Documents That Changed the Way We Live
DOCUMENTS THAT CHANGED THE WAY WE LIVE
DOCUMENTS THAT CHANGED THE WAY WE LIVE
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JOSEPH JANES
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
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Copyright © 2017 by Joseph Janes
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
ISBN 978-1-5381-0033-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-5381-0034-9 (electronic)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
for Terry,
who makes the songs make sense
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Gregorian Calendar, 1582/Gutenberg Indulgence, 1454
2 Exaltation of Inanna, c. 2300 BCE
3 The Rosetta Stone, 196 BCE
4 Donation of Constantine, c. 750
5 Liber Abaci (Arabic numerals), 1202
6 Annals of the World, 1650
7 Philosophical Transactions, 1665
8 The Riot Act, 1714
9 Declaration of Independence deleted passage, 1776
10 What Is the Third Estate? 1789
11 “The Star-Spangled Banner,” 1814
12 Webster’s Dictionary, 1828
13 The Book of Mormon, 1830
14 First Woman’s College Diploma, 1840
15 John Snow’s Cholera Map, 1854
16 Rules of Association Football (Soccer), 1863
17 Alaska Purchase Check, 1868
18 Robert’s Rules of Order, 1876
19 Alfred Nobel’s Will, 1895
20 The First X-ray, 1895
21 Fannie Farmer Cookbook, 1896
22 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, c. 1900
23 IQ Test, 1905
24 The Zimmermann Telegram, 1917
25 The 19th Amendment, 1920
26 Statistical Significance, 1925
27 Stock Market Ticker Tape, 1929
28 The Richter Scale, 1935
29 Einstein’s Letter to Roosevelt, 1939
30 FDR and Thanksgiving, 1939
31 “Letters of Transit,” 1942
32 “We Can Do It!” Poster, 1943
33 Joseph McCarthy’s “List,” 1950
34 Mental Disorder Diagnosis Manual, 1952
35 Airplane “Black Box,” 1958
36 Space Needle “Sketch,” 1959
37 Obama Birth Certificate, 1961
38 Zapruder Film, 1963
39 Quotations of Chairman Mao, 1965
40 The 18½-Minute Gap, 1972
41 Internet Protocol, 1981
42 Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1982
43 AIDS Quilt, 1987
44 Nupedia, 2000
45 Palm Beach County “Butterfly” Ballot, 2000
46 Pope Benedict XVI’s Resignation, 2013
Conclusion: The Next Document?
About the Author
PREFACE
My office is a mess. Not just in a “Gee, somebody really ought to dust in here” way, either. There are papers and books and folders and such everywhere, ancient long-faded Post-it notes indicating what goes on what shelf or in what pile. (File drawers are for dead things.) You get the idea. It’s not a mess to me, naturally, because I know where everything is. I put it there, with the most recently used or consulted things nearest by, so as a result, they’re handy.
So when I say I know about documents, I know about documents. I swim in them daily. I also have professional credentials, with training and experience both as a librarian and as an information scientist and a few decades of educating and preparing people for careers of all kinds in the information world. Fundamentally, I am interested in and fascinated by the stuff itself; all the forms and genres of information that we’ve created over the centuries to record, well, just about everything, how those have been developed and evolved, how they work, and how it’s all changing. In that light, a project like this seems not only like a great fit, it seems practically inevitable.
That means I approach these documents and their stories as an information scientist and as a librarian. I’m not a historian—at least I wasn’t trained that way—or an archivist, or a sociologist or journalist. Having spent my entire life immersed in the study of information and information objects, that’s how I see the world; as my friend and mentor Mike Eisenberg invariably puts it, I look at the world through information-colored glasses. So while most people would see the Rosetta Stone as a monumental object that has survived the centuries to represent its culture, I want to know what it says, how it got written, and what happened to it. People visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall and grieve for a generation or more of young men and women lost in a ghastly and largely purposeless war. I do too, and I also want to know how those thousands of names got there, who decided who was listed and not. Those information stories are here, and many more besides.
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What you see here is the printed and illustrated version of a podcast series I started in 2012 called Documents That Changed the World. I began that as a way of telling stories about documents, the various kinds of things we create, intentionally and otherwise, to record and remember. Lots of those things are obvious, so there’s a birth certificate here, and a will, a map, a telegram, a presidential proclamation, a couple of letters, and quite a few books, the sorts of things everybody is used to thinking of as “documents.”
There are also a few things that stretch that definition a bit: a home movie, for example, which if it were not taken in Dallas on a certain November afternoon in 1963 would be completely unremembered. A ticker tape. A ballot. A test. A quilt and a wall meant to memorialize people lost. None exactly leaps to mind when you think “document,” though with a moment’s thought, they make sense. There are also some objects that aren’t what they seem: forgeries, frauds, fakes, a poster everybody recognizes but almost nobody knows. And creatures even more exotic: a sketch that can’t be found, a law that has to be read out loud to work, a list that never was, a critical paragraph deleted, a conversation that became a void, the Constitution that I’ll almost guarantee you isn’t where you think it is.
I purposely decided to stretch that definition of “document” for a couple of reasons.
One of my not terribly well-concealed motives here is to help people understand the breadth and reach of what documents are and can be and are becoming, and the power they have in our lives individually and as communities and societies. Many things are created for the purpose of documenting, such as an invoice or a class photo. Just about anything, though, can document, based on the meaning somebody assigns to it. There are a handful of tiny pieces of white—now yellowed—paper I keep in a special place. They’re a little less than an inch square and have no marking whatsoever, and if anybody else ran across them, they’d likely be seen a
s scrap paper or something equally meaningless. To me, though, they represent a powerful connection; they were used to simulate snow during the Opening Ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2010, which we got to attend, and every time I see those little scraps of paper, I go right back to that night and always will. There is power in every chapter here, and I wanted to expose that.
Where there’s power, there’s controversy, and that’s here too. With a couple of obvious exceptions, I don’t take sides—or at least I try my best not to—and tell these stories fair-mindedly and even-handedly, even though it’s probably not all that hard to work out what I think in more than a few places. In general, I’m on the side of the documents, and like Bishop James Ussher in chapter 6, I do the best I can with the tools I have at hand.
After a quick glance at the table of contents, you might notice that some things you’d expect to find are missing. Where’s Magna Carta? Or the Bill of Rights, the Bible, the Qur’an, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Communist Manifesto, the Code of Hammurabi? Those are all on the lists of the Most Important Documents in History, so to be honest, they’ve been written about thousands of times, and those stories aren’t hard to find. I’m more interested in the ones that are somewhat less familiar, a bit off the beaten track, even a little odd. (And the list of topics I haven’t yet done fill several pages in my battered black notebook, now its own document— the Bayeux Tapestry, “Steamboat Willie,” the Q Source, the Tiriti o Waitangi, the first viral video, Sequoyah’s syllabary, the first spreadsheet, the Damnatio memoriae, the Kama Sutra, Wikileaks, the Apple “1984” commercial, the Motion Picture Production Code, My Name is Bill W., “Video Killed the Radio Star,” Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and on and on.) The list of what is here is admittedly idiosyncratic; as I began this project, I did what interested me, and now several dozen documents later, I hope it interests you as well.
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What will you learn here? Who can say? Though I can tell you what you’ll find:
• Why the Roman Catholic Church is “Roman”
• Why we only use Roman numerals for Super Bowls, royalty, and Olympiads
• Why, if you’re American, you spell “color” with only five letters
• Why there are so many kinds of football
• Why every kitchen store sells measuring cups and spoons
• Why you can’t prove your way out of a conspiracy
• Why about 5 percent of all the research reports you hear about aren’t necessarily what they seem to be
• Why the Internet works the way it does
• Why an attempt to help more people to vote more easily in one community may have swung the entire history of a nation
• Why race is still . . .
And now, it’s all changing. With a few exceptions, just about every document and format you see represented here has, or could have, some digital counterpart, and in many cases those digital versions might be more authentic or faithful or useful than the analog ones. That’s certainly the case that the creators of the Nupedia made, which gave rise to the Wikipedia. Real-time stock market reports and texts are quicker than waiting for a ticker or telegram; a money-sharing app is more efficient than writing out and depositing a check; modern imaging techniques are substantially more effective and safer than taking and developing X-ray films; Googling a word is much faster than looking it up in a dictionary. All true, though then we’d be deprived the ornate script of the check that purchased Alaska, the haunting image of the first X-ray, or the homespun beauty of Catherine Elizabeth Brewer’s diploma.
Four millennia of such progress are on display here, stories of faith and belief, science and investigation, learning, commerce, art, law, politics, war, revolution, hate, love, hope, death, birth, loss, memory, error, triumph—the great and noble and the simple and small. And food. It’s the stories of us all, of our eternal, necessarily human quest to make sense of the world around us and make it work a little better.
We will begin with two men, separated by a few hundred miles and about half a dozen generations, a pope and a printer, and the two pieces of paper they generated that completely transformed their world and our world, and still do.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Everybody knows—at least everybody who reads the acknowledgment sections of books—that things like these don’t get done by anybody on their own. I have many debts of gratitude to repay for helping bring this book to fruition.
First, to my students, all the students I’ve had over the years at various schools and institutions, and in particular to those I’ve worked with on this project. This all started several years ago with one of my typically wacky ideas—wouldn’t it be fun to do a podcast series about the stories and impacts of important documents? Andrew Brink, a master’s student at the time, thought so too, and so we spent a quarter exploring the Gregorian Calendar and the Cholera Map (Andrew picked the gross one), figuring out what a podcast was, how to make it, how to make it interesting, how to write the scripts, how to do the research, and all the other various bits and pieces of the process. We indeed had great fun and the results came out pretty well, so I owe him a lot for helping to get this whole thing started. His work is here, as is the work of another of my graduate students, Eli Gandour-Rood, and several undergraduates who were part of freshman seminars I led about this project, so thanks also to Jill Fenno, Kelsey Gibbons, and Andrew Kyrios and all their colleagues for their questions, interest, and hard work. I’m proud to have their efforts included here.
I am also grateful to many generous people at the University of Washington Information School. Few people in academia are fortunate enough to have as large and collegial a community as we have, and so many of them have been interested in and supportive of my work. Allyson Carlyle, Katie Davis, Eliza Dresang, Megan Finn, Nancy Gershenfeld, Ricardo Gomez, Dave Hendry, Batya Friedman, Trent Hill, Ian King, Cortney Leach, Liz Mills, Marie Potter, Matt Saxton, David Stearns, Jevin West, and Jake Wobbruck, and especially Cheryl Metoyer, Mike Eisenberg, and Harry Bruce suggested topic ideas, answered ridiculous questions, listened patiently to me go on at great length about obscure aspects of documents they’d never heard of, talked me in off a few ledges, and in general have just been terrific colleagues and friends. Being a part of the iSchool community has been one of the great privileges of my professional life. Special thanks also to Nancy Huling and Mary Whisner and others at the University of Washington libraries for their help in tracking down the exotica I couldn’t find on my own.
I’m particularly indebted to several people who were greatly instrumental in getting the podcast series heard and noted: Lori Dugdale and Michele Norris of the Information School, and the redoubtable Peter Kelley of the UW Office of News and Information. Each of them saw something in my work that they believed in and thought would be of greater and wider interest, yielding interviews, opportunities, and way more stories on the university’s news website than I could ever have dreamed possible. Kindred spirits all, and friends to boot.
The book you see here is, I assure you, insanely complicated. It all looks easy—some breezily intriguing stories and a few pictures to liven things up, and the whole thing has in fact been a labor of love. That also means, though, that it’s been a labor, and two people in particular made the labor much lighter and more manageable. I was so lucky to get help in the preparation and production of the manuscript from two outstanding graduate students: first Katie Mayer, who got the process off to such a solid and promising beginning before graduating and starting off on her career, and then the extraordinary Tim Blankemeyer, who has gone so far above and beyond what I could have expected from him. He has wrangled dozens of images and the nightmarish process of rights and permissions to use them, wrestled with all the text files, gotten everything into the correct formats and layouts and done it all with a calm and genial attitude that I find truly remarkable—all of which while he was taking too many credits and doing lots of other
stuff besides. He quite literally saved my bacon, and I know he will go on to do great things from here on. Whoever is lucky enough to hire him will never regret it for a moment.
Tim also has thanks to pass along: Agnete Wisti Lassen, associate curator of the Yale Babylonian Collection, for help tracking down and verifying that a tablet among forty thousand in the YBC collection did indeed have an excerpt from the Exaltation of Inanna on it. Cathy Coxey Snow, director of Alumnae Affairs at Wesleyan College, for her kind assistance in acquiring the high-resolution image of Catherine Elizabeth Brewer Benson’s 1840 diploma. David Mandapat, director of public relations for Space Needle LLC, for help locating a high-resolution image of the Space Needle sketch. Anthony “Indy” Magnoli, owner of Magnoli Props, for providing the image of his wonderful replica Letters of Transit. Patrick Fahy, archives technician at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, for his flexibility in assisting the project in acquiring both the Einstein letter to FDR and FDR’s Thanksgiving Proclamation.
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Now, finally, to the two people who really made this happen. First, my long-suffering publisher (aren’t all publishers long-suffering?) and cherished friend, Charles Harmon, who may not quite have fully appreciated what we were all getting ourselves in for here, but who always cajoles and nudges and pushes and prods and occasionally scolds me in the nicest possible way into producing work I’m proud of and I hope he is too. This would never have seen the light of day as a book without his vision and confidence in me and, as ever, he has my undying gratitude.
Nor would it have happened if not for my husband, Terry Price. Always my loudest cheerleader, always my greatest supporter, always willing to tell me the truth when something doesn’t sound quite right or needs to be better, always the first person to listen to a new podcast episode or read a new script, and the last word I turn to for guidance. He is the love of my life and makes the good days better and the bad days better and has been with me every step of the way with this and I wouldn’t have it any other way.