A Priceless Archive of Ordinary Life

William Henry Dorsey was an information hoarder. An African American of means who lived in 19th-century Philadelphia, Dorsey suffered from a “malady” that afflicted others of his era: archive fever. He spent much of his long life—he was born in 1837 and died in 1923—clipping newspaper articles and pasting them into one or another of nearly 400 scrapbooks, organized by topic.   

Dorsey’s scrapbooks represent a bricolage of one man’s far-ranging interest in African American history and culture. He clipped articles mainly from northern newspapers, Black and white, including some extremely rare publications. The scrapbooks hold articles on Black emigration schemes, fraternal orders, actors, and centenarians who lived through slavery. Dorsey devoted one scrapbook to an 1881 North Carolina convention of Black Republicans, one of many such gatherings at which African Americans envisioned post-emancipation political futures. He devoted another scrapbook to lynchings, and several scrapbooks to Frederick Douglass. Dorsey’s work spans the esoteric and the everyday, and serves as an invaluable record of Reconstruction’s promise and failure, and the nation-changing journey of Black people from chattel to citizens.

Dorsey made the scrapbooks by hand. As his base material, he often used existing volumes or wallpaper books. He neatly pasted newspaper clippings or printed programs from community events atop the pages, frequently dating these palimpsests in his own hand. He sometimes bound pages together with crimson string that remains bright more than a century later.

In the fall of 1896, the Philadelphia published articles about two visits to Dorsey’s “humble dwelling” at 206 Dean Street. The reporter found a collector so consumed by the need to document Black history that he had transformed the top floor of his rowhouse into an “African museum.” Dorsey had amassed a prodigious library concentrating on Black achievement, along with a jumble of eclectica. Walls were hung with engravings, as well as a glass painting of the British Parliament, a mosaic of St. Peter’s Basilica, and paintings by Black artists (of such quality,