HIstorical Footnotes

4

A newspaper is sometimes referred to as the first draft of history. Today's events are tomorrow's history, and the newspaper is there to report on those events that eventually age enough to go into books. And the paper itself on which the news is written goes into wrapping tomorrow's fish.

Newspapers are not all about reporting today's events. They remind us of historical events all the time. Thus, if you're paying attention and categorizing what you're reading, you'll get news, history, and speculation on the future. A triple.

Take Monday's full page story on suffragist history and the search for a copy of the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions from the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention in New York. The document has never really been found, but that doesn't mean the tree didn't fall in the forest. It did.

'Hunt for a Relic Revives Interest in Suffragist History' gets a full page treatment complete with photos and copies of key documents and...footnotes!

I cannot recall ever seeing footnotes in a NYT story. Footnotes are a pain to include in a document if you've ever tried it, even with modern word processing software. And if you ever tried to complete a paper in the 1960s with footnotes produced by a typewriter you might marvel at the resiliency of the human mind and body to overcome a task of epic difficulty.

In high school we had to produce a paper, a research type of paper, in English class. Where else? Certainly not the shop class.

I think my subject was Washington Irving and his Sleepy Hollow stories. One block from the family flower shop was Irving Place, a short street going north/south from 14th Street to 20th Street, past the house where he was supposed to have lived, and past the high school named after him.

As readers of this blog might remember, the family shop was a once on Irving Place and 18th Street, serving as the front to the speakeasy that was run by Peter Bellas. The bar restaurant is still there, now legal, and known as Pete's Tavern, the oldest bar in NYC I believe. O Henry wrote some of his stories while sitting in a booth at Pete's decades ago. Some have Irving Place settings.

Never mind all that. The NYT story on the Suffragist document and the history of the Suffragist Movement has 15! footnotes. (Don't call them Suffragettes.) The footnotes are so tiny sitting in an exponent position after the last letter of a word a sentence that it might even serve as a game if you can identify all the words that are linked to a footnote. Look closely. It's not easy an easy search.

I can't imagine it would have been possible in the linotype days of producing a newspaper that footnotes could have been introduced in the text. Alert readers, anyone?

An email query was sent to Sam Roberts, one of the reporters who shares the byline with Liz Robbins on the story, asking if the use of footnotes is the first time the NYT has ever used them in the text of a story.

A response was received, but perhaps not an answer. "Like a law review!"

And there we have it. The NYT: current, past, future. And law review. All for $3.00 Monday through Saturday. A little more on Sunday.
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4 Children's books with footnotes might really discourage reading.

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