy (2014) studies the ways that stories about lobotomy have influenced perceptions of biomedicine and mental health across time; she draws on sources from medical treatises to horror films.

Rhetorical studies, influenced by Pierre Nora and others, have long claimed a sharp dichotomy between memory and history, but that is changing. Comparable to the perspective that Andrew Schocket mentioned at the conference, my understanding of historical investigation is that it is a form of memory production, albeit a form that has communal expectations for methods, evidence, claims, and arguments. My disciplinary colleague Kirt Wilson has expressed a distinction helpful to rhetoricians: he refers to history as forensic and commemoration as epideictic, arguing that memory encompasses both. That is, history operates within technical arenas of peer-reviewed publications and museum curation, has its own specialized language and accepted methods, and seeks to make factual claims about the past; commemoration has broader participation and fewer methodological constraints, focuses less on accuracy and more on emotional resonance, and emphasizes claims of values and identity more than claims of fact. In the journal Rhetoric & Public Affairs in 2010, Wilson wrote, “Memory is not comprised simply of facts about the past, nor is it solely myth. It is, instead, a rhetorically negotiated commingling of history and commemoration, each form dictating slightly different exigencies.”

Question: Has the physical separation of the two volumes of the Clionian Society's Minutes -- divided between repositories in Charleston and Duke University -- contributed to some of the obscurity or silencing of the society's members? Can digitization or transcription bring these archival sources together -- seems like both Angela and Daniel work towards the ends of  collocation? But what are the bounds of a source, archival or otherwise? What to include in the "works" of the Clionian Society or the "works" of Andrew Jackson is still an issue? (anonymous)

AGR: Yes, I think that the physical separation of the two volumes of debating society minutes has definitely contributed to the organization’s obscurity, but another contributing factor is the comparatively small number of scholars who have examined nineteenth-century debating as a significant cultural phenomenon. And yes, through transcribing the two volumes and studying them together, I am enacting a commitment to the notion that the two are most meaningful as a single unit; while that is an arguable proposition, it is productive for the research questions I have. At the same time, I also understand the “works” of the society as including materials no longer extant. Additional documents (e.g., correspondence, lists of officers) are mentioned in the minutes but have not survived, at least in public archives. The group also collected books, some of which are sufficiently well described in the minutes that I can make a confident judgment about their authors and titles. (These include Benjamin Franklin’s Life.) Although the copies that were in the society’s library are no longer together (at least as far as I can determine), I am reading other copies held in libraries elsewhere or in digital facsimile, and I am, in general, considering these texts as part of the group’s holdings. Drawing on the scholarship of colleagues in theater and performance studies, I can also understand the “works” of the society as including its ephemeral, long-ago activities, which must be studied via surrogates like the minutes themselves.