In July I was fortunate enough to participate in a weeklong Landmarks of American History workshop sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and presented by the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association. It was a fantastic learning experience and deserves a column all to itself, it was that rich in information, resources, speakers and experiences. But that is not what this column is about.
A tangential comment during the workshop, made by an expert on slavery and captivity in early New England, stuck with me. In her research, professor Joanne Melish combed countless handwritten account books, journals, letters, etc., and projected images of some of those primary sources in her slide show. In an aside, she asked us, a group of 23 elementary, middle and high school teachers from across the country, to raise our hands if we had students who couldn’t read cursive. We all raised our hands. (The reasons why many students can’t read cursive is also a topic for another column.)
“Life is over,” the historian sighed after seeing our unanimous reply. “How are students going to learn from historical documents if they can’t read handwriting?”
That thought hadn’t occurred to me, and it got me thinking. I was reminded of a community service I signed up for in March 2020, when schools abruptly closed and we were told to isolate ourselves in our homes. The crowd-sourced By the People transcription program of the United States Library of Congress was a terrific way to delve into a particular time in history and engage in a civic activity from home that will serve countless people well into the future. I’ve visited the physical Library of Congress in Washington D.C. many times, and it never fails to delight. The library’s online presence is just as wonderful and fascinating, in different ways.
A visitor to www.loc.gov can explore so many resources, including an enormous collection of digitized primary texts, photos, maps, films and sound recordings. What a visitor to the site cannot do is search within many of those written texts, because they are hand-written or otherwise inaccessible by screen readers or other assistive technology (i.e. they are images of type-written documents that cannot be searched by optical character recognition readers). That’s where we the people – you, I, we – come in.
Through the By the People program, volunteers can pick a campaign – a movement, historical figure or author – and transcribe original papers from that collection that have been scanned into the site. Directions are provided and each transcription is reviewed by another volunteer, taking some pressure off the transcriber by ensuring that another pair of eyes will check the work.
Completed campaigns include the papers of Rosa Parks and Major League Baseball recruiter Branch Rickey and the diary of a Union soldier imprisoned in the notorious Andersonville Prison during the Civil War. Among the current campaigns are the papers of Clara Barton, a nurse and founder of the American Red Cross, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, political theorist Hannah Arendt and writer Walt Whitman.
I decided to transcribe some of the notes and speeches of Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954), the Oberlin-educated founding president of the National Association of Colored Women and one of the founders of the NAACP. Terrell was clearly an important figure in the fight for civil rights and suffrage, as well as a fierce advocate for education, yet I had never heard of her. She wasn’t mentioned in my sons’ school-issued history book and I suspect she’s absent from most others. My unfamiliarity with Terrell is why I chose her. From reading her papers I’ve learned so much more about the reform movement in the U.S., and the achievements of other African American women of the time. From Terrell’s speeches I learned, for example, that because Frederick Douglass (who gets three paragraphs in my sons’ history book) “did so much to cause the world to place a higher estimate upon the ability & the worth of the race with which he was identified,” it was the National Association of Colored Women that “succeeded in lifting the debt from Mr. Douglass’ homestead” to make it a memorial.
I learned of other college-educated Black women who founded schools of their own, and women who, “in spite of the two heavy crosses of race and sex which they (were) obliged to carry,” climbed “the steep heights to achievement and success.” I became familiar with how Terrell’s pen sometimes scripted the letter ‘e’ so narrowly that it could have been mistaken for a plump letter i, and learned to look for a dot over the letter in question (transcribers are directed not to correct misspellings, but to transcribe as written).
Not all documents are hand-written, however. Many are typed and much easier to transcribe. Most of Terrell’s speeches are typed, and the ones I had the pleasure of transcribing or reviewing were also uplifting, encouraging, full of hope and determination.
My pandemic transcriptions were a nice escape from and an antidote to current events. The speaker at July’s NEH workshop reminded me that my work is also a service to researchers and hobbyists who for whatever reason – including vision issues or an inability to read cursive – would not otherwise have had access to troves of information on their topics of interest. It makes me feel even better knowing I’m participating, from my living room, in such a large and fascinating civic engagement project. You can, too.
If you would like to get involved in the Library of Congress transcription project, the website is: https://crowd.loc.gov/
Leslie Skantz-Hodgson is the librarian at Smith Vocational and Agricultural High School in Northampton and a teacher-consultant with the Western Massachusetts Writing Project.