This is jumping ahead a bit on my colleagues. But I hope they won’t mind.
As I’ve mentioned a few times we’re getting ready to launch a new historical artifact section at TPM. It will include many things. But the core of it will be a steady stream of historical artifacts from the past. These might be documents, coins, photographs, posters – anything really, but with an emphasis on visual representations of physical objects that provide a window into a past world.
This clipping above I just chose out of a bundle of possible choices our team is coming up with as we get ready to launch. I chose it because it is interestingly connected to things TPMy. But in general we’re looking much, much further afield than things that have anything to do with elections of the past or news in a generic sense. But this is a bit of a treat.
As you can see there is a very young Walter Cronkite looking at tabulated computer data produced by a machine called Univac. (Cronkite would have been around 35 at the time.) CBS had contracted with the device’s manufacturer to process election data for the 1952 presidential election. As you can see there, the headline reads “CBS to Use Electronic Robot to Forecast Election Results”.
How can you not love that?
Univac
As some of you know, I was trained as an historian. I have a PhD. But it was clear to me before I finished that I wasn’t cut out for it. In many ways, though, my interest in history is as voracious as its ever been. It’s just not a professional one. Virtually everything I read when I’m not on the job at TPM is history and usually about something at least a couple centuries in the past. I virtually never read anything about contemporary events or politics on my own time. So it remains an intense and abiding interest. On my own time I live in the distant worlds of the past.
We’ve collected together an amazing group of some of sharpest and most prominent historians in the country who will be involved in this project. So I’m very excited about it. We’ll have essays, articles on different topics. But the day to day, week in and week out will be these artifacts.
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there, as LP Hartley put it in his immortal evocation. And we hope to take you there.
