Tag: history

Franklin County Records

1800sPapers

About a month ago this story started showing up on the librarian listservs about the destruction of a newly discovered trove of centuries-old county documents in rural North Carolina. The story was made public after the county’s historical society began protesting the action on the group’s Facebook page. A blogger, who lives in the South and writes a great deal about civil war history and various local happenings, took notice and did some investigation into the matter. As the story has unfolded, she has—in a manner, I must admit, is not completely journalistic—collected the facts and has arranged them into a more-or-less coherent narrative. She published this logical timeline of events, which I think is the best telling of the story to date. Here’s a brief summary of what happened:

The Clerk of Court in Franklin County, NC opened the long-sealed basement of the county courthouse and found boxes and boxes of very old documents. Having no idea what they were, she invited the Franklin County Heritage Society to examine the material and I guess decide if any of it had historical value. It was determined that the documents were county records, dating as far back as the 1840s. The find generated a great amount of interest within the community. Several volunteers began creating an inventory of the items. Area businesses offered to contribute office space to the effort. People were really excited

That summer, while the Clerk of Court was letting town residents assess, appraise, and in some cases gawk at the old papers downstairs, the County Manager was conferring with people from the North Carolina State Archives about what to do with the boxes and boxes of unidentified papers it suddenly had on its hands. After reviewing some documentation that it had on hand about the supposed contents of Franklin County’s records, the State Archives determined that the documents in question were primarily ““duplicates, confidential, drafts, or duplicated in another records series that has been saved” and recommended that everything be destroyed. So, on December 6, 2013 about a half dozen men showed up at the courthouse in a white van, wearing hazmat suits, and, in compliance with the County Manager’s orders, they collected the entire archives and incinerated it later that evening.

hazmat

As the story began to grow on the internet, the Director of the State Archives found it necessary to draft an open letter, published Franklin County’s local newspaper, defending the Archives rationale. You can find it posted on the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources blog here.
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I actually find this letter the most interesting part about the whole story. When you read it everything seems to check out. He says things like “Appraisal of these records was done using established professional standards within the state and the archival field across the country” and “Many of the records in question have been eligible for destruction since the 1960s and have routinely been destroyed in other counties in the state in accordance with the schedule,” trying to make it sound like the destruction of centuries old documents is a perfectly common and regular thing for a state archive to do. He writes this letter with the perfect mixture of professional authority and bureaucratic tedium, and it leads you to think, indeed, competent people were put to work on this and they went out and did the job right. But if you analyze some of the assertions he makes, you begin to see that there are some major inconsistencies in his account of things. He says:

“Based on an inventory submitted to our office by Patricia Burnette Chastain, the Clerk of Superior Court, it was determined that a majority of the documents in the basement were financial records that were decades past the recommended period of retention.”

This inventory that he mentions was the list of documents compiled by the Heritage Society people, a list which even they admit was hastily constructed and mostly incomplete. But the very fact that his office would use documentation pieced together by amateur historians rather than a true inventory rigorously constructed by trained archivists suggests that he probably didn’t have the evidence he needed to make the determination that he did. He certainly isn’t in a position to say that records were appraised with established professional standards common throughout the archival field. I would argue also that what he says about retention schedules and destruction eligibility isn’t relevant to the documents in question and that those standards were misapplied due to his office’s lack of understanding about what it was they were reviewing. Retention policy is a component of records management: you keep a record until it is no longer useful to be knowledgeable about the thing it records. Records can become archival, however, when the record has outlived its original intended purpose but becomes useful for research of another kind or is believed to be of future use to researchers for historical perspective. Cherry states that “If the records are not identified as archival, once retention is reached, the local agency may elect to destroy them, as was the case in Franklin County,“ but I don’t see how the N.C. State Archives couldn’t have interpreted the Franklin Records as archival. The people of the county, whose shared history is conveyed in those records, demonstrated their interest the material, so much so that they were wiling to comb through it and give it order. Historical value of the documents seems abundantly clear. They did all the things that historical artifacts are supposed to do: elicit fascination, kindle imagination, provoke questions about past occurrences, recreate the conditions of life in a place as it once had been.

What has happened here, and what happens everywhere in the modern world all the time, is that memory is being devoured by an automatic and ill-considered present. We have this entity of government which is supposed to be responsible for the retention and preservation of public memory, arrogantly betraying its own mission and purpose so that it might function more efficiently and at lower cost. It is a willful suppression of complexity, because the simplicity of a system of fixed rules is easier. I don’t fault them. It’s a big job that they’re doing, and there needs to be rules to guide the work. But at least acknowledge the system’s shortcomings and own up to it when you’ve incinerating thousands of precious historical documents by mistake.

ArchivesShelves

The Demise of the Productive Classes

In a previous post, I described the European aristocracy’s fading relevance during the 19th century. I characterized this decline as a cultural shift, perpetuated by changing attitudes toward social roles and class following the Age of Enlightenment. I do not disavow this claim, but I must concede that really the more influential factors were economic. The development of industrial production in European cities caused an absolute explosion of capital which propelled the productive classes into a place of sudden prominence. With their fortunes still tied to the land and to agricultural output the aristocracy largely missed out on the industrial boom. Thus their wealth and power were eventually eclipsed by that of a new enterprising class which was more interested in generating new capital rather than protecting old. This was the bourgeois revolution, an age when society ceased to be ordered around obedience to traditional authority and transitioned instead into an organized system in which individuals conformed to capital markets to discover and exploit opportunities for new production. It should sound familiar because it is our own age. It is the dawn of modernity, industrial development and the rise of market capitalism. As for the old order, it was swept aside in the tumult and allowed to burn itself out in quite resignation.

The lesson to be learned is that class systems change, often very rapidly; sometimes in violent revolution, sometimes as a symptom of changing economic conditions. Ostensibly, our modern class system has progressed has not progressed much beyond what it was following the overthrow of the Ancien Régime. Our society is still ordered around property ownership, market exchange and obedience to law. According to Marx this is “the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,” invented for the growth of capital and freely expressed productivity. And like all systems it follows the same pattern of ascent and decline. Marx predicted that the bourgeois order would be toppled by the proletariat and that the working classes would rise up to supplant the owning classes, in the same way that the owning classes wrested control away from the noble class. It would seem history has not played out that way, not exactly. In fact, one could argue it is the working classes which have been marginalized over the course of modern history and have gradually been rendered irrelevant. The cause of this unexpected turn of events is 1: automation of work processes and 2: globalization of capital. Productivity within the world’s post-industrial economies is derived from mechanized labor; this has been the primary reason productivity has continued increasing in the industrialized world even though population growth has more or less stalled out. Outside of the post-industrial economies, traditional industry and human labor remain relevant and continue to escalate, but the effect this has on core capitalist economies is such that industrial labor vanishes. Slavoj Zizek explains our current economic milieu quite nicely in this article from The New Left Review:

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How else should we conceive the connexion between the two mega-powers, the United States and China, for example? They relate to each other more and more as Capital and Labour. The US is turning into a country of managerial planning, banking, servicing etc., while its ‘disappearing working class’ (except for migrant Chicanos and others who mainly toil in the service economy) is reappearing in China, where a large proportion of American goods, from toys to electronic hardware, are manufactured in ideal conditions for capitalist exploitation: no strikes, little safety, tied labour, miserable wages. Far from being merely antagonistic, the relationship of China and US is actually also symbiotic. The irony of history is that China is coming to deserve the title of a ‘working class state’: it is turning into the state of the working class for American capital. (“Why We All Love to Hate Heider“)

Of course, there are still masses of people in the core economies that require employment and ever greater quantities of capital floating around those economies that require spending. Consequently we see the formation of vast service sectors which emerge out of the market to cater to that thin layer of citizenry who still has money to toss at it. But where does the wealth of the rich originate? Certainly not from the generation of capital. This is wealth derived from a rentier economy. There was a time when people became rich by extracting raw resource from the earth and refining them into manufactured products. The main driving force of the old industrial economy was creation of capital goods (goods used to create more goods). Industry supported industry and the primary aim of industry was to expand productive capacity. Now industry functions to support a sprawling consumer economy which seems to just feed on itself in a recursive fashion: people go to work to buy goods which other people go to work to make so that they themselves can buy goods that still some more people went to work to make and so on and so on. I think we can interpret this state of events as indication that we live in an age of obvious decline. The question then becomes where will we go once this decline has damaged our social fabric so thoroughly that the forces which keep everything together dissolve and change becomes inevitable? So far we’ve witnessed an increasingly exaggerated stratification of wealth—completely to be expected, I think—and lately it seems that mass unemployment will be another manifestation of the transition. But these are not final outcomes; they are transformational occurrences. I think there is something else in store for us. I haven’t a clue what.

City Life

I watched a documentary film recently about urban planning titled Urbanized. It had an empowering though not altogether accurate message that a lot of design-minded people subscribe to: that systemic problems can be at least temporarily fixed with cunning and experimentation. The film showcases a half dozen or so urban projects taking place in cities throughout the world that are supposed to be solving problems specific to their place and time and that are being shaped in ways that are responsive to the people they are supposed to benefit. The designers and architects interviewed are people of remarkable vision and will, very smart, heroically competent. But I find that many of them appear to lack a sense of history. It seems appropriate, I think, because design is a prospective endeavor. Designers will look into the past for inspiration, but usually not out of precaution. Most of the designers I’ve met don’t appreciate their work being repudiated, and it’s a timid and ineffectual practitioner who’s inclined to look around for reasons to doubt his own work. That said, I’ve seen design people aligning themselves with false ideology, and it’s due to their neglect of history. Example: In Urbanized, there is a professor of urban planning from Columbia University who makes the assertion that most cities are founded in locations that are conducive to trade. This is false. Almost any city founded before the industrial era exists where it does because the terrain upon which it sits is easily defensible. One might make an exception for coastal cities, which are normally built where there is a natural harbor or protection from weather. But most of the world’s major capitals are not port cities, despite the obvious advantages of trade and travel; and if you go back 500 years ago, this is almost exclusively the case. Old cities are built inland, on high ground. They begin as fortresses housing a king or a lord. Commerce grows up around the spot due to security and stability offered by the regent. I think this was the case all the way up until the end of the 18th century when artillery bombardment became a formidable tactic of siege warfare, at which point it didn’t matter if a city was high or low, had thick walls or no wall. For the rest of human history, people emigrated to cities to conduct their business in safety and peace.

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Trade and culture are not the roots of a city’s greatness. The city is mighty because it is the seat of power. There is an authority that moderates interactions between citizens, controls the environment, regulates occurrences. To be a denizen of the city is to obey and to expect the obedience of others. Trade and culture are just by-products of uniform compliance. This hasn’t changed in the modern era.

Erich Auerbach and the Reading Public

The full title of Auerbach’s monumental project is Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. It is an examination how writers went about the work of portraying the world around them in a way that was comprehensible and recognizable to their readers. The analysis covers every major stage and stylistic program of the European literary tradition, beginning with the Homeric epics and the Torah and ending with 20th century modernism. Each chapter represents a new development in aesthetic attitude and approach to creative representation. Auerbach chooses a work that is exemplary of its time and surveys the text’s language and theme. It is intended that the text act as an artifact and that it disclose the identity and attributes of the era of which it was a part. As a work of literary criticism, I’d say Mimesis is unexceptional. Auerbach is able to provide unique interpretation for only a few of the text, those that he is most familiar and has made a career writing about. The rest he just reproduces the standard interpretations that are already widely accepted and which offer little besides a starting point for more penetrating analysis. Many of us remember the major controversy that erupted from having viagra pills from canada prayer in schools and the even better news is, no prescription is required. Erectile dysfunction is said to be a silent killer that murder viagra generika male sexual desires every night. How to buy generic sildenafil online? One can buy the efficient and effective viagra free consultation 100 mg pills (generic sildenafil citrate) online from our medical stores at an unbeatable price; Buying from us has several advantages such as- *Genuine and effective medications*FDA approved*cheap price*Discounts on bulk purchase*secure way of transactions*no prescription required*doorstep delivery Visit our online pharmacy now and place an order for the medicine. it will reach to. But, the question is which one has the viagra generic canada most successful rate of turning impossible into possible. At its worst, Mimesis feels like an undergraduate lecture, albeit an exquisitely composed and unusually erudite undergraduate lecture. I think the work is more interesting and more useful as an historical treatise. Auerbach is able to distill the tastes, attitudes, emotions, manners of speech, and modes of thinking of an entire age into 20 or 30 pages, and he’s perfectly accurate, remarkably effective. His most profound insights have to do not with the texts under consideration but with the people who produced those texts and who read them. Invariably we are talking about an elite class of folk when we are talking about literary audiences. These are individuals who shaped history, who led society from one age to the next. We learn more about the way they thought and how they saw the world by investigating their entertainments and fantasies than we do by studying their achievements and aspirations. There are few better scholars of the European ruling classes than Erich Auerbach. What he has to say about them is endlessly fascinating.

Die Geschichte vom Volkspark Friedrichshain

The history of Volkspark Friedrichshain is worth recounting. Like everything else in Berlin, its story is astonishingly varied and extraordinary. Neither the largest park in Berlin nor the most famous (that would be the Tiergarten), Volkspark Friedrichshain was the first free land to be opened for use to the general public, and it continues to be central to the city’s civic life. The park was inaugurated in 1848 at a time when Berlin was boiling with unrest. Citizens demanding a democratically elected parliament and rights of free speech had clashed with Prussian soldiers in Alexander Platz earlier that spring. All of Europe was experiencing a spontaneous popular revolution. For the first since antiquity, common people began identifying themselves as citizens of nations rather than simply vassals of a lord or subjects to some far away king. People thrust themselves into civic life and began demanding to have a say in their countries’ destinies.

The creation of Volkspark Friedrichshain was one of the first major projects undertaken by the elected city council of Berlin. Unlike the Tiergarten, which had originally been the hunting grounds of the Hollenzohlern monarchs and was only gradually being made available to the bürger, Volkspark Friedrichshain was a completely open and public space manifested from the will of the people. It is perhaps the first place in all of Germany to be thought of as a possession of the commonwealth, belonging to the people taken together as a nation. For two generations the park was used by the newly emerging working class of Berlin for the enjoyment of their increasing leisure hours. And the, like almost every national expression of the German Volk, Friedrichshain would be seized by the National Socialists almost a century later and perverted for the new state’s senseless, militaristic purposes. Apropos of nothing the Nazis built enormous concrete bunkers in to the park’s carefully tended grounds and erected flak towers to repel air raids from Allied forces. Converted into a military installation, Volkspark Friedrichshain became a target of the war and was utterly obliterated in successive bombing campaigns.

The supporting cast also had some good actors like Wahlberg, James Franco, Mila Kumis, etc. http://www.devensec.com/sustain/eidis-updates/IndustrialSymbiosisupdateJanuary_March2013.pdf cialis price Brandon Johnston is only seventeen years old and was suffering from the problem of severe hair loss and hair thinning for the last several lowest price for levitra months. Applicants can buy Tadalafil 20mg after they check the case and find out the fundamental cause behind the issue likewise influence dosage. online prescription viagra without useful store order cialis It is approved by the governments of all over the world. During the occupation and the subsequent rebuilding of the Berlin, Friedrichshain was used as a dump for the prodigious quantity of rubble and debris left behind from the city’s destruction. The two well-known climbing hills in the park, Mont Klamott and Kleine Bunkerberg, are actually enormous heaps of wreckage covered over in earth. I remember climbing the larger one, Mont Klamott, without any notion at all that I was walking over the interred ruins of the old Berlin, a separate and forgotten city that existed before the war was fought. I do not recall there being a historical marker to tell the story of the hill’s identity. Maybe it is a fact that Berliners would prefer to forget. Then again, maybe it is so commonly known that it need not be mentioned. Almost every German city has a similar rubble pile, covered over and planted with trees and grass. They are so frequent in the landscape of Central Europe that the Germans have a term for them: “Schuttberg.”

Volkspark Friedrichshain was rebuilt by the Deutsche Demokratische Republik once again for the enrichment and well-being of the people. The communist government was redeveloping a new East Berlin. Architects educated in the Soviet Union designed the central city so that it would be egalitarian and functional, with none of the bourgeois conventions that had come to characterize what Berlin had been. They built wide avenues and high-rise housing blocks inspired by Le Corbusier. Individual residents were given much less personal space. To compensate, the volksparks were expanded and improved. These became the city’s backyard. Where children once played make-believe with their siblings in the courtyards that existed in the center of every Berlin block, during the time of the DDR they went to the park after school and played large, organized games with all of their classmates. I remember spotting an old neglected and vandalized ping-pong table in Friedrichshain that dated from the communist era. It attracted my attention because I had never seen a cement ping-pong table before, nor had I ever seen table tennis played in a park. In the United States, ping-pong is decidedly a rec room game. We play it in our houses when entertaining guests. In a socialist country one only owns his paddle. He goes to the park to find a table and people to play with.