This week, we had to explore special library collections through finding aids from the Online Archive of California database. The collection I wanted to examine is the Guide to the 4th of July Orations Collection.
The collection contains four boxes with 150 speeches, orations, and addresses on the topic of American Independence from the time period 1795 to 1876. The physical collection is located in the Ella Strong Denison Library at Scripps College. It is organized alphabetically by author and details the title, date, location, and notes where and when it was printed. Themes of the speeches include revolution, American institutions, westward expansion, party factionalism, and slavery.
Based on the materials in this collection, a possible narrative could be told about the evolving meaning of freedom and what it means to be an American over the course of 80 years. By looking at the orations chronologically, we can understand what events were going on and gain insight into perspectives of the people at each point in time. The diverse locations of the speeches could also potentially tell us which areas of the United States had differing views such as being more progressive or more conservative than others during the same events in history. For example, speeches in the time of the Civil War made in cities in North could be expressing ideas that all men despite color are equal when cities in the South could be expressing the opposition. The narrative can also be really specific by analyzing a certain time period or event or person. I believe creating a narrative from speeches is really powerful because one could imagine the crowd they were speaking to and the emotion they had behind the words they wrote.
Something that is missing from this narrative would be the general public’s voice. The speeches and orations were spoken to a crowd, so I wonder who is the crowd? How did they feel about what was happening or what the speaker was saying? Did they agree or disagree? I think this is important because even though prominent figures go down in history, they would be nothing without support in their cause or voice. Maybe some sources to get this information would be newspapers that did articles on the speeches that offered a recount of the scene and an opinion.
Hey there!
I think the narrative you described was very interesting, not only do we have the direct narrative that is expressed by the speeches themselves, we are able to contrast and compare these records with similar ones in the archive. Not only do we see how the time aspects affects these speeches but you mentioned the geographic constraints and that is very important to discuss when we dissect the transformation of American freedom. The archive itself seems to emphasize the time in connecting the narratives into a larger picture. This gives a very clear cut narrative that many of us are use to. Still it does neglect some more aspects we could delve deeper into such as the themes and we can center these geographically as well. In addition, what you said about the public and how there reactions were unaccounted for in the narrative is similar to what were talking about in class; how these power setups sometimes silence entire groups of people who are also part of the narrative. It is true that newspapers could fill this gap for us, but I would be critical of putting too much value in newspapers as audience records because all media we consume has power structures that silence many in reporting. Still, it is true that a record of audience reaction would be useful in giving the audience a more in depth narrative of the speech surrounding freedoms at this time.
Wow, this is so cool! Thanks for uncovering this collection. I think this would actually make an awesome DH project using text analysis, don’t you? We could figure out which terms rose and fell in popularity over the years as the idea of “freedom” was articulated differently.