Seward Stories Talk: From Documentary Editing to Biography

Last Wednesday, at the suggestion of Pat Corcoran, Thomas Slaughter invited me to be the keynote speaker at the Seward Stories event at the University of Rochester. Slaughter edits and manages the Seward Family Digital Project, which lives in the Rush Rhees library there, and Seward Stories allows researchers working on the project to present interesting aspects of the project's findings and progress.

The whole endeavor is really exactly what an editing project like this should be. It makes archival material accessible to the public, annotates it for context that sometimes even scholars do not know nor understand, provides professional and scholarly experience for both undergraduate and graduate students, and facilitates collaboration within and across institutions and interest groups. This is the sort of thing of which I could only fantasize when I was at the Douglass Papers, before the technology was even available.

I met with students who are working on impressive dissertations, with the history department chair, with the library dean, with the digital lab technicians, and with the archivists in special collections. Everyone was wonderful, but the last two left me with gifts.

The digital lab techs have created 3-D printing software for copies of the Douglass bust owned by the University of Rochester, and when I gushed about making plans to get to my local library to have them make one for me on the 3-D printer their, one of the techs said, "hey, here, have this one." So, swag!

"Claire Strong" is for my 5-year-old niece, 

who is recovering from leukemia.

Then, the special collections librarians did one better. They brought out the volume of sheet music that contains "Farewell Song to Frederick Douglass," composed by Julia Griffiths and her brother T. Powis, the one performed at the big Douglass gala in Rochester last December. They let me touch it! Without gloves! And had a great acquisitions story! And share my horror at auction houses that don't want to know provenance prior to their own purchase!

After the tours and lunch, we went to the auditorium in the library for presentations, which included reports on the work with seniors who collaborate with the students in transcribing letters, two charming discussions of unusual names in the project and the regular appearance of pets in the correspondence, and a rumination of the importance of this intimate view of the Seward family.

My own paper, conceived separately from these presentations, seemed to touch on some of the same issues. As you can see if you watch or listen to the video, I decided to explain the ways that my book evolved from my annotation of the Douglass correspondence. The paper fit right in methodologically and theoretically.

We all go so deeply into the details of our subjects' lives in annotation, but we are looking primarily at the alleged "private" side, finding that such distinctions are not accurate, even if they are the language of our subjects and thus the ways that they tried to explain the bargains and boundaries of their own lives.