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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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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Sharing Ideas

April was a month of learning, sharing, and inspiration for me, thanks to several conferences and workshops. First, I attended the annual meeting of the National Council on Public History (NCPH), held in Pensacola, Florida this year. I bumped shoulders with several hundred other public historians from around the country and learned about how others [...]

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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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An Unexpected Connection to Dr. King

In honor of this week’s holiday (yes, I’m a few days behind), I thought I’d look a few decades beyond my usual focus on the 1920s and 30s. I am still elbow-deep in the Albert M. Greenfield papers (collection 1959), which includes materials on an impressive array of topics, events, and notable people. Even Dr. [...]

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