Historian Spotlight: Ben Bartgis

Ben volunteering at a historic site as a book binder

Today, we are going to begin the first of a series of interviews with a number of historians, in various stages of their careers. By the time this series concludes in late April, we will have heard from Nick Kane, Ben Bartgis and Robbie MacNiven. All of these individuals are broadly interested in the Kabinettskriege era, and have been selected as a result of recent promotion, career success, entry into graduate school, new scholarly projects, or work recently begun in graduate school or at a historic site.. Today's young historian is Ben Bartgis, a conservator at a large government archive and independent public historian.

Alexander Burns : What drew you to study the history in this era? In 2018, much of popular memory of military history in the United States is focused on World War 1, World War 2, and the Vietnam War. What about the history of the 1648-1789 era do you find so compelling?

Ben Bartgis: While most people in the reenacting world know me through my work teaching penmanship or reproducing book and stationery materials, my “real life” career for the last 12 years has been in conservation, which has meant working directly with original books and documents on a day-to-day basis and studying their physical aspects closely in the course of a conservation treatment, from writing a condition report, to photo-documentation in visible, UV, and IR light, to the treatments themselves. Both the first institution where I worked as an apprentice book conservation technician and the present institution I work at have extensive 18th century collections, and in the course of learning about iron gall ink, papermaking, leather tanning, wafer seals, and bookbinding as part of my conservation training I became interested in the context that the documents and books I work with were created in. I suppose part of my fascination with the long 18th century simply has to do with so much of my career happening to involve documents from that time period, especially at my current job where I’m focused a lot on documents from 1775-1795.

More broadly, America between 1740 and 1820 is a time when educational pedagogy undergoes a slow and steady revolution as people reconsider who gets to be educated and for what ends. At the same time that this expansion in literacy happens, wider trade networks and increasing prosperity alters the ways that the material objects of literacy were created and consumed. It’s a world that can be startlingly familiar in some ways - the practice sheets that people used to learn cursive are very similar to modern ones - yet uneasily foreign, and that tension is what pulls me more narrowly to 1770-1800 in particular.

The types of objects that Ben works to conserve

AB: Is there a particular person, conflict, event, or geographical setting which draws you to this era?

BB: I’m not drawn to any particular person, conflict, or event, but my interest is definitely in the material culture - the objects themselves and the processes involved in creating the paper, stationery, books, and newspapers of the period in general. On a geographic level I’m particularly interested in how they differed between Britain and her North American colonies - the differences between British and continental paper and early American paper, or how the colonial reliance on imports affected the bookbinding trade in North America versus how it was practiced in London.

AB: How do you plan to continue your research into this era? How does your work in conservation match up with your particular interest in history? Why have you chosen your particular path?

BB: My work in conservation doesn’t always match up with my interest in history - first, my institution is a pretty big one so we get a huge variety of projects, and sometimes I’ll spend weeks vacuuming mold off of late 19th century records, flattening hundreds of mid-20th century photos, or ordering supplies because that’s what the job requires. Second, conservation is a terrible field to be in if you’re interested in what’s on the items you’re working with! A lot of our work is done on the backs of things to make repairs less visible so I mostly see shades of cream and beige all day. Finally, part of the discipline of the job is learning to not read what you’re working on so you can complete your work without being distracted - one former supervisor saw my ability to read secretary hand and Latin as a liability, not an asset, and there was a degree to which she was right. It can be really hard to work with key documents of American history and not even have the time to be able to appreciate being with them, much less read them, but that’s the job.

A Bandbox Seller by Paul Sandby

I’ve chosen my particular path because at the end of the day I love working with my hands, and I don’t like the prospect of giving up my workbench and tools for a job with just computer work - and indeed, now that I’m teleworking full time for the duration of the pandemic I’m discovering just how much I miss the hands-on aspect of my job.

But on the positive side, since I can’t take original documents home I requested to spend some of my work time on some of the blog content generation and transcription projects going on elsewhere in my agency. I am hoping to collaborate with several of my colleagues and write some short articles about the writing materials used by the Continental Congress and early federal government, which means that for the first time in my career I’ll be able to wear my historian hat at my real job!

I’ve had to put all my research trips on hold, so I’ve been revisiting several landmark works in my field, such as David Pearson’s “English Bookbinding Styles 1450-1800” and Dard Hunter’s 

“Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft”. I’ve also spent a lot of time over the last few weeks doing the sort of work that you need to do as an artisan - just sitting down and making things, particularly pasteboard boxes, wafer seals, and vellum ledger books.

Ben's interpretation of the Sandby Image

AB: What challenges have you faced in the historical profession? What, if any, advice would you give to high school and college students considering this field?

BB: Not being a student, professor, librarian, or curator at a university or museum creates a lot of practical barriers to accessing common scholarly resources such as JSTOR, digital collections that require subscriptions, discounted memberships to journals, conference and research funding, and scholarships and fellowships. These barriers to access are common ones faced by a lot of non-traditional public historians, especially people working as artisans or in living history. Additionally, because my work as a historian doesn’t overlap with my real job I have to use my vacation time and savings if I want to speak at a conference, teach a workshop, or make a research trip, and I have to build connections outside the context of the people I know in conservation since I don’t work directly with curators or researchers.

 I am fortunate because I have access to a university interlibrary loan program through my institution, I’ve been able to build connections with the curators and librarians that I’ve met through living history to gain physical access to collections, and I have several mentors who are willing to take the time from their busy lives as PhD candidates or historians to direct my reading, refine my historiography, and include me in the academic dialogues I otherwise don’t have access to. If you’re not in traditional academia and want access to top-quality scholarship and scholars, build those relationships - and living history is an excellent way to do so through finding historians who bring their knowledge to public history events.

 My advice to high school and college students considering the field is rather mercenary due to my personal experience as someone who had to work through college and was unable to afford the unpaid internships that would’ve advanced my career faster: can you afford it without going deeply into debt, and do you need to do something you love for a living even if it means a high level of financial and personal instability? History is a field where deep, passionate engagement with the subject is possible without acquiring a lot of student debt for an MA or undertaking the poorly-paid labor of love that is being a museum interpreter or TA, but to have a deep, rewarding relationship with history outside of the framework of a university or job you also have to be willing to make your own curriculum and be extremely self-directed, committed, and internally driven.

The most recent book that I’ve finished is “The Living History Anthology: Perspectives from ALHFAM”, which I reviewed for the May volume of The Public Historian, the journal of the National Council on Public History. “The Living History Anthology” covered a wide range of topics from the practical to the theoretical. I’d recommend it to anyone in reenacting or interpretation who is looking for an introduction to thinking more critically about doing living history. The anthology has the benefit of being in the convenient form of 26 short essays, with a good bibliography for further reading.

A recent publication in my area of interest that I enjoyed is Joseph Adelman’s 2019 book “Revolutionary Networks: The Business and Politics of Printing the News, 1763–1789”, which among other things gives a succinct summary of how an 18th century print shop worked on a day-to-day basis that is an extremely handy reference, as well as clarifying the economic pressures printers were subject to over the course of the 1760s, 70s, and 80s. Adelman does an excellent job of looking critically at the evolution of historical thinking about the roles printers and the news played in creating the American Revolution from the late 18th century to the present, and provides a compelling narrative framing to the 1763-1783 period by looking at the printers who created many of the primary documents we now reference in our research, and the context in which they created those documents.

 For those interested in printing and its related subjects Adelman was interviewed for two podcasts with the Omohundro Institute’s Ben Franklin’s World Podcast, one on his book and the other on the 18th century American postal system.

AB: Thanks so much Ben! Good luck with your conservation work, we are looking forward to following your career as it continues!

If you enjoyed this post, or any of our other posts, please consider liking us on facebook, or following us on twitter. Consider checking out our exclusive content on Patreon. Finally, we are dedicated to keeping Kabinettskriege ad-free. In order to assist with this, please consider supporting us via the donate button in the upper right-hand corner of the page. As always:

Thanks for Reading, 

Alex Burns