" . . . whether we like it or not, eBay's made it easier than ever to consume history."

Consuming History?
Molly McCarthy

Part I | II | III

Don't get me wrong. All of this eBay cheerleading does not mean we should be uncritical of its faults or unconcerned about the trends it may encourage. Fraud, for example. Six-figure fakes may make headlines, but they aren't the only frauds on eBay. One archivist witnessed bogus Salem trial testimony put up for sale. A museum curator spotted a Maxwell House coffee can classified as "vintage" when it was an obvious reproduction. And eBay's not like the local antique shop. You can't pick up the item, smell it, feel it. Photos are nice, but they can't substitute for the real thing. Some curators say they just don't trust the descriptions offered by sellers. They'd rather not participate than risk being burned.

In their defense, eBay executives say that only a small fraction of the house's auctions go bad. About 5 million items are listed on eBay every day--more than 50 million in the second quarter of 2000 alone. Of those listings, about one in 40,000 results in an insurance claim, according to eBay's spokesman Kevin Pursglove. "The statistics speak for themselves. Chances are you are going to have a positive trading experience," Pursglove said.

Price--alongside authenticity--is another sore spot for eBay skeptics. Yet again, it's not the issue grabbing headlines that is of greatest concern to scholars. When the F.B.I. opened an investigation of shill bidding on eBay, few historians shuddered. Employing or recruiting shills to bid up prices may occur in auctions for the higher-end items like fine art or vintage cars. But it seems an awful lot of trouble for the more measly two-figure sums that many goods of greater interest to scholars command. Yet prices on eBay can reach the sky without the use of shills. Just try bidding against someone you know is an avid collector and your efforts begin to feel futile. Often, resource-starved non-profits just can't afford to compete with an enthusiast's deep pockets.

In this charged, competitive atmosphere, surfing eBay becomes, for many historians, a schizophrenic pursuit. As professionals, we tell ourselves we're pursuing history on eBay. Our participation is simply an extension of our scholarly mission. And what about all the other bidders? They are consuming history, in the dual sense of the word: buying it up, and using it up. They are the ones glued to PBS's Antiques Roadshow. They are the ones scouring the attic for family heirlooms that might fetch a good price online. And, yes, they are most undoubtedly the ones who prevented you from acquiring that one item essential to your next book project. With such rhetorical gymnastics, we eBay-addicted scholars work to separate ourselves from eBay's "rabble."

But of course, scholars too, are consumers. Our interests--whether for scholarly or other ends--are encouraging this online buying frenzy as much as collectors' are. We may pursue an auctioned object with an eye toward including it in an exhibition or discussing its significance in an academic journal, rather than displaying it on our parlor shelf. Nonetheless, we also inflate its monetary value.

And, whether we like it or not, eBay's made it easier than ever to consume history. It has opened up the market for historical objects, large and small, and brought with it a dark side. Imagine people prowling public library shelves, county offices, or parish archives for records or books they could turn into quick cash online. It may sound like a stretch, but historians have reported seeing church records that go missing from the local parish mysteriously show up on eBay. And there was a recent case in Anderson County, Tennessee, in which county records were put up for auction on eBay. Luckily, someone alerted the county historian, who "won" the records back. Elizabeth O'Leary, a guest curator at Maymont Foundation, a historic house museum in Richmond, Va., uses eBay to collect images and housewares for an exhibition on domestic life in a Gilded Age mansion. She admits feeling a pang of guilt each time she sees an advertisement on eBay she knows has been torn from an old periodical. "The scholar in me hates that these journals like Harper's have been cannibalized for their ads ... but I just love that I can pull it up and look at it," said O'Leary.

Before we end the historical (hysterical?) hand wringing, there is one more trend worth mentioning: eBay has become a convenient dumping ground for material libraries are eager to toss. Even though the general public is not likely to gasp at this development, it may bring a chill to many in the historical and library professions. In a recent article in the New Yorker, novelist Nicholson Baker shined a bright and disturbing light on the long-running, if rarely publicized, tendency of repositories including the British Library and the Library of Congress to discard (or de-accession in library lingo) bound volumes of newspapers that have been microfilmed. Although eBay was not Baker's target, he did mention finding there a 1908 volume of the Panama City Star & Herald that had once belonged to the Library of Congress. At about the same time Baker's essay appeared, the Milwaukee Public Library announced it would sell more than 3,000 bound volumes of its British patents collection on eBay to free up yards of needed shelf space. EBay officials say there is little they can do about such uses of their venue. "As long as the sellers are the legal owners of the merchandise, the item can be sold on eBay," explained Pursglove.

All told, the charges lodged against eBay sound grave: peddling fakes, inflating prices, putting history up for sale, and encouraging the pillaging of library shelves. But the long-term impact of these trends may be as difficult to gauge as the future of the Internet itself. Many historians say they will continue to peruse eBay's offerings despite the obvious dangers of forgeries and high prices. As with any purchase, the best policy is "buyer beware," O'Leary said. And, when it comes to the over-heated collectors' market, is eBay really to blame?

After all, eBay, based in San Jose, Calif., has only been around since 1995, while these trends have been happening for decades or longer. EBay itself is simply a new venue for an old addiction--collecting. Many of the great libraries and research archives in the United States began with a personal passion for owning the past. The Huntington Library, the American Antiquarian Society, even the Library of Congress were built on the foundation of personal collections: those of Henry E. and Arabella D. Huntington, Isaiah Thomas, and Thomas Jefferson, respectively. "Private collectors have been consuming history, in the U.S. at least, for easily 200 years, which has made amassing a public manuscript collection of certain time periods and historical figures a very difficult, and expensive proposition," wrote one curmudgeonly curator by e-mail. "This trend predates eBay, the Antiques Roadshow, the computer, the television …. I think that any hypothesis that postulates that eBay is somehow significantly new, or significantly alters the existing trend is just another inane byproduct of Internet über-hype."

To be sure, collecting is an ancient pursuit. But eBay has changed the landscape of collecting and scholarship in some key ways. It has transformed the way many historians do research. Take, for instance, Priscilla Brewer, associate professor of American Studies at the University of South Florida. Brewer is currently chair of her department and, thus, has found it difficult to get to archives in the Northeast to examine college yearbooks, student scrapbooks, letters, college brochures, and other ephemera for a project on student life at American women's colleges. Because she was "desk bound," she decided to begin sniffing online for material. She is amazed at the success she has had. "The material I'm finding on eBay is similar to antiquarian book shops. If I had the time to go to bookstores all over the world I might have amassed the same amount. But there is a minor revolution in terms of scale," she said. "I check eBay every day from the office. I now consider it part of my research program." Brewer's greatest find, acquired online at an antiquarian book site, is a collection of student letters that had been owned by a book shop in Sydney, Australia.

Never before have scholars had this kind of reach from their homes. And some historians, uninitiated to collecting, have slipped by necessity into this exciting and often addictive pursuit. Indeed, scholars working in less traditional fields of study--in popular culture, for example--find eBay more valuable than most archival collections. The material they study simply is not found in libraries. Psyche Williams Forson is finishing up a dissertation on African American foodways. She scours eBay for advertisements that "herald the stereotype of 'chicken loving darkies'" and postcards or objects that depict African Americans in "compromising, bedeviling positions with chicken." Forson, of the University of Maryland, College Park, said she is even more interested in how the sellers characterize these images as "cute," "hilarious," or "wonderful."

EBay also offers a stash of great teaching tools. Ilana Nash, who teaches courses on youth culture in the American Studies department at Bowling Green State University, has found "real treasures (on eBay) that are quite literally not findable anywhere else." She uses the items she wins on eBay for her own projects and teaching. "When scholars use eBay to find scarce items which they then incorporate into their work, they are establishing a body of knowledge that will grant historical legitimacy to the objects," Nash said. "Thanks largely to eBay, there will someday, hopefully, be respected academic discourses in subjects that are currently scorned or severely under-studied."

A boon for scholars like Brewer and Nash, for curators, eBay's impact has been mixed. Some say they can't afford to bid on eBay items and generally do not trust the accuracy of the item descriptions. At the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library in Delaware, curators adhere to an informal policy to acquire materials only on approval and that is difficult to do on eBay, where sellers may be reluctant to accept returns. Others, such as O'Leary, are more enthusiastic and perhaps more creative about plumbing eBay's riches. Like Brewer, O'Leary says eBay gives her a broader reach. "Whereas Richmond, Va. materials (today I purchased a liquor merchant's price list, 1911) are available and inexpensive in distant states, they are almost non-existent in the immediate region," O'Leary said. Even when she can borrow such items from a local history museum, she added, "reproduction and permission fees far exceed [the cost of] actually acquiring artifacts" on eBay.

Those curators logging the greatest success on eBay tend to be those acquiring artifacts or materials for the last century. At the Minnesota Historical Society, Supervising Curator Patty Dean has used eBay to help develop the museum's rock & roll and furniture and design collections. Kevin Hearle, a scholar of American literature, has purchased yearbooks and other Steinbeck-related ephemera for the Steinbeck Research Center at San Jose State University. At the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, Curator Debra Hughes has found items related to the DuPont Company and acquired artifacts to furnish a 1925-era kitchen.

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