Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
database and not just a collection of anecdotes. This work allowed for its recontextual-
ization and analysis.
The Grimké-Weld household's project of mining the newspapers was made possible
by access to large piles of Southern newspapers. Where did they get the papers? They
could have looked to the reading rooms and public libraries of NewYork City, locations
crucial to spreading ideas and information. Some reading rooms were political, offering
print resources in support of a cause. For example, in the late 1830s there were at least
two antislavery reading rooms in New York City, both run by antislavery newspapers,
making use of the newspapers and magazines they received in their exchanges. Like
other newspapers, abolition papers exchanged free copies with other publications and
were allowed by the U.S. Post Office to mail exchange copies without cost. The anti-
slavery papers received copies of pamphlets, as well, which they made available to visi-
tors who paid a yearly or weekly fee. Both of the NewYork reading rooms framed their
projects as offering resources to the black community.
One NewYork reading room was run by David Ruggles, an African-American activist
with the New York Committee of Vigilance, which watched out for and fought against
kidnappers and slave catchers, and editor of the
Mirror of Liberty
, whose office was
located at Lispenard and Church Streets. In May 1838 he complained that black men
were excluded from “Reading Rooms, popular lectures, and all places of literary attrac-
tions and general improvement,” and announced that he had opened a reading room at
the Committee's office, which was also his home, offering “access to the principal daily
and leading anti-slavery papers, and other popular periodicals of the day.”
34
His reading
room offered access to these papers for a fee—from $2.75 per year to 6½ cents per
week, waived for “strangers visiting this city”—including the many fugitive slaves
Ruggles was in contact with.
35
Another antislavery reading room soon opened less than
half a mile away, sponsored by the weekly
Colored American
, a black-owned newspaper.
In January 1839, the paper announced that it planned to offer to “friends and subscrib-
ers” a place to read the other papers they received in their exchanges.While those papers
would have included the abolitionist press, the
Colored American
exchanged with others
as well. It announced, “Our Files are well filled with the principal Foreign and Domestic
papers—Religious, Moral, Literary and Political.”
36
While these antislavery reading rooms—and others around the country, like the one
Frederick Douglass ran in Rochester—were valuable as sites for following the move-
ment, spreading knowledge of events and tactics, and possibly for education and self-
improvement as their prospectuses proclaimed, they were not extensive repositories.
