Knowledge History
Women's History, Union Work, Educational Ambitions, and More in a 1942 Photo
Creek County, Oklahoma, 1942. Photograph by Russell Lee for the U.S. Farm Security Administration.
Wife of Pomp Hall, Negro tenant farmer, writing on typewriter. Through union activities this family has developed a desire for higher education. This typewriter is to them a symbol of that education and as such is the most prized family possession.
Via NYPL Digital Collections, image id 58092147.
A lot of talk about the shadow library Libgen today in my socials because of Meta. In this context, Molly White has recommended an interesting open-access book: Joe Karaganis, ed., Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education (The MIT Press, 2018).
📽️ “Cloak and Dagger,” dir. Fritz Lang (Warner Bros., 1946), is good as a thriller and as a war film. Unfortunately, it never develops its initial premise, the race to develop the atomic bomb.
Given that the U.S. was the only nuclear power in 1946, emphasizing the transferability of knowledge about weaponized applied nuclear physics would have been politically problematic anyway.
Fighting fascism, however, was a-okay. So were women serving as counterintelligence agents and partisans in this early Atomic Era film. Gary Cooper stars as an American physicist turned agent, who falls for a gun-toting Italian played by Lilli Palmer.
📽️ I am really enjoying Irene Dunne in her old comedies, most recently “Lady in a Jam,” dir. Gregory La Cava (Universal, 1942). It involves a lost fortune and a psychiatrist too sure of his professional knowledge, which he posits has a kind of mathematical accuracy. Love, however, has other ideas.
“Why Has Transphobia Gone Mainstream in Philosophy?” by Samantha Hancox-Li, Contingent Magazine, October 1, 2019, contingentmagazine.org… 🏳️⚧️
The historyofknowledge.net domain is no longer live. Use historyofknowledge.hypotheses.org instead.
I’m in the process of checking and changing links on this site that point to the old domain. I’m also removing Twitter links still lurking in my markup.
Inspiring Photo from 1971 for Our Troubled Times
“Isabel Miller and Barbara Gittings hugging librarians” in 1971 at the American Library Association Conference in Dallas, Texas. (Miller is on the left. Gittings is on the right in the floral sleeveless dress.)
Librarians can be central in the fight against bigotry and for equal rights, which might explain why some gay rights activists were there. (An important example: early professional Black librarians.)
Photo by Kay Tobin, via the Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen Gay History Papers and Photographs Collection, NYPL Digital Collections, image ID 1606079. 🏳️🌈
One of the pieces I linked to in my previous post is a “must read” about scientific speculation and its selective dissemination in the media. Sam Kean, “The Comet Panic of 1910, Revisited,” Distillations Magazine, January 16, 2025, www.sciencehistory.org…
Colón-Vásquez’s drawing remains a prime example of how interactions between scientists and the public can go wrong: the prestige and imprimatur of science is such that people take even wild speculation at face value sometimes. It’s easy to chuckle over the sillier manifestations of the 1910 panic—comet pills, insurance scams, and the like. But the record left by a frightened teenager also helps Méndez and Acosta-Colón appreciate the “blend of fear, fascination, and artistic expression that such events can provoke.”
Reading Notes: 'Last Call at the Hotel Imperial' by Deborah Cohen
I finished reading Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War (Random House 2022) by Deborah Cohen. At times I got impatient because it was as much about the journalists' private and inner lives as their reporting, but I realized that this was the point and decided not to skip over those sections. Cohen’s protagonists were people with experiences and viewpoints relevant to their work and our understanding of it. As journalists, they had been taught “impartiality” (resembling bothsidism today) but the dictatorships, wars, and atrocities they witnessed demanded a viewpoint, even if their editors disagreed. It was for these viewpoints that I had begun reading the book in the first place.
Cohen focuses on the four biggest star journalists of the era, John Gunther, H. R. Knickbocker, James Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson, whose lives became closely entwined, and who left behind a prodigious written record for Cohen to mine. Thus, we learn about their upbringings, educations, and early career experiences; their love, sex, and reproductive lives; their sexuality and mental health; their exposure to psychoanalysis, and more. This period of changing cultural mores adds an important backdrop to the events and people they wrote about, and it helps us understand the reporters themselves.
Cohen’s focus on these individuals and their significant others, especially Frances Fineman Gunther, hints at the relevance of the individual in a few other ways besides context and viewpoint. First, there is the question of private lives in situations where public affairs tend to crowd everything private out. Next, there is the question of the role of individual agency in history. This issue concerned Cohen’s protagonists, who met many of the leading political figures of the day. It was also relevant to the issue of the masses and the extent to which circumstances or individual characteristics made them into Nazis, for example. Finally, there is the question of the reporters' own impacts.
Cohen notes in the prologue that the image of the United States embodied by the large number of American journalists overseas was at odds with the old isolationist stereotype. Clearly there was an appetite for information about the world. Moreover, the travels by ship and plane of her protagonists points to the many economic, professional, and personal entanglements of the United States with the rest of the world despite the strength of nationalisms and protectionist tariff regimes. Cohen’s book takes us across Europe, including to fascist Italy, the Spanish Civil War, as well as Weimar and Nazi Germany, to whose murderous intentions they were by no means blind. We also see Ethiopia at the moment of Mussolini’s invasion, Palestine, Egypt, the USSR, pre- and postcolonial India, and civil-war China, not to mention the U.S. Jim Crow South.
The book is long, probably too long to teach undergraduates, unless one assigned specific sections, but it is accessibly written, affordably priced, and has received favorable reviews outside the academy, including in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune. Readers should be prepared to look up names and descriptive vocabulary they might not know, which is easy enough with today’s mobile phones.
Squaring the Anti-Science, Pro-Technology Circle
I sometimes read on social media about the apparent contradiction between right-wingers' positive attitudes toward tech and their negative attitudes toward a lot of medicine. After all, both are rooted in science. That said, there is a commonality between these two sets of attitudes: the role of regulation. A lot of tech is under- or unregulated, and the supplements that Trump’s favored quacks and talking heads peddle are not regulated either. Medicine and medications, on the other hand, are regulated. And we have mandatory public health measures.
This is not to say that there is anything principled about their dislike of regulation. If the FDA was founded in 1906 with the support of business because expert-based standards and trust would benefit business, that insight seems to be absent from the current discourse. Instead, the quacks, grifters, and monopoly capitalists value their freedom to muck about with society and the environment as they please, secure in the knowledge that they’ll have the might to be right on the so-called open market of goods and ideas, especially after capturing the federal government.
Call for Contributions: Histories of Expertise, via Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge (LUCK)
Revisiting Image of Two Back Sailors Browsing Books
On August 27th, I posted a mid-to-late 1940s photo of two Black sailors browsing books in a library section marked “Negro Books." In response, a couple people on my socials expressed outrage or sadness over the segregation they thought they were seeing. That makes sense if one doesn’t consider the book titles I mentioned or the link to a related post here titled Reading about Black Librarians and Knowledge Formation.
Thing is, though, books could be powerful wherever librarians made them available in their collections and discoverable by their readers. That’s why I see in the image two sailors browsing books in a thematic library display that highlighted a selection of books of probable interest to Black people. The photo’s provenance also suggests as much: the U.S. Navy Department’s Office of Public Relations produced it, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture preserved it. What’s more, there is the photo’s suggestive chronological proximity to the end of the war and to Harry S. Truman’s desegregation order for the U.S military in 1948. Yes, the photo was taken in a broader context of prejudice and segregation, even atrocity, but the story does not end there.
We can’t allow our knowledge of historical and present-day racism to blind us to signs in the image of people with agency who worked toward a more just world. Someone in the navy’s PR office decided or was ordered to take and distribute such a photo, or have this done. One or more people in a navy library ordered and displayed the books that caught the photographer’s eye, perhaps owing to the cataloging innovations of Dorothy B. Porter. Moreover, someone shaped the command climate in which these things transpired.
Whatever led to these particular sailors posing for this picture, the camera recorded two young black men doing something about their present and future. We see them serving their country. We see them acquiring knowledge about it that had emancipatory potential.
Of course, nothing in this kind of framing can negate the history of racism in this country. What thinking about individual agency can do is open our eyes to the humanity and strength of the people who endured and made lives for themselves despite the oppression. The books on the shelves written by Black authors were also evidence of such spirit. And the unknown characters behind the making of this photograph? It is productive to think of them as individuals who made choices within a specific institutional, social, and cultural matrix. Human agency matters.
"Two U.S. Navy sailors browsing library shelf labeled 'Negro Books'" – U.S. Navy Department, Office of Public Relations, ca. 1944-49.
To scrutinize the titles in this image, download a high resolution scan from the NYPL Digital Collections.
W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is clearly visible. Also: Charles S. Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregation (1943) and Louis Adamic, The Native's Return (1934).
Repository: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library Digital Collections, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/22e61340-6379-013b-2df1-0242ac110003.
Follow-up remarks: Revisiting Image of Two Back Sailors Browsing Books (Sept. 7, 2024)
Related post: Reading about Black Librarians and Knowledge Formation (June 19, 2024)
Reading about Black Librarians and Knowledge Formation
"How Black Librarians Helped Create Generations of Black Literature" by Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times, June 19, 2024.
This is a fascinating short history that references the scholars whose work the cultural reporter draws on.
Teaser: “Recent scholarship is uncovering the role of the women who ran libraries during the Harlem Renaissance where they built collections and, just as important, communities of writers and readers.”
Agents of change: The necessary activism required of librarians in oppressive contexts will sound familiar to people today in the context of bans related to race and sexuality. For example, the only significant collection in the Jim Crow South was in Roanoke, Virginia. When the librarian there, Virginia Lee, was eventually told to get rid of the books, she moved them to the basement instead and continued to discretely circulate them.
Knowledge formation: The seemingly banal work of collection, classification, and organization required the creation of new knowledge. For instance, cataloging using the Dewey scheme required the addition of new subjects because that system only foresaw shelving Black-authored and Black-themed books in two limited spaces: under the headings of “slavery” and “the Negro question,” the latter a subset of “colonization and migration.” Dorothy Porter added entirely new categories, including for slave insurrections, the blues, and passing. She also reorganized American political history by situating presidents in topics important to Black readers. Andrew Johnson’s tenure was filed under “emancipation” and Rutherford B. Hayes under “Ku Klux Klan”.
Knowledge, culture, and sociability: This article has some wonderful photographs, including of the women in groups.
Addendum: The New York Public Library and, within it, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture have digitized some of their materials. That’s where I found a powerful pastel by Morris Schulman titled “The Writing Lesson”.
I noticed the GHI’s History of Knowledge blog was crashing this week. Apparently they solved the problem but had to disable the display of the blog’s categories. 🫤 Automattic, you disappoint me. I hope the GHI comes up with a workable, long-term fix soon.
Getting the News
Crowds lining up to get their letters and newspapers at the post office on Pike and Clay Streets in San Francisco, California, ca. 1850. This was a decade before the East and West Coasts were linked by rail and telegraph. Besides getting news through the mails, note the many conversations people were having while they did so.
Source: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2012645628.
Children Watching
“The Children Were Watching,” dir. Robert Drew and Richard Leacock, USA 1961, 25 min. – This documentary doesn’t feel as old to me as I wish it did. In part that’s because I watched it in Trump’s America during an especially difficult year, but something deeper is at play. The film’s ongoing relevance represents an ambiguous answer to its directors' main question: What were the children of a New Orleans neighborhood learning as they watched their parents during the conflicts surrounding school integration in November 1960?