Ads

Advertisements (ads) can be lots of fun to read. We learn what movies were shown, what kinds of clothes were for sale in stores, what kinds of foods were sold and how much things cost. An auction is a sale where people tell the person in charge, called an auctioneer, what they want to pay. If someone else wants the same thing, they offer to pay more. This is called bidding. Each article is sold to the person who bids the most. Sometimes, before an auction, an auction house will put a list of everything being sold in the newspapers. If the auction is held after someone died, this could be a list of almost everything the person owned. These lists tell us what kinds of furniture, dishes and household goods people had.

We can even find out how people's ideas about health have changed by looking carefully at ads. For example, ads for vitamins or tonics used to show thin women as unhealthy. These ads promised to make women plump. Today, women are more likely to want to be thin.

Old newspapers have lots of ads telling mothers to give laxatives to their children. Here is one example that was published in some St. John's newspapers in 1923:

Mother! Child's best laxative is "California Fig Syrup."

When baby is constipated, has wind, colic, feverish breath, coated- tongue or diarrhea, a half-teaspoon of genuine "California Fig Syrup" promptly moves the poisons, gasses, bile, souring food and waste right out. Never cramps or over acts. Babies love its delicious taste.

Today, we almost never give laxatives to children. If we wanted to know why these ads were in the papers, we would have to ask about what foods children ate, and the ideas mothers had about health and illness. If children did not eat enough fresh fruits and vegetables, constipation may have been a real problem. But it seems as if the makers of this laxative wanted mothers to believe that the digestion of food could be dangerous to babies. To find out what mothers thought, we would need other kinds of information. Maybe we could interview older women. But these ads give us a whole new way of looking at, and thinking about, one small part of the past.