by Josh Wood

For Blog Post 2 I decided that I wanted to learn more about Shay’s Rebellion. It was never touched on much when I was receiving my primary or secondary education which makes me feel as if I’m missing a key piece of information. I initially struggled with using the databases as I have never used them before (oops). After I finally figured it out, I came across a scanned copy of the book above Provided by the Digital Public Library of America and preserved by the University of Pennsylvania. The first thing that I noticed was that the book was published in 1788 one year after the end of Shays rebellion meaning this was a retrospective with a fresh point of view. However, unsurprisingly, the appearance of this book is anything but fresh. The pages, every single one of them, have yellowed considerably, and every single one of those yellowed pages has a unique set of stains as well.

As well as a plethora of unknown stains, the book’s pages are also dotted with droplets of ink. This small detail, while seeming innocuous, is incredibly cool in my opinion. This is because assumably each set of dots is unique to each individual book as they were all hand-pressed by a highly trained team of printers. Finally, the last thing that I found to be interesting on an aesthetic level was the use of the “long s” which is something that I never had any idea existed. Before doing some background research, I found myself incredibly confused as to why the printers would have used the letter f instead of an s as it kept causing me to misread words.

As it pertains to the content, I was disappointed to find out that Shay’s rebellion was only mentioned briefly. This unfortunately means I’m going to have to find information on It elsewhere. The information that was presented in the book while not being what I was looking for was however still interesting. It stated that the reason for its publication was to look back on the issues that caused upheaval within our new nation so that we can learn from them and keep it from happening again.

1787 Massachusetts Disqualification Act.

by Tabetha Judy

Originally, my online trip to the archives was pretty overwhelming. Each site that I checked out was packed with information and I had no idea where to begin. But I decided to stick with the Digital Public Library of America and found an easier way to sort through all of the information. On the website, they had sets of primary sources. So I headed there and found that there was an entire collection of primary texts from 1754 to the 1820s. I immediately noticed that there was a set dedicated to Shay’s Rebellion that caught my eye.

This is where I found out that Massachusetts passed a disqualification act in 1787. The act states that anyone who participated in Shay’s Rebellion could not serve as a juror. But through more research on this act, I learned that this went beyond not allowing participants in the Rebellion to be jurors. I learned that participants in the rebellion also lost their ability to vote, were not allowed to serve in town or state government, and were not allowed to go into certain professions for three years. Interestingly, a conditional agreement was created that if any participants pledged allegiance to the state after May 1,1788 then each disqualification in the act would be pardoned.

I did not find the actual text too difficult to read, with the exception of a few oddly spelled words (by our modern standards of course). But it was somewhat clear what the text was stating. I did find the layout of the text to be interesting, as it follows a column newspaper-like pattern. Originally, I found this layout to be a bit odd as from the image I saw, this did not appear to be clipped from a newspaper. But through some more online research, I found out that this did appear in the Daily Hampshire Gazette. It is still unclear if the layout of this act was purposely done for a newspaper, but this helped provide a possible explanation. I was unable to find the conditional agreement that would pardon each disqualification from the act. Which caused me to wonder if there was a separate act passed and how that information was communicated to the public.

This item felt like a perfect match as we just discussed the allusion to Shay’s Rebellion in The Contrast. I also remember us discussing in class how the population of those who were eligible to vote was incredibly small. This act provides even more context to that idea as virtually any government position was unattainable for rebellion participants or anyone who was not wealthy. As well as how voting was so exclusive at this time. I also found it interesting that pledging allegiance would pardon participants from these disqualifications. Since those involved in the rebellion were angry at the government and felt corruption was present in politics, I feel there were probably very few who agreed to those terms. I was unable to find how long this act was in effect or how many participants did agree to the conditions for a pardon which I feel would have made this even more interesting.

While I had some previous experience with digital archives, it was for an education course. So this experience was out of my wheel house and it took me a good bit to get the hang of looking for possible items on the suggested archive websites. The section dedicated to items from the time period for this course was very helpful and I feel I’ve gained a much better understanding of the implications of Shay’s Rebellion. This is a period of history that was often quickly passed over in my previous history courses so I enjoyed exploring the archives and learning more about this interesting act!