"Finding America's Commercial Vocabulary: Considering the Language of Advertising and Business through Longitudinal Computer-Aided Analysis"

This paper takes a longitudinal look at newspaper advertising to understand how business jargon changed over time. Using primarily open-access repositories, we compiled a sample set of approx. 2,000 American newspaper pages (containing about 40,000-60,000 advertisements) dating from 1750-1900. To account for regional distinctions, the sample set contains both African-American and mainstream (i.e. white-owned) publications, in both rural and urban locales in the eastern and mid-western US. We developed a Python script to crawl this dataset and locate keywords, adjusting the script to account for variations in typography and other idiosyncrasies. From this data, we have built an index of commercial vocabularies from the colonial period through the Gilded Age, cataloging the rise and fall of the language of respectability and character that dominated middle-class culture in the antebellum years. Printing technologies shifted both the look and content of advertising in these years, but consumer-focused appeals remained constant throughout the survey period. Merchants who emphasized exclusiveness, luxury, and variety in eighteenth century soon added demonstrations of their own status, couched in the coded language of the antebellum middle class. This data thus enables us to consider the contours of commercial language as it developed and shifted to accommodate increasing professionalization first in the cities, and then in semi-urban and rural areas across the eastern US. Preliminary analysis suggests that discursive shifts in language indicate the ways in which the business community responded to changes in American politics and culture at different paces and along segregated and often regional frameworks, while cultural prescriptions for etiquette and manners also influenced changing vocabularies in commercial speech, albeit at uneven and often surprising intervals.