A new series trawling this newspaper’s digital archives will give nuance to the broad sweep of history
THE DIGITAL revolution has changed the present and will change the future in ways we don’t see yet, but it can also change our perceptions of the past through the easy access it provides to a wide range of sources. Prime among them are the digital archives of newspapers, previously the domain of the dedicated researcher, which now allow one to find needles in a haystack of millions of words.
Search engines (though not always perfect) can almost instantly bring to light information about people and events that was seemingly buried forever in old newspapers and virtually impossible to find without enormous effort and a lot of luck.
It might not always produce what is expected – that great-great uncle may turn out to have a more extensive criminal record than the one patriotic act for which he is remembered – but it is almost always certain to be interesting and provide new insights on individual or communal history.
The easy availability of all these sources of information seems certain to alter our understanding of the past. At the very least, it will add to our knowledge of the nuances, textures and subtleties of events or developments which are smoothed away by the broad sweep of history as it is re-told as a continuous narrative. At most, it may lead to new interpretations and even a radical re-think of aspects of the story of how we got to where we are today.
We always see the past as having been a simpler age, mainly because it no longer holds the uncertainties of the present about the future. We know what happened, so it all seems to have been inevitable, obvious and even pre-ordained. X caused Y and the result was Z: surely people should have known that at the time but, of course, it’s never that obvious or inevitable at the time. History in the making is always a messy business. You don’t have to spend long reading old newspapers to realise that the present was always as fraught with uncertainty about the future as it is today.
Indeed, one of the most persistent newspaper stories was always, and still is, some variant of “the end is nigh”, whether it be a major change in the national or international balance of power, the collapse of civilisation as we know it or climate change. (And, yes, this time it really is serious: the end really is nigh.)
Looking back through the early decades of The Irish Times, it is easy to see and empathise with the hopes and fears of people regarding, say, the prolonged political battle over Home Rule and independence. For some, it seemed like an unthinkable disaster, for others a near-impossible dream that would solve all problems. Many feared civil war, not the civil war that did come in 1922 which was a civil war within nationalism, but the civil war between unionists and nationalists which was, in a sense, finally played out in the Northern Troubles.
Equally, the rise of trade unionism and socialism filled some with apprehension and others with hope. What eventually happened was generally not quite what anybody expected; reading old newspapers can quickly raise one’s level of scepticism about all predictions of the future. And there were always the occasional references harking back to an earlier time, when the world was a simpler place and people hadn’t to cope with the speed and change and demands of modern life.
Equally, in the newspaper pages of old, with their verbatim or near-verbatim reports of political meetings, rallies and demonstrations, one finds many of the themes and tendencies that underlie present-day politics. These can range from the hints (and sometimes more than hints) of graft and corruption, to the role of publicans in public life, or the culture of individual political parties. Many of what we casually think of as the unique issues of today have their origins deep in the past and in the temperamental, cultural and religious tendencies that created the national psyche and were as visible decades ago as they are now.
The main attraction, however, in looking through old newspapers is not necessarily what it does for our understanding of the big issues of national life or history. It’s the attraction of finding an old newspaper in an attic or lining an old drawer and the sudden insight it provides into times gone past and people long dead. Newspapers are said to be a first draft of history in the sense that they tell the story of the day and put them into a contemporary context or narrative. A good report is also a snapshot in time, sometimes telling as much through the reporters’ tone and stance as through the description of the events witnessed. The archives are fascinating just for the stories they resurrect – all the quirks of daily life, from horses bolting down Grafton St and injuring shoppers, to collapsing buildings (not a very rare occurrence), to the elixir advertisements promising a solution to everything from arthritis to hair-loss, sometimes in the one bottle. As every historical researcher knows, the couple of paragraphs in the next column about some minor and random event are often more intriguing than the serious subject one is supposed to be reading.
Discover the past
A new daily series by Joe Joyce, starting on Monday, will highlight stories from the last 150 years as they appeared in The Irish Times. Readers can access the original articles, and the editions in which they appear, for free at irishtimes.com/150.
In addition, The Irish Times Digital Archive, which contains all editions of the paper, has been made available free to access this week. Many thousands of readers have availed of this service over the past seven days. Such has been its popularity that the free-to-access period has been extended for a further week, to Sunday, April 11th.