Historians and Their Memoirs

Randall Stephens

What can we learn about the craft of history by reading the autobiographies of historians? A great deal, I think. We get a picture of the context and era that shaped research and writing interests. We see how a historian grew into his or her work. We get an idea of how he or she was trained and mentored . . .

In my Critical Readings in History course I've paired selections from John Hope Franklin's memoir with selections from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s autobiography. Both went to Harvard in the 1930s. Students can see pretty clearly the basic differences in their backgrounds. One grew up in a well-to-do white family with ties to America's intellectual aristocracy. The other came of age in Oklahoma, struggling with poverty and race prejudice. It's not difficult to move from that reading to a discussion of how historians pick the topics they study and how historians are formed by their setting. From there students can reflect on their own interests and how history is, at least in some sense, autobiographical.

I recently dusted off and started rereading C. Vann Woodward's Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1987). Years before he became the tweedy, pipe-smoking Johns Hopkins and then Yale sage of southern history, Woodward was an aspiring historian, not quite sure what the next stage in his life would hold for him. Still, he was ahead of the game. He already had what would be a major book underway while he was still a grad student at UNC in the 1930s:

With a fresh if empty mind and an exciting book of my own underway, I reasoned that perhaps I would now see this unexplored field take on a new glamor and I would rise to the challenge. Much better minds had done so. After all, I was nearly four years older since my first brush with the subject and far riper in wisdom—or so I thought. The first thing to do, I was told, was to master the standard "sets"—the old American Nation series, the Yale Chronicles, and others guaranteed to bring one up to date. Noting with some puzzlement that most of the many volumes were already a generation old, I nevertheless plunged in. That first plunge was chilling. Plodding through volume after volume, I began to wonder if I had ever encountered prose so pedestrian, pages so dull, chapters so devoid of ideas, whole volumes so wrongheaded or so lacking in point. Was there anything memorable about what one was expected to remember? Was this the best my newly chosen profession could do? Was it what I would be expected to do? A career, a lifetime dedicated to inflicting such reading on innocent youth? Or accepting it as a model for myself? Fleeing the stacks repeatedly, I spent much of that first year pacing Franklin Street by night debating whether I might fare better as a fruit-peddler, panhandler, or hack writer. . . . (21-22)

No Southern youth of any sensitivity could help being excited by the explosion of creativity taking place during the early 1930s—in fiction, in poetry, in drama. Nor could I help seeing that the novelists, poets, and playwrights were in the main writing about the same South historians were writing about and making the whole world of letters at home and abroad read what they wrote and ring with their praise. With this awareness and the expectations it aroused, I arrived as a young apprentice at the doors of the history guild for training—and what a striking contrast, what a letdown, what a falling off! No renaissance here, no surge of innovation and creativity, no rebirth of energy, no compelling new vision. This was a craft devoted primarily at the time, or so it seemed to me, to summing up, confirming, illustrating, and consolidating the received wisdom, the regional consensus that prevailed uniquely in the South of the 1930s and—though I could not then have known it—was to continue through the 1940s. That consensus proclaimed the enduring and fundamentally unbroken unity, solidarity, and continuity of Southern history. (23)

The business about continuity sums up much of Woodward's work as a historian. Indeed, at the beginning of The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) he wrote "The people of the South should be the last Americans to expect continuity of their institutions and social arrangements" (3). The book—which Martin Luther King, Jr., called the historical bible of the civil rights movement— argued forcefully that the South's segregationist turn in the 1890s was something new. Woodward's memoir abounds with similar insights into his life and career.

There are many other memoirs by historians that I'd still like to explore. I include here a handful of those I've read and a great many more that I haven't.

Max Beloff, An Historian in the Twentieth Century: Chapters in Intellectual Autobiography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)

Thomas Dionysius Clark, My Century in History: Memoirs (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006)

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000)

Gerda Lerner, Fireweed: A Political Autobiography (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003)

Forrest McDonald, Recovering the Past: A Historian's Memoir (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004)

John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin (New York: FSG, 2005)

Margaret Atwood Judson, Breaking the Barrier: A Professional Autobiography by a Woman Educator and Historian before the Women's Movement (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1984)

George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925-1950 (New York: Pantheon, 1983)

William Hardy McNeill, The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian's Memoir (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005)

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918)

Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke, The New History: Confessions and Conversations (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002)

James M. Banner Jr. Jr. and John R. Gillis, eds., Becoming Historians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)

John Lukacs, Confessions of an Original Sinner (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1990)

John B. Boles, ed., Autobiographical Reflections on Southern Religious History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001)

John B. Boles, ed., Shapers of Southern History: Autobiographical Reflections (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004)

Guy Stanton Ford, ed., (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1910) Essays in American history, Dedicated to Frederick Jackson Turner. Read Carl Becker on Kansas!

Getting Students to Read . . .

Randall Stephens

Over at Times Higher Education Tara Brabazon wonders how to get underaduates to care about reading ("Bringing Them to Books," March 9, 2011). I enjoy Brabazon's snarky reports from across the Atlantic. This one is particularly witty and relevant.

"One short sentence chills the expectations of teachers," Brabazon begins. "A student, in reply to a tutorial question or query about an assignment, shrilly replies: 'I don’t like reading.' This is an ice pick through scholarly culture. It is naive. It is short-sighted. It is foolish. It is ignorant. Without reading, a student is trapped within the limitations of their own life, confusing personal experience with researched expertise. Reading builds a productive network of authors, approaches, theories and evidence." For Brabazon, "Reading is not meant to be liked or disliked: it is a way to understand the views of others." How should professors "support the act of reading," she asks. Brabazon describes her use of GoodReads, a social media site where readers across the world post reviews and comments about their books. "GoodReads enables students to comment on books, meet authors who are registered on the site and commence a dialogue with an array of interested groups." Sounds like a great idea.

In my classes I use other, rudimentary strategies. I usually give a very basic quiz on the day that a book is due in class. (Sounds awful, I admit, but it works.) The quiz is elementary, asking the most simple questions to ensure that students are at least reading the book that we will be discussing in class. In my experience students need to know that reading is not optional and the quiz tends to help.

Still, how can a professor "make" a student care about reading? I occasional begin my classes by describing a recent book--by a historian, sociologist, religious studies scholar--and then using that as a hook for the lecture of that day. I also start off classes by pointing out a history book or a newspaper article that connects the topic we are covering in the class with a current event or a larger historical theme. Maybe, just maybe, that will make students think about how reading and being informed makes their lives richer and more interesting.

We know that reading widely helps individuals develop as writers. So, I tell my students that if they want to fine tune their writing and become better writers, they should read opinion journals, newspapers, serious nonfiction, and the like. William Zinsser puts it well: "writing is learned by imitation." He suggests that students find a writer whose style they like. "Study their articles clinically. Try to figure out how they put their words and sentences together. That’s how I learned to write, not from a writing course."

I'd be curious to know what carrots others use to attract students to the practice of reading.

Earthquakes through Time

Randall Stephens

When I was on a fellowship in San Diego last summer, I became very familiar with the USGS’s “Recent Earthquakes” page. The aftershocks from the Easter Mexicali earthquake continued to rumble through southern California. Having never been in an earthquake before, even minor ones like we were having, the whole experience was bizarre and a little frightening. The US Geological Survey has another helpful page that lists “Earthquakes with 50,000 or More Deaths:
Most Destructive Known Earthquakes on Record in the World.” I include a selection from that below. Note the words “on Record.” It has been 1,200 years since Japan suffered an earthquake as destructive as the one that shook the island nation on Friday afternoon.

Year: Place, death toll, magnitude

856: Iran, Damghan, 200,000, unknown

1667: Caucasia, Shemakha, 80,000, unknown

1693: Italy, Sicily, 60,000, 7.5

1727: Iran, Tabriz, 77,000, unknown

1755: Portugal, Lisbon 70,000, 8.7

1923: Kanto (Kwanto), Japan, 142,800, 7.9

1970, Chimbote, Peru, 70,000, 7.9

1976: Tangshan, China, 255,000, 7.5

2005: Pakistan, 86,000, 7.6

2010: Haiti region, 222,570, 7.0

Men and woman have always tried to understand why earthquakes happen when and where they do. After the 1755 Lisbon quake, felt in Africa and across Europe, Europeans were eager for on-the-ground intelligence and desperately sought to make sense of the whole thing.

Social critic Walter Benjamin, oddly, delivered a 1931 radio address to children on the effects of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. He ably demonstrated its scope and terror . . . for kids, nonetheless! He also spoke about how it changed the ways Europeans thought about their world:

There is a further, special reason that helps to explain why this event affected people's minds so powerfully--why countless pamphlets passed from hand to hand, and indeed why new descriptions continued to make their appearance almost a century later. The reason is that the earthquake was the most powerful on record. Its impact was felt throughout Europe and as far away as Africa. It has been calculated that, together with its most distant tremors, it affected two and a quarter million square kilometers--a huge area. Its most powerful shocks extended from the Moroccan coast to the shores of Andalusia and France. (Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: vol 2, part 2, 1931-1934, eds. Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings [Harvard University Press, 2005], 537.)

Benjamin goes on to site some original accounts of the quake, including one by the Englishman Rev. Charles Davy:

It was on the morning of this fatal day, between the hours of nine and ten, that I was set down in my apartment, just finishing a letter, when the papers and table I was writing on began to tremble with a gentle motion, which rather surprised me, as I could not perceive a breath of wind stirring. Whilst I was reflecting with myself what this could be owing to, but without having the least apprehension of the real cause, the whole house began to shake from the very foundation, which at first I imputed to the rattling of several coaches in the main street, which usually passed that way, at this time, from Belem to the palace; but on hearkening more attentively, I was soon undeceived, as I found it was owing to a strange frightful kind of noise under ground, resembling the hollow distant rumbling of thunder. All this passed in less than a minute, and I must confess I now began to be alarmed, as it naturally occurred to me that this noise might possibly be the forerunner of an earthquake, as one I remembered, which had happened about six or seven years ago, in the island of Madeira, commenced in the same manner, though it did little or no damage. . . .

Perhaps you may think the present doleful subject here concluded; but alas! the horrors of the 1st of November are sufficient to fill a volume. As soon as it grew dark, another scene presented itself little less shocking than those already described: the whole city appeared in a blaze, which was so bright that I could easily see to read by it. It may be said without exaggeration, it was on fire at least in a hundred different places at once, and thus continued burning for six days together, without intermission, or the least attempt being made to stop its progress.

It went on consuming everything the earthquake had spared, and the people were so dejected and terrified that few or none had courage enough to venture down to save any part of their substance; every one had his eyes turned towards the flames, and stood looking on with silent grief, which was only interrupted by the cries and shrieks of women and children calling on the saints and angels for succor, whenever the earth began to tremble, which was so often this night, and indeed I may say ever since, that the tremors, more or less, did not cease for a quarter of an hour together. I could never learn that this terrible fire was owing to any subterranean eruption, as some reported, but to three causes, which all concurring at the same time, will naturally account for the prodigious havoc it made. (Modern History Sourcebook, Fordham Univ.)

As of now, there is no telling what the long-term implications of the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami will be. What sort of additional reports will be relayed from those who survived it? How will we understand it differently in days and years to come, after considerable reflection and after the damage is assessed? How will victims make sense of it? What will be it's global impact?

University Press Imprints

Randall Stephens

I just got word from Harvard University Press that my forthcoming book, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, co-authored with Karl Giberson, will be part of the press's Belknap Press imprint. We're elated!

I've always noticed that certain books with HUP list "The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press." Oxford University Press has its Clarendon Press imprint. Though other than the fact that good books come under the banner of various imprints, I didn't know much else about how all this works. Max Hall explains the role of Belknap in his Harvard University Press: A History (Harvard University Press, 1986):

"What is the Belknap Press?" People ask this, sometimes mistakenly voicing the silent "k." The answer: it is an imprint, identifying the books whose costs are paid out of Belknap funds and whose sales receipts are plowed back into Belknap working capital after the parent body has deducted a share for its operating expenses-so percent until 1976, when it was raised to 60. The Belknap Press has no separate staff, only separate accounts. Waldron Belknap himself supplied the name, specifying that the income from his bequest was to
be used for "publishing activities, under the name of the Belknap Press, of the Harvard University Press." . . .

In the will Belknap said that it was his intention "that the relationship of the Belknap Press to the Harvard University Press shall be as closely analogous as may be to the present relationship of the publishing activities of the Clarendon Press to the Oxford University Press." The Clarendon Press imprint was known for books of long-lasting importance, superior in scholarship and physical production, chosen whether or not they might be profitable. Those principles were adopted for the Belknap Press. At first, when the funds were just a trickle, the subject matter was confined to Belknap's own main interests, American history and civilization, but the benefactor imposed no restrictions and in 1961 the scope was expanded to all fields. (140-41)

There are a variety of imprints and series at University Presses. When shopping your MS around it's always a good idea to know what a particular press specializes in. What series will be the best fit for your book? A smaller press like Mercer University Press has wonderful series on religion in the South, Kierkegaard studies, and biblical studies. Whether you are working on Native American history, Medieval devotionalism, or 20th-century military history it's always a good idea to do some real investigating in order to find the press that would best suit your work.

Historians and Their Theories/Methodologies

Randall Stephens

Theories/methodologies come and go. Take a look at the history profession over the last half century to see how that works out. Where are the pyschohistorians? The social historians armed with computer punch cards and prosopographic reports? The consensus historians clutching well-worn copies of Adorno's Authoritarian Personality? The world systems historians of international affairs? And the Marxist historians? (I'm not pointing this out in some neanderthal effort to convince historians to ditch theory. Far from it. If anything, thinking about how things fade and move on might make us a little more humble.)

In this vein Terry Eagleton reviews Eric Hobsbawm's How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011 in the March 2011 LRB. Eagleton is, for me, always a pleasure to read. He begins:

In 1976, a good many people in the West thought that Marxism had a reasonable case to argue. By 1986, most of them no longer felt that way. What had happened in the meanwhile? Were these people now buried under a pile of toddlers? Had Marxism been unmasked as bogus by some world-shaking new research? Had someone stumbled on a lost manuscript by Marx confessing that it was all a joke?

We are speaking, note, about 1986, a few years before the Soviet bloc crumbled. As Eric Hobsbawm points out in this collection of essays, that wasn’t what caused so many erstwhile believers to bin their Guevara posters. Marxism was already in dire straits some years before the Berlin Wall came down. One reason given was that the traditional agent of Marxist revolution, the working class, had been wiped out by changes to the capitalist system – or at least was no longer in a majority. It is true that the industrial proletariat had dwindled, but Marx himself did not think that the working class was confined to this group.>>>

Labor Battles and Exploring the Past Online

Randall Stephens

Nelson Lichtenstein writes about "The Long History of Labor Bashing" in the March 6 Chronicle. What are the antecedents of the current struggles over benefits and bargaining? What light does history shine on all this? asks Lichtenstein.

This right-wing critique of trade unionism has often been contradictory and inconsistent. At the turn of the 20th century, many establishment figures in the news media and politics saw the unionism of their era as but a manifestation of immigrant radicalism, often violent and subversive. After World War I, the business offensive against the unions went by the name of "The American Plan," with the American Legion and other patriotic groups often serving as the antilabor militants who broke picket lines and physically manhandled union activists.

At the very same moment, a quite contradictory discourse, which portrayed the unions as retrograde rather than radical, was emergent. Progressives, as well as conservatives, often denounced unions as self-serving job trusts, corrupt and parasitic enterprises linked to ethnic politicians and underworld figures.>>>

After reading that I went over to the Library of Congress's Chronicling America website, an excellent, free historical newspapers resource. My search for the exact words "labor," "anarchists," and "immigrant" brought back 8 results for 1890-1900. Here's a fairly typical article from the Chicago Eagle, June 15, 1895. Notice that the author acknowledges that the Haymarket Riot at least drew the public and the experts to acknowledge the labor troubles of the day.

A little over nine years ago Chicago's Haymarket tragedy occurred. On the night of May 4, 1880, a bomb was thrown into the ranks of the police, who had gone to disperse an anarchist meeting. One policeman was killed outright, six were mortally wounded, and sixty more or loss injured. The number of the crowd killed or hurt was never known. Chicago never witnessed excitement so intense, and she at once achieved the reputation of being the center of anarchism for the whole world. No one event ever brought labor troubles and agitation to the notice of so many people, and probably no other influence has done so much to cause a widespread study of social economy. Four men wore hanged for the Haymarket crime, and one killed himself in jail by blowing his head to pieces with a dynamite cartridge exploded in his mouth. It was never discovered who threw the bomb. When it exploded it blew Chicago anarchy to pieces and answered the directly opposite purpose its thrower evidently intended.

A similar search on Google Books (from 1890-1900) for "anarchy," "labor," "unions," "immigrants," and "radical" returned 21 results. Of course, word searches like this cannot pick up on the subtleties of meaning and the distances between the words on the page. But they still represent a huge leap in the way we do or can do our research. Journalists, too, must be taking advantage of these relatively new ways to access the past. (One could spend hours and hours searching and browsing through countless other databases to harvest similar sources.)

(In the coming days I'll be posting here a video interview I did with Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard and director of the Harvard University Library. I ask Darnton about what is being called the Digital Public Library of America, the range of digital resources on the web, and the ways historians are using these new materials.)

Thirty years ago a historian who knew little about labor history, but wanted to learn more about how the present compared to the past, might have had to spend hours in the library, browsing indexes, thumbing through moldy card catalogs, or roaming the stacks. Not any more. Though, I still love to browse the stacks!

Second Annual Conference on Public Intellectuals at Harvard University

Randall Stephens

I've been working with Larry Friedman and Steve Whitfield on organizing the Second Annual Conference on Public Intellectuals at Harvard University, April 7-9, 2011. The program has shaped up nicely. Those who attended last year can attest to the lively discussions and debates generated by panels and keynotes. (We've asked all participants this year to pay a $25 fee. Friedman hopes to have funding options in the future, which might reduce or eliminate the fee.)

The 2011 conference will feature a variety of session that are sure to be productive. (See the program below.) Panels will address "Historians as Public Intellectuals," "The Cosmopolitan Generation of Intellectuals," "Religion and Public Intellectuals in America," and "Race, Gender, and Public Intellectuals." We anticipate roughly 20 participants and a number of non-presenters.

SECOND ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS, APRIL 7-9, 2011

Thursday, April 7

4:00 - 6:00: OPENING RECEPTION
Larry Friedman’s house, 335 Highland Avenue, Somerville (a 10-minute walk from the Davis Square stop on the Red Line T)

7:00 - 9:30pm: OPENING SEMINAR
James Hall penthouse seminar room, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge (please read James Kloppenberg’s Reading Obama: Dreams, Hopes, and the American Political Tradition in advance)

Introduction: Larry Friedman (Harvard University)

James Kloppenberg (Harvard University), “Reading Obama”

Comment: Dinesh Sharma (Institute for International and Cross-Cultural Research)

Friday, April 8

8:30 - 9:00am: Conference Chair: Anne Wyatt-Brown (University of Florida), welcome; coffee, tea, bagels, pastries, etc. provided.
James Hall 1305

9.00 - 12.00pm: Panel 1: HISTORIANS AS PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS
James Hall 1305

Chair: Jill Lepore (Harvard University)

Bertram Wyatt-Brown (Johns Hopkins University), “C. Vann Woodward and W.J. Cash: Similarities and Contrasts”

Joyce Antler (Brandeis University), “Gerda Lerner, Citizen-Scholar: ‘Why What We Do with History Matters’”

David D. Hall (Harvard University), “Perry Miller: Prophecy, Declension, and the Promise of America”

Ray Arsenault (University of South Florida), “The Freedom Writer: John Hope Franklin as a Public Intellectual”

12:00 - 1:15pm: Lunch on your own

1:15 - 4:30pm: Panel 2: THE COSMOPOLITAN GENERATION OF INTELLECTUALS
James Hall penthouse seminar room

Chair: David Starr (Brandeis University), with remarks on Solomon Schechter

Neil McLaughlin (McMaster University), “Fromm, Riesman, Nisbet and the Public Intellectuals: A Sociological Perspective”

Anke Schreiber (University of Chicago), “Erich Fromm as Public Intellectual”

David Andersen (Helena, Montana), “Three 1950s Classics: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society, and Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism”

Jonathan B. Imber (Wellesley College), “Philip Rieff and Fellow Teachers”

4:30 - 5:30: Break

5:30 - 9:15pm: DINNER AND A CONVERSATION WITH GERDA LERNER AND ROBERT LIFTON
James Hall penthouse seminar room

6:30 - 6:50pm: Gerda Lerner (Madison, Wisconsin) on her life as a scholar and public intellectual (Skype video connection)

7:00 - 8:30pm: Robert J. Lifton (Harvard University) on his life and career

Saturday, April 9

8:30am: Coffee, tea, bagels, pastries
James Hall penthouse seminar room

9:00 - 12:00pm: Panel 3: RACE, GENDER, AND PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS
James Hall penthouse seminar room.

Chair: Roberta Wollons (University of Massachusetts Boston)

Mark West (University of North Carolina at Charlotte), “The Literary Roots of Theodore Roosevelt's Views on Women’s Rights”

Steve Whitfield (Brandeis University), “The Many Facets of Frank Tannenbaum”

Damon Freeman (University of Pennsylvania), “Kenneth B. Clark and the Just University”

Jim Clark (University of Kentucky), “‘In the South these Children Prophesy’: Robert Coles’ Documentary Argument”

12:00 - 1:30pm: Lunch on your own

1:30 - 4:30pm: Panel 4: RELIGION AND PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS IN AMERICA
James Hall penthouse seminar room

Chair: Jon Roberts (Boston University)

Maura Jane Farrelly (Brandeis University), “No Man is an Island: Catholic Clerics and the Perils of Public Intellectualism”

Bo Peery (George Washington University), “On ‘Doing Nothing’: Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr Debate the Merits of Taking Action in a Tumultuous World”

Randall J. Stephens (Eastern Nazarene College), “The Public Intellectual and the Public Anti-Intellectual: The Life of the Mind among Conservative Evangelicals”

Ronald E. Doel (Florida State University), “Religion, Science, and Cold War Visions: J. Lawrence Kulp and the Challenge of 20th Century Biography”

4:30 - 5:00pm: Break

5:00 - 6:30pm: CONCLUDING ROUNDTABLE WITH ALL CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS: “WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL?”
James Hall penthouse seminar room

For final discussion please read pre-circulated material: Lawrence J. Friedman, “Public Intellectuals on Philanthropy,” in Philanthropy in America: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Dwight F. Burlingame (ABC-CLIO, 2004), 390-402; David A. Hollinger, “How Wide the Circle of the ‘We’? American Intellectuals and the Problem of the Ethnos since World War II,” American Historical Review (April, 1993); and selection from, Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (Basic Books, 1987)

7:30pm: Dinner at Chang Sho, 1712 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138

All participants are asked to contribute $25 per person toward the cost of the conference.

Religion and American Prisons in the Antebellum Era: An Interview with Jennifer Graber

Randall Stephens

"Americans incarcerate," writes Jennifer Graber in her new engaging book The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). "Though the United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population," she writes, "it has almost a quarter of its prisoners." Such facts make the long history of American prisons and their maintenance all the more interesting. Graber, an assistant professor in the department of religious studies at the College of Wooster, analyzes the "intersection of Christianity and politics in the American penitentiary system."* Her interesting account also looks at the religious dimensions of discipline and the ideas that undergirded punishment from the 1790s to the 1950s.

Randall Stephens: You write that antebellum Americans disagreed on much when it came to prisons, but most “affirmed religion's central importance” to prisons and reform. How was criminal justice “religious” in this era?

Jennifer Graber: If you were concerned about criminal punishment in the early republic, there were lots of things to fight about. Once the states began to build prisons, the big debate was between a discipline out of Pennsylvania that featured total solitary confinement and one out of New York that combined labor in workshops during the day with solitary confinement at night. Partisans for these two systems called the other side un-American and un-Christian. Beyond the rival disciplines, people debated the best way to reform inmates. They argued about what was more important: a good Sunday School teacher in Sing Sing or clean water and decent food in Sing Sing? Without fail, everyone interested in the debate claimed that “religion”—and they used the word “religion” even though they meant variations of evangelical Protestantism—was central to inmate reformation and the overall health of American prisons as strong institutions. What they didn't realize is that their common evocation of “religion” masked significant differences. For instance, they all thought that prison chaplains were necessary, but disagreed—sometimes violently—over the role these ministers should play inside institutions. Or, they all assumed that God ordained the civil authorities to punish lawbreakers, but varied on the question of that punishment’s severity.

Stephens: What kinds of problems did evangelicals target in the prison system? What can we learn about them by the sort of reforms they pursued?

Graber: Their first target was colonial-era punishments, whether it was steep fines, corporal punishments such as whipping or branding, or the gallows. They joined a trans-Atlantic movement to reform punishment and were active in the construction and administration of the first prisons. Protestant evangelicals—and I include many Quakers in this group, which might ruffle some historians’ feathers—envisioned the prison as an ideal site for prompting criminals’ conversion and reformation. Because these reformers had the new nation’s urban slums in mind, they emphasized the need for a decent physical environment, steady labor, education, and worship. Once the prisons were off the ground and running, reformers also had to take a stand on the reemergence of corporal punishment.

What can we learn about these evangelicals? Unfortunately, I think we see their utter inability to countenance cultural patterns and systems of meaning outside their own. Many of them were certain that criminals from poor neighborhoods would welcome the opportunity to go to prison. Despite the rising number of Irish inmates in the 1830s and 40s, it never occurred to them that it might be a good idea to have a Roman Catholic priest visit inmates on their deathbeds. Ultimately, for evangelicals the prison was one site for making the America they wanted. They had a vision in which all newcomers—as well as slaves and American Indians—would become like them. Of course, this perspective was shared by the broader upper and middle classes. It would have been strange for these reformers to see things otherwise. I mention it because this worldview helps explain how they approached criminal justice and why they failed to see that their prison experiments weren’t working.

Stephens: When it came to prisons, how did Alexis de Tocqueville, Gustave de Beamont, and other observers understand the American difference?
Graber: Tocqueville and Beaumont were coming from France, where there had been no substantial criminal justice reform. Other interested onlookers came from England, where most of the reform ideas came from, but had never been realized. For these folk interested in prisons, then, America was a blank slate, a place where something new and revolutionary could be attempted. Touring these facilities, however, brought many visitors out of abstract considerations and back to the difficulties of organizing an ethnically and religiously diverse population. Just because Americans could try something new did not mean that they could achieve the perfect institution. Slavery also cast a shadow over these tours of facilities where people labored against their will and could be whipped for disobeying. Foreign tourists struggled with the resemblance between prisons and slavery. In this way, America’s prisons both fascinated and repelled them.

Screening the Past: On History Docs, 1960s Counterculture Films, and Online Abundance

Randall Stephens

Werner Herzog once quipped: "It's all movies for me. And besides, when you say documentaries, in my case, in most of these cases, means 'feature film' in disguise."* Perhaps that's a post-mod nod to relativism. It is true that there are documentaries and there are "documentaries," just as there are feature films and "feature films." Be wary about which ones you use in a history class. The History Channel's series of films on ancient aliens stand in contrast to episodes of PBS's American Experience. (Do history students know the difference?)

I've seen a few history-related documentaries in the last few months that are as enchanting as many feature films. I've also seen some feature films that view like weird documentaries, or period pieces, trapped in the amber of time.

While The Unseen Alistair Cooke: A Masterpiece Special first first aired on PBS in 2008, I hadn't seen it until a couple of weeks ago. The film, "chronicles Cooke's decades in America, friendships with Hollywood icons, celebrated journalism career and years as host of Masterpiece Theatre. Marking the November 2008 centennial of his birth, The Unseen Alistair Cooke: A Masterpiece Special turns an admiring eye on the master observer." It's a captivating story of an endlessly fascinating character. For anyone interested in exploring how Brits view Americans and vice versa, this is a fun one.

The latest installments of American Experience include some films that tie in to anniversaries. On the Civil War front, the Robert E. Lee bio aired in January. On February 28 Triangle Fire will run on PBS, marking

the 100th anniversary of that tragedy. HBO will be showing a similar documentary. "The PBS special is affecting," writes Aaron Barnhart at the Kansas City Star, "much more so than the overly talky HBO documentary on the fire airing next month. PBS also takes more liberties with the facts. In 1909, about a year earlier, the Triangle ladies had led a walkout that quickly spread to other Garment District shops. Crucially, some of New York’s leading aristocratic women, such as Anne Morgan (daughter of J.P.), joined them."

Moving forward in time and genre . . . I watched the 1970 film Getting Straight, which seems strangely proud of its relevance and counter cultural bona fides. (In full here.) The film stars that ubiquitous actor of the Me Decade, the hirsute Elliott Gould as a a former campus radical who returns to school with a single-minded purpose: He wants his degree and his fun, with no political strings attached. Complete with chamber-pop hippie soundtrack, Getting Straight features a young Candice Bergen, an even younger Harrison Ford, and an array of stock characters playing Baby Boomer roles. There's the Dionysian stoner, the African-American radical (who demands a black studies department), and various libertines and longhair sign carriers. It almost has the feel of a clunky play, with the youngsters squaring off against the hopeless, old squares in the admin. (Watching it, I was reminded of Christopher Lasch's line about the era: "Even the radicalism of the sixties served, for many of those who embraced it for personal rather than political reasons, not as a substitute religion but as a form of therapy" [Culture of Narcissism, 33].) Getting Straight's cinematography borrows heavily from pop art in some visually appealing ways. The filming is playful, even silly at times. A great period piece, which can, at times, be grating.

I'm always on the look out for 60s films that can be used, in bits, in class. Maybe next time I teach America in the 1960s I'll use a clip or two from the Monkees colossal psychedelic bomb, Head (1968), or Roger Corman's The Trip (1967). The Graduate (1967), or the Strawberry Statement (1970) (watch the latter in full here) might work as a generational flick in ways that Getting Straight would not.

Much, much, much can be tracked down on YouTube or on the "watch instantly" feature on Netflix. Selections from two well made Rock docs, both on Netflix, come to mind: Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him?) (2010); and Rolling Stones: Stones in Exile (2010).

On accessibility/access to film clips, performances, historical movies Don Chiasson observes in his review of "Keif's" new biography ("High on the Stones," March 10 NYRB):

Anyone reading this review can go to YouTube now and experience Muddy Waters, or Chuck Berry, or Buddy Holly, or the first Stones recordings, or anything else they want to see, instantly: ads for Freshen-up gum from the Eighties; a spot George Plimpton did for Intellivision, an early video game. Anything. I am not making an original point, but it cannot be reiterated enough: the experience of making and taking in culture is now, for the first time in human history, a condition of almost paralyzing overabundance. For millennia it was a condition of scarcity; and all the ways we regard things we want but cannot have, in those faraway days, stood between people and the art or music they needed to have: yearning, craving, imagining the absent object so fully that when the real thing appears in your hands, it almost doesn’t match up.

It all makes screening the past in the history classroom much easier. More choices than ever, though.

Abraham Lincoln's Bank War, or Whigs Leaping out of Windows

Randall Stephens

Everyone now knows the story of how Wisconsin state senators stopped the wheels of government, for a moment at least, by getting out of the state. Over at the the Chicago Tribune Eric Zorn points out another such instance ("As a State Legislator, Lincoln Tried to Play the 'Run Away' Game, too," Chicago Tribune blog, Feb 21, 2011). In 1840 Lincoln and the Illinois Whigs tried the same exit strategy against the then-dominant Democrats. (Zorn quotes from Gerald J. Prokopowicz's book on the topic.) The Whigs hoped to build canals and railroads throughout the state. And then the Panic of 1837 set in. The Democrats and the Whigs squared off on the matter of the Illinois State Bank. What transpired played out some of the national themes of the Jacksonian era.

A bit more on it from Alexander Davidson and Bernard Stuvé, A Complete History of Illinois from 1673 to 1873 (Springfield, 1874), 423.

Parties in Illinois became almost divided upon the subject of the banks. Nearly all the leading democrats opposed them and the acts legalizing their suspensions, although they were authorized and their capital stocks were increased irrespective of party. The whigs were called bank-vassals and rag-ocracy, and charged to be bought and owned by British gold. The bank officers were sarcastically denominated rag-barons; and the money was called rags and printed lies. The whigs retorted that the democrats were disloyal, and destructive of their own government; that the banks were the institution of the State, and to make war upon the currency was to oppose its commerce and impede its growth and development. Although parties were in a measure divided upon the banks, with the democrats largely in the majority, this was not without benefit to those institutions. It gave them unswerving friends. Besides, the merchants and business men of that day were, with rare exceptions, whigs, who gave currency or not to the money as they pleased. Partisan zeal led them to profess that the banks were not only solvent, but that they were unduly pursued, and that the opposition to them was nothing but absurd party cry.

When the suspensions of the banks was legalized again in 1839, it was to extend until the end of the next general or special session of the general assembly. The legislature for 1840-41 was convened two weeks before the commencement of the regular session to provide means to pay the interest on the public debt, due on the first of January following. . . . The democrats now, however, thought that their time of triumph had arrived. It was by them contended, that that portion of the session preceding the time fixed for the regular session to begin, constituted a special session, and if the suspension was not further extended, the banks would be compelled to resume specie payment on the day the regular session should begin or forfeit their charters and stop business. Upon the other hand, it was contended that the whole constituted but one session. Much party animosity was, besides, manifested at this session. The fate of the banks seemed to hang upon the motion pending to adjourn the first part of the session nine die. It was perceived that the motion would prevail. To defeat it in the House, the whigs now essayed to break the quorum. But the doors were closed, a call of the House ordered, and the sergeant at arms sent in quest of the absentees. The whigs, being thus cut off from the usual avenues of retreat, bounded pell mell out of the windows, but without avail—enough were held in durance to make a quorum, and the sine die adjournment was carried.

Editors . . . Editing?

Randall Stephens

Last week Alex Clark wrote of the "Lost Art of Editing" in the Guardian. Presses have been cutting back for some time now. "Many speak of the trimming of budgets," notes Clark, "the increasingly regimented nature of book production and of the pressure on their time, which means they have to undertake detailed and labour-intensive editing work in the margins of their daily schedule rather than at its centre." A freelancer Clark consulted told him: "'big companies used to have whole copy-editing and proof-reading departments. Now you'll get one publisher and one editor running a whole imprint.'"

Clark's mostly talking about literary fiction here. But the cutting back on editing--line, copy, content--is something I've heard about repeatedly from historians and editors at university and trade presses.

You can do a thing or two to counter the trend. Have multiple historians, experts in your field, read your work. Getting far more than your two MS reviewers to take a look at your work will be a big plus. And, readers will probably be happy to have you return the favor for them at a later date.

See if you can get a second copy editor to go over your manuscript. I was able to work this out with Harvard Univ. Press for my first book, The Fire Spreads: Holiness and Pentecostalism in the American South. It helped. The two copy editors caught loads of grammatical infelicities, leaps in logic, spelling mistakes, etc. that I didn't have eyes to see. (It's even worth shelling out the money for an extra copy editor, if you can afford the $500 or so.)

And, finally, ask those at the press that you are speaking to if editors do much "editing." How will your editor help you shape your MS? Talk to authors who have worked with that editor in the past to see what goes into the process. Does she have a hands-off approach? Will she help you craft your argument and ask for important revisions?

Chris Beneke on The First Prejudice

Randall Stephens

[From Religion in American History]

About a week ago over at Religion in American History Paul Harvey posted on Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda's, The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 2011). The edited volume, "presents a revealing portrait of the rhetoric, regulations, and customs that shaped the relationships between people of different faiths in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. It relates changes in law and language to the lived experience of religious conflict and religious cooperation, highlighting the crucial ways in which they molded U.S. culture and politics." I recently caught up with Beneke, a Historical Society board member, by email and asked him some questions about the project and the work being down on tolerance/intolerance.

Randall Stephens: What is the unifying theme of The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America?

Chris Beneke: Our title, The First Prejudice, plays on the popular understanding of religious liberty as the nation’s “First Freedom.” It also draws on the proposition that religion was initially the source of the deepest prejudice to afflict early Americans and the object of the first large-scale efforts to mitigate prejudice. We asked our contributors to be attentive to the distinguished and extensive historiography on church and state, but not beholden to it. The idea was to create a history of religious tolerance and intolerance that took into account a broader range of religious and cultural interaction than histories of religious liberty have traditionally done. For us, it presented an opportunity both to build a compelling new narrative of early American religious history-where religious differences are at center stage-and to develop a common set of reference points and questions that would frame more useful conversations about tolerance and intolerance in America.

Stephens: Why did religious tolerance develop in the West when and where it did?

Beneke: In a sense, it depends on what you mean by tolerance (I know it’s annoying when historians say that, but there, I’ve gone and done it). If you mean what Willem Frijhoff calls “everyday ecumenism,” or at least everyday cooperation and non-violence, then it’s very old indeed. Historians have been hard at work in the archives over the past two-plus decades, discovering that sort of tolerance in surprising places across medieval and early modern Europe. But as a commonly accepted ideal, as a stated commitment to some form of equality, and a legal practice that guaranteed a modicum of protection, tolerance is something that developed in the intellectual capitals of northern Europe during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And though I risk irritating my intrepid co-editor and some contributors by saying this, I think that it took hold in a much more fundamental and irrevocable way in the early national United States.

Stephens: When it comes to religious tolerance did the early United States differ all that much from Great Britain and western Europe?

Beneke: Here's the very short answer: official church establishments persisted across most of Europe into and beyond the twentieth century. In the United States, they did not. The U.S. may have maintained an unofficial Protestant establishment for many decades (via instruments such as the common law, public education, state religious tests.), but the fact that it was un-official and the fact that it was accompanied by substantive protections for free exercise, was critically important. For all the disingenuity involved, an un-official establishment was surely more hospitable toward religious minorities than almost any official establishment might have been. Maybe just as importantly, the commitment to disestablishment and religious liberty meant that the religiously intolerant had to explain themselves and find ways to wrap bigotry in the mantle of tolerance.

These factors have always kept American religious intolerance in check.>>>

More on Our Virginia: Past and Present

Randall Stephens

The new issue of Harper's Magazine includes some of the findings of a "Report on the Review of Virginia’s Textbook Adoption Process, the Virginia Studies Textbook Our Virginia: Past and Present, and Other Selected United States History Textbooks." Heather blogged about the controversy surrounding the adoption of the textbook and some of its pseudohistory here. Now we return to it with more on the text's creative or unknowing anachronisms . . . I didn't see anything in the report about John Quincy Adams being a founding father.

The reviewers of the text included: Christopher Einolf (DePaul University); Mary Miley Theobald (Retired: Virginia Commonwealth University); Brent Tarter (Retired: Library of Virginia); Ronald Heinemann (Retired: Hampden-Sydney College); Lauranett L. Lee (Curator of African American History, Virginia Historical Society).

A note to any future textbook writers out there: Check your sources and then check them again. Or, at least have sources. Don't make things up.

I include below a sampling of the official critique. The items in quotes are from Our Virginia:

“In 1607 Queen Elizabeth sent three ships to found Jamestown, Virginia.” That would have been difficult, since Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, and neither she nor her successor, King James, “sent” any ships. They approved when a private company, the Virginia Company, sent ships to Jamestown, and no doubt King James approved when the colonists astutely named the town after him.

“They had been terribly persecuted and had seen friends killed.” I would like to know the source for this statement. I’ve never heard of Pilgrims being killed in England. Mostly they left England because they wanted to get away from the bad influences of the established Anglican Church. The statement seems over-the-top, but I can’t prove or disprove.

“Very few people in colonial America could read . . .” This is a myth. The overwhelming majority of white colonists were literate. In New England, literacy rates were higher than elsewhere because there were more schools and there was an emphasis on learning to read the Bible, but even in Virginia and other Southern colonies, almost all white men and even most white women could read in the eighteenth century. Percentages change over time, always growing larger, but even in the seventeenth century, about 60% of men in Virginia could read and about a quarter of the women. Figures are higher for the northern colonies. At no time in American history did “very few people” know how to read (unless one is talking about African Americans or Native Americans).

“. . . until you realize that it hurt America’s tea makers, whose tea already had a heavy tax.” America didn’t have any tea makers; the climate isn’t suited to growing tea. American had merchants who sold smuggled tea, avoiding the tax. Again, I understand it is hard to explain a complicated issue in simplistic terms, but this treatment of the Tea Act isn’t accurate.

“Washington and French General Lafayette inspect troops before the Battle of Morristown in New Jersey.” First of all, there was no Battle of Morristown. Morristown was where Washington and his troops wintered in 1777 (January 6- May 28). Second, Lafayette was not a general until July 31, 1777 and didn’t even meet George Washington until August 10, 1777, long after Morristown, so they wouldn’t have been reviewing any troops.

“Cyrus McCormick’s young grandson was there on the day the reaper was tested.” (then the book quotes the grandson’s “eyewitness ” account). Since Cyrus McCormick was 22 in 1831 when he first tested his reaper, it is unlikely his grandson was present. The reason this grandson’s account is quoted is to “prove” that a black slave, Jo Anderson, helped invent the reaper. While the slave helped with all the farm work, including building a reaper, he should not be credited as a co-inventor, as some Politically Correct people would like. It is a serious mistake to title this section “Anderson and McCormick’s Reaper.” It was Cyrus McCormick’s reaper. http://www.virginialiving.com/articles/lion-of-the- hour/index.html

“The Quakers, a religious group, believed that all people were created by God.” A rather unnecessary sentence, don’t you think? What religious group does not believe that all people were created by God? It doesn’t say anything about the Quakers’ beliefs. It might be better to note that they were Christian pacifists who believed all people were equal, even women, Indians, and blacks.

“Evenings were spent playing cards or checkers, writing letters to loved ones, reading old worn newspapers, and playing baseball by torchlight.” That would be some trick, playing baseball by torchlight, since you couldn’t see to catch a ball. Torches give off almost no light beyond a few feet from the flame. I have never seen any mention of playing baseball by torchlight.

“Atlanta, Georgia, was one of the South’s largest cities. It was an important railroad hub . . .” Yes, Atlanta was a railroad hub, but it was one of the smaller cities in the South. In the 1860 census, Atlanta ranks 99th among American cities, with a population of 9,000. The South had many, many cities larger than Atlanta, including Baltimore at 212,000, New Orleans at 169,000, Louisville at 68,000, Richmond at 38,000 (25th), etc. Georgia alone had three cities larger than little Atlanta: Savannah, Augusta, and Columbus. http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab09.txt

Map showing Fort Necessity (which is spelled wrong as Neccesity) locates the fort in the wrong state. Fort Necessity is in Pennsylvania, not Ohio. Fort Duquesne is also in Pennsylvania, not Ohio. (The text accurately states that Fort Duquesne is near Pittsburgh, but the map positions it in Ohio.)

St. Louis is always written as St., not Saint.>>>

Sports, History, and Culture

Randall Stephens

With the Super Bowl and the Puppy Bowl over, and the barrage of clever and not-so-clever ads that went with the former, I've been thinking about the history of sports. I admit, I know little to nothing about the subject. (I do know that a class on the history of sports would probably populate.)

I am fascinated by how recreation has changed over the centuries. Has it become less violent, less like hand-to-hand combat? Of course, we do have ultimate fighting in are era, and their are all sorts of ways to die in a high-speed Nascar race, but it strikes me that common sports are less violent than they were in previous ages. A man does not need to train an animal to kill another animal to show that he is a force to be reckoned with.

Is it natural that sports should become more humane? Would dog fighting or bear baiting have struck late antebellum Americans as being as cruel and debased as most Americans think those are today? Ideas about propriety and impropriety appear to have dominated conversations about recreation for centuries.

There are still class and cultural connotations to sports in our age, much as there were hundreds of years ago. (One of my favorite Onion articles in recent years revealed that "a professional wrestling 'fan' has written a shocking new book that claims wrestling fans are actually paid actors.") But were class and cultural markers much stronger 150 or 200 years ago?

What do sports tell us about the people who have enjoyed them? How long have sports been woven into consumer culture? What can we know about western history be looking at the way men and women "recreated." (I hear that those who work in the subfield of cricket studies have some interesting things to say about empire and global culture.)

Anthony Fletcher's Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500-1800 (Yale, 1999) explores some of these topics. On sport in 17th-century England, he writes:

The gentry enjoyed the sport of their deer parks, their bowls and tennis; communal sports tested men's physical prowess and endurance, absorbing competitive vigor. Local tradition was deeply founded in this respect. In Wiltshire football was entrenched in the downlands, while bat-and-ball games like stoolball and trapball flourished in the vales of the north. East Anglian villages had their 'camping' grounds with their own indigenous and popular team games. There was something for everyone at the Whitsun Cotswold games, held annually from around 1611 on Dover's Hill, a marvelous green amphitheater outside Chipping Camden which is now owned by the National Trust. There was hunting and horse-racing for the nobility and gentry and the old sports, like wrestling, singlestick fighting and shin-kicking, for the country populace. The games were a veritable celebration of manhood which, at least until the 1640s, attracted people of all social ranks from miles around. (94-95)

An observer of late-17th-century England, Guy Miège said a little about sports in his country. Notice the praise for bloodsports and the comment about foot-ball's popularity among the lower sort.
Guy Miège, The New State Of England Under Their Majesties K. William and Q. Mary: In Three Parts (London, 1691), 39-40.

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.

Had Enough Snow? You're not Alone . . .

Randall Stephens

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. . . Arghhh!!

Does it give us any comfort to know that Americans have been trudging through snow drifts, swearing at Jack Frost, and sinking into a dark cold night of the soul/seasonal depression for decades, even centuries? Probably not. But, if you think that blizzards have a way of shutting things down today . . . imagine what it would have been like before the second industrial revolution and before some clever person attached a shovel to the front of a car. By the 19th century, telegraph lines could report storms in the West before folks felt those in the east. (In 1861 Western Union completed the first transcontinental line, from San Francisco to the East Coast.) But, things were much more messy. What was the world like before Doppler Radar?

The Long Storm of 1798, which stretched from Maryland to Maine, dumped about 18 inches on New York City. In Historic Storms of New England (1891), Sidney Perley wrote of that memorable November wintry blast:

The great quantity of snow that fell was unprecedented so early in the winter, and in but few instances had the settlers experienced such a snow storm during any part of the year. The mail carriers, or postboys, as they were called, were obliged to ride through fields for miles at a time, the roads being impassable in all parts of the country. The snow was so deep that in some places where the highways had been shoveled out the banks of snow on both sides of the road were so high that men on horseback could not look over them. Many houses were so deeply buried in the snow that the families which lived in them found it very difficult to make an egress without tunneling through the drifts.

Ninety years later Americans looked out their windows, wide-eyed and anxious about the whiteout that the Blizzard of '88 produced. Temperatures fell well below zero, winds gusted, and cities across the country were brought to a standstill. A reporter at the New Hampshire Sentinel could hardly believe it. "The oldest inhabitants can recollect no such storm as the present," he observed. "It probably never snowed faster in this part of the country than it did from Monday morning until Tuesday morning, almost without interruption. In addition to this the wind blew a gale continuously, and the snow was packed into deep, solid drifts on all sides. . . . Telegraphic communication with Boston was cut off during the afternoon. All wires between Washington and New York were down in the morning, and by noon the wires between New York and Boston were all down."

Then there was the Armistice Day Blizzard of 1940. From November 11 to 12 temperatures dove in some parts of the country from the 60s to single digits. The storm stretched from Kansas to Michigan and caused nearly 150 deaths. "In Texas sub-freezing temperature nipped fruit crops," reported Life magazine. The thermometer dipped to 20 degrees below in Belgrade, Montana. "The storms did not spare the great cities of the Midwest. More than 16 inches of snow fell in Minneapolis and piled up in great wind drifts which halted transportation and buried stranded cars. Buildings were unroofed, chimneys toppled and trees uprooted be winds of tornadic force."

The Blizzard of 1978? Some folks have still not warmed up from that one.

So, as you sit through hours of snow snarled traffic jams, put those chains back onto your tires again, and bundle up your kids like Randy in Christmas Story . . . remember that others have gone before you, a great snow-filled cloud of frostbitten witnesses.