Photoessay #2839 - Start of Maier Zunder scrapbook article

My professor of my first class as an Access Student last summer, would say "OK, here we GO, here we GO!" when he started to introduce something that he thought was really important.

So, here we go, time to start drafting my next paper "Maier Zunder's Scrapbooks."  Of course, it challenges me big time but I bring with me the confidence that I did it once (publish a paper in peer-reviewed journal) so I can do it again.

The first paper "Prayer in the Schools: "The 1877-78 Devotional Exercise Controversy in New Haven," appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of Connecticut History.  I recognized it as a sweet story right away, a great narrative arc, colorful drama, Maier Zunder a leading character, and nobody had written about it.  As I've said before, I wasn't part of the Connecticut history community, no academic appointment or prior academic publication.  Just some lady from Washington State writing about her Grandpa - the kiss of death.  But the gods smiled on me because, unbeknownst to me, the editor was preparing a special issue "Religion and Politics in Connecticut History."  I hit it just perfect.

This topic does have chronology as far as proceeding through the years in the scrapbook.  At the end of my October trip, I realized that the writing in the scrapbook matched the handwriting on a Promissory Note that Maier Zunder wrote regarding a loan to secure the cemetery property for Mishkan Israel.  Which meant that Maier Zunder kept this scrapbook himself.

Who else would have kept it?  The null hypothesis has some real value.

The Zunder family scrapbooks cover four volumes but I'm just interested in the first 1 1/2 volumes.  My brother came with me in January and we photographed all of the pages.

So I have the whole thing.  Not having a database application (and why not???), I built an excel spreadsheet of all the items.

167 pages containing 359 items.  300 items in English, 59 items in German.

I haven't found too many articles about specific scrapbooks but I have enough sources to bring in some academic issues.  Don't know if I can tackle intertext but cultural capital, categorization and mirroring, scrapbooks as open source, material manifestations of memory, look doable.  Also Linda K. Millers use of two scientific terms, spline and asymptotic could work.  As well as Pearce's view of scrapbooks as objects, physical landscapes and narratives.  I can't use all of these, but given an effort, I can use one of these approaches.

Did I mention that I LOVE having UW library access as an Access student?

Nineteenth century scrapbookers often repurposed other books as their foundations.  Maier Zunder used a ledger book for alcoholic beverage dealers for hist first volume.  This book held up a LOT better than the blank book he used for his second volume.

Notice the ledger format and the title at the top "Daily Record of Spirits purchased or received, and sold or delivered."

Here we go....