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Introduction: Decoding Historic Documents
When you're doing historical research, you often encounter documents that are difficult to categorize. Without knowing more about such works, it's difficult to advance a knowledgeable argument about them. For instance, the Egyptian Red Book" (1885), a satire that is part of the Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA), reveals little about itself directly. It includes no author, introduction, table of contents, statement of purpose or even references to the figures represented in the text and the images. Few of the cartoons have named figures or artists. The pamphlet presents itself to the reader like the political cartoons it contains: an overt message with very little background, a visual sermon to the converted with little consideration for those outside the know. If you would like a synopsis of the story addressed in the Red Book you may skip to our sketch of the historical events.
In order to understand both the intended and historical meaning of the text and the images, it is important to find out what sort of work the "Egyptian Red Book" is. We will use the following questions to guide our research:
- What is the significance of the term "Red Book" in the title? To answer this question, we will look up the term in dictionaries and examine other red--and green--books.
- How do we categorize the work? We'll see how librarians have descibed it by using the catalog.
- How does this work compare with others that come from the same period and/or that address a similar topic? Let's analyze the "Red Book" in relation to newspapers and magazines from the same time period.
Defining Key Terms: "Red Book"
Often the first clue to a document's significance is its title. To begin, then, we should define what is meant by "Red Book". What is the significance of "Red" here--why not blue or green? The adjective "Egyptian" indicates that the work focuses on a particular country, but it's not clear how. Time to head to the library to find more information! We will use online reference materials to begin our sleuthing. For the purposes of demonstration, we will describe how to conduct this research using Fondren Library's resources, but a similar process will work at most other research libraries.
From the Fondren home page select the Collections option and then the Online Reference Sources option that appears next to it.
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The Oxford English Dictionary is not only a guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of over half a million English words, both present and past, it is the definitive reference source for the meaning and pronunciation of any word in the English language. It traces the usage of words through quotations from a wide range of international English language sources. For example, "Red Book" is defined as "a book bound in red" in terms of today's usage. However, its usage has varied from a collection of all the "composicions" of the "chauntry preestis" in 1479 to "a Witche's red Book, a Catalogue of such as have sealed to the Devil with their own bloud, la rouge liste" by 1688. By the time of the publication of "The Egyptian Red Book," in the late nineteenth century, the term seems to have referred to a book containing the names of all persons holding office under the State or receiving pensions from it.
As we shall see, "The Egyptian Red Book" addresses the work of government officials. It also condemns those actions, holding the officials responsible for the death of a General in the British army. We can see the possibility that the term has held onto some of its previous meanings: the condemnatory list of individuals that have exchanged their free will for power, an account of the works of particular authorities, and a list of individuals in the service of the State, in this case those involved with British policy toward Egypt. As we continue with our investigation of this work, other explanations for the title will present themselves, all of which must be considered in our research.
Categorizing the work you are researching
Nearly every work shelved in every library around the world is categorized in relation to other works in terms of its content. This is done according to a system of subject headings established by the Library of Congress that describe the content of the work, such as Athletics or History. Subheadings then further specialize the relation of the work to others, such as Swimming or Britain, 1800-1900. By locating our work within this system of categorization, we not only discover what sort of work it is considered to be, we also gain access to other titles that are similar to it. This can be of great advantage in any research project.
WorldCat
WorldCat is a system designed to help you to browse the collections of over 16,000 libraries world wide. You can also order the books you find on WorldCat from other libraries through Interlibrary loan if they are not available at your library. Here we will use WorldCat to locate our work for the purpose of defining exactly what sort of work the "Red Book" is in terms of the way libraries categorize it around the world. For a more extensive tutorial, visit our WorldCat module.
You can either use WorldCat.org, which can be accessed at http://www.worldcat.org/, or the full version of WorldCat, which is available to subscribers, such as your university library. WorldCat.org is free, but provides fewer features than the full version of WorldCat. Please note that in order for the link to the full version to work, your institution must have a subscription and you must either be on campus or be connected via a VPN or proxy server. Different libraries organize their materials differently, of course. If you were to look for the link to WorldCat from the Fondren home page, you would click on "Catalog," then select "Other Library Catalogs" and look for "WorldCat."
Once you're in WorldCat, type the title into the text box provided and then select Title in the pulldown menu.
The second search result looks like our work.
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The information we are most interested in for now we find under the heading Subject(s).
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The list is relatively short, only twenty-five entries. The second descriptor beginning with Egypt is reserved solely for "The Egyptian Red Book" so we are dealing with a manageable number of works. For now, let's just mark all of these entries and email them to yourself so we will have them for later stages in the project.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page until you see the Mark all option.
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Note that our list makes several mentions of "Punch" and "The Westminster Gazette," which area nineteenth-century periodicals. These publications are included in our list under a dated subject heading; thus we can be confident that they were in publication at the same time as our work. When we look for similar works in the collection at the library in the next section, we should be sure to explore their periodicals as well as books on our subject.
Limits of Finding Works by Subject Headings
It is interesting to note here that one very similar work does not appear in our list of works that share a subject heading with the "Egyptian Red Book." It is a work that we discussed in our "Identifying the Characters of the Egyptian Red Book Module" entitled "The Irish Green Book." It is important to note this here for a few reasons. First, this valuable resource for our research would have remained undiscovered if we had not explored a variety of options, rather than simply one or two. Second, this kind of oversight is indicative of the limitations of a system that attempts to categorize works by general subject. It is important that we develop an understanding of the limitations of our techniques and resources so that we may overcome them. Let's locate the Irish Green Book on WorldCat and compare the subject headings.
For the Irish Green Book and
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In relation to our original question, "What is a Red Book?," now we can add, "What is a Green Book?." Considering the association of the color green with Ireland we must ask ourselves about the color red and its relationship with Egypt. We do not have to look very far to discover that the Egyptian flag is indeed red and that red is the color internationally associated with the Ottoman Empire, which is historically to Egypt by politics and religion. The relationship between England and the regions that are the subject of our two books, Ireland and Egypt, is a comparative subject that these works only hint at in a humorous way. There is room here for serious academic study, however, as a more thorough examination of the history of the three countries would reveal. Now let's go on to the location of more similar works in the library.
Finding similar works
Here we will be looking for material related to "The Egyptian Red Book." We could hope to find information on political cartoons in Britain in the late nineteenth century, other works of political satire, other cartoons that depict the characters in our work, and anything else that we can immediately get in hand to further our project in whatever direction our findings take us. We are primarily interested at this point in locating other primary sources, meaning original documents such as other works of political satire from the same period.
Library Catalog
At most libraries, the days of the card catalog are long gone; instead, patrons search web-based catalogs such as WebCat, the online catalog at Fondren Library. WebCat and similar tools offer a variety of search options to assist you in sifting through the variety of materials available to find the exact item you are looking for. For a more in depth tutorial on online catalogs, visit our WebCat module.
Pull up the web page for the catalog; at most libraries, it is available immediately from the home page. Enter the subject heading--"Political satire, English" into the textbox. Select the Subject option so that you are searching for other works with the same subject term.
We find 53 results, none of which pertain, exactly, to our period. However, by looking closely at the entries we see that political cartoons seem to have been prevalent all the way back to the middle of the eighteenth century.
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Periodical Search
Let's return to the basic search page and enter the title of our periodical into the text box and select the Periodical option. We do not find any copies of the Westminster Gazette in the catalog (we might find it at another library), but Fondren does list Punch in its collection.
Select the record and scroll down to the location listings. Notice that Vol. 1 begins in 1841.
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First we have to figure out which volumes we need. We're looking for information about Gen. Charles Gordon, the protagonist of he "Egyptian Red Book," from around the time that the satire was published in 1885. (See Getting the Whole Story From "The Egyptian Red Book": General Charles Gordon in Khartoum for more information.) If Vol. 1 came out in 1841 and Vol. 218 came out in 1966, then we might assume that Vol. 100 would fall around 1900. If we have around 200 volumes over about 120 years, with a little division and subtraction we can place the 1880's somewhere in the 70-80 volume range. Let's order volumes 75-95 and have a look. We are going to need the call number title and publication year, so make a note of these. At Fondren, as at most other libraries, you can request items from storage through a web interface; here we will select the User Services option at the top of the page.
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You will notice that we are required to provide both the volume numbers and the years of publication. Because these are not provided for us we will enter the approximate volume numbers for the years we want and explain the possible discrepancy in the text box provided next to the word Notes.
Another way to find information in nineteenth century periodicals is to use an index such as 19th Century Masterfile (your institution needs to be a subscriber for you to search this resource). Unfortunately, Punch is not one of the journals indexed by this research tool, but many other sources--including the Times of London and the New York Times--are.
Punch
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Our calculations placed our period in a volume somewhere in the 70's to 80's range and upon inspection we find it in volume 88-89.
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Comparing Punch to The Egyptian Red Book
The Egyptian Red Book is, as you know, a collection of quotes from debates in Parliament and cartoons that express criticism of the British Government. Punch takes a different attitude toward its audience. It is important to note the differences between the two if we wish to know exactly what kind of works we are dealing with, what the intentions of their authors might have been and how the works may have impacted the attitudes of their intended audiences.
In the issue dated February 14, 1885, we find a poem and cartoon expressing profound sadness at Gordon's demise.
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By locating and reviewing the pages of a contemporary periodical we have broadened our understanding of the popular views of the events in the Sudan. We can now compare Punch with the Egyptian Red Book in our project to specify exactly what the Red Book is. By this we mean not only its style or presentation of the information, but also the political leanings of its authors, the demographic and political perspectives of its intended audience, and the possible purpose and goals of the publication in the existing political climate.
