Historical Context for Historical Sources
On making sure you know how to read what you find in the archives
Yesterday, the internet turned up this old newspaper article about my great grandfather Einstein, the first of (what are now five) Johns. I found it at https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/80600965/john-lewis-einstein while I was looking for information about his brother, Haven, for whom my sister is named. (Oddly, Haven isn’t on the list of siblings, although he can be found elsewhere on the website.)
I was able to track down the article using the databases available through UTC’s library (but not a regular subscription to Newspapers.com). It was the lead story on the front page of the Roanoke Times on October 3, 1897. Other stories on the page are mostly about sporting events, though there is one about yellow fever (urging people to withhold solid food from those ill with it) and another about someone named Casimir Zeglen demonstrating the effectiveness of his then-revolutionary bulletproof fabric.
I don’t know this story. I don’t think my father knew this story. I have no idea what of it is true and what of it isn’t true… but I do know both why it would be the lead story of the Roanoke Times in the late nineteenth century and the clear editorial choices that have been made in reporting it. I note the choice to call my great grandfather a “boy” here; he was sixteen, which is a liminal age, but in 1897 it would have been more common to call him a man or, at least, a young man. (I actually have quantitative research on this that I am using for another part of the book, but it’s the unpublished work of a colleague who was generous enough to share the data with me. Sorry—I hate sharing assertions like this without the data to back them up, and generally think people who say “trust me on this” on the internet should, well, not be trusted.) The other person involved is described as a “small white boy” but not named, and there is no context given for the altercation. The Black men are described as a “gang of turbulent negroes,” a “gang of savage negroes,” and “negro desperados.” We are told my great grandfather left his farmwork to go and rescue the “a white boy who was being most unmercifully beaten, “is badly wounded with an ugly wound,” and later "is resting easily today.”
Here’s the thing. Not only did I not know my great grandfather Einstein, I don’t know many stories about him, though I do know that he graduated from the Chicago Theological Seminary as an ordained Presbyterian minister and then, horrified by what he saw as a chaplain during WWI, became a Unitarian minister (for a while).
I don’t think he was a bigot—though my grandfather, his son, certainly was—from what little I can find about his life online. He was, at least during the time he was a Unitarian minster, active in progressive causes of his day. His life is harder to track in public record after that.
But if he wasn’t a bigot, the editorial policy of the Roanoke Times in the late nineteenth century certainly was. I wish I knew the story of what actually happened that day, so that I could better parse what is obscured in this article and why, but I don’t. But I do know that I can’t take it at face value, given the charged language.
It’s serendipitous, perhaps, that I found this article yesterday, just as I was noticing how charged the reporting on the war between Israel and Hamas has become. In almost all the reporting I’ve seen, it’s instead posited as a war between Israel and the Palestinians. Note how this frames Israel, a nation, as being at war against a people rather than against a hostile government (and Hamas is the governing authority in Gaza) whose provocation began this war. I’m still seeing articles that take death tolls reported by the Palestinian Health Authority as accurate on their face, when we know the PHA is Hamas-controlled and was behind the false story that Israel had bombed a hospital in Gaza when all the evidence now shows that the rocket was a misfire—aimed at Israel—from Islamic Jihad.
As you try to parse information from propaganda, both in your writing research and in your understanding of current events, pay careful attention to the language used. The “tells” are almost always right there, at the surface. And when you find it, take what you read with at least a grain—and maybe many grains—of salt.