The Boston Athenaeum displays a digital collection, “Menus from Boston Hotels 1843-1865 ”, on their website. The basis of the collection appears thematic, geographic, and temporal in that all documents in the collection are menus (theme) from Boston (place) during the 19th century (time). While these documents at first appear private—once belonging to hotels and restaurants such as the Parker House and Young’s Cornhill Coffee House, or patrons of these establishments—further study reveals their relationship to what, in “The Power of the Archive and its Limits,” Achille Mbembe calls, “the general work of the state” (19). The fact that many of these menus originated in events such as the “Annual Dinner of the Common Council of the City of Boston” reveals one reason that some of these documents may have “fulfil[led] the criteria of ‘archivability’” (19). In fact, the archive description acknowledges these characteristics by stating that “some menus were for the general public, while others were printed for special private dinners held for groups of gentlemen or committees involved with government of the City of Boston.”

Items such as “Young’s Cornhill Coffee House Menu” reveal the movement of these objects from private to public possession—or “dispossession,” as Mbembe argues (20). The handwriting on the Young’s Cornhill Coffee House menu, which states the motto “Heart to heart, bold and true” and “Class of 1860,” recalls a (presumably now deceased) individual owner—demonstrates how the menu “ceased to belong to its author, in order to become property of society at large” and allow public accessibility. This movement or public repossession indicates the menus’ privileged statuses, a status I am always keenly aware of as a member of The Boston Athenaeum. Despite the public access to these documents, the athenaeum’s architecture, the ceramic busts in its halls, the location in Beacon Hill, and the very age of the institution announce a historical, patriarchal, and political status that seems to apply to every “archivably acceptable” document that the institution houses, including these menus. The menus belong to all of us and no one.

The description on the webpage of this collection addresses the status of the documents themselves in relation to their origin and physicality. Browsing through the menus, a viewer will observe that some menus are ornate while others are plain. Some are handwritten while others are printed (in black and white or color). The archive description implies that menus with “decorative printing in colored and metallic inks” or listings of “amazing bills of fare” have greater status, value, or (at least) difference by calling them “noteworthy.” The doily style menus are particularly arresting, some including figures of angels and filigree. These physical markings, and the original monetary investment institutions such as the National Lancers once made to create them, imply an economic and political privilege that The Boston Athenaeum upholds through the act of archiving, preserving, and publicly displaying the menus. These objects are granted the “privileged status” that’s material and narrative (Mbembe 20).

The archive description also reveals the “strategic position” of the archivist through the listing of both the collection’s financiers’ and curator’s names on the collection’s homepage. It is not until after digging down into the collection, clicking on the individual documents, a view will find the name of the original donor of the objects (“Gift; Ruth Thomas; Sept. 26, 1949.”) and names of individuals related to the institutions of the documents’ origins (e.g. Cornhill Coffee was “operated under the direction of Ora A. and Charles M. Taft until 1845”). The textual prominence of The Boston Athenaeum curator and donors’ names recalls Mbembe’s argument that “it is by the bias of this act of dispossession—this leaving out of the author—that the historian establishes his/her authority, and a society establishes a specific domain: the domain of things which, because shared, belong exclusively to no one (the public domain)” (25).

Lastly, to consider Jacques Derrida’s argument that “the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future,” the fact that The Boston Athenaeum archived these menus long before the collection was digitized is apparent in the medium of the collected objects (17). The collection includes only printed or handwritten documents on paper, which was then possible to scan. In fact, many of the other items in other collections archived at The Boston Athenaeum during the same period are reports, directories, and almanacs from various public agencies and community organizations. It’s either literally impossible or very unlikely that the collection could include audio, video, or 3D objects such as a swatch of the Parker House’s tablecloths. The knowledge that this archive of menus transmits to us has been “determined by a state of the technology of communication and of archivization” during the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Derrida 16). In this way, the “Menus from Boston Hotels 1843-1865” collection is limited to textual and pictorial knowledge about the “migrating ducks and shore bird species” that were common in the area, the printing presses used by the prestigious organizations, and the spaces that Beacon Hill’s rich and powerful would have inhabited during the 19th century. All else is lost to then uncollectable mediums.

The main questions I had when reviewing this collection were:

1. What criteria did menus regarding dinners of private groups have to meet in order to be included among menus from public agencies?
2. Is it even fair to think that a Parker House tablecloth or some ephemeral object from the Committee and Sub-Committees’ 4th of July celebration could have been archived from this time period (or in 1949, when the items were donated)? While I agree with Derrida’s argument that technology informs the structure of the archive, these considerations feel a little anachronistic.
3. If we were to consider Michel Foucault’s thoughts that “the archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events,” what does a group of menus say other than that groups of wealthy or politically powerful men ate extravagant meals at notable Boston hotels and restaurants (129)? Does the collection do more than affirm ye old Bostonian politics and patriarchy? In other words, in what “limited space of communication” do these menus operate (126)?