Today’s blogger is Heidi Heller, a senior history major at Augsburg College. One of the interns with the Historyapolis Project, she will be a regular presence here in 2014.

It’s map Monday. Today we’re highlighting another item from the tower archives at Minneapolis City Hall. At the dawn of the atomic age, the city created this map–dividing the community into numbered districts– as part of its new campaign against tuberculosis. During the summer of 1947, a mobile x-ray unit visited each of these sectors and performed chest x-rays on most Minneapolitans. The hope was that this miraculous new technology would help the city identify residents with active and contagious tuberculosis.

For Minneapolis and other cities around the country, tuberculosis had long presented a public health problem with few effective treatments; doctors had relied on sanatoriums, which prescribed fresh air, sunshine, rest and healthy eating for patients. This changed dramatically in the 1940s, which brought major breakthroughs in understandings of disease transmission as well as new treatment methods, including chemotherapy and antibiotics. This freed up new resources for TB detection efforts.

In Minneapolis, the idea of large scale city-wide survey to detect and treat individuals with contagious tuberculosis had been discussed since the late 1930s. But the high cost of screening equipment presented a major barrier to implementing such a program. In 1947, the city was offered new support for this effort from the federal government; the U.S. Public Health Service organized and supported a large-scale x-ray program for cities over 100,000 people. Thanks to this program–and with help from the Hennepin County Medical Society, Hennepin County Tuberculosis Association, the Minnesota State Cancer Society, the Hennepin County Chapter of the American Red Cross and the Minnesota Department of Health–the Minneapolis Health Department finally had the financial means to undertake a large scale TB chest x-ray survey.

An extensive educational campaign was launched to inform the citizens about the program and the need to be screened. Eleven mobile units with portable 70 mm photofluorographic units were used to screen 306,020 individuals over 15 years of age (in a city with a population of about 500,000). These initial screenings identified 5977 people who required follow-up exams. By the end of the summer, the survey had identified 150 to 200 people with active TB.

The U.S. Public Health Service continued the x-ray screening program until 1953; approximately 20 million people were examined during this time. The effort was discontinued after 6 years because the mobile units were costly to operate. Also, as effective preventive and treatment methods increased, tuberculosis infections rates dropped allowing public health programs to shift their focus to more pressing health concerns.

Image is from the Minneapolis City Archives. Material for this post is taken from J. Arthur Myers, Invited and Conquered: Historical Sketch of Tuberculosis in MN (St. Paul: Webb Publishing Company, 1949), “A Century of Notable Events in TB Control,” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (Atlanta: CDC, 2000), William Roemmich, Francis J. Weber, Frank J. Hill and Lucille Amos ,“Preliminary Report on a Community-Wide Chest X-Ray Survey at Minneapolis, Minnesota,” Public Health Reports(1886-1970) 63, no. 40 (Oct. 1, 1948) 1285-1290.

Today’s blogger is Stewart Van Cleve, a graduate student in the program for Library and Information Science at St. Catherine University. The author of Land of 10,000 Loves: A History of Queer Minnesota, Stewart discovered the tower archives at Minneapolis City Hall when he was researching the history of gay sexuality in the city. He has joined forces with Historyapolis this month to illuminate the holdings of this forgotten cultural repository.

On a dusty shelf in the tower archives at Minneapolis City Hall sits a line of oversized leather volumes. These are the remnants of the city’s Bertillon ledgers, which served as the intake logs for the Minneapolis Department between 1907 to 1921.

Paris police clerk Alphonse Bertillon developed this system for identifying criminals in 1883. These photographs illustrate how the system was supposed to work. Officers were instructed to make an elaborate set of anthropomorphic measures of each suspect. The length and width of the head, the length of the right ear, the size of the feet and the length of the left, middle and little fingers were all recorded. Taken together, these measurements created an unique set of statistics. Each person on the planet–according to Bertillon–could be reduced to a set of body measurements which they shared with no one else.

The Bertillon system imposed an order to criminal classification and allowed police to discover the “real” identities of the people in their custody. It created a common language for police all over the world. The number sets could be shared–via telegraph–with other law enforcement officers. This global network was intended to prevent habitual criminals from slipping from one police jurisdiction to another without detection.

The Bertillon system was introduced in the United States in 1887 and immediately “became the distinguishing mark of the modern police organization,” criminologist Raymond Fosdick explained in 1915. It came to Minneapolis twenty years later. Until this time, the police had relied entirely on their “rogue’s gallery” of photographs to track suspects.

Once they adopted the Bertillon system, the Minneapolis police recorded body statistics as part of their intake procedure. In addition, they also wrote short details about their suspects—their race; their ethnicity; their age; their address; their behavior—and the crime: its location, its details, and sometimes its body count. The notes are possibly the most interesting and unique feature of the ledgers: intended as internal communication among officers, they offer insight into how the police saw the people they captured. Occasionally, officers even used the ledgers as scrapbooks; they pasted newspaper clippings about the crime on the back of the record.

In most cities, the Bertillon cabinet included photographs that may still reside somewhere in the city. Even without the accompanying photos, the Tower Archives’ Bertillon Collection is possibly one of the last of its kind.

The system never functioned in the way that Alphonse Bertillon envisioned. As the photographs here might suggest, the measurements were difficult to record with precision. In Figure 4, “operators” are instructed to “have the subject take the position indicated by the engraving on a firm solid bench. This position will force the most stupid or wiley person to place himself in a proper position so the measurement will be accurate.”

By the time of Bertillon’s death in 1914, most criminologists considered his system obsolete. “Its fundamental inferiority to the simpler, surer system of dactylosopy,” or fingerprinting, criminologist Fosdick declared, “makes inevitable its final downfall.” But the city maintained the ledgers until 1921.

A century after their creation, the Bertillon ledgers offer no scientific overview of crime in Minneapolis. But they do provide fascinating reading. Each entry is a tantalizing glimpse into the underworld of early twentieth century Minneapolis. In the days to come, we’ll share a selection of these entries with you.

Images are from Alix Muller and Frank Mead, History of the police and fire departments of the Twin Cities: their origin in early village days and progress to 1900 (Minneapolis: American Land & Title Register Association, 1899). This book is from the Minneapolis history collection at Hennepin County Library Special Collections.

It’s map Monday. Today we’re featuring another item from the Minneapolis City Archives, the hidden historical repository housed in the narrow tower at City Hall. Historyapolis is working to illuminate the importance of this archive’s holdings, which are known only to a handful of the most dedicated and knowledgeable researchers in the city.

This photograph shows a plate from the city’s 1912 Sanborn Maps. A thick volume of highly-detailed maps, Sanborn diagrams depict American cities in incredible detail. Created after the Civil War to help the insurance industry assess the fire risk for particular properties, Sanborn Maps are prized by a range of researchers today. They are a favorite documentary source for historians, genealogists, and planners, who use the maps to understand the evolution of the urban environment. Re-issued at regular intervals, Sanborn Maps provide fine-grained snapshots of American towns and cities at different moments in time.

This plate–which was photographed by Historyapolis volunteer Lisa Lynch–shows the intersection of First Avenue North and North 5th Street as it appeared in 1912. It has the trademark Sanborn color-coding, which indicates the building construction of the Cream of Wheat building and the West Hotel, two of the notable properties on this block. Additional annotations indicate property boundaries, building use, sprinkler systems and the employ of night watch men.

The Sanborn Map company has digitized its historic maps, which are available for use in a subscription database through the Hennepin County Library and the Minnesota Historical Society. But the digital versions do not include the color-coding that conveyed so much information. The set in the City Archives –which retains its original coloring and is absent of later annotation–is thus an invaluable historical source. Plus it’s just plain pretty, don’t you think?

Happy Passover! This Jewish holiday is traditionally celebrated with a seder. During this ceremonial meal, participants recount the story of how Jews were delivered from slavery thousands of years ago. This 1915 photo shows a seder in the Minneapolis home of Rabbi Silber, who led Congregation Kenesseth Israel during its early years. Silber is at the head of the table and his sons and daughters are seated on the right.

Photo is from the Upper Midwest Jewish Historical Archives through the Minnesota Digital Library.