Segments of a Historically Political Existence: Diaries & Scrapbooks a History in the Making

From 1850 to 1877, a man by the name of Charles T. Cotton wrote 15 pocketbook diaries that displayed his daily thoughts and an account of the political situation in Washington D. C. during the Civil War. Alexander Gumby (a virtually unknown aspiring artist whom at one point took a job as a waiter at Columbia University in New York City), created a collection of 138 scrapbooks documenting American black history, and the discourse surrounding black leaders from the Civil War to the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement. This essay will juxtapose both collections to convey how both objects present a historical narrative that explores the potential and underbelly of American democracy. In doing so, a letter correspondence between James Madison and Thomas Jefferson will become the locus for how both collections construct the democratic political landscape. Aside from themes in the American political tradition, memory studies from the perspective of Maurice Halwbachs, Susan Crane, and Alon Confino argue that forms of memory, like scrapbooks and diaries, neutralize a dominant form of history that tends to hide historical representations of political practices that are specific to different groups. The use of both collections, allows the modern reader to understand what is hidden and explicit in the politics of American history. This essay calls for a re-envisioning of how the practice of diary keeping and scrapbook making documents a form of history that engages the modern reader with the cultural nuances of the body politic. These types of repetitive practices develop the possibility of repudiating or revising the ills of the past, and re-envisioning how poor populations historicize life in the American body politic.