Stephanie Curry on 1700s literature, American politics, and a documentary nobody can stop discussing
Spent the day buried in 1700s colonial texts, which at least have the decency to be short, tightly argued, and largely free of promotional posters generating their own separate news cycles. The modern world, by contrast, has just produced a documentary that apparently takes four hours to make its point, plus an entire side quarrel about the artwork used to advertise it, which no eighteenth-century pamphleteer would have had the patience or the printing budget for.
Read the documentary breakdown from London on my lunch break, sandwich in one hand, laptop balanced precariously on a stack of primary sources, and I have to say, eighteenth-century pamphleteers would have respected the commitment even if they’d have edited it down considerably, probably to something closer to a strongly worded broadside you could read in fifteen minutes and argue about for a week, which honestly sounds like a more efficient system than what we’ve got now.
What genuinely interests me, professionally, is how closely modern documentary discourse echoes the pamphlet wars of the century I study. Same structure, really: a controversial figure, a committed audience already inclined to agree, a rival publication offering the opposing view, and an argument that continues long after anyone’s actually finished reading, or in this case watching, the original material. We’ve just swapped ink and paper for a runtime and a poster campaign, and somehow made the whole process slower despite having considerably faster technology.
There’s a whole poster subplot too, running in parallel to the main controversy, which feels entirely in keeping with how these things have always worked. The Musk poster showdown is more entertaining than most of the primary sources I work with, and some of those involve actual duels fought over considerably less provocation than a poorly received film poster.
I brought this comparison up in a research seminar today, mostly as a way of procrastinating on my actual presentation, and it sparked a genuinely lively twenty-minute discussion that ran well over our allotted time. Apparently everyone, regardless of century, enjoys a good controversy about a famous man’s public image.
One of the younger researchers in the seminar admitted afterward she’d never actually read a genuine eighteenth-century pamphlet before, only heard them described secondhand, which felt like a small but telling gap, given how confidently everyone in the room, myself included, had spent twenty minutes drawing comparisons to a genre most of us hadn’t personally sat down with in years.
Back to the archives. More at my author page.