Electric History:
Detection and Measurement of Human Behavior Through Quantifiable Historical Records
By Joel Thurtell
Ever hear of an “electric historiscope”?
Nor had I until I began thinking about history in a new way.
“Electric historiscope” is my offbeat way of imposing order on the way I perceive and explain the passage of time and events.
What we call “history.”
I don’t use a real meter or oscilliscope. It’s definitely a conceptual thing.
For those who are not specialists in some section of a historical discipline, let me explain that I do a form of investigation known as “quantitative history.”
I count.
I count things that I think will help me understand how people’s lives were changing over time.
Then, I use a computer to help me figure out what was happening. Now, while the computer sure helps, my own imagination and power of observation form a large part of the process. It was the latter which helped me discern a pattern in surname-giving that led to my discovery of something previously unknown about Tarascan Indians after the Spanish Conquest — they resisted priests’ efforts to adopt Christian surnames and instead kept on using surnames dating to before the Spanish arrival in the New World.
My area of interest is western Mexico.
My period of interest is pre-Hispanic and colonial times.
But I don’t feel confined by those terms. I don’t recognize barriers between so-called “periods.”
My particular focus and the documentary source for my investigation is the set of records compiled by priests as they tried to keep track of important events in church life.
Those events are births of parishioners, followed by marriages followed by their deaths.
Priests in colonial Mexico wrote down these important events in separate books known as “registers.” I’ve worked with all three kinds of register, but my primary focus now is on a book containing priests’ notations of baptisms of Tarascan Indian babies born to parents from the villages of Cuanajo and Tupátaro, Michoacán, between 1665 and 1690.
Each baptismal notation contains dozens of pieces of information, from the baby’s name, date of baptism, church where the baptism took place, name of priest officiating, birth date (sometimes), race of baby, names of father, mother, residence of parents, race of each parent, and similar information for godmother and godfather, including in some cases the free or slave status of a participant and, if slave, who the owner was.
That is a lot of information packed into a notation that might take up an inch of vertical space on a page.
You can see, though, that with such an array of information being repeated for newborns week after week, month after month, year after year, there is a tremendous flow of data with the consequent possibility of asking questions about subjects like who is selecting whom as godparent, or, are people from one town choosing, say, other Tarascans or maybe Spaniards as godparents? It turns out that sometimes Tarascans were appointing negro slaves — in one case a slave owned by the officiating priest — as godparent.
In some places, the stream of data sometimes begins as early as the late 1500s and flows well into the 20th century.
Such sources of data give us an opportunity to approach history in a scientific way. Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel describes the concept of a “natural experiment” in which data are created in a way unintended by the compiler but suitable for analysis by modern historical detectives. So it is with parish archives. The priests had no idea that by ritually setting down vital data about individual human beings, they were actually creating a compendium of data capable of being mined and analyzed in an orderly way.
The person who convinced me to study colonial Latin American history was the late Professor Charles Gibson of the University of Michigan. Before I went to Mexico in 1970, I was influenced by the French social historian, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who was encouraging students to think demographically. Think people in the aggregate. The way to study trends in population is to look at parish registers of burials, marriages and burials.
I went to Mexico looking for parish registers with the express purpose of transferring their data onto individual data recovery forms. I would — and did — carry the forms home, where the plan was for me to transfer the data again, this time onto punch cards that could be processed by an IBM mainframe computer at the University of Michigan.
That last step — the UM mainframe — turned out to be a huge stumbling block, or so it seemed at the time. Nowadays, I’m using my MacBook Pro with Parallels and Microsoft Access to do my analysis. I don’t have to finesse a computer bureaucracy. In fact, there are a lot of reasons why waiting 40 years to process my data turns out to be serendipitously a good idea, but that is another essay.
What I want to discuss now is my idea for electrifying history, at least conceptually.
I find it helpful to look at change in this way. Maybe you will find it useful, too.
Remember, I wrote that there are dozens of pieces of information in each baptism notation. Over time, it adds up to huge numbers of data points.
You can think of them as static entries on a page.
Or you can do as I do, and envision parish register data — or any quantifiable historical data — as electrons conducted in a circuit. The conceptual shift is important — we’ve gone from static to dynamic.
Month-to-month, year-to-year, individual negatively-charged pieces of data flow toward the positively-charged present. In a particular locale, say a Catholic parish where data are recorded, we have a continuous forward or future-directed stream that can be measured as an electrician might insert an ammeter to measure rate of flow — amperes — or electrical current.
[We might also use the movie metaphor: We’ve gone from a single photograph to a series of pictures related lineally in time to form a moving image of human behavior.]
The historian inserts metaphorical probes into points in time. While a simple meter measures one dimension, an oscilloscope (a cathode-ray tube displaying contemporaneous, disparate electronic behaviors) can detect complex changes in waveform. And so it is with parish registers, where our computer analysis can query about gender, surname, race, free/slave status, godparent selection, as well as birth and fertility, death and mortality, and a host of other qualities.
Are there differences between different inhabited places? Again, the electrical analogy helps conceptualize how we might measure differences in potential between towns where priests simultaneously recorded data. So, our meter probes would measure and compare rates, say, of erosion or retention of native surname transmission in two or more parishes. Or we might measure the extent to which people from one town marry people from another, maybe even correlating to social class.
In Michoacán, western Mexico, there are at least 17 parishes with extensive runs of baptism, marriage and burial records back to the 1600s and sometimes 1500s. This is amazing, since in central Mexico, parish registers are virtually nonexistent, as I found when I surveyed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints section for Mexico on ancestry.org.
In Michoacan, for a reason I don’t yet understand, many, though certainly mot all, parish archives have been preserved. Whether or not you accept my electrical analogy, these archives provide an opportunity for comparative measurement of social change and even individual human behavior on a large scale both in temporal and geographic terms.
