Chapter 2 of 8

CHAPTER TWOWhat a search result is

For seventy years the daily high and low in Palestine, Texas sat in the national weather table, in hundreds of American newspapers, between Oklahoma City and Pensacola. Every one of those lines is a page that a search for Palestine will find.

So before counting anything, ask what a result actually is. Thirty pages per decade were drawn from 1890 to 1963, at random positions in the Chronicling America result set for the single word palestine — 210 drawn, 203 readable, each one read and coded twice by two people working separately. This is a sample of the American press, not of this archive.

64 are false matches. Palestine, Texas. East Palestine, Ohio, whose porcelain workers’ union printed its meeting room and its secretary’s street address every week. New Palestine, Indiana, where someone sold week-old ducklings for twenty cents. Palestine Commandery No. 5, Knights Templar. A West Dixie League score: Shreveport 2, Palestine 2, tie. A tax list in which a woman named Palestine Copes owed $10.34.

44 are a real place in the past tense — Sunday-school lessons on sandals and foot-washing, King Edward I putting off a crusade, Maimonides traveling by way of Palestine to Cairo.

35 name the country and are about something else. Palestine between Piraeus and Alexandria in a shipping manifest. Palestine beside South Africa in a newspaper’s own subscription rate box. Palestine as the ninth clue down in a crossword. Palestine as a man’s posting twenty years earlier, in a Washington state election story. Palestine as the setting of novels by an English writer who had never left England. A radio listing: 6:30, Palestine Appeal Dinner, WFBM.

Before 1910 the subtraction takes nearly everything. Of 57 hits in those two decades, 53 are a weather table, a sermon or an aside. Four passages are about Palestine as a place where people were then living. None of the four reports a death.

Which means a search returning 23,972 pages for the 1940s is not 23,972 pages about Palestine. Reading hit counts as coverage inflates the record more than threefold across the span, and by roughly fourteenfold before 1910 — worst exactly where the record is thinnest and the temptation to claim an early silence is strongest.

Of the 60 passages that are about Palestine, politics takes 63% — the mandate, partition, Zionism, the UN. Violence takes 18%. Ordinary life — work, school, farming, a court, a crop — takes 7%: a juvenile probation service needed in Jerusalem, the start of the agricultural year, vocational schools being set up, and a note that the United States had more doctors a head than any country except Palestine, because refugee physicians had arrived faster than patients.

The 203 pages come from 119 different newspapers, and the early stretch, where the subtraction is sharpest, draws on sixty-nine of them. It is not one paper’s habits.

None of this says the American press ignored Palestine. It says that most of what a search for the word returns was never about the place, and that the proportion changes by decade. Any number on this page that came from a search — including the ones below — is a count of pages where a phrase appears, not of stories, and not of events.

This research is still being worked through. Every count drawn from the archive is recomputed from the records each time the page is built, and every figure from outside it is printed with the query that produced it. Where a finding has changed, the correction is printed beside it rather than quietly swapped in. More of it is still being checked, and some of it will move.