Reading Clothes, Hair Styles, Architecture, and More

Randall Stephens

I'm teaching a course this semester on American history from 1783-1865. I'd like to introduce the students more to everyday life than I have in previous years. So, I'm asking questions like: How did Americans behave, dress, eat, live, work, worship, and play? What can we learn from reading the material culture and the manners of, say, the Early Republic or the Age of Jackson?

A look at Jack Larkin's excellent The Reshaping of Everyday Life: 1790-1840 (Harper, 1989) seemed like a good place to start. The book is part of a series that examines the intimate and public lives of Americans in a given period. I read a couple of short passages to the class on Thursday. For example, Larkin says this of how Americans were greeting each other in the Jacksonian period:

Shaking hands became the accustomed American greeting between men, a gesture whose symmetry and mutuality signified equality. The Englishman Frederick Marryat found in 1835 that it was 'invariably the custom to shake hands' when he was introduced to Americans, and that he could not carefully grade the acknowledgment he would give to new acquaintances according to their signs of wealth and breeding. He found instead he had to 'go on shaking hands here, there and everywhere, and with everybody.'

All this will overlap nicely with a book that the class is reading--Leo Damrosch's wonderfully entertaining and insightful Tocqueville's Discovery of America (FSG, 2010). In Damrosch's telling Tocqueville was quite sensitive to the styles, cultural peculiarities, and attitudes of the Americans he encountered in his trek across the country in 1831 and 1832.

I have been doing some searches on-line for websites and resources for the teaching of material culture. I wonder if their is a one-stop site that would include bibliographies and short summaries of what material culture and style can tell us about a given era? What can we know about American men over the decades by looking at changes in facial hair? (That topic would certainly lend itself to an interactive graphic.) Or, as one student asked me several years ago: Why did men have outrageous mustaches and lambchops--like cats and walruses--in the 1850s-1870s and why did so few have the same in the 1920s and 1930s? I don't really know. For those later decades, maybe faces were supposed to look like the fronts of streamlined trains. What can we learn about men and women, children and adults, in the Jacksonian period by looking at the clothes they wore? How might we compare those styles with ones from today? Can we speak about the democratization of architecture, speech, or, as Larkin writes, physical greetings?

Students seem to have fun with these kinds of topics. I do as well, though, I know little about them. So . . . if anyone out there knows of some on-line resources to get at these kinds of material culture and cultural history questions, please let us know.

Stonewall, the Mafia, History, and Teaching

Heather Cox Richardson

A week or so ago, a group of high school sophomores asked me what the Stonewall Riots were. I could give the basic survey answer: 1969, New York, the spark for the gay liberation movement. The basics. But my young friends wanted to know more. What, exactly, happened, and why?

We went to the internet to poke around. And there, on some basic website, we found a throwaway line that went something like: “although the Stonewall Inn was owned by the Mafia . . .”

This was certainly news to me, so I wrote to ask Jennifer Fronc, author of New York Undercover, about it. She studies moral policing in communities and law, so I figured she might know why the Mafia owned a gay bar. She did. She answered:

The Stonewall Inn, and most gay bars in NYC at the time, were, in fact, owned by the Mafia (or at least petty criminals of Italian-American descent). The reason that they owned them was purely as a business venture--not out of some sense of civil rights or justice. The New York State Liquor Authority had very strict codes about dress and conduct in public houses, and you could easily lose your liquor license if your patrons did not abide by those codes. So, in the case of gay bars, the codes that affected the patrons were no same-sex kissing, touching, or dancing, and your patrons were required to wear 5 articles of clothing that corresponded with their biological sex (this was targeting drag queens but ended up nailing dykes much harder). So, what started happening is the cops would raid gay bars and frisk/strip search the patrons to make sure they were wearing the right clothes. Bar owners couldn't afford to pay off the police or get back their licenses after raids like this, so the mafia stepped in and started running the gay bars and paying off the local cops….

The Stonewall Inn was a frequent target of those raids, and there are 2 theories as to why they rioted that night, which was like any other: 1. they were just fed up and 2. the memorial service for Judy Garland had been earlier that night, and the men were drunker than usual. Although it was allegedly a tough dyke who threw the first punch at the cops.

For contemporary newspaper clippings, she sent me to an online exhibit at Columbia University:

This is, itself, one of those great connections in history (like Elvis and Nixon) that make it possible to survive January in New England. But it also raises for me two other issues.

First, it indicates the importance of a renewed historiographical interest in societal systems. In this case, the New York code dictating dress in public had huge implications for gay culture, suggesting that we must understand the legal codes in order to understand what happened at Stonewall. That code also clearly had big economic repercussions for business owners, suggesting that we cannot understand discrimination without looking closely at the economic systems with which it is intertwined.

There is a strong tendency among historians of America to see legal history, economic history, political history, and the study of similar systems as old-fashioned and reactionary, but it seems to me the very opposite is true. We can’t understand most aspects of social history completely without these systems factored in.

Second, the fact these high school students came to a neighbor who teaches history for information on Stonewall speaks to this blog’s on-going discussion of teaching. They asked me about Stonewall because they have a teacher who always has the answer to everything. They figured out in the first two days that she was often wrong, and their education has taken a fascinating turn. Rather than being turned off to history, the students have made it a game to learn everything better than she knows it. (The Stonewall question apparently came up when she tried to tell them that the “Stonewall Riots” had something to do with Stonewall Jackson.) Had she assigned them an essay on Stonewall, they likely would have grumbled and done as little as possible. But since they were doing it for themselves, they took their own time to find answers, and they didn’t stop with the job half done.

While making things up to drive students to try to embarrass us is hardly a model for how to teach, it does suggest that our job is less to have all the answers than to have enough answers just to whet curiosity, and then to make sure our students know how to keep learning. This, curiously enough, is the conclusion of a new study on learning conducted at the University of California.

[Thanks to Jennifer Fronc for her information, and for letting me post from her email.]

An Interview with Jacqueline Riding on Mid-Georgian Britain

Randall Stephens

Jacqueline Riding is a historian and consultant who is completing her PhD in 18th-century British art and culture. She served as the curator at the Theatre Museum, the Guards Museum, the Tate, the Palace of Westminster, and was founding Director of the Handel House Museum in London. Her Mid-Georgian Britain, “the latest addition to the growing Living Histories series, charts the growth of the empire and looks at the growing importance of London as a capital city where the rich and poor rubbed shoulders. Jacqueline Riding creates a vivid portrait of the daily reality of life for a middle-class family in this age of growing affluence.”* Ever wonder what life was like in an 18th-century city? How did people eat, work, and play? What did they think about the world around them? Riding's concise, immensely entertaining book gives a snapshot of an amazing, vanished world.

Randall Stephens: Your book, Mid-Georgian Britain is a readable, fascinating account of life in the 18th century. Did your own work as a curator and scholar of art and culture influence how you composed the book?

Jacqueline Riding: Thank you very much. The basic chapter structure and length were set out by the publishers, although I did change a few of the headings. For example I think “Charity and Citizenship” is a key theme of the period and I have done a lot of work on the Foundling Hospital (my PhD is on an artist, Joseph Highmore, who donated a history painting to the charity). So I changed the chapter heading accordingly. The tight word length meant I had to be disciplined and the text feels pithy and quite fast-paced, which I like. It was important to stop worrying that so much inevitably gets left out. Even so, some of the themes were out of my comfort zone (dental pelicans anyone?!). So I learned something new too. Word length permitting, I was keen to show contrasts and find unusual facts or opinions rather than trot out the usual Georgian suspects. Having said that I could not resist Dr. Johnson. I think my background in curatorship means I think of an historical period in 3D—a case in point was recreating Handel’s house in Mayfair. I believe it is important not to be confined by a particular academic discipline, to study an historical period in the round. One of the benefits of being an art historian is that you know your way around a picture library, so I was very eager to get really good quality images. Ultimately, if I gave an interesting snap shot of the period, which encourages people to look further and even visit some of the locations mentioned, then I've done my job.

Stephens: Could you say something about how the London of the early 21st century differs from the London of, say, the 1750s?

Riding: Well, if they thought it was big in the mid-eighteenth century, they should see it now . . .

Stephens: Throughout Mid-Georgian Britain you quote a host of contemporary authors. Do you have a favorite character/author from that period?

Riding: It would have to be William Hogarth. He’s quite simply a hero, a real London bruiser with a heart made of putty.

Stephens: You include sections in the book on “Love and Sex, Marriage and Family,” “Home and Neighbourhood,” “Work,” “Food and Drink,” and more. What did you find most interesting to research and write about?

Riding: As I say, most of the headings were provided by the publisher although “Love and Sex . . .” was one of my modifications—partly so I had the excuse to illustrate the syphilitic skull and condom. When you are asked to rattle through a thirty-year period covering as many bases as possible you start to realize how little you know or at least how relatively limited your expertise is. No one is an expert on “the eighteenth century”—it’s just not possible. Humbling but true.

Stephens: Are you working on any projects now that you can tell us about?

Riding: I am indeed. For anyone interested in mid-Georgian art and charity I have an article in Art History Journal titled “The mere relation of the suffering of others’: Joseph Highmore, History Painting and Charity.” I have an article coming out in April’s History Today on Charles Edward Stuart and I am also writing a narrative history on the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 for Bloomsbury Publishing (eta 2013).

Reading Primary Sources: Estate Inventories

Dan Allosso

One of the things that fascinates me about doing historical research, is that it doesn’t always involve long trips to exotic archives or well-known historical sites. For example, wills and estate inventories going all the way back to the earliest days of settlement are often kept in the county records office. Whether you are trying to find information on a particular family or individual, or looking for background material to help you rebuild the world your subjects lived in, probate documents can be a really interesting window into the material culture of the past, and into the attitudes and values of people long ago.

I went to the western Massachusetts town of Northampton a while back, to look at estate information for the town of Ashfield. Hampshire County encompassed the area which is now Franklin County until 1811, so I went to Northampton expecting to find Ashfield documents up to that time. In fact, I found several later than 1811, suggesting that people in the habit of going down to the Northampton Courthouse to conduct their business were not turned away. Sometime soon, I’ll make a similar trip to Greenfield, and see what they have in their files.

Wills are public records, so you don’t have to provide any credentials to look at them—but I don’t imagine they get a lot of use. In Northampton, there’s an old-fashioned card catalog where you can find the names you want to ask for, and a simple form you hand to the records clerk. The January 3, 1811 will and April 10, 1811 inventory of Joseph Clark is typical of what I found. Most of the old documents are folded into palm-sized packages, often bound with string. The inventory, taken by Clark’s executor Japhet Chapin, lists everything of value that Clark owned. First and most important, of course, are “Fifty acres of land including the buildings valued at $800.” Everything else Clark owned was worth about $159, including six cups and saucers valued at 12 cents, a vest worth 42 cents, and seven sheep and two lambs whose $13.50 value suggests they may have been newly introduced Spanish Merinos.

In his will, which Clark executed four months before his death, he first specifies “I would have all my just debt paid.” Next, Clark orders the division of his remaining assets. He specifies cash settlements to be paid “within one year after my decease” to his five daughters; fifty-five dollars to each of the unmarried, and five dollars to the married woman, who had probably received the fifty when she wed. He gives fifty dollars to his son Otis, and “to my dearly beloved wife” Clark orders “she should have a comfortable maintenance out of my estate so long as she remains my widow then the income of one third of my estate during her natural life.”

Clark’s widow’s income and maintenance would come out of the balance of his $959 estate after the $275 in cash bequests and whatever went to pay his debts. This balance was to be split equally between his two remaining sons, Joseph and Loring, who would presumably either work the farm together, split it into reasonably equal halves, or find a way for one to buy out the other’s equity. There was a practical limit to how small a farm could be and remain viable; if all fifty acres were “improved” cropland, they may just have been able to split the property. On the other hand, one or both of the brothers may already have owned other property, before their father’s death.

The will and inventory raises several questions that can help direct my further investigation. I can check the town’s Vital Records book (there’s one for every town in Massachusetts, covering births, deaths, and marriages up to 1850), to determine the ages of the family members in 1811. Town “valuations” (tax lists) will tell me what land the sons may have owned already, if they lived in town, and possibly whether either of them had cash on hand to meet the “within one year” requirement of the cash bequests. Since Clark left no cash and I believe he had no large sums owed him (I don’t know for sure, but I assume there are none because the two notes he held were crossed out at the bottom of the inventory list, suggesting they had been settled), the brothers would have needed to raise over three hundred dollars relatively quickly, to satisfy their siblings’ and provide for their mother.

In addition to these particulars of the Clark family, the documents tell me several things about Ashfield, that I can check against historians’ understanding of similar places at this time, to get a better sense of the town. Clark writes affectionately of his wife and leaves her not only a widow’s maintenance, but a third of the income of his estate, suggesting that he valued her contribution to the family's fortunes. The inventory is witnessed by Ebenezer Smith Jr., son of the Baptist minister and grandson of the town’s first settler, suggesting Clark (who was a member of the Congregational Society) was on good terms with neighbors outside his denomination. The will itself is witnessed by Polly Chapin and Margaret Wood, who signed their own names, suggesting that among Clark’s friends, both men and women were relatively well educated. It would be interesting to know exactly where the farm was, what type of land it was on, and how many buildings were on it; since the $800 valuation makes up the majority of Clark’s estate and seems a little high for the times. Finally, the list of items Clark owned is very valuable, not only for the relative values of the items, but as an inventory of the items that surrounded him during his life. The combination of indoor and outdoor tools, the three cows and three heifers, four dining chairs and four pewter plates, all help set the scene and give us clues about Clark’s life. They also suggest ways he may have been connected to extended family and neighbors. Ten “cyder barrels” but no press: so who pressed his apples? No plow and team: did one of his sons have one? One axe: how much of Clark’s land was cleared? This will and inventory give a fascinating glimpse into both the physical and social world in which Joseph Clark lived and died in 1811.

Oral History and Iconic Red Desk Objects

Heather Cox Richardson

Morgan’s post on oral history struck a chord. (Among other things, he observes how valuable information is lost from one generation to the next.) I was shocked, recently, when talking to a high school student about her National History Day project, to learn that she had never heard of the Cold War hotline between the US and the USSR.

Indeed, why should she have? She was born after the end of the Cold War, and knows the USSR only from history books, most of which are too general to mention the hotline.

But in the 1960 and 1970s, everyone knew the story of the Red Telephone. It was such common knowledge that no one, apparently, has bothered to make a point of passing it down.

The significance of that loss goes far beyond understanding the mechanics of the connection. Indeed, the actual hotline was not a red telephone on the President’s desk; it was a teletype machine at the Pentagon. (The history of the hotline is told wonderfully here, by Webster Stone, now producer and executive of the American Film Company.)

The mechanics of the line are far less important than the cultural context it evoked. Imagine watching TV or films from the era of the Cold War without the knowledge of what a red telephone meant. Everyone who lived during that time understood that when a red phone sat on a desk, it was not a fashion accessory. It was a symbol of an enormously important link on which hung the fate of the world. (See this clip of a 1967 episode of Batman, for instance.)

But to a more recent generation, it’s just a red telephone.

For younger readers who don’t see why this matters, think of a red Swingline stapler. It’s a key prop from the black comedy Office Space. It represents the stifling bureaucracy of the modern office, cut into cubicles staffed with faceless paper pushers. (This is also the film that gave us “Didn’t you get the memo?”) To a certain generation, a red stapler carries an indictment of the soul-crushing big business of the early twenty-first century. Ignorance of that meaning tears a critical understanding away from modern popular TV and film.

But will anyone bother to tell their children what a red stapler signifies?

It seems to me that such cultural context is one key aspect of history that is lost without oral history. People simply don’t write down what is common knowledge. It is more likely to get recorded in a passing comment made to an oral historian.

World Heritage Sites

Randall Stephens

The Dallas Morning News features a piece on World Heritage sites. Lynn O'Rourke Hayes notes that "The U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization works to preserve significant and inspirational places worldwide. Designated World Heritage sites, they're as diverse as Yellowstone National Park, Shark Bay in Australia and the historic center of Vienna, and they symbolize the world's collective history, culture and landscape. Reviewing the list of 911 World Heritage locations provides an impressive history lesson. Here are five your family would enjoy." >>>

Unesco's World Heritage Committee makes the decisions on whose in. On the criteria: "To be included on the World Heritage List, sites must be of outstanding universal value and meet at least one out of ten selection criteria. . . . The criteria are regularly revised by the Committee to reflect the evolution of the World Heritage concept itself."

A handful of the sites in China: Imperial Palaces of the Ming and Qing Dynasties in Beijing and Shenyang; Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor; Mogao Caves; Mount Taishan; Peking Man Site at Zhoukoudian; The Great Wall . . .

A few in the United States: Mesa Verde National Park; Yellowstone National Park; Independence Hall; Statue of Liberty; Hawaii Volcanoes National Park . . .

A building, town, area, or natural feature designated a World Heritage Site can still sink into the sands of time. The Australian reports that "Historic treasures across Italy, from the fabled Golden House built by the emperor Nero to the Colosseum, are at risk of collapse. The treasures are under threat because of official neglect and budget cuts, heritage experts say."

It helps to have a thriving economy and a relatively corruption-free political order.

Art of the Americas

Randall Stephens

The Boston MFA opens its new Art of the Americas Wing this week. (Watch a video on the space.) The extension represents the most significant public art project in America today. With a price tag of over $500 million, it will display a portion of the museum's massive South and North American collections. It ranges from the pre-Columbia to the 20th century. Some critics have complained that the wing will lack some of the MFA's best post-war pieces. That seems like a minor issue though.

WBUR reports:

And while this is a big cultural moment for Boston, the rest of the world is paying attention, too.

“Museums all over the country have expanded over the last decades and this is the MFA’s entry in the ‘space race,’ ” said arts writer Judith Dobrzynski, who has reported on the MFA’s expansion for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

“And because it’s a beautiful space, and because it’s chock-a-block with art from the Americas, which is different. This is very important and I think it probably going to raise the profile and the stature of the MFA.”

Dobrzynski is impressed by the MFA’s fundraising effort, and the $504 million represents a feat for Boston. Other cities — bigger cities, she said — including Los Angeles and Chicago, have not been as successful in raising money for their own museum campaigns. Or as strategic. The MFA’s new construction cost about $340 million — much of the rest sits in an endowment. “You know the MFA was very ambitious here,” she said, laughing, “but at the same time a bit conservative by going for a building fund and an endowment fund at the same time. I shouldn’t say conservative. I should say responsible here.”>>>

As far as North American artists, highlights will likely include:

Washington Allston
John Singer Sargent
Gilbert Stuart
Frederic Edwin Church
Martin Johnson Heade
Fitz Henry Lane
Thomas Eakins
John Singleton Copley
Childe Hassam
Frank Benson
Edmund Tarbell
Winslow Homer
Mary Cassatt
Ellen Day Hale
Gretchen Rogers
Lilian Westcott Hale
Georgia O’Keeffe
Arthur Dove

History of the World in 100 Objects

Randall Stephens

For those who missed it, check out BBC Radio 4's "History of the World in 100 Objects." (The series ends this week.) I read about it in the TLS a few weeks back. The reviewer praised the audio exhibit for its elegant, almost cinematic qualities, something that stretched the radio format in amazing ways. Yesterday, the Guardian lauded host Neil MacGregor, who "wears his knowledge lightly. He manages to both charm and enthuse at the same time, a hard trick that, but at the core of each bite-sized podcastable talk is an ardent and contemporaneous message: civilisations do not so much clash as learn and borrow from each other. One picks up from where the other leaves off."

The program might work well in the classroom. (How often do we listen to audio, rather than watch film, with students? Once in a blue moon, I'll find a segment on NPR that fits into what we are going over, but otherwise, it's rare.) Here are a few bits from the series:

035 Head of Augustus, 21 May 2010, Listen, Duration: 15 mins

Head of Augustus, the first Roman emperor. Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, looks at one of the world’s most famous rulers, whose powerful, God-like status is brilliantly enshrined in a 2000-year-old bronze head with striking eyes. He explores how Augustus dramatically enlarged the Roman Empire, establishing his image as one of its most familiar objects. The historian Susan Walker and the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, help explain the power and methodology of Augustus.

057 Hedwig glass beaker, 22 Jun 2010, Listen, Duration: 15 mins

Glass beaker from central Europe probably made by a Muslim craftsman. Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, examines a glass beaker made in Syria or Egypt at a time when Christians were warring with Muslims in the crusades. The glass became associated with the miracles of a Christian saint, Hedwig, who turned water into wine when it touched her lips. But how did Islamic glass reach Christian Europe during the Crusades?

088 North American buckskin map, 6 Oct 2010, Listen, Duration: 14 mins

Map of the area between the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, explores the differing attitudes towards land and living of Europeans and Native Americans in the 18th century. He looks at a buckskin map drawn up by a Native American as the British negotiated for land between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. With contributions by cartographer Martin Lewis and historian David Edmunds.

From the “Yet Another Good Reason Not To Throw Anything Away” Department

Heather Cox Richardson

When President Warren G. Harding died suddenly of a heart attack on a goodwill tour of the country, his vice-president Calvin Coolidge was visiting his family homestead in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. Early in the morning of the next day, August 3, 1923, Coolidge’s father, a notary public, administered the oath of office to his son, making him the nation’s 30th president. (This is the only time, incidentally, that a father has administered the presidential oath to his child.)

This dramatic scene caught the popular imagination. In an era of glitz and glamor, graft and corruption, the vision of Coolidge taking the oath of office beside his aged father in the glow of a kerosene lamp seemed to embody Yankee simplicity and old-fashioned values.

The family home, where this dramatic scene took place, is now a museum. The curators there have just made a startling discovery:

“Historians at the President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site in Plymouth Notch, Vt., which houses the president’s collection, are trumpeting the discovery of the tablecloth that was used during Silent Cal's makeshift swearing-in ceremony, site officials announced Wednesday . . .”

For years, the brown-and-white cloth tucked at the end of a daybed was thought to be a shawl, and an embroidered green cloth dressing the table was believed to be the original table covering. . . .”

When a historian recently opened the cloth to catalog it, a note fell out. Over the initials G. C. (probably Coolidge’s wife, Grace), the note read:

“‘Cover which was on the mahogany-topped table in the sitting room of father Coolidge’s house in Plymouth, Vermont on the night of August 3rd, 1923.’

That cloth ‘had always been there, but it was never really unfolded and carefully looked at,’ [the site administrator] said.”

But is it History? II: Deep History

Randall Stephens

Harvard University professor of history Daniel Lord Smail has challenged the idea that history begins only with the advent of writing. In his 2008 book, On Deep History and the Brain (University of California Press), he lays out his arguments about how history and biology have worked together over the long arc of time. Smail asks "When does history begin?" and "What characterizes it?" He follows up on the work of evolutionary biologists and the macro history of Jared Diamond, with a new way of understanding the past.

"The ancient world is unimaginable without archeological evidence;" Smail observes, "the Middle Ages very nearly so; and the effort to reconstitute the lives of peoples without writing has been one of the signal achievements of the twentieth century." In light of that Smail asks: "So what does it matter that the evidence for the deep past comes not from written documents but from the other things that teach--from artifacts, fossils, vegetable remains, phonemes, and various forms of modern DNA?" (On Deep History, 6)

But, as Heather asked earlier on a different topic, is it history? How can we undertsand preliterate humans and societies in a historical sense? Can historians add to our understanding of pre-historic humans in ways that anthropologists and archeologists cannot? Historians inside and outside of the guild will have to figure those questions out for themselves.

What follows are some recent macro-historical, deep history, evolutionary history essays, and tidbits from the web:

Drake Bennett, "How Animals Made Us Human," Boston Globe, September 12, 2010.

. . . . What explains [our] yen to have animals in our lives? An anthropologist named Pat Shipman believes she’s found the answer: Animals make us human. She means this not in a metaphorical way — that animals teach us about loyalty or nurturing or the fragility of life or anything like that — but that the unique ability to observe and control the behavior of other animals is what allowed one particular set of Pleistocene era primates to evolve into modern man.>>>

Cynthia Haven, "Stanford historian tells why the West rules - for now," Stanford University News, September 14, 2010.

. . . . Stanford Classics and History Professor Ian Morris puts forth some bold answers in his ambitious new 750-page book, Why the West Rules – For Now (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). And that places Looty in a longer story going back to the last ice age.

Morris' book argues that history is a slow, complicated tango between geography and social development.>>>

How could a civilization that mastered the planet suddenly Collapse? Inspired by the New York Times best-selling book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed", NGC time travels 200 years into the future to see what the world would look like after civilization as we know it collapsed. Guided by author Jared Diamond, we'll piece together the remarkable story of what on earth triggered our decline.

Collapse: Based on the Book by Jared Diamond, National Geographic Channel.

How could a civilization that mastered the planet suddenly Collapse? Inspired by the New York Times best-selling book "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed", NGC time travels 200 years into the future to see what the world would look like after civilization as we know it collapsed. Guided by author Jared Diamond, we'll piece together the remarkable story of what on earth triggered our decline.>>>

Mary Gray, "Are You Descended from Neanderthals?" New Zealand Herald, September 2, 2010.

. . . . With the expansion of human populations and climate change, Neanderthal populations are thought to have shrunk toward Europe and Spain. Europeans and Neanderthals had potentially longer to interbreed compared to other human populations, but there is no evidence for this - so far. Did waves of human migration from the Middle East replace ancient Neanderthal-human Europeans or did the first human inhabitants of Europe and Neanderthals keep to themselves? >>>

The Enduring Power of the Cowboy Image

Heather Cox Richardson

Many years ago, I had the good luck to hear Werner Sollors illustrate the importance of cultural understanding in interpreting popular history. He did it by describing what a Martian would guess about American life

if his only source of information was The Brady Bunch.

The Martian would assume that American humans in the 1960s reproduced by cloning, Sollors guessed, since it was clear that the adults had no sexual contact. Male clones were always brunette and females blonde. And a Martian could easily conclude that humans kept older members of the species set off from the others in the kitchen, like a sort of pet.

I remembered Sollors’s talk recently when I discovered the new Old Spice advertising campaign. The ads have certainly hit a popular chord; the videos have gotten more than 12 million hits and have boosted sales of Old Spice by more than 107%.

And the ad campaign shows, again, just how much cultural understanding you need to make sense of popular history. This particular image plays on age-old popular stereotypes of the American West, with their heroic men and devoted women. But without that cultural knowledge, what on earth would a Martian examining modern American life through this image conclude?

Their D-I-V-O-R-C-E: Mad Men, Infidelity, and Life in the 1960s

Randall J. Stephens

Some of us go around the world three times, divorce, remarry, divorce again, part with our children, make and waste a fortune, and coming back to our beginnings we find the same faces at the same windows, buy our cigarettes and newspapers from the same old man, say good morning to the same elevator operator, good night to the same desk clerk, to all those who seem, as Johnson did, driven into life by misfortune like nails into a floor.

-John Cheever, The Wapshot Scandal (Harper & Row, 1964)

The suburbs of New York City in the 1950s were a homogenous and extended community held together by common interests: children, sports, adultery, and lots of social drinking

-Susan Cheever, Home Before Dark: A Personal Memoir of John Cheever by His Daughter (Houghton Mifflin, 1984)

Frank could not escape the impression that she was asking him to get a divorce. Meanwhile, our advisory capacity in Vietnam was beginning to stink and the market was frightened, frightened yet excited by the expanding war. Basically business was uneasy with Kennedy; there was something unconvincing about him.

-John Updike, Couples (Ballantine Books, 1968)

Our D-I-V-O-R-C-E; becomes final today Me and little J-O-E will be goin' away I love you both and it will be pure H-E double L for me Oh, I wish that we could stop this D-I-V-O-R-C-E.

D-I-V-O-R-C-E, recorded by Tammy Wynette (1968)

More heavy drinking, more chain smoking, more prefeminist barbarity, more impeccably dressed businessmen, and woman. Mad Men, season 4, is kicking off on Sunday night.

Benjamin Schwarz wrote an insightful, appropriately skeptical piece on the series in The Atlantic back in the fall. Among other things Schwarz wondered about some of the over-the-top boorishness on display, condescending social commentary, and the overall historical accuracy of this "megamovie."

Watching the program, which I'll admit I'm a big fan of, has amazed and perplexed me. (How did the production crew get the colors and the tone just right? Scenes often look like staged advertisements from LIFE or Look Magazine.) Mad Men's interiors--wood paneling, ab-ex paintings, and sleek modernist surfaces--is as nearly as cool as the set of a Jacques Tati flick. The "lush styling and art direction," wrote Schwarz, "which make the series eye candy for its (again) target audience, already in thrall to the so-called mid-century-modern aesthetic—-an appeal that’s now further fueled by the slimline suit/pencil skirt marketing tie-in with Banana Republic, that canny purveyor of upper-mass-market urbanity."

How about the behavior, attitudes, and values of the characters? How does America in the early 1960s compare to America in 2010? The latter seems to be one of the chief questions the program raises. (At least for me, as a nerdy historian.) See, for instance, this John McWhorter piece from The New Republic, "Mad Men In a Good Place: How Did People Sound in 1963?" September 1, 2009. (Did they sound different after 1964? I'm wondering if a Beatles episode might feature Fab Four music. Doubtful. Would cost a fortune.)

And what about the infidelity on parade? Lead ad man Don Draper is a whiskey-soaked, feral Don Juan. Couples on the show occasional make fools of themselves in drunken revelry. Many of the chief men and women have had shaky relationships, boozing it up and forgetting their vows. One agent sleeps in his office after his wife discovers his alcohol-fueled, one-night stand with a secretary. Nearly all of the main male characters are unfaithful. Divorce, though not easy to obtain, is an ever-present option.

So what did the divorce rate look like in the swinging sixties? Brown University historian James Patterson notes that a significant rise in divorce rates seriously affected American families from the mid-sixties on. "Divorce rates per 1,000 of population doubled--from 2.5 per 1,000 people in 1965 to a peak of between 5 and 5.3 per 1,000 between 1976 and 1985."[1] Indeed, the divorce rate rocketed up 100% from '63 to '75. The current rate is 3.5 per 1,000 population.

What about infidelity? Is that more difficult to measure? David Gudelunas observes that we can gauge some national opinions by looking at letters to advice columnists. "The most frequent complaint from women in the 1960s was their cheating husbands," notes Gudelunas.[2] Polls and social science research from the day could also reveal much.

All that is to say that the show has made me more and more curious about how even the recent past can look decidedly strange, remote through the eyes of the present. Fun stuff.

On Sunday night when episode one of season four airs, I'll have my trusty DVD recorder at the ready. (A device, by the way, of pure science fiction by the standards of 1964.)

[1] James T. Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (Oxford University Press, 2005), 50.

[2] David Gudelunas, Confidential to America: Newspaper Advice Columns and Sexual Education (Transaction, 2008), 112.