Author Archives: ryanbarry

Blog Post 2

by Ryan Barry

Being honest, I really had no idea where to start. My search began very blandly, and I didn’t really know what I should be looking for. It didn’t take very long for me to start noticing these business card things.

While I do not understand their history, I don’t think they are meant to be very historical. Instead, they appear to be what is known in today’s world as forms of advertisement. The reason I was drawn to these rather plain documents has nothing to do with the individual pictures of each, but the fact that I came across so many of them in the database (I used the Digital Public Library of America).

Their appearance is quite simple and straightforward; they possess differences and similarities to the ‘advertisements’ of the contemporary world. As simple as they are, however, they are all unique. It comes to my attention that the reason these caught my attention is because we are working on document design at the moment in my 225 class. While these would never pass for effective advertising today, they still possess some of the most basic elements of an effective form of communication. They contain all of the necessary information to convey their intended message.

I think the main difference between today and the time these cards were created is the visual design and layout. Not only are we flashier today but audiences prefer only the most essential information because our attention spans are not nearly as long as they used to be. For instance, the second picture advertises an amalgamation of ingredients to be sold in a sort of sentence-style paragraph. Today, this information would be lucky to make the paper and if it did it would be in the form of a bullet point list.

It’s difficult to read deeply into these articles. You might be able to assert that life was simpler or that there was less regulation or even that it did not take much to capture people’s attention (because any document created was not very common), but otherwise they are merely forms of advertisement. It’s cool to see and I wish I could see how they were presented to audiences (i.e., by hand, on a wall, etc.). It was certainly different from how advertisements reach audiences today. Perhaps they were mediums of basic information, and all the information people needed was obtained by talking to other individuals in the community. Nevertheless, it is cool to see just how different documents are today than they were a few centuries ago.

Ryan Barry, Museum Visit Experience

My visit to the Charleston Museum was significantly more entertaining and informative than I anticipated. It was in fact the first time I had been to a museum with whose focus (i.e., Charleston) I was familiar. I wasn’t raised in a very historic or monumental region… my town had little to no important or at least interesting history. And I for one was entirely disconnected from any sort of local culture.

After living in Charleston for the past three years, I was fascinated by the history of the peninsula. Learning how everything came to be, things like the Ashely and Cooper Rivers, Rutledge Street, the Market, East Bay- it was quite an engaging experience.

I found myself intrigued by the very first exhibit. It was sort of the pre-Charleston history. I don’t know why exactly, but I find native American history really cool. They are indeed a forgotten and underappreciated culture that we do not learn enough about. Natives were living here millennia before Europeans, and we learn significantly less about them than any other culture.

I also found myself very focused on the life of slaves, as the exhibits provided in-depth detail and artifacts from their lives. It may be difficult for a student to comprehend how America was, to some degree, built by slavery, but these exhibits made this process entirely clear. Of course, America would still have been America and may have been able to prosper without slavery, but slavery undoubtedly contributed to the rapid rate of growth of the United States. Would America be as powerful as it is without slavery?

Both the history of slavery and of colonial relations with native Americans makes any reasonable individual question the idea of freedom in America. To contemporary individuals, we see it as hypocritical. Many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century individuals, however, saw no problem with it. They viewed freedom as it pertained to white men.

On the other hand, while the history of freedom in America may seem hypocritical, its philosophy has thus far prevailed. The racist and sexist hypocrisies that once polluted its practice for the most part no longer prevail. And if I could go one step further, I would say we are heading in an even better direction.

What’s interesting, then, is that the idea of freedom, though selective in its origins, has overcome (and is still overcoming) its own shortcomings. So, while our founders may not have been entirely pure in their practice, they understood the ‘goodness’ of freedom. They understood for themselves why it was right, why it is better, and why they deserve it.

Ultimately, this ideology represents the epitome of western society. Of course, it is not practiced perfectly (and may never be), but it has certainly made a lot of people’s lives a lot better (as long as you consider freedom to be better).

The question is, how do we reckon with the sins of our history? Surely, we cannot hold ourselves accountable. But it is our responsibility to understand everything in its context. We must connect ourselves with our pasts so as to not repeat its mistakes and move forward in a better direction.