Historians and biographers almost overwhelmingly focus their research and writings on famous people. Men and women who were active in the public sphere of history, whose names were widely recognized and whose actions were publicized and discussed across the country, inevitably draw the attention of most researchers. It is certainly easier to study the impacts of those men and women because of the greater number of sources available — people in the public sphere are more likely to appear in newspaper and magazine articles and are more likely to have their speeches or writings published for public access. But while there is no denying that these famous men and women had enormous impacts on history, too often they are given credit for initiating entire social, cultural and political movements all on their own.
History often overlooks the role that ordinary people played in these movements. Changes in the human experience, positive or negative, are not the result of one person’s single-handed efforts — these changes came about because of the combined involvement of ordinary people, whose personal experiences were the real driving forces behind these movements.
The question then becomes how to uncover and then preserve these experiences of ordinary people, which can be a fairly challenging task. Unless the individual took it upon himself to keep a diary or write a personal memoir or autobiography, a historian is left to uncover clues about the individual’s daily life without the guidelines of a written history. Without the ability to trace a person’s day-to-day activities or read their inner thoughts on the political, social and intellectual movements swirling around them, historians must rely on seemingly ordinary items to discover the places and roles that these ordinary people created for themselves.
With the right mindset, however, the stories of ordinary people are easy to find if you know where to look for them. The childhood experiences of your great-grandmother can be just as evident in her vast collection of Mason jars as if she had written a book about growing up during the Depression, and how her family’s poverty forced them to save everything, down to jelly jars and scraps of soap. The cookbook of 30-minute meals passed down from your mother speaks volumes about her experiences trying to work and raise a family at the same time. Your father’s old leather briefcase tells the story of his climb up the corporate ladder.
But even outside the realm of family heirlooms — or junk, depending on your family — you can tell a great deal about people you have never met through their material goods. A walk through any antique store, estate sale or yard sale gives evidence to this fact. A copy of “Jane Eyre” with an inscription in the front can tell you that the previous owner of the book loved to read classic literature at age seven. A single fur coat on a rack full of polyester jump suits tells you that someone had finally earned enough to treat herself to something nice, or just that everyone had terrible taste in the ’70s. There are certainly some items that people buy merely for show or that sat on a shelf for years without ever being used. But those who valued the things they had often put a piece of themselves into the most basic items, and those items continue to tell their stories through the years.
There is a growing movement in history to preserve these items and to study their importance as windows into the lives of ordinary people. The true connoisseurs of “daily” history are not the antique appraisers who only see the monetary value in old items, or the overworked parents selling their household miscellany in an attempt to make a few extra dollars. Those who really know about the history of the ordinary person are the oral historians and the archivists, who make their livings studying the stories and items of regular people leading regular lives. An oral historian can glean a wealth of information about the civil rights movement from an old white woman who watched it unfold from her apartment in Birmingham. An archivist can tell, merely by looking at a photograph, where and when the person lived and what their social status was.
These men and women do not disregard the stories and items of people who were not famous or in the public eye. They use the experiences of the individual to shed light on the way history affects people simply living their lives.
— Sarah Russell is a junior in history. She can be reached at srusse22@utk.edu.
