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The "Giants of Olden Times" Stories in 19th Century America: A Progress Report

5/22/2015

8 Comments

 
As anyone who knows me and/or follows this blog might have guessed, I am in the midst of assembling (yet another) database relevant to understanding the "giants" phenomenon that emerged in 19th century America.  I'm currently collecting examples of printings of what I call "Giants of Olden Times" stories, a handful of similar stories that contain listings of accounts of various European giants.  These stories were reprinted time and time again during the "giants" craze of the mid- to late-1800s, and I would like to understand if and how these stories were related to the reporting of "giant skeletons."  I've spent the better part of the last two days compiling information about the printings of the "Giants of Olden Times" stories (you're welcome), and I've noticed a few interesting things that I'd like to pass on.  There are still more data to collect and lots of analysis to do, so this is preliminary.

First, a quick recap.  On May 10, Jason Colavito wrote this post
about a mid-1700s address by Claude-Nicolas Le Cat to the Academy of Sciences at Rouen. I recognized many of the descriptions of "giants" in Le Cat's address from my stumblings through 19th century American newspapers: portions of his address, copied from somewhere, had been incorporated into stories that were circulated and re-circulated during the later half of the 1800s.  As I wrote in this post, the earliest versions of the story that I could find dated to the mid-1840s and seemed to associate the listing of European giants with a lecture by Benjamin Silliman, Jr., a Yale chemistry professor.  In this post, Jason worked on tracking down what may have been the origins of the story, showing how Silliman's name may have been attached (presumably by a reporter/editor somewhere) to a story with a listing of giants that was already in circulation in the 1840s.  The original giants story probably originated with someone copying a portion of Le Cat's address out of an encyclopedia or other available source (the address was also printed in a Maryland newspaper in 1765 as well as other places). As the hybrid story was passed on and mutated, Silliman's name became welded to those of the giants.  Many of the giants suffered great indignity as the accumulation of copying error transformed their original names into nonsense.  The grand, 25' tall Theutobochus Rex, for example, had become known as Keutolochus Sex by the time the story was printed in Idaho in 1871.  More on that later.

So, three days and many hours later, I've got enough data on these "Giants of Olden Times" stories to recognize some patterns.  I've compiled about 220 printings of the stories so far (there are probably three of four "main" versions) dating from 1842 to 1905.  I'm recording the date, the newspaper, the state, and the occurrence/spellings of several of the names in the stories as well as several key dates associated with the giants.  The errors in the stories are interesting to me because they, along with information about space and time, will help track how the stories were spread through time and across space (like mutations in DNA).  Understanding the mechanisms and patterns of spread will be relevant to understanding the "giants" phenomenon in general, I think.  And it will also potentially shed light on how information flowed during a really interesting period of demographic, social, and technological change in the United States.  For now, though, I just wanted to take a quick look at some temporal and spatial dimensions of the data I've collected so far.
Picture
Time

The top part of the figure to the right shows the counts of the printings of the "Giants of Olden Times" stories by decade.  You can see that the distribution of the stories across the decades of the late 19th century is not uniform.  After the first printings of the story in the 1840s (the first "peak") there is a lull in the 1850s followed by a large number of printings in the late 1860s and early 1870s.  You can't see it in this view of the data, but  there is a strong peak from October of 1868 to June of 1870.  Note that the peak starts prior to the "discovery" of the Cardiff giant  (and perhaps reflects the context of the interest in giants that spurred the creation of the hoax) and drops off soon after it was revealed as a fake (in December of 1869).  There is an apparent lull in the printing of the stories in the 1880s, followed by a strong peak in the 1890s.  I have found just a few re-printings of of the stories after 1900.

The bottom part of the figure shows the bars representing re-printings of the "Giants of Olden Times" stories placed within my data of the number of reports of "giant skeletons" in my current database.  Note the general similarity in the shape of the upswing curves. And note also that the reports of giant skeletons drop precipitously after 1910-1919, a couple of decades after newspapers apparently stopped printing stories with listings of European giants.

Space

Printings of the "Giants of Olden Times" stories were not randomly distributed across the county.  The map below shows the counts (in red) by state in the data I've accumulated so far.  A histogram of the number of re-printings by state shows most states with less than six.  Nine states have six or more (shaded in the map below). With the exception of California, those states form a kind of "Giant Stories" belt stretching from the east coast into the Great Plains. This is the region of the country where these stories were printed over and over again.
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There are several possible reasons, of course, for the spatial distribution of the re-printings of the "Giants of Olden Times" stories that may have nothing to do with giants.  The distribution may have something to do with the distribution of newspapers (there were more newspapers in California than in Wyoming, for example) and population.  And it may have something to do with the sampling of newspapers I'm using.  Those are things that can be checked.  I don't think that they will fully explain the distribution, however - I think it is actually reflecting, at least in part, something to do with geographic interest in "giants."  And it may be related to where the skeletons of "giants" were actually being reported.  And those two things are presumably inter-connected somehow.
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Giant Stories vs. Giant Skeletons

Are the "Giants of Olden Times" stories connected to reports of giant skeletons? I plotted the number of re-printings of the "Giants of Olden Times" stories vs. the number of reports of giants by state  that I have in my current database.  The top chart shows all the data I have so far.  Two things are notable: first, the points on the left side of the chart appear to show a possible positive relationship between the number of story re-printings and the number of accounts of giant skeletons being unearthed; second, there are several outliers on the right side of the chart that don't appear to fit that relationship.  I've located 43 re-printings of the "Giants of Olden Times" stories in Kansas newspapers, for example, but only five reports of giant skeletons from that state.  North Carolina newspapers also loved the "Giants of Olden Times" story, but the state just didn't produce that many giant accounts (at least not that I've seen so far).

If I remove those outliers, a linear, positive relationship becomes easier to see (bottom chart).  The R square is 0.69, with a p value of <0.0001. The strength of the result decreases to an R square of 0.40 if I remove Ohio (the point at the upper right), but is still statistically significant.
With just these values, in other words, it doesn't look like this relationship is just by coincidence: places where the story ran more often are places where there were more reports of giant skeletons.

But the identification of this correlation doesn't tell us which way the causal arrow(s) point.  Did re-printing these stories "cause" people to report giant skeletons?  Or did the finding of "giant" skeletons stir up public interest and prompt newspaper editors to re-print the "Giants of Olden Times" stories?  Or both? That's going to be a tricky thing to understand, but I think it may be possible to figure out it.  The great thing about the newspaper accounts is that they are all dated, so it will eventually be possible to understand the temporal ordering of events.  It will also be possible using GIS to factor both time and space into an analysis and frame it in terms of the changing technology of media communication.  This is great problem and will take some time to deal with, but I think it is probably solvable.  And I think it will ultimately be an important part of the puzzle of "giants" in 19th century America.

8 Comments
J M
5/22/2015 05:59:52 am

Hi Andy, are you taking any and all giant skeleton reports into account for this data collection or only the accounts listed in newspaper articles? The reason I ask is because after reading this post, it makes me wonder if the release of the Smithsonion's Bureau of Ethnology Reports in the mid 1880's and early 1890's could possibly come into play here? The BAE digs did report on a few 7' - 7 1/2' skeletons during that time in the late 1800's. If I'm not mistaken one of those was in North Carolina. Totally could have sparked news papers to report on such things for reasons of public interest in an attempt to sell news papers.

Reply
Andy White
5/22/2015 06:20:59 am

Hi J M,

This is preliminary, so I'm just going with what is in my database in the moment. Right now, that doesn't include the Smithsonian reports (I haven't been through them yet), so it's mostly newspapers with a few county histories. I think the timing and contents of the Smithsonian reports may be important, especially to understanding the tail end of the "giants" phenomenon. I can tell you by looking at my database of the "Giants of Olden Times" stories that a good number (12) from North Carolina pre-date 1880. I still have no clue why Kansas newspapers loved giants so much.

Reply
JM
5/22/2015 07:59:07 am

Here is a Google book link to the North Carolina Bureau of Ethnology account that I was thinking of. It's also worth mentioning that the BAE's twelfth annual report, published in 1894, was also the final report regarding the mound explorations performed by the Smithsonian...so on the flip side, it could also fit into why giant skeleton talk slacked off after that, because most of the mound exploration in this country came to a screeching halt...with which giant skeletons reports had been closely associated with. Just some hunches after seeing your graphs there.

https://books.google.com/books?id=mZwYFhr_DFAC&pg=PA335&lpg=PA335&dq=Bureau+of+Ethnology+12th+annual+report+%22squatter%22&source=bl&ots=czYUZWFFmV&sig=6xAAstSndHOMQjFLSRC87KPkWeo&hl=en&sa=X&ei=IaBfVebwFK7IsQSrp4HYBQ&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Bureau%20of%20Ethnology%2012th%20annual%20report%20%22squatter%22&f=false

Reply
Tom Mohr
5/25/2015 05:24:45 am

Hi Andy,
Are you able to cite your Ontario sources? Are they finds, or just reporting of American "Giants of Olden Times" stories?

Reply
Andy White
5/25/2015 11:38:28 pm

Hi Tom,

Those are just printings of the story in Ontario: 1845 (Ottawa Free Trader); 1868 (Ottawa Free Trader); 1887 (Ottawa Journal); 1891 (Ottawa Journal). I don't yet have any reports of "giant skeletons" from Ontario.

Reply
David L Ulrich
10/14/2015 01:00:13 pm

great for some reading......nothing like a 1500 and counting newspaper stories and photography

https://www.createspace.com/5616874

Giants on Record
America's Hidden History, Secrets in the Mounds and the Smithsonian Files

Authored by Jim Vieira, Hugh Newman
Foreword by Ross Hamilton

<<<he has collated over 1500 newspapers and scholarly accounts of giant skeletons being found in North America and around the world>>>>

Reply
Wade (The Poorman)Krause
4/19/2018 01:23:01 pm

I am from Wisconsin and these Graves are every were, there not just a mound they are perfectly flat on top, and slope down at a angle. They were very much respected in creating. If you read genius you soon will find that the Bible is such a small part of the world and alot of it was written by man not jesus, some times people do the right thing to get away with the wrong thing. (Be good to everyone) they say people in the south ran them in to caves but when they found a giant burned to death it was only one, then they said god took the rest, they were expert miners so I would have to say we are not out of the dark yet with them, so understand them learn, remember there were good ones just like us, I was a giant to my kids once, still to my cat or dog, lizard and they love me. Respect comes when given. Thanks

Reply
Jeffrey Gedney
11/17/2019 07:28:00 pm

There are hundreds of articles from the New York Times in the mid 1800’s to the early 1900’s of farmers digging up giant skeletons from 7-11 ft tall while farming their land, in each article the Smithsonian institution is mentioned in taking the bones of these giants and somehow they are nowhere to be found, it appears to be covered up because it goes against the whole theory of evolution they promote, things are supposed to be getting bigger and better, not smaller, it is a total lack of integrity in the education field

Reply



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