Bankers Trust Company becomes entangled in a ‘publishers’ war’

Several years after its failure, Bankers Trust Company became entangled in a ‘publishers’ war’ which pitted two of Philadelphia’s most prominent newspapers against each other: The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Record. The larger backdrop for this conflict was the vicious political battle raging in the city as well as the rest of the Commonwealth [...]

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Transparency in documentary editing

Postmodernist theory, which emphasizes the inevitable existence of individuals’ subjectivity and bias, has for the most part, become commonplace thinking. Within academe, postmodern critical analysis has affected all disciplines, including the “pure” sciences, which are no longer viewed as completely objective and neutral. The reality of subjectivity has caused scholars in the humanities and social [...]

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Banker, Can You Spare a Dime?

Given all the headlines about the struggling economy over the last couple years, it feels remarkably timely to be transcribing documents from the early months of the Great Depression as part of the Greenfield Digital Project. Recently, I’ve been working on letters from depositors of Bankers Trust Company, which became one of the first large [...]

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Getting from paper pages to digital texts

Now that we’re elbow-deep in encoding the 300 or so documents for the Greenfield Digital Project, my colleague Faith Charlton and I are spending a lot of time at the keyboard. As I’ve explained in past posts, we are digitizing, transcribing, and annotating primary source documents to tell the story of Bankers Trust Company, a [...]

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The Philadelphia Record news clippings morgue

About 90% of materials that will be included in the Greenfield digital project on the Bankers Trust Company of Philadelphia come from the Albert M. Greenfield Papers (collection 1959). The other 10% include items from other collections here at HSP that also provide information about the bank. One such collection that Dana and I have [...]

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Untangling text encoding

Over the last few months, I’ve been spending a lot of my time focused on a fairly technical topic: text encoding. Basically, text encoding is a method for representing text in a digital form. It allows you to record information about text — for example, whether it is handwritten, or mentions someone’s name, or is [...]

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Bankers Trust Company: too small to save?

One of the main tasks Dana and I have been working on thus far for the Greenfield digital editing project- part of a larger effort funded by the Albert M. Greenfield Foundation- is to try to piece together the history of Bankers Trust Company, the banking institution on which our project is focused. This can [...]

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A Bank’s Failure

Is it ever good news if a business associate sends you a telegram at 4 a.m.? This one, part of the Albert M. Greenfield papers (collection 1959), announced an emergency meeting of the board of directors for Bankers Trust Company, which within hours became the first large Philadelphia bank to fail during the Great Depression. [...]

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A New Digital Project About 20th-Century History

I recently began work on a new digital history project here at HSP that will highlight one of our flagship collections related to the history of Philadelphia in the 20th-century: the Albert M. Greenfield papers (collection 1959). Greenfield (1887-1967) was a prominent Philadelphia businessman involved in real estate, banking and mortgages, retail, and politics. His [...]

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