Media History and the Archive

Craig Robertson, Craig Robertson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317983170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Journalismus

By the time readers encounter academic history in the form of books and articles, all that tends to be left of an author's direct experience with archives is pages of endnotes. Whether intentionally or not, archives have until recently been largely thought of as discrete collections of documents, perhaps not neutral but rarely considered to be historical actors.

This book brings together top media scholars to rethink the role of the archive and historical record from the perspective of writing media history. Exploring the concept of the archive forces a reconsideration of what counts as historical evidence. In this analysis the archive becomes a concept that allows the authors to think about the acts of classifying, collecting, storing, and interpreting the sources used in historical research. The essays included in this volume, from Susan Douglas, Lisa Gitelman, John Nerone, Jeremy Packer, Paddy Scannell, Lynn Spigel, and Jonathan Sterne, focus on both the theoretical and practical ways in which the archive has affected how media is thought about as an object for historical analysis.

This book was published as a special issue of The Communication Review.

Writing From the Archive: Creating Your Own

SUSAN J. DOUGLAS

Department of Communication Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

The author hopes to address what counts as an historical record, especially in the area of media history, and to lay out how one creates one’s own archive that might capture the media zeitgeist of the past, and might even reveal, however incompletely, how past audiences might have made sense of the media environments surrounding them. Using her own research, she focuses on 3 archives: one for a standard academic monograph that relies on existing and self-constructed archives, a second that is almost completely homemade on the representations of women in the media, and a third for an overview history of radio in the United States.

I am standing here in my basement, looking at three legal-sized, four-drawer file cabinets, and a large set of shelves filled with cardboard boxes. There are more boxes on the floor. They are all stuffed to the gills with Xerox-filled manila file folders, some about radio, the others about women’s history and images of women in the media. These are my archives, and even though the books and articles they informed have been long since published, I cannot bear to throw them out. The hours and money that went into them!

In this article, I hope to address what counts as an historical record, especially in the area of media history, and to lay out how one creates one’s own archive that might capture the media zeitgeist of the past, and might even reveal, however incompletely, how past audiences might have made sense of the media environments surrounding them. Unlike the other essays that will no doubt be much more philosophical and theoretical, this one recounts how you make your own archive that seeks to get at the role of the media in everyday life and culture, and what you can learn from such archives. I will focus on three archives: one for a standard academic monograph that relies on existing and self-constructed archives, a second that is almost completely homemade on the representations of women in the media, and a third for an overview history of radio in the United States.

This essay is also something of an elegy for how we used to have to do things—all hardcopy, physically rooting around library basements, Xeroxing hundreds, even thousands of pages. It is so much easier and faster today to sit at the computer screen and download all those academic articles and magazine and newspaper stories from ProQuest and LexisNexis. However, there is a tactile and atmospheric quality to running your hands and eyes across the pages of old magazines and newspapers that gives you a much richer feeling for the media and culture of the past and how they interacted. Simply put, it is much easier to be transported back to past eras with the old bound copies—how they look, how they smell—than it ever is through your laptop.

As a graduate student, I was trained as an historian, and then there was a conventional notion of the archive: it was a place you went to, created by historical societies, libraries, state or federal governments, universities, museums, and other institutions. Much, although hardly all, of the material in them was top down: the papers of prominent political leaders, captains of industry, inventors, government agencies and the like. But what if you are interested in that evanescent, hard-to-pin-down factor, the culture of the past? What if you need to capture what was swirling around everyday people, especially through the prevailing media of the times? Well, there are archives one can go to, of course. But inevitably you have to make your own.

We know that all archives are incomplete, have their own biases on the basis of inclusion, omissions, and point of view, and the ones we make are no exception. However, the ones we create can be, and should be, a counterbalance to the ones created by institutions and political and corporate elites.

Existing archives are sometimes not nearly as easy to find or know about as one might think, and often one needs to be a relatively persistent detective to find them. (This may be easier now with the Internet.) As most media historians can recount, it often takes numerous inquiries to ad agencies, radio stations, individuals and families, movie studios, and the like before the desired treasure trove, sometimes previously undiscovered, emerges. When I was working on my first book, Inventing American Broadcasting (Douglas, 1987), I needed the records, diaries, and correspondence of the inventors and businessmen. Where were they? Did they even exist or had they all been lost, destroyed? One obscure book cited a collection at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I called, and, at first, no one knew what I was talking about. However, repeated inquiries produced a librarian who knew the collection and said it was at the Smithsonian. Off I went, and there it was—more than 200 boxes, all unindexed, many with only the most general or cryptic identifiers on the outside. The slog began, and finally, I hit pay dirt: papers of three of the major radio inventors. They had been gathered up and saved by an engineer who had worked in radio and also had a keen sense of history. And they were chock full of technical and business details, rivalries, ambitions, hopes, betrayals, and failure.

This was my first major lesson in archives, and how you had to absorb so much from them, yet also be skeptical of them and learn to read between the lines. At first, given the excitement of finding such rich primary materials actually written by the main actors in my story, and hearing their voices, I succumbed to their self-presentation, their point of view. But gradually you learn that in memos, memoirs, oral histories, correspondence, diaries, people posture; make exaggerated claims; attack others unfairly; see slights where none existed; blame others for their own failings; say too much or say too little; tell the truth and lie; and often fail to tell you exactly what you need to know. David Sarnoff, for example, the head of RCA, liked to suggest that he was the only ham radio operator conveying updates about the fate of the Titanic when it turns out hundreds of hams were on the air. So you must always be questioning the motives of those in your archive, even if they are primarily noble.

These inventors were all trying to sell equipment to the U.S. Navy and hated dealing with them. Their complaints seemed justified; I took their side. But then, you really do have to get the other side. So off I went to the National Archives, only to learn that the boxes I requested could not be found. Taking pity on me, the archivist let me go back into the stacks, and after much rummaging—talk about the absolute importance of serendipity to successful archival work—I basically stumbled upon the exact boxes I needed.

The things you do to complete your story—I learned that Marconi’s daughter was living in northern New Jersey, wrote to her, and she permitted me to come and read his personal correspondence, which was filled with details not available elsewhere. These were primarily letters to his wife or to close friends that presumably the family wanted to keep for their own. It is important to be relentless, because often such letters or diaries do stay inside families, away from business and corporate records.

But I did not want to tell only the technical and business side of the story. How was this new device, first known as wireless telegraphy, received? What sense was made of it, what did people think it might do to their lives, to society and culture? How did these understandings and imaginings evolve over time, as wireless itself turned into radio broadcasting? This is where you have to complement the existing archives with those of your own. So even as I was tracking down and visiting institutional archives, I began to create my own, starting with the technical journals of the time, such as Electrical World and Scientific American, and moving onto the more popular press.

What are the main principles that guide building an archive? For some archives, you need to include material from every single week of every single year of the period you are examining. For others—say a project analyzing the trends in print advertising over time—one can make an archive on the basis of a sample of several issues a year of selected magazines. Obviously, one must gather materials on salient events and turning points. The archive must be representative so that you get multiple viewpoints and versions of important events and trends. The archive needs to be systematic in how materials are selected and in how a chronology is constructed and maintained, as historical or topical gaps can do you in. And for media history, especially more recent media history, including trade journals is crucial to understanding how the industry talks to and about itself. All of this is guided by the criteria you set up for what you believe counts as salient, representative and the like; and it is a criteria you need to stick to. If you don’t adhere to your criteria throughout the archive-building process—and it can become tempting not to as the months slog on—the archive will not be coherent or as systematic as it should be. And a set of criteria matter, so we don’t search only for what we think might support a tentative, preexisting hypothesis and so we don’t search for only what we want to find. Because archives often do—and should—take us to unexpected places that prompt us to rethink our larger analytical questions and frameworks.

Except for radio pioneers who left behind memories of radio’s early days, there was, of course, no archive with everyday people’s reactions to early radio. So newspapers and magazines had to serve as a proxy for these. But press accounts first, of wireless telegraphy and then, of radio, also played a central role in the social construction of radio, in shaping people’s expectations of these devices and what they might afford. So the press accounts were also important historical actors on their own. My first archive building began (this was long before electronic databases!) with two crucial sources, The New York Times index and The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. Then, one had to develop a list of search words, including inventor’s names, laws, and regulations proposed and passed, major shipwrecks (especially the Titanic) in which wireless telegraphy played a role, and the like. (The old, faded green-bound The Reader’s Guide suggested alternate entries to consider, which helped expand the universe of possible articles.) I went through every year in both indexes from 1896 (when Marconi first demonstrated his device in England) to 1924, when the radio boom was at its height. This is how you build a timeline. For The Times, you really had to look at every story. For The Reader’s Guide, stage one of archive building was Xeroxing all the relevant pages with appropriate entries. Once you had these, then you had to go through them and determine which articles about which events in which publications were most significant; my criteria were prominence or popularity of the publication, amount of coverage an event or trend received in multiple publications, and new technical or cultural developments. Then, you used bags of dimes and started Xeroxing away.

Here was yet another side of this media history, the awe in which radio was held, the fantasies about what it might do, the anxieties it evoked, the greed it stirred up. And again, skepticism is crucial here too. The New York Times positively adored Marconi and his invention, even though it performed somewhat poorly at first. So you had to ask why. There were several answers, but a not insignificant one was that The Times hated the transatlantic cable companies because they charged so much for press transmissions, and Marconi suggested he could eventually compete with them and offer newspapers a cheaper rate.

It was through this archive, the one I created, that the past communicated to me about what radio meant to people. Most moving were the multiple newspaper and magazine accounts (combined with Marconi’s own letters to his wife) of the Titanic disaster, the wrenching experience of watching loved ones drown, first person accounts of refusing to let one more person in a lifeboat because then it would sink, and thus watching him perish, and of how radio saved the lives of the survivors. No existing archive could have conveyed this. And this material showed me the central role that the disaster played in getting the first significant regulation of radio enacted.

Last, the radio magazines that sprung up in the early 1920s featured letters to the editor, and although these are, of course, an already selected and thus biased sampling of opinion, they did convey the multiple and sometimes conflicting attitudes toward radio programming, how the device was and should be used, the tensions between the desire for local versus national programs, and the like.

My next project, Where the Girls Are (Douglas, 1994), relied almost entirely on the archive I created, given the down-low subject matter, the representation of women in the media. And this had to be much more of a multi-media archive, consisting not only of print materials but also of popular music, films, old ads, past newscasts and television shows. The initial process was the same, pouring through The New York Times and The Reader’s Guide indices, but at least, having lived through the period, I had a much stronger sense of a timeline and significant events. So, of course, one wanted to see stories about the introduction of the birth control pill, or reviews of Sex and the Single Girl and The Feminine Mystique, coverage of the women’s movement, and so forth. But an archive that you create—which, yes, can be painstaking—allows you to see evolution as opposed to revolution.

For many people, for example, the women’s movement seemed to come out of nowhere and burst on the scene during the Miss America pageant of 1968, followed by the outpouring of activism and demonstrations in 1970. But when you build your archive, slogging through every The Reader’s Guide entry on “women” from 1945 to the early 1990s, you also find, shockingly enough, references to feminism much earlier than 1968. One of the most interesting parts of building this archive was going through The Ladies’ Home Journal—every issue—from the late 1940s and early 1950s.

And here, by the way, is one of the greatest losses to media historians, as researchers and teachers—the elimination of bound magazines from libraries, and having them only available on microfilm or microfiche. There is nothing like going through the original printed version of a magazine to get a feel for the times; how things looked and felt; what was being sold, and how; what issues were foregrounded; what dreams and dreads were being sold. I also used to love to give my students assignments that required them, for example, to compare the advertising in Life and Ebony in the 1950s, or to go back to The Ladies’ Home Journal to look at the depiction of women and compare it to today. Now, no longer possible—all those magazines are in storage.

Back to The Ladies’ Home Journal from the mid-to-late-1940s. I was expecting an instant “back-to-the-kitchen” drive given that the war was over and a full court backlash had begun to get women out of the workforce. But I was wrong. Instead, one saw a more gradual process, sincere debates about the role of women and, yes, feminism, given how much men had, according to certain columnists, screwed up the world. Really. The word feminism was used and only gradually dropped away over time. Similarly, I was surprised to see so much reference to what I would call prefeminist rumblings in the early 1960s, even before Betty Friedan’s blockbuster would pull it all together. This is one of the key insights building your own archive provides—seeing, tracking the momentum certain ideas and trends develop, their origins and roots, and how and when they start to come together and then explode.

This was also the first time I used the Vanderbilt Television News Archives, which, back then, were indexed in bound volumes, and today are conveniently available and indexed online. They only go back to August 1968, and how I would have loved to have seen how women and women’s issues, if covered at all, were represented in the old 15-min rip-and-read news of the 1950s. But talk about a treasure trove for seeing how the women’s movement burst onto the nation’s television screens from 1968 onward. (For those of you who have not used this archive, you go through and ask for only those stories you want, and the Vanderbilt staff will edit them together chronologically for you. Then you have a complete news timeline about your trend or event. I also did this for The Mommy Myth, and got a 35-year history—22 tapes, 2 hr each—of how issues around motherhood and the family had been covered by the three broadcast news shows.)

I was expecting condescending and dismissive coverage of feminists and the women’s movement, and some of it, especially the on-air editorial commentary by the likes of Harry Reasoner and Howard K. Smith, was actually worse than I anticipated. However, there was also sympathetic coverage, including that from some men, because the obvious discrimination against women that feminists identified violated the core belief in fairness and what Herbert Gans labeled altruistic democracy that informed dominant journalistic values. In other words, the coverage was contradictory, providing a crucially important podium for feminists and their positions (and the length of the soundbites they got back then!), while dismissing certain demands and certain types of feminists as outside the mainstream.

Building your own media archive, as previously implied, constantly confronts you with the incoherence of the media, their contradictions, the tensions between their preferred, negotiated, and oppositional readings. You see the process of hegemony, the struggle of it, up close. The archive I was building showed me that feminism and antifeminism, even in the late 1940s, and again by the early 1960s, clashed against each other, and that rank misogyny coexisted with more upstart media fare. In fact, it was by reading articles in, of all places, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, and even Reader’s Digest that I was able to understand the staggering success of Bewitched as not just some kitschy sitcom that used special effects well, but also as one that spoke exactly to women’s simmering desires for more power and control in their lives during the prefeminist era of the early 1960s.

Which brings us to the video archives. Young television scholars today, their research blessed by endless “complete season” DVD collections, have no idea what it was like to hunt down episodes of Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie in syndication on independent stations or wait for a TNT marathon of C...