A professor goes to school

Shortly after the New Year, the list appears on the National Endowment for the Humanities Website, and, as soon as I return to my office after the holidays, I spend a morning carefully perusing it. I can’t apply to many of the summer research seminars and institutes for college and university faculty members, due to the calendar differences between American and British universities: many programs begin shortly after Memorial Day when American institutions have already held graduation but when their British analogues remain embroiled in external examiners’ boards and degree-classification meetings. Dreaming of July in the midst of January, I look through my abbreviated list and am pleased that, although “Early American Microhistories” is no longer a possibility for me, “Encounters between Europeans and Indigenous Americans, 1550-1750” is still an option. With an eye on the March 1 deadline, I begin the process of applying, working on my personal statement, contacting my referees, and taking care to emphasize throughout my application that, despite my British address and university affiliation, I am indeed an American citizen and thus meet the qualifications for participation in this institute.

Friends and colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic are puzzled by my desire to devote five weeks of my summer “vacation” to a project that will keep me away from both research and recreation. They are still more perplexed when they realize that I am committing myself to a situation in which I will be, more or less, a student, not a teacher; as little desire as many academics have to teach summer school, at least it is a familiar situation to them. “Why do you want to go back to school?” is a phrase that I hear again and again, despite the fact that the NEH has offered such summer programs for the past two decades. No doubt each of the several hundred academics who participate each summer in these projects has his or her own very specific reasons for choosing to devote a large chunk of the summer break to it, but what follows are my thoughts on the immediate and enduring value of being part of such an endeavor.

As an American who pays her taxes to a government whose decisions she frequently disapproves of, I find a certain degree of satisfaction at the thought of getting some of that money back in the form of the NEH stipend. Of course, the majority of this stipend is devoted, and rightly so, to paying for transportation, accommodation, food, and books for the duration of the institute. I may not be Robin Hood, but nonetheless I gain an admittedly childish sense of glee from this minor act of resource redistribution. Still greater satisfaction comes from looking over the list of topics for NEH-sponsored gatherings. Many of these seem to offer a latent or, occasionally, an overt challenge to the policies and ideologies of the current administration.

How, I wonder, might our president, so dedicated to drilling for oil in the High Arctic, feel about a seminar on the concepts of “Environmental Ethics and Issues: Alaska as a Case Study”? Our “second lady” Lynne Cheney is well known for her concern with what she sees as the narrative of America’s heritage of freedom; was she the intended audience for “Landmarks of American Democracy: Freedom Summer to the Memphis Sanitation Strike”? What might John Roberts or his Senate interlocutors make of a month of study on the intersection of “Religious Diversity and the Common Good”? How might Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum approach the conjunction of “Science and Values”? When one considers the current political climate and recalls the struggles of the NEA, the NEH’s sister agency, over its funding of such allegedly blasphemous, pornographic, and just plain un-American artists as Robert Mapplethorpe and Karen Finley, it is tempting to view participation in one of these programs as one of those rare occurrences in which financial and professional achievement can go hand in hand with political ideology.

To promulgate such a view, however, would be unfair: not only would it contradict both the letter and the spirit of the NEH’s programs, but it would minimize the many benefits of participating in these summer research seminars and institutes. Throughout the five weeks at my institute, I read literally thousands of pages of primary and secondary texts relating to encounters between Europeans and Native Americans, including many works that I had long intended to explore but for which I had never made the time. I exchanged ideas with the other two dozen participants, with the institute’s director, and with several visiting faculty members. This allowed me to come into contact with people from numerous disciplines—history and literature were numerically dominant, but sociology, anthropology, art history, and geography were also represented—and at every stage of their academic careers, from ABD graduate students to scholars for whom retirement was drawing into view. Moreover, the institute’s location at the John Carter Brown Library, with its abundant resources and skilled staff, allowed all participants to explore visual and textual representations of “the encounter” at an unparalleled level of sophistication.

But as much as I learned from the manifest content of this institute—and I learned a great deal—what was at least as valuable to me and, I believe, to my fellow participants was what I learned about teaching and learning.

To begin with, it was very difficult for seminar participants not to recognize the importance of understanding, respecting, and responding to differences in practice between various disciplines. The value of interdisciplinarity is something most of us within the academy are familiar with and to which many pay lip service. But here, there was no lip service. Interdisciplinarity was central to our entire enterprise. In our first meeting, the institute’s director invoked a series of academic keywords representing recent approaches to the study of the humanities and the social sciences—post-structuralism, new historicism, cultural relativism—and asked our group to come up with working definitions of these. Initially, I was skeptical of the value of such an endeavor: didn’t we (or at least I) already have well-developed understandings of these terms? And if we didn’t, who among us would be willing to admit it? Yet the ensuing discussion made it clear that our individual ideas, however highly we might think of them, were in many cases quite limited, particularly when we were asked to employ them within the context of another discipline in the humanities or social sciences.

For example, a scholar of literature pointed out that the textual focus of the whole concept of new historicism ignored relevant social context, and a sociologist queried the innately bourgeois standpoint from which academics employed theories of culture. Soon afterwards, a seemingly simple question regarding the extent to which English had supplanted Latin as the language of state in seventeenth-century Britain sparked a realization that historians and literary scholars began with very different assumptions, based on the textual corpus with which they were familiar.

It occurred to me at the halfway point of our five weeks together that, while we were working together to understand the ethnographic strategies that undergirded the encounters between Native Americans and Europeans in North America, we were simultaneously carrying out our own communal ethnography of one another and of our disciplinary allegiances; we were challenging each other as individuals and as historians, anthropologists, geographers, et al. to share with the whole seminar how a particular disciplinary sub-group might evaluate or illuminate a particular image, text, or idea.

At the same time that we were beginning to question familiar ways of looking at our research materials, we were facing another challenge: ceding control over the classroom. However much we as individuals might work to render our classrooms open forums in which instructors and students engage in nonhierarchical interaction, some of us found it unusual and even frustrating to give up control over the progress of discussion, both in form and in content. It was a shock to realize that we could speak only when the seminar leader acknowledged our raised hands and called on us, to accept that, however crucial we believed our interventions to be, we were expected to wait until our turn came. I am willing, if embarrassed, to admit that I had a very difficult time accepting that it would have been a real breach of decorum simply to blurt out my ideas, however valuable, rather than awaiting my turn. Similarly, some of us (again, including myself) were quick to express annoyance when some visiting faculty members did not touch on the readings they had assigned—another instance in which we were reluctant to give up dominion over the classroom.

From this last point, it can be argued that, although we had begun the institute as teachers, confident in our professional status and expertise, it was surprisingly easy for us to metamorphose into students. Such a rapid shift was, perhaps, predestined for the half of our number who took the option to spend the five weeks in university housing; we soon became “institutionalized,” concerned about faulty air-conditioning and locked bathroom doors, leaving messages on door-mounted whiteboards, and carrying our toiletries in plastic buckets. But even those among us who led more adult lifestyles—renting off-campus apartments, sometimes with partners or children—soon found themselves in a strange process of regression.

Dressed in our summer casual wear of shorts, T-shirts, baseball caps, and sneakers, we felt both guilty and gleeful when we came late to sessions, grew cranky when we became hot, tired, or bored, and, after a “field trip” (complete with yellow bus and buddy system) to the Peabody Museum, scattered throughout Harvard Square in search of burgers, milkshakes, and shopping opportunities. This sense of adopting a student mentality along with a student lifestyle was especially evident on the final day, when we said our goodbyes with a definite end-of-semester feeling, taking group photographs, swapping addresses, and promising to stay in touch. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, as we drove back around the Great Lakes or rode Amtrak down the East Coast, we felt ourselves undergoing a change, slipping off our temporary student veneer and becoming our academic selves again.

It is this temporary return to the mental and physical experience of our students that I think is the most valuable aspect of the NEH-summer-institute experience. After five weeks, our group learned something about communicating across disciplines and something more about understanding the encounters between inhabitants and invaders of North America, encounters that continue to shape American identity, ideology, and policy. But as the gap between our experience of academia as students and as teachers expands, it is this ability to regain, even temporarily, the student’s-eye view of our material, our disciplines, and our pedagogic practice that is the most critical encounter of all. Although we may think of ourselves, at least in our most confident moments, as dynamic young intellectuals, the sort of repositioning that participation in one of these institutes requires humbles us, sending us back across decades and into younger, less certain versions of ourselves, and this makes us better teachers.

By way of conclusion, I suggest that these sorts of lessons could benefit not only academics, but policy makers as well. Humility and empathy (rhetoric notwithstanding), not to mention historical awareness, appear to be in rather short supply among those who populate the upper ranks of our government. If we, and by extension our students, can gain so much when we are encouraged to open our minds and to question monolithic approaches to questions and problems, how much more might we all gain if not only the Ann Coulters and Robert Novaks, but the Karl Roves, and indeed the Cheneys and Bushes, were compelled to question their own convictions and competencies? What I learned over my “summer vacation” was that there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and that’s a lesson that no one, inside or outside the academy, can afford to ignore.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 6.1 (October, 2005).

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Natalie Zacek is a lecturer in history at the University of Manchester, specializing in colonial America and the Atlantic world.

If success can be measured by persistence, the transition-to-capitalism model is a classic. It has now been used continually for the better part of a century, deployed by a wide range of scholars to explain every imaginable type of change. Capitalism’s emergence has been updated, downdated, located geographically in northern Europe, Italy, various parts of the Western Hemisphere, and in the Atlantic world as a whole. In the transition model, capitalism is always somehow understood as supplanting a more egalitarian past and preventing a more humane future, forced on unwilling populations by corrupt or power hungry elites.

In her study, Breaking Loose Together, Marjoleine Kars argues that the agrarian upheaval known as the North Carolina Regulation reflected “the slow separation of morality from economics that characterized (and enabled) the development of the emerging capitalist order” (6). Specifically, she sees the evangelical smallholders of the Appalachian piedmont who fought against government corruption in provincial North Carolina as champions of a different, less hierarchical society that was eventually overwhelmed by elites determined to participate in “the selfish and relentless pursuit of unlimited material gain” increasingly common in the eighteenth century (6). Her study thus raises an important question: does this time-tested model, and the updated corollaries to it, have anything left to tell us about late colonial and Revolutionary America?

The North Carolina Regulation grew from the confusion and conflict that defined the settlement of the province’s interior. A massive, rapid immigration from the northern colonies after 1750, a land-tenure system made unstable by overlapping royal land grants, weak and partisan governmental institutions, religious tensions between evangelicals and Anglicans, and a host of land-hungry colonists led to decades of lawsuits, political turmoil, and collective violence. Specifically, aggressive speculators who tried to manipulate the legal system came into conflict with squatters who claimed their property by a labor theory of value. The groups struggled for control of the interior for fifteen years. Political corruption and the lack of shared cultural terrain foiled the early efforts of yeomen crowds to “regulate” the behavior of the coastal elite with demonstrations and threats. In 1771, tensions built to a violent confrontation known as the Battle of the Almanace that involved thousands and ended with a victory for the royal government.

These sorts of conflicts were systemic to the early American countryside and have attracted considerable attentions from historians. Scholars who have examined them can be divided loosely into two schools: those who see the conflicts as driven by cultural and religious divisions and those who believe class conflict or structural injustices created the preconditions for unrest. The two approaches manifested themselves over sixty years ago in the work of Dixon Ryan Fox and Irving Marks, who both examined provincial New York’s troubled land-tenure system. Fox saw the society’s land-related problems as a result of conflicts between Yankees and Yorkers, whereas Marks saw them as a product of structural inequality and a grossly exploitative system of tenancy. A number of recent studies have tried to subtly balance these approaches to create a more thorough understanding of change in the countryside.

Professor Kars, too, tries to walk the path between cultural conflict and structural change, with limited success. Breaking Loose Together places a heavy emphasis on religion and religious life. Her heroes in this story are the evangelical smallholders who came to populate the Carolina interior in the twenty years after 1750. “I argue,” she writes “that . . . many North Carolina farmers were inspired and sustained in their rebellion by popular religion . . . Inspired, too, by the unfolding protests against Britain, Regulator leaders like Herman Husband combined the Protestant insistence on one’s own moral truth with radical Whig ideas about the right and duty of citizens to resist unjust government, to fuel and justify their rebellion” (5). That same moral truth, she believes, led them to resist the capitalist values of North Carolina’s land speculators and political leaders who were trying to lock up control of the colony’s land tenure system. The research design that underlies this framework is inadequate to sustain it, and in fact only serves to expose its contradictions and lack of explanatory power.

Breaking Loose Together, or at least the parts that address the yeomanry, is based in large part on Moravian archives, Quaker records, and the writings of agrarian spokesman Herman Husband. The appeal of these records is obvious–they are complete, which is unusual for pre-Revolutionary America’s source bases that address agrarian issues. It would seem a bonanza for a scholar studying the North Carolina Regulation, except for two glaring problems. The Moravians, and many Quakers, sided with the government against the Regulators or remained neutral (121, 123, 170). The major source base thus does not speak to the major groups involved in the unrest, and what use these sources might have been in reconstructing life in provincial North Carolina is limited by Professor Kars’s approach. The majority of Regulators were Presbyterians and Separate Baptists, groups whose social, institutional, and theological dynamics are inadequately explored in this study.

These Presbyterians and Baptists shared a number of social and economic goals with the vast majority of migrants to the southern piedmont. They came from the north seeking upward social mobility, free markets for their crops, freehold property, inflated money supplies, decentralized credit markets, good or at least limited government whose local branches would be under their control, and the right to worship in their Protestant churches without interference. Some among them had qualms about finery and conspicuous display, and some in this period began to question slavery. But in most ways they look a lot like nineteenth-century America’s petty agrarian capitalists, seeking advantage and land for their ever growing families. Professor Kars in fact describes them this way. “Their desire,” she writes, “to create communities based on strict moral values led evangelicals and radical Protestants to attempt to regulate the behavior of their fellow Christians.” These groups “supervised family conduct in such areas as childrearing, courtship, and marriage, as well as deportment in politics and business” (113). If there ever were a description of middle-class, Protestant American culture, that’s it. Throughout the nineteenth century, white Protestant Americans, and indeed many free Protestant African Americans, would try with great success to make the entire country, indeed the entire world, over in this image. Such moral crusading, emphasis on good government, and material restraint was the very soil in which nineteenth-century American capitalist culture grew. The reality, for certain, was often quite different from the ideal, but the ideal continued to exist into the twentieth century.

A large part of the problem with Breaking Loose Together is the vocabulary used to sustain its argument. What is meant by “capitalism”? Are we to equate it with greed and abuse of power, as Professor Kars does? If so, it has existed in all complex societies at all times, since such abuses and desires are a shared aspect of the human condition. If by capitalism we mean industrialization, the force that ripped premodern society from its agrarian foundations, that change had yet to come and was not foreseen by anyone in North Carolina. Or does she mean possessive individualism? Is capitalism really as amoral as she maintains? What is meant by “radical”? Were the Quakers still “radical” in the late eighteenth century? Were the Moravians who professed their loyalty to Governor Tryon really radical? Such terms become even more confusing when applied to the Presbyterians and Quakers because some remained loyal to the government even as others supported the Regulation.

There seems to have been only two groups in provincial North Carolina that can be fit in any way into Professor Kars’s variation on the resistance-to-capitalism model. Paradoxically, the congruence of these groups’ behavior with the model illuminate the study’s underlying problems. The first of these, unsurprisingly, is the Moravians. This pietistic German speaking sect originally settled in Pennsylvania along with a number of other German speakers such as the Amish and the Mennonites. The Moravians believed in some group controls over commercial activities and feared the effects of unrestrained commercial behavior on the sect’s cohesion. Groups of them began to go south in the 1750s during the first wave of migrations from the mid-Atlantic to the Carolina interior. They again set up inward-looking communities, passing rules against certain types of commercial behavior. When sustained violence erupted they remained loyal to the imperial government. And by then, Moravians in both Pennsylvania and the Carolinas had given up much of their plans to restrain economic activity.

The second group that fits the Kars model, it seems to me, was the society’s leaders, the William Tryons and Edward Fannings, the very same people Professor Kars sees as the agents of capitalism. These officials and the circle of provincial gentry within which they moved had a vested interest in preserving a premodern, landed order tied to the British empire. They were greedy and they used their offices and connections to try to gain title to tens of thousands of acres. To do so was the norm in the eighteenth century, and in fact was normal behavior in most premodern societies. The political structure and the social structure were supposed to look alike; those in power were supposed to be the great landholders, men of money and means. People like this had a vested interest in keeping economic activity flowing in controlled channels that served their position. They were of course opposed in this by yeomen protecting their own interests and economic autonomy, but that conflict hardly makes one side or the other capitalist. Moreover, these leaders generally belonged to the Church of England, some of the ministers of which were, in the 1760s, preaching a form of divine-right monarchy and leading weekly prayers for the royal family. They, like the Moravians, come closer to fitting Professor Kars’s resistance-to-capitalism model than those who supported or participated in the Regulation.

At heart Professor Kars is a structuralist and one senses that she would love to reduce evangelical religion, the Regulation, and some aspects of the Revolution to the struggle against capitalism in the best tradition of Christopher Hill and other English Marxists of his stripe. She quotes them a good deal and is an obvious admirer. But she has done real archival research and realizes that the Carolina backcountry was in a state of ferment that was simultaneously cultural, material, and political. The social components she looks at and the questions she asks are worthwhile ones, at the core of the Protestant, agrarian America that took shape in the eighteenth century. The Moravian and Quaker archives are important sources. But the transition-to-capitalism model, even the modified form she uses, is exhausted. It leads Kars into a good guys/bad guys format that blurs rather than explains the nuances and contradictions that are part of the fabric of change in human societies. Even her clear writing style cannot make the data she has work the way she wants it to.

The transition-to-capitalism model has been with us for almost a century, but in early American history it reached its greatest appeal in the 1960s and 70s. Its champions, together with their contemporaries who created the republican synthesis and the neo-liberal framework, produced an unusually rich body of scholarship. The political ferment of those times, the opening of the field to new practitioners from social groups previously underrepresented, methodological innovations derived from interdisciplinary work, the increased financial support for archival research and writing, and the spread of the Evans microfilm/microcards to research libraries across the country helped to fuel this scholarly production, the intellectual legacy of which remains with us today in a number of contemporary schools of scholarship. And yet in paying this tribute, I cannot but think it is past time we came to understand these frameworks, even in their updated forms, archaeologically, as artifacts of a time that has passed. If we can put them aside, a difficult task in itself, perhaps we can then ask that world of 250 years ago new questions and look closely in the archival sources for the answers. In so doing, we will have broken loose ourselves from the legacies that have dominated our field for nearly forty years, and entered a frightening and exhilarating new world.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 3.1 (October, 2002).

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Brendan McConville is an associate professor of history at SUNY-Binghamton. He is presently completing a study entitled The King’s Three Faces.

For historians of the colonial south, particularly the lands south of the Tennessee River and east of the Mississippi, the trade in Indian slaves has long been one of the region’s greatest unsolved mysteries. In the half century before 1715, intertribal warfare, kidnapping, and enslavement displaced thousands and reshaped the lives of all of the region’s inhabitants. Slave raids depopulated the missions of Spanish Florida and complicated French efforts to colonize Louisiana. Disparate Indian communities formed powerful confederacies in an effort to take advantage of the lucrative trade and avoid enslavement. By exporting their human cargoes everywhere from Boston to Barbados, the British slave traders of South Carolina spurred the colony’s economy while extending its influence among slave-hunting Indians as far west as the Mississippi River. No corner of the region escaped the hunt for slaves or its consequences.

The general outlines of this trade are no secret, but the mystery remains in the significance of the details. Because no colonial power compiled records on the illicit trade, historians have been reluctant to reconstruct this complicated story from disparate and patchy sources. Despite historians’ occasional references to a telling fingerprint here or a missing vase there, one of the greatest thefts of people in North American history has been left untold.

Thanks to Alan Gallay, that is no longer the case. Gathering all of the suspects into the proverbial drawing room, Gallay presents fascinating details and striking new conclusions about a commerce that flourished from 1670, when the English founded South Carolina, through 1717, when they concluded peace with the pan-Indian alliance that nearly destroyed them. Tracking down evidence from California to France, Gallay argues that South Carolina’s emergent planter class exported Indians to finance the purchase of African slaves. Upon the backs of African laborers who were less likely than Indian chattel to run away or revolt, white Carolinians would construct a more lucrative (and, to their minds, respectable) economy based on rice and indigo. Although South Carolina receives most of his scrutiny, Gallay nimbly ranges across the entire region in his effort to sketch the larger geopolitical context of the trade. In the course of this densely packed narrative, readers will find fresh insights into topics ranging from the political relations among Indian confederacies to the biographies of the English men who sponsored this sinister business.

Gallay unravels his tale in four roughly chronological parts. The first set of chapters describes the native societies and their encounters with Spanish and English colonists before 1701. Despite the Spaniards’ century-long head start and Carolinians’ internecine feuding, the later arrivals quickly proved more ruthless and effective at colonizing the region. The English and the nascent Indian confederacies realized that cooperation would best serve their respective interests. At the heart of this cooperation lay the slave trade. Carolina’s proprietary sponsors in England tried to limit trade with Native Americans, but ambitious colonists ignored these distant overseers and quickly “infected” the South with this highly profitable traffic (6). The English did not act alone. Indians traded to avoid enslavement themselves and because the sale of slaves enabled them to acquire large amounts of the cloth, beads, and guns that Carolinians offered in return.

The second part focuses on the ways that Native Americans and Europeans adjusted to this new commerce. In the five years following the outbreak of the War of Spanish Succession in 1701, Carolinians advanced their economic and military fortunes by enlisting native allies to conduct massive raids that destroyed Florida’s missions and threatened the stability of newly established French Louisiana. French officials responded by encouraging their own allies to capture slaves, and French and Spaniards together tried to use their Indian allies for colonial defense and a fruitless counterattack against Charles Town.

Carolinians’ unsuccessful efforts to regulate the trade before 1711 are the focus of part 3. Bitter squabbles among rival traders made a mockery of any regulatory efforts, and as traders continued to beat, rape, cheat, and occasionally enslave their Indian allies, Indian disaffection quietly grew. Carolinians had sown the wind. Part 4 describes the rising whirlwind. The raids that Carolinians sponsored across the region enabled them to export, according to Gallay’s calculations, 24,000-51,000 Indians at prices comparable to African slaves. In 1715, Native Americans throughout the region abruptly halted this commerce when they simultaneously killed the English traders among them and began raiding the colony itself. When the Yamasee War of 1715-17 ended, the Carolinians’ plantations, trade, and regional influence lay in ruins. The end of hostilities marked not just the demise of the slave trade, but a new watershed. Carolinian involvement in a staple-crop economy dependent on African slaves began in earnest after 1717; this new economic system would define white wealth until the Civil War.

The book’s scope, attention to detail, and insightful analysis are the product of impressive sleuthing. Nonetheless, I was disappointed to find so little discussion of two principal actors. Gallay’s contention that “Spain’s influence did not reach much farther into the South than Florida” (33), contributes to oversights as simple as referring to Governor Juan Márquez Cabrera as Juan Marais Cabrera and as significant as ignoring the subtle impact of Spanish gifts on nonmission Indians’ intratown and intertown relations. This shortcoming contributes to the second, and larger, problem. Although Gallay highlights how the Indians were integral to the trade, he says little about how being hunters and hunted shaped native cultures. In any mystery, everyone wants to know both whodunit and why. Indian actors play a central role; unfortunately, their motives lack a similar presence.

But even this criticism is a product of the book’s success. Gallay’s ability to integrate the frequently segregated schools of colonial and Native American history means that Indians occupy a leading role in a colonial history. Furthermore, his ability to explore early Southern history without losing sight of the larger picture is as unusual as it is refreshing. If the joy and burden of history is that its mysteries are never completely solved, historians of the colonial South, and indeed of early colonial North America, should all be grateful that Gallay has at least cracked this case wide open.

 

 

This article originally appeared in issue 3.1 (October, 2002).

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Joseph Hall studies Indian confederacy formation in the early colonial southeast and is assistant professor of history at Bates College.

Each year in my course on the history of the American West, I ask students what images they most closely associate with colonial America. Always they respond with Pilgrims (at the first Thanksgiving), Pocahontas (as drawn by Disney animators), and patriots (led by George Washington). No surprises here: depictions of Pilgrims, Pocahontas, and patriots remain staples of American popular culture. They also affirm the enduring hold of an older vision of colonial history, for, as synecdoches, the figures of Pilgrims, Pocahontas, and patriots present a past that commences with the founding of Massachusetts and Virginia and culminates with the independence of the United States.

As a historian of the American West and even more as a teacher at a public university in California, I have been surprised, however, by what students do not add to the list. Not once has a respondent mentioned missions. The omission of missions is puzzling, because the vast majority of the students are from California. That means that back in fourth grade almost all of them built an elaborate diorama of a mission. When prompted, students remember in great detail the experience of constructing missions from sugar cubes, popsicle sticks, egg cartons, and whatever else could be scrounged from parents’ kitchens. Yet despite this most memorable of projects, missions do not enter their vision of colonial history. In their view, the history of colonial America played out exclusively on the Atlantic coast and involved only the thirteen mainland British American colonies that became the original United States.

Not that long ago, that is how most scholars conceived the field too, but recent work has forwarded a broader vision, and Alan Taylor’s new book provides the best synthesis to date of that wider frame. Taylor’s title, American Colonies, rather than the traditional Colonial America, announces his intention to survey plural pasts (xiv). Bringing all of North America and the West Indies into his sights, Taylor juxtaposes French, Spanish, Russian, and Dutch brands of colonialism alongside the imperial endeavors of the British. If the Chesapeake and New England still merit the most extensive treatment, these regions and the rest of mainland British America no longer “warrant exclusiveattention” (xv). In addition to chapters on the Middle Colonies and the Carolinas, American Colonies ranges from Canada to the Caribbean and from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Indeed, Taylor’s text ends not, as almost all colonial American histories do, with a chapter on the coming of the Revolution, but with one that examines the expansion of various European empires to the West Coast of North America and to the islands of the Pacific Ocean. The usual climax for colonial history, the imperial crisis that followed the Seven Years’ War, gets only five pages (in a book of nearly five hundred); the American Revolution earns only a paragraph. And these topics arise in the book’s penultimate chapter. Instead of with the inception of American nationhood,American Colonies closes with a chapter that carries well into the nineteenth century and that deals, among other subjects, with the establishment of missions in California.

Beyond the recognition that California’s missions belong in colonial American history, Taylor’s continental perspective foregrounds the common and comparative dimensions of European colonialism in North America. Drawing in particular on environmental and ethnohistorical scholarship, Taylor underscores how various mixtures of peoples and products from Europe, Africa, and the Americas shaped and reshaped all of North America’s colonial and indigenous societies in the centuries after 1492. Across the continent, even in places unseen by Europeans, American Colonies describes how the spread of European peoples (or at least of Afro-Eurasian animals, plants, and microbes) had transformative consequences for Indian peoples. Often the consequences were simply tragic, though Taylor insists that through the eighteenth century most of North America’s Indians retained the power to contest colonial domination and negotiate intercultural relations on more favorable terms. In most of the territory claimed by one or another European empire, the paradoxical impact of colonialism was a “deepening mutuality of dependency, binding Europeans and Indians together in an uneasy embrace” (92). The distinctive features of British, French, and Spanish domains depended as well on interimperial relations. Although the book treats different parts of the continent in separate chapters, Taylor appreciates that no region was entirely isolated and that colonial regimes regularly intersected and interfered with one another.

It is unfortunate, yet also revealing, that American Colonies concludes without a full and formal conclusion. The absence may reflect Taylor’s sense that while the colonial era of North American history ended, the legacies of colonialism endure. Or, it may be that Taylor was unable to distill a complex, polycolonial interpretation down to a satisfactory summation. After all, unlike the constricted, Anglo-centric vision that looked on colonial history only as a seedbed for American national history, Taylor has more ground, more people(s), and more experiences to recapitulate. Moreover, because Taylor disdains the teleology that reduces the colonial era to a protonational period, he cannot, as early American historians once did, wrap things up with a few well-chosen words about how the extension of liberty, equality, and opportunity set the stage for revolution and republican government. In lieu of patriotic balms, American Colonies leaves readers with discomforting truths. If North America proved “the best free man’s country” for several hundred thousand European immigrants, it “was a hard land for [millions who were temporarily or permanently] unfree” (441). Echoing John Murrin, Taylor’s book suggests that the fortunate few, whether colonists of British, French, Spanish, Russian, or Dutch America, were the beneficiaries of a catastrophe visited upon far larger numbers of Indians and Africans.

Next time I ask students for their first impressions of colonial America, I will come armed with a copy of American Colonies. When they tell me about Pilgrims, Pocahontas, and patriots, I can tell them to read a book that will open their eyes to a far more expansive colonial panorama.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 3.1 (October, 2002).

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Stephen Aron, associate professor of history at UCLA and director of the Autry Institute for the Study of the American West, is the author of How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore, 1996) and coauthor of Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A History of the Modern World from the Mongol Empire to the Present (New York, 2002).

Ten years ago an unnamed historian advised Richard Godbeer not to undertake this project on early American sexuality because there was not “sufficient evidence” (12). That negative assessment was certainly the standard view. Historians could read for years without discovering much about sex in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the whole, the inhabitants of the colonies and early republic were remarkably reticent about what went on in bedrooms (and attics, stables, fields, ships, barracks, and bawdy houses, not to mention haystacks, pool tables, and more) as bodies interacted with bodies in ways that were “erotically charged” (11). They occasionally mentioned “conjugal embraces,” “flourishes,” “ravishings,” “connexions,” or “abominations.” But for the most part, even post-Freudian historians did not try to decipher the meanings of these arcane words. Our access to the sexual practices of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has also been mediated by those pesky Victorians who bowdlerized many published documents, or who fed offending letters and diaries to the flames in order to make their ancestors seem “respectable.”

Since the early 1990s, however, the work of Kathy Brown, Sharon Block, Kenneth Lockridge, Claire Lyons, John Murrin, Merril Smith, Bruce Daniels, Rodney Hessinger, and more has proven the naysayer wrong. And earlier studies by Roger Thompson, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Christine Stansell, and others stretching back to Edmund S. Morgan’s 1942 article on the Puritans, meant that the advice was outmoded even when it was uttered.

Historians have recovered early sexual beliefs and practices in three ways. One is by intensive searches through the archives for surviving evidence. Another is through a rediscovery of popular literary and medical texts. For example, Aristotle’s Masterpiece, a guide to procreation that went through many cheap editions, provides access to contemporary sex lore, while joke books, almanacs, and best-selling novels reveal anxieties about gender, power, and seduction. The final and perhaps most useful method has been the development of an expanded definition of sex. The sexual encompasses far more than erotically charged physical interactions. Sex is also a cultural construct that includes a particular society’s ideals and anxieties, practices and constraints, and categorizations of the erotic. These constructions vary over space and time. Expressions of the sexual are everywhere in the archives: in sermons, magazines and newspapers, court records, letters and diaries, even if the physical manifestations of sex are not.

Godbeer has followed the sources in this synthetic overview of the sexual in early America. He spends the bulk of the book in New England where the well-preserved sermon literature and court records offer a wealth of information. Of the nine chapters in the book, four are devoted to New England, and a large part of the chapter on the interactions (or lack thereof) between native peoples and European colonizers also concerns New England. In the discussion of the southern colonies, Godbeer focuses on the Carolinas, but, when evidence is sparse, he includes examples from the Chesapeake, the Caribbean, and even Surinam. In his last chapter he turns to Philadelphia in the second half of the eighteenth century, a focus that follows Clare Lyons’s innovative analysis of that place and time—a dissertation soon to be a book—but inserts occasional court cases from New York City. It is an approach that maximizes the evidentiary base and provides a wide-ranging look at the sexual, but makes it difficult to track change over time or to define regional sexualities, except in New England where change seems to have been more evolutionary than revolutionary.

In one of the important findings of this book, Godbeer challenges our early-twenty-first-century understanding that it is natural that each person have a distinct sexual orientation that comprises a major part of personal identity—a sexuality. Early European Americans had no such understanding. Sex was an aspect of family life, of religious belief, of developing racial identities, of attitudes toward the authority of state and church, but rarely, if ever, considered an innate predisposition. Sex was a site of conflict, particularly between officials and the bulk of the people who were either rebellious or bound by customary notions of respectability or accountability that emanated from community traditions, not from their so-called “betters.” Puritan officials celebrated the joys of marital sex and utilized explicit sexual imagery in theological writings, in part to distinguish themselves from their view of Catholic teachings, but worried about the tendency of illicit sex to undermine godliness. In the more loosely governed Carolinas, officials worried about undisciplined settlers reverting to savages. City officials worried about post-Revolutionary assertions of sexual liberty. Those who seek a golden age of “family values” in the past will not find it in the lives and times of the founders.

If the strength of the book is that it is source driven, it is also a weakness. Godbeer does not fully address the biases of the surviving sources, one of which is that most are male authored. Indeed, he often adopts an uncritical male gaze in passages such as “Americans became increasingly troubled by the implications of a more permissive sexual culture, especially as it affected young women” (277). Who are these Americans? It seems that they are not young women, who are only the objects of national concern. He tends to see women as the variable, and men as constants, so that he spends much time tracing the development of the seducible woman, morally responsible for her sexual purity, but no time asking why so many men adopted the persona of the sexually libertine rake. He seems to argue that feminist historians have exaggerated the liabilities of women under the double sexual standard. Christine Stansell calls the Bedlow rape trial “a digest of misogynist thought girded by class contempt.” Godbeer places it in the context of the poem “The Orange Woman,” a “celebratory” ditty “acknowledging [poorer women’s] sexual urges and welcoming opportunities to indulge them” (307). But whose fantasy is this? Some analysis of the source would be welcome. Issues of gender, of consent, of power, of the practice of mastery are generally underdeveloped.

This is a book aimed at a general audience. Those who have been able to attend recent conferences and keep up with the increasingly voluminous literature on sexuality will find much that is familiar, perhaps a little too familiar. Others will welcome a short, accessible survey of an interesting topic.

Further Reading: Christine Stansell’s description of the Bedlow rape trial is taken from her City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (Urbana, Ill., 1987), 23-4.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 3.1 (October, 2002).

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Susan E. Klepp is a professor of history at Temple University and has published on eighteenth-century demographic and social history, most recently “Colds, Worms, and Hysteria: Menstrual Regulation in 18th-Century America,” in Etienne Van de Walle and Elisha P. Renne, eds., Regulating Menstruation (Chicago, 2001).

Author’s Note:
As I hope will become readily apparent, The Hungry Eye is a work of historical fiction. Some of its characters and incidents are pulled from the historical record–most particularly, the dueling “special artists” Peleg Padlin and Little Waddley. Their misadventures while touring New York’s netherworld originally appeared in an 1857-58 series of articles in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper written by New York Tribune reporter Mortimer Neal Thompson. That the pseudonymous pictorial reporters stood in for Leslie’s staff artists Sol Eytinge Jr. and a very young Thomas Nast should not be of concern to the present-day reader. Moreover, the mystery at the heart of The Hungry Eye, which entangles these and other characters and the constellation of their relationships, is my own invention. Much of what transpires here (and in the ensuing installments, which will appear in Common-place monthly between January and April) is utterly fantastic–and yet it also, I believe, remains true to the history of a specific time and place.

While I originally conceived of The Hungry Eye as a conventional novel (at least in the sense that it would end up as a tactile book printed on paper with a spine available for cracking) the chance to emulate the once ubiquitous format of serialization was hard to pass up. And wedding an older episodic approach to the still inchoate medium of the World Wide Web offered an intriguing narrative challenge. Aside from requiring some reconfiguring of the story’s structure to accommodate the start-and-stop pacing of extended and intermittent reading, I’ve tried to work with the Web to intermingle the visualization of the past–which plays a prominent role in the plot–with the telling of the story. That said, you won’t come across any state of the art programming here: what I’ve tried to do is enhance the reading experience on the Web, not replace it.

All original artwork © 2001 Joshua Brown.

 

“The dog hunt had turned nasty now, and Padlin–as he scrawled the arcs of flailing arms and the jags and dashes of torn turf and flesh–didn’t want to risk a blow from a misaimed club or a bite from a wounded cur.”

 

Our Special Artist

Padlin’s familiarity with the dead woman was the result of only one occasion, an incident that had occurred during one of his sketch assignments.

Before Padlin began work for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, its proprietor and namesake had settled upon one particular subject that guaranteed a dedicated readership: disease. While the paper’s audience enjoyed the engravings of visiting dignitaries, devastating disasters, and violent crimes, it was fevers, poxes, plagues, and infections that sent circulation soaring, especially when the illustrations portrayed the ghastly purveyors of pestilence. The city seemed to be clotted with an array of tainted animal life, from swill-milk cows rotting in their dark stalls to the bloated carcasses of pigs blocking the streets. So, once he joined the weekly newspaper’s art staff, it was Peleg Padlin, weak in rendering humans but masterly in the figuration of fauna, to whom the sanitary assignments fell whenever Mr. Leslie sensed his readership declining.

Which was why, one spring afternoon, Padlin found himself crouching beside an abandoned wagon on a muddy street off the Five Points. He was using the mired vehicle, pungent with the spoiled stench of its earlier cargoes, as a combination easel and shield. The dog hunt had turned nasty now, and Padlin–as he scrawled the arcs of flailing arms and the jags and dashes of torn turf and flesh–didn’t want to risk a blow from a misaimed club or a bite from a wounded cur.

Padlin had arrived early on that gray morning just as the seasonal city-sponsored dog hunt got underway. For hours the nooks and crannies of the Sixth Ward were alive with scampering boys and men excitedly chasing a skeletal mongrel here, cornering a sleek wolf there. The air crackled with the boys’ chirps, mingling Irish and English into an indecipherable Points pidgin, their bare feet slapping the swampy street. The dogs barked, yelped, growled, and Padlin filled his pad with amusing cartoons:

 

two urchins thrown into a bumbling embrace as their intended victim swerved round, teeth gnashing, to call their bluff; a hulking bullyboy munching a cigar and marching down the middle of Bayard Street with a convulsing sack over his shoulder; a trio of Points beauties–a cackling crone, a barrel-like grocery store matron, and a groggy concert-hall damsel–razzing the hunters.

By midday Padlin thought he had enough material for a month’s supply of Leslie’s sanitary reports. The hunt was over anyway. Most of the animals had been carried off to meet watery deaths in the East River before their sodden corpses were tallied by the city clerks who paid out the bounties. About a dozen miserable mutts still remained, corralled within the triangle of scrawny trees and weeds in the heart of the Points called Paradise Park. The skinniest of the dogs occasionally managed to wriggle through the clapboard fence, but the cordon of jeering lads always succeeded in intercepting them, booting and jabbing the fugitives back into the imprisoned pack.

The sun began to burn through the overcast sky, cutting seams into the grayness that sent blotches of light down upon the Points. The hot puddles of sunlight exalted the scene, giving it an innocent air despite the whooping and hollering, yelping and barking, despite the crooked posture of the low buildings and the crumbling of their facades. Padlin sketched a cartoon in his mind: a skeletal figure marked Rabies rising above the carnival scene, dissipating defeated into the heavens. He’d work the idea out at the office. Padlin pocketed his pencils, slid his sketches under one arm, and prepared to walk the short distance south to Spruce Street. That was when he noticed the girl.

She scampered from sunlit spot to sunlit spot, interrupting conversations, touching an arm, inquiring with an intent gaze that sent heads shaking, eyes averted until she moved on. Then stares followed her course. A host of stares, her progress competing for attention with the shouts around Paradise Park. At first Padlin took her for a beggar requesting a little charity on a rare occasion of neighborhood affluence. But, as she drew closer to Padlin, inquiring and rushing off, inquiring and rushing off, each time barely hearing an answer before she departed, he saw that her face carried a despair that differed from the mendicant’s. Each answer seemed to feed a panic that pressed her to move faster, ignoring the turds and trash, the hem of her dress skimming the pools of water that always pocked the Sixth Ward streets.

“Sir, have you seen my Jakesy?”

How could he have mistaken her for a beggar? She stood, hands clasped primly at her bodice, her red hair kept in place by a straw bonnet decorated with paper flowers. Attractive, in an unrefined way. A pretty Lize dressed for a Hoboken excursion, looking for her Mose.

“My dog, sir,” she said, her eyes widening, blue pupils against a faultless white. “I fear he has been taken off.”

“That,” Padlin mumbled, “is a distinct possibility.”

She emitted a sound–a muffled cry of consternation or a sigh of exasperation, he couldn’t be sure which–and swept past Padlin.

“What kind of dog?” Padlin heard himself call after her.

But she ignored him, pressing now toward Paradise Park. As she moved away, Padlin saw her back stiffen, her corseted waist dilate ever so slightly, the encasing fabric going taut. An intake of breath, a strengthening of resolve. He realized the girl’s seemingly meandering search had been but preparation for a more grueling confrontation.

He pulled out his pad, hurriedly attempting a likeness: innocence in the Points, a nice bit of pathos to counter the bloody farce. As usual, Padlin failed miserably. In his effort to capture her countenance, he worked the face too hard, the pencil revolving from an oval–no–to sharper lines that harshened her face–no!–to an utterly generic visage: round eyes, button nose, dew-drop mouth. He was grimacing at the mess on the page when all hell broke loose.

He had ignored the first few hearty whoops and squeals, accented by unaccustomed thumping sounds. It was the scream that broke his concentration. A gurgle that catapulted to a high-pitched screech. It coursed up his spine and palsied his drawing hand.

Paradise Park was a chaos of frenzied movement, bodies launching over the fence, brickbats and clubs swinging, beasts snapping, darting–dying. In moments scarlet blotches appeared, dots on clothes, on fists, on the hides of curs flung against the park fence, exploding into gore that seemed to rain upward into the sky. Something had been let loose. The giddiness of the hunt had toppled over into a bloody bacchanalia.

The girl was running toward the massacre, splashing through the puddles and shit, emitting that horrible scream. She reached the perimeter of the park, jittered one way, then another, looking for ingress, knocking aside the excited urchins ululating to the slaughter. Her hands went to her head and Padlin was sure he heard again, through the bellows, bleats, and thuds, her awful cry. Then she threw herself upon the fence, reaching over, wildly grasping out. She caught onto something, Padlin couldn’t see what. Her frail frame seemed to go through a series of hiccoughs, the spasms rapidly mounting in intensity, jolting her up, jolting her down. Then Padlin saw that her hands were clasped about a flailing arm. A broad plug-ugly was trying to twist around within the sanguinary clutch of curs and killers, shaking and shimmying his forearm caught by her hands. His club, a limb torn from one of the park trees, spiraled helplessly, sprinkling the air with bits of brain.

No one came to her aid. Instead, the urchins at the fence descended upon her, grabbing at her skirts, reaching up at her shoulders, pulling and pelting. The girl was like an awful convulsing carcass, barely visible under a layer of pecking, digging bluebottle flies.

Instinctively, protectively, Padlin crouched down beside the empty wagon, hurriedly sketching the chaos of movement, concentrating on the dray’s remnant fumes. The girl was screaming again, the sound cracking now, cut into gruesome burps as she flew up and down and against the planks.

Padlin stared helplessly at his drawing, at his maladroit strokes. He should do something–yet he’d be a fool to do anything in the Points. What could he do? Stab a bullyboy with his pencil? Despite his size, he was no bare-knuckle bruiser, and anyway, anyway, he had his responsibility right here in his hands. His day’s labor. His bread and butter. He looked up and saw a boy scramble over his compatriots and grab hold of the girl’s hair, yanking so her head snapped backward. Her bonnet flew off and disappeared under the trample of bare feet and boots.

Padlin grabbed the pad in his two hands and careened toward the park, holding it before him, a flimsy, fluttering shield.

He never reached the mayhem. A bloodied, slimy ball of a pig, mistakenly corralled amidst the curs, dislodged itself from the slaughter, squealing and stinking, and made straight for the sketch artist. The swine caught him across the shins. In a rare exhibition of coordination, Padlin managed to raise the pad above his head before he catapulted and landed, face down, in the muck.

He spent what seemed an eternity mired, teetering back and forth on his belly, his arms outstretched above him, trying to keep the pad out of the mess. Then he felt a sudden tug and the pad was wrenched from his grasp.

In a panic, shouting oaths, Padlin scrambled up, in the process submerging his arms in the cold slime of the street. He made it to his knees, furiously scooping mud out of his eyes, and found that he was being watched by a kid, soaked to the knees in blood, standing a few feet from him.

Padlin agitatedly examined his muddy clothes, wiped his hands on the few unbesmirched sections of his coat, and snatched the pad from the wide-eyed boy.

“You do those pictures, huh?” The kid stared up at the soiled sketch artist. A jagged tear split his shirt up one side, the faded red fabric parting to reveal the grimy ladder of his ribs.

Padlin peered around. The adults were wandering off and disappearing into the houses, grocery stores, and saloons bracketing the Points, eager to slake thirsts generated by the exertion of extermination or observation.

“You do those pretty pictures. Right, mister?” The kid took a careful step forward, nodding toward the pad in Padlin’s hands. “Of them dimber morts and swells?”

Padlin suddenly remembered the girl. He scanned the park fence. She was standing–miraculously, she was standing–gazing into the park, her hands gripping the pickets. He approached, fearful to observe her face, which she averted toward the ruins within the triangle. Her dress was torn, her bonnet lay shattered at her feet.

Padlin opened his mouth and, unsurprisingly, nothing came out. He stood behind the girl, mouth agape, unaware that he was parodying the wide-open jaws of the slaughtered beasts spewing mucous and blood before him. For want of anything better to do, Padlin finally closed his mouth, unfurled his pad and began to draw the scene. His heart wasn’t really in the task, yet in a few moments he found that an excellent sketch was emerging.

“I did you a good turn. Right, mister?” The kid was standing on tiptoe, trying to gaze around Padlin’s peripatetic elbow. “You do me and Mike, huh?”

Padlin shrugged and quickly drew two boys standing to one side of the park fence, two smudgy and beslopped urchins gesticulating and slapping their thighs in a way that nicely set off the girl in the sketch.

“Mister!”

The kid’s nose grazed the side of the pad, knocking Padlin’s pencil across the page. Padlin looked aghast at the long black line that now bisected his drawing. He swung around and slapped the boy across the top of his head.

“Hey!” The kid looked incredulously at the artist, rearranging his matted hair as if Padlin had mussed a carefully arranged coiffure. “What’d you do that for?”

“You ruined my picture, you little guttersnipe.”

“That’s the thanks I get, huh?” The kid shook his head, displaying a disdainful look that would have been more effective had he not, at the same time, stepped back several paces. “You was ruining the picture.”

Padlin advanced toward the kid, who simultaneously scampered back a few more feet.

“You got Mike all wrong,” the kid shouted.

“Go away,” Padlin said, checking his voice at the last moment, aware that the boy might have a few burly friends in the vicinity.

“You drew him wrong, mister, that’s all I’m saying.” The kid moved a little closer. “Mike ain’t a person. He’s my dog.”

Padlin cursed, but before he could do anything foolish he was stopped by a sharp tug at his elbow. The girl stood by his side, holding the fabric of his muddy sleeve. Her face was working through several expressions in an effort to locate some equilibrium.

“Your dog?” her voice like a wisp of smoke, curling around the perspiration dotting her upper lip. She tottered over to the boy and grasped his shoulders. “He’s alive?”

“Sure he’s alive,” the kid said, checking Padlin for support now that he was in the clutches of something less predictable than brutality. “I locked him up.”

“Where?”

“Kit lets me keep him at the Bandbox when the hunt’s on. You know Kit?”

“I know him.”

The kid flinched: “You do?” His eyes shimmied to the whirring of the cogs and wheels in his head as he tried to work out the trajectory of the interrogation. “You sure we’re talking about the same rabbit, ma’am? Kit Burns?”

“Yes.”

“The sole owner and proprietor of the Sportsmen’s Hall on Water Street? The best dogfighter in the Frog ‘n Toe?”

“Are there any new dogs in his pens?”

“Excuse me, ma’am, but I ain’t seen you ’round the Bandbox. And I’m the closest a cove comes to being Kit’s apprentice.”

“Are there new dogs there?”

“You mean besides my Mike? Not that he’s a permanent resident, you understand.” The kid was seesawing his shoulders now, like a sweep worming his way up a chimney.

But the girl tightened her grasp. She was barely a head taller than the boy, yet she easily subdued his squirming. “I mean a special dog,” she said. “One you’d never confuse as being like any other.”

“No,” the boy said. But his eyes and his imperfect attempt to anneal his features contradicted the word.

Then he said, “I got to go.”

Then he whimpered, “Please, ma’am.”

And when the besmeared young woman began to moan, a fluting “Oh no, oh no, of course, of course,” the kid really put his heart into wriggling free.

But she held him fast. She pressed her face close, her forehead colliding with the boy’s quivering brow, and she wailed: “Tell me! Tell me or I’ll place a curse on you and your kin and your wretched Mike and every filthy thing you ever touch! Tell me, does he have my Jakesy!”

“There ain’t no dog called Jakesy!” the boy yelled back with equal desperation. Padlin, once more the helpless, hapless bystander, noted faces peering from windows, heads turning in the street toward a new sensation in Paradise Park.

“No dog with blue eyes?”

The boy blinked back at the question.

“You’ve noted the eyes, huh?” The girl nodded in triumph. “Sort of, yes, sort of like yours. Like a young boy’s. Frightened one moment, ecstatic the next. But, there’s calculation in Jakesy’s eyes, like he knows the worst that a human being can do and he’s sizing up everything you say. He’s seen terrible acts, that’s what his eyes say. He’s seen them, been the victim of them, and understands them. I’ve had him but a month, but it’s been like seeing a panorama of men’s deeds, looking into those eyes. I know you’ve seen him, I can see it in your eyes.”

Padlin discovered that his mouth was hanging open again.

“His name ain’t Jakesy,” the boy said. “Kit calls him Butts.”

A tremor jolted the girl’s frame, a quake that blurred the gingham of her dress and the tatters of the boy in her clutches. In the spasm, she released the kid, who scampered off toward the wagon behind which Padlin had earlier sought refuge. From there he watched her stationary dance, as did Padlin, whose emotions were now lost somewhere between awe and trepidation.

Later he would wonder if the girl had not been some kind of wraith, a spirit haunting the city’s underworld. Or, perhaps, she was afflicted by such a feathery force; her eyes, rolling up in their sockets, the shaking of her limbs, and the moan escaping her lips seemed to come from a hidden presence bubbling within.

The next moment she was gone. A sharp nod, a grimace, her hands clutched her head, and then the girl was cascading forward, gallivanting on a straight course, unmindful of the terrain. Her feet sent up gasps of muck as she went, her shoes became churning blocks of mud, her hair flew free like flames pouring from the mouth of a locomotive stack.

“Ma’am!” The boy called after her through cupped hands. “Ma’am!”

She did not turn.

“Ma’am!” the kid tried again. “I don’t think Kit’ll be too keen to let him go.”

Her maniac tread went uninterrupted. Her feet made slight shifts as they momentarily lost footing, but she did not stop, did not falter in her forward momentum, heading toward the East River.

“Did you hear me?”

The girl passed a corner grocery, attracting the attention of a clutch of b’hoys quaffing liquor at the entrance. Necks craned to follow her passage, a few shouts peppered her footsteps–“Where you off to, me doxie?” “Run, Saratoga Sally, run!”–and she disappeared from view.

The heads around the grocery door bent back to mark the frozen Special Artist. Padlin quickly closed his pad. Drying mud crumbled out of the creases of his coat. He patted his stiffened pockets to make sure his pencils were still there, as if he would bother to tarry if they weren’t. Pulling the brim of his hat lower so it hooded his eyes (which he knew, despite his best efforts, carried the vulnerable look of bewilderment), Padlin set off.

“Hey, mister!”

Padlin ignored the boy.

“How about my picture?”

Padlin paused. The girl had earned herself an audience that would have made any Bowery performer proud. Padlin opened his pad and turned to his damaged sketch of the girl and two urchins. He tore the page from its binding. He draped the sheet over the park fence and exited the scene.

 

“Is this my work: Am I somehow the author of this horror?”

 

Editing II

What Little Waddley lacked in height and age he more than made up for in ambition. To Peleg Padlin’s mind, his junior colleague’s aggressive good humor and eagerness to plunge, pencil to the fore, into the gruesome realm of the sensational masked a calculating and morbid soul. Stealth was what Padlin read in that cherubic face, its tiny eyes hugged tightly by buttock-like cheeks, his pinched mouth disarmingly offset by an aspirant goatee. Waddley’s bulging package of a body always lingered around Mr. Leslie when he made his daily survey of the artists’ work. He was forever the first to volunteer for the most odious assignments, strenuously voicing (in that annoying treble that fondled his Teutonic pronunciation) his willingness to serve, fully aware that Quidroon, the true republican, believed in equally distributing the onerous tasks. And Waddley, unlike the silent Padlin, consistently accepted his editor’s every criticism, responding to each correction with a store of continental gratuities–“Quite so, sir”s and “I stand corrected”s (carefully rolling the canine letter)–that enunciated surrender while implying his acquiescence was due to a greater, if unworthy, force.

Waddley was equally adroit at accepting praise, releasing a viscous stream of self-abnegation that only a fool like Quidroon could believe, not to mention relish. Indeed, Quidroon appeared to enjoy Waddley’s embroidered modesty–in equal proportion, it seemed, to how much he hated Padlin’s silence. No doubt it was this behavior that prompted Quidroon to choose Waddley to doctor Padlin’s drawings over some other less obsequious member of the art staff. Certainly, as far as Padlin had been able to discern, it wasn’t due to any particular talent–beyond the talent for doing exactly what his superior wanted–that designated Waddley for the duty.

When Padlin returned from the morgue and proceeded to ignore his editor’s greeting, his queries about the grisly assignment, and finally his request to see the sketches, it was not too surprising that the (by then) nearly apoplectic Quidroon summoned Little Waddley to his side. Ordering the rotund youth to follow him, Quidroon marched over to Padlin who sat hunched over his sketches, staring at his miserable, albeit preliminary, rendition of the dead girl’s face.

“Mr. Waddley,” Quidroon said, “what do you see before you?”

“Peleg Padlin, sir,” snapped the ever vigilant lad, quickly embossing his answer with: “My esteemed colleague, Peleg Padlin.”

“Mr. Padlin has just returned from the morgue. I wonder if he will do us the honor of showing us his drawings.”

“I would be most pleased to see what he has recorded, sir,” Waddley said as he and his editor pressed around Padlin. “I have learned, even in my short time in these premises, how much I can learn from his skill and sharp eye.”

“‘Skill,’ you say, Mr. Waddley? Is that how you would characterize Mr. Padlin’s efforts at representing this grim scene?”

“Most assuredly, sir. The sketch,” Waddley took in a breath, rolling one hand like he was winding a mechanism for oration, “it projects a . . . dampness that reminds me, if I may say so, of the Rhine when it floods its banks.”

“What about the face of that young woman–it is a face, isn’t it, Padlin? Would you call that an example of skill, Mr. Waddley?”

“I don’t have much experience in matters of death, sir, but I would say that Mr. Padlin has caught the mark of the grim reaper.”

“Curious, though, how the girl’s face is not unlike the face of the corpse behind her. And the corpse behind that one.”

“I see your point, sir,” Waddley eagerly nodded. Then, eyeing Padlin, he added: “But the mustache on the second face clearly denotes a male.”

“You hear that, Padlin?” Quidroon remarked into Peleg’s ear, “Mr. Waddley praised your efforts. I think such generosity of spirit deserves a reward, don’t you?”

No, Padlin didn’t think so. He just stared at his drawing, at his inadequate rendition of the girl’s contorted face, thinking: Was this Kit Burns’s work? And underneath that thought, like a rivulet seeping, eating away at its construction, emerged a more dangerous idea: Is this mywork: Am I somehow the author of this horror?

“Padlin!” Quidroon’s shout sent heads turning, silencing the gouging of gravers into wood, the prattle of reporters exchanging ribald jokes.

Peleg nodded.

“Are you planning to do something here or have you decided to merely grace us with your presence?”

Padlin graced Quidroon with his full face. He contemplated the dome of his editor’s head, glistening with perspiration.

“Well?”

Padlin looked at the expectant Waddley, the predator whose gaze was fixed on his prize, his possession, hissketch.

“Yes,” he said and, with more ceremony than he intended, Padlin reached up and lifted his hat off his head. With uncharacteristic daintiness, he placed it at the head of his desk where it wouldn’t block the light.

Quidroon’s mouth remained twisted in exasperation, but his eyes followed the hat’s unprecedented journey. He gazed at it for a few moments, seeming to consider the pits and bald spots that marred its columnar sheen.

“Do it, then,” Quidroon snapped. “Make it a full page.”

The editor swiveled and marched off. A few moments later Padlin heard his bark emanate from the composing room, castigating one of the slower typesetters; shortly thereafter, from a different direction, a lounging reporter was the object of his abuse. There would be a chain of assaults, distributed arbitrarily, until Quidroon’s ire abated, a standard feature after one of his altercations with Padlin: one more reason why Padlin was not a popular figure in the publication’s office.

But Padlin wasn’t bothered by the perpetuation of his infamy; rather, he was puzzled by Quidroon’s gesture, his bow to Padlin’s proprietorship over his morgue sketch. Puzzlement was as far as Padlin would permit himself to venture: a faint tremor of elation tickled the corners of his mouth, but it was best to keep that at bay. As for Waddley, he remained for a short while, blinking, trying, like Padlin, to discern the turn of events. Then he abruptly headed back to his own perch.

Padlin knew there was little time to spare. He went over to the engraving department where he chose a large rectangular block of boxwood, about one inch thick. Taking it in his hands, he examined its polished and unblemished surface: cut across the grain, it was solid and unyielding to the touch. His fingers traced the bolts and nuts sunk into the reverse side; in fact, the block was really twenty pieces of wood attached together to cover the dimensions of a full page. He returned to his desk, set the block down, and with a fine lead pencil began to trace out his morgue sketch on the smooth surface, working out a mirror image, everything reversed. It was a good block, the constituent pieces meeting evenly so his moving pencil barely sensed their borders.

Padlin enjoyed this part of the work, his mind roaming over how he might instruct the engravers to treat his sketch. Picking up a brush, he began to emphasize his pencil work with India ink, making precise outlines to guide the cuts. When the figures and objects were clearly delineated, he began to suggest the lighting with watercolor tones. He wanted to leave as little as possible to chance, aware that, in the end, the engravers decided how his work appeared in the published pages of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. When Padlin was done, the block would be unbolted and distributed to several of them. The engraving department was staffed largely by a squad of lank-haired and slouching youths, obstreperous in the office, ranging wildly in the dexterity of their craft (Leslie got what he paid for), and irresponsible in their attitude toward the sanctity of the sketch artist’s work. Grimacing and cursing, the lads would hunch over their magnifying lenses, squinting down at Padlin’s efforts, their cupped palms pressing the gravers into the wood.

The clearer the path set out for them, the more likely it was they would only gouge away the surface around your lines and properly transform your watercolor tones into gradient cuts. When the engravers had done their worst, the finished pieces would be rebolted, a master craftsman would etch the lines across the borders of the smaller pieces, and something akin to Padlin’s vision would go to the presses. It was a fast and efficient process, the marvel of the age: visual news presented to the public in a matter of days. For once, Padlin felt he had some control.

And, as he worked, as he mastered his memory of the scene, Padlin grew calmer. His earlier dreadful thoughts dispersed with his treatment of the wood, the logic of his hand’s movement diminishing the guilt that had poisoned his mind. There was no way that his inaction could have precipitated the girl’s fate: true, she had gone to confront the (no doubt) terrible Kit Burns. But the incident had occurred–what?–weeks ago. Her death, her wretched, rigid remains, could not have resulted from that moment. Something had happened in the interim, something horrible to contemplate, but it most likely had nothing to do with her dog or Kit Burns or Sportsmen’s Hall or himself.

Now his mind had no more room for doubts or recriminations. He had saved the girl’s face for last, and he could no longer put off the challenge. Padlin looked at his insubstantial sketch and tried to will her face into a palpable vision, a map to pilot his hand. He pulled sheets of paper from his desk drawer, experimenting, starting with an oval, tracking out lines for the brows, the end of her nose, her mouth, then working out the features. This time, he thought, this time I will get it right. With an effort, he banished the vision that always clouded his work. The woman’s face broke through into his mind’s eye, he grasped its horrific stare, his fingers seemed to be moving correctly–but then it all fell apart.

Emitting an exasperated grunt, Padlin swiped the paper off the block and tried again. And again. And again. The light outside diminished, the gas jets were lit, and in their wavering, ochre light Padlin made no progress. The old familiar panic took hold of him, but he fought it, forcing himself to try one more time . . . and then one more time again. He’d stay all night if he had to; he’d remain crouched over his work until he got it right.

“It’s time, Mr. Padlin.”

Quidroon stood over his shoulder, examining the latest rendition, examining the shuffle of papers surrounding Padlin’s desk. He was wearing a long coat, his top hat in one hand, his watch in the other. Quidroon didn’t look irritated, he didn’t look forlorn. He appeared, in fact, quite content. Padlin realized that his editor had provided him with a generous length of rope.

Quidroon gazed over his spectacles at Waddley, sitting alert and beady-eyed like an expectant barnyard cock, his short legs dangling, shoes shaving the floor in anticipation.

“Mr. Waddley,” Quidroon called, “it’s your turn.”

“He should never have gone back into his mother’s sick room, should never have stared at her wrecked features.”

 

Ghosts

Padlin stayed too long in Mulvahill’s saloon, drawing and redrawing the girl’s face in the wet circles left on the bar by his glass, putting off for as long as possible the retreat to his room in Mrs. Mendoza’s boardinghouse. At some point late in the evening his stomach began to grumble and, knowing he’d missed his landlady’s designated dinner hour as well as her disinclination to keep a dish in the oven for the likes of an artist (a suspect calling in itself, let alone one with liquor on his breath), Padlin stoked up on Mulvahill’s fare of fatty mutton. But amidst the mastication of his third or fourth mouthful, Padlin felt his unhappy stomach take a still unhappier turn. It took the last shreds of his determination to make his way past the crush at the bar and through the cluttered alley alongside the saloon to the privy in the back.

So, stomach empty and head compressed in the liquor’s remnant vise, Padlin returned to his boardinghouse. He disrobed, slipped on his soiled nightdress, and burrowed under the rough ticking. All he wished for was the deliverance of sweet slumber, nothing more: no thoughts, no dreams, and, certainly, no visions. But against the scrim of his eyelids it began to emerge: the face he could not capture and the shame, the thick, choking miasma of mortification. His counterpane seemed to shrink about him; he could feel it tightening into a shroud.

Gripped by a sudden panic, with a shout Padlin wrestled free, flinging the wet covers onto the floor. He had been dreaming, however briefly. But the realization did not bring relief. He lurched off the bed, the straw mattress crackling with alarming loudness, and proceeded to walk the meager contours of his room. Apparently, his pacing was accompanied by rather audible exclamations because in due course–although Padlin had no idea how much time had elapsed–Mrs. Mendoza made a dramatic entrance, accompanied by the red-eyed Wall Street clerk who rented the room below. Padlin was required to exhale in his landlady’s face upon which, her lips compressed in condemnation; she suggested that if he could not hold his liquor or his tongue there were more suitable quarters available for the sketch-artist in the Five Points. After the duo departed, Padlin realized there was really no recourse. He lit the gas and pulled out his pad.

He shut his eyes and burrowed into his mind, trying to clear a path to the girl’s face. The pulsating pain the liquor had induced in the center of his forehead actually helped, a knife slicing away the usual interfering images. When he thought he had it he let out a long sigh and began to draw.

But it was no good. When the harsh yellow of the gaslight was replaced by the muted blues of a dull morning, Padlin faced a batch of unsuccessful death-portraits scattered at the foot of his bed. Each seemed one step further removed from the last in its fidelity to the girl’s countenance. He stared at the pad, unnerved by his utter inability to guide his hand, to control the glide and twitch of his pencil. The chatter of morning traffic seemed like a rebuke, wagon wheels and horse hooves composing a condemning litany, a chorus uttering failure, failure, failure.

Choking back a sob, Padlin fell back against the wall. And the terrible face broke through his restraints and took over his mind.

Not the girl’s face. It was the one that always haunted his inner eye, beclouding his mind and paralyzing his fingers.

He drifted out of his room and the rising noises of the street diminished, replaced by the keening of his father. The usually deep voice cracking into ear-splitting whimpers. He could not look at his father, knowing he had failed him. His first and everlasting failure.

Nine years ago. Just when Padlin thought he had mastered his craft, it proved beyond his grasp. And it had been his mother’s face that had sealed his fate.

Now he saw it before him: cradled on the white pillow, shrunken, deteriorated. The odor of vomit and purged bowels was heavy in the July air about him, the awful stench worsened by the nose-piercing camphor “segar” smoking on the table by the bed. The effluvium lingered despite the windows cast wide open to disperse the stink of her last hours of life. The Brooklyn street outside was eerily silent: everyone who could had fled the city; those who couldn’t hunkered in stifling terror in their homes. Padlin had tied a kerchief over his mouth and nose before he began laboring over the corpse

His father had refused to remove her to the cholera hospital. That was no place for his Lil, that charnel house for the vice- and vermin-ridden denizens of the Points. They had forced down her throat the gobs of chalky calomel mixed with laudanum prescribed by the head-shaking doctor until her gums bled, stuffed her with sulphur pills only to see them spurt from her desiccated lips. Within a day, her soft features had shriveled against the angles of her skull, her rosy complexion turned a terrifying sky blue. One moment she had been bustling about his father’s print shop, cooing praises over Peleg’s latest drawing–of what he no longer could recollect–when she wasn’t retrieving errant tools or wiping invisible specks from the press (even though there had been no customers for weeks); the next, she was prostrate but for the violent vomiting and shitting.

The end came quickly. But before the deathwagon arrived to remove her, her son had one final duty to perform. His father had begged him: draw her, draw her as she was, my dear dried up darling wife, your mother. You never got round to sketching her lovely face in life: now, for the love of God, do it before it’s too late. You can’t bring back the dead, but you can return her face as it once was. Give it back to me, he pleaded. Please, lad, give it back to me now!

Padlin should never have jumped to obey the request . . . but how could he refuse? He should never have gone back into his mother’s sick room, should never have stared at her wrecked features. But he thought it might jar his addled, bereft imagination, give him at least the foundational markers from which he could resurrect her once splendid form.

Steeling himself, Peleg propped his pad in front of him and, wiping away the obscuring tears, he set to work. Oddly, he felt a confidence emerge out of his grief, like a resplendent butterfly arising from the murky pupa: he could do this, he thought: capturing a likeness was almost second nature to him. Sitting by the Fulton Street ferry for hours at a time, hadn’t he rendered face after face after face with only the most passing glance as a resource? Hadn’t his father guffawed mightily at the caricatures of his customers that Peleg quickly scrawled from memory?

It was all delusion, though. As Peleg worked by his mother’s corpse, he was slowly poisoned. The beauteous, red-winged monarch never emerged from its cottony shroud: instead, in its place, scuttled some hideous, slimy-carapaced beetle. Padlin labored furiously, labored for hours–he labored as he had never done before and never would again. He babbled encouragement to his cramped fingers; he tried out small cartoons hoping to prime the pump of his exhausted being, his useless being; he held back the realization of his incapacity for hours until, weeping, he trod from the deathbed and dumped the rotted fruits of his efforts before the unforgiving gaze of his poor father.

Of course, Padlin tried again. The next day, then the next week, then the next month he went through notebook after notebook, filling them with inaccurate, unidentifiable physiognomies. It was as if a hole had been burned in his eyes, leaving only the smoldering remnants of his mother’s deathmask for him to cherish for eternity.

Padlin poured water into his wash basin, savagely slapped his face and armpits, dressed and, punishing himself, avoided the attractive odors emanating from Mrs. Mendoza’s kitchen to make his way back to the office.

He was chagrined to hear, on his arrival, that the woodblock was now in the hands of the engraving department. Luckily, the slothful engravers had not deigned to begin their work until forced to do so, and he found the boxwood rectangle still bolted together. It lay on a table, looking more solid than before, lacquered by the lines and tones jotted over its surface. Padlin carried the block to the window, away from any prying eyes, before he permitted himself to inspect what Waddley had wrought.

The drawing was wrong, so wrong. Waddley was good, Padlin had to grant that; the face possessed dimension in that its placement felt right, the head heavy and slack against the slab, a dense weight tautly tethered to the body by the long line of the neck tendons. But the face projected too much grace, too much purity: instead of her contorted features, the girl had become a martyred saint, undeserving of her end and yet at peace with her fate.

“Do you approve, Mr. Padlin?”

The little sketch-artist stood a few feet away, his mouth set in that irritating, wet pucker of a smile. His eyes danced upon Padlin’s face, sliding off of the shadowed brows, skittering on the inky beard, vainly trying to locate a secure plane to settle upon.

“I hope you’re pleased with my endeavors,” Waddley continued, one hand flapping vaguely at the block. “I have tried to do justice to your vision.”

And then as Waddley approached him, Padlin turned and raised the heavy boxwood above his head.

“Padlin, what are you doing?”

Padlin didn’t know what he was doing. He just stared down at Waddley, imagining the impact of the block on the round melon head, the feel of density converted to pulp through the wood, pits and bone and meat spattering the floor.

Go to The Hungry Eye, Episode 1

Go to The Hungry Eye, Episode 3

 

This article originally appeared in issue 2.2 (January, 2002).

---

 

Author’s Note:
As I hope will become readily apparent, The Hungry Eye is a work of historical fiction. Some of its characters and incidents are pulled from the historical record–most particularly, the dueling “special artists” Peleg Padlin and Little Waddley. Their misadventures while touring New York’s netherworld originally appeared in an 1857-58 series of articles in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper written by New York Tribune reporter Mortimer Neal Thompson. That the pseudonymous pictorial reporters stood in for Leslie’s staff artists Sol Eytinge Jr. and a very young Thomas Nast should not be of concern to the present-day reader. Moreover, the mystery at the heart of The Hungry Eye, which entangles these and other characters and the constellation of their relationships, is my own invention. Much of what transpires here (and in the ensuing installments, which will appear in Common-place monthly between January and April) is utterly fantastic–and yet it also, I believe, remains true to the history of a specific time and place.

While I originally conceived of The Hungry Eye as a conventional novel (at least in the sense that it would end up as a tactile book printed on paper with a spine available for cracking) the chance to emulate the once ubiquitous format of serialization was hard to pass up. And wedding an older episodic approach to the still inchoate medium of the World Wide Web offered an intriguing narrative challenge. Aside from requiring some reconfiguring of the story’s structure to accommodate the start-and-stop pacing of extended and intermittent reading, I’ve tried to work with the Web to intermingle the visualization of the past–which plays a prominent role in the plot–with the telling of the story. That said, you won’t come across any state of the art programming here: what I’ve tried to do is enhance the reading experience on the Web, not replace it.

All original artwork © 2001 Joshua Brown.

 

The increase of vice and rowdyism among the youth of our cities is in a great measure to be attributed to the decline of the apprenticeship system. When that system was general, masters had some control over their boys; they were obliged to keep them out of vice as much as possible, and they had personal interests in their conduct . . . [Now the] master does not wish the trouble of providing for all the wants of the boy, and the latter desires independence of control when not actually at work.

–“The Modern Apprenticeship System,”
Fincher’s Trades’ Review, November 14, 1863

I cannot understand the mystery: but I am always
conscious of myself as two (as my soul and I).

–Walt Whitman

This is hell, this is hell
I am sorry to tell you
It never gets better or worse
But you’ll get used to it after a spell
For heaven is hell in reverse

–Elvis Costello

Nondescript

Pity the poor sketch artist who can render one subject with skill but is incapacitated in pursuit of another.

Peleg Padlin was not particularly articulate. You wouldn’t go to him for a mellifluously phrased description of an event, personage, or place, let alone a disquisition on the slavery question. He was, after all, a Frank Leslie’s Special Artist, not one of the weekly newspaper’s wordsmiths. What he failed to enunciate in words he could, with relative ease, miraculously transmogrify into form: when it came to providing context–the corruption in a close Five Points hovel; the crush of horses, omnibuses, and drays on Broadway; the thrash and roil of a sky heavy with rain over the Battery–no one on the staff could hold a candle to him.

Yes, Padlin excelled as a draughtsman. But there was one thing he could neither articulate nor sketch. And, unfortunately, it was a fairly ubiquitous item in the artist’s repertoire: faces. Padlin could not capture a face. Understand, Padlin could draw a face; he had no problem handling the basic anatomical structure or constituent features. But, try as he might–and Padlin tried mightily–specific, even vaguely accurate, likenesses utterly evaded his grasp.

Few actually remarked on Padlin’s dilemma, though over the course of repeated failures it became general knowledge in the newspaper office. How many times had Padlin’s botched efforts been redone by Little Waddley? What was more often the subject of comment was the effect of Padlin’s incapacity on his temperament: his was a dark, brooding, irreproachable presence. Among his colleagues were some of a more empathic bent who, upon the summoning of Little Waddley, would have pitied Padlin–if the draughtsman’s mortification had not taken such an ominous turn. In the dichotomous parlance of the day, Peleg Padlin’s personality decidedly favored shadows over sun, gaslight over daylight. With his mouth clamped tight like the vise in a blacksmith’s shop, and with his beaver hat pulled low over his brow to hide the consternation that racked his features, Padlin gained a reputation in the illustrated weekly’s office for misanthropy if not downright meanness.

“The visitors to the morgue didn’t want to know about the histories of these victims of horse-car accidents, domestic strife, or disease. They came for one purpose and one purpose only: to be assured that they would not suffer the same fate as these unfortunates.”

 

Sanitarian

At the moment, Padlin’s air of restrained wrath seemed appropriate.

His scowling countenance, his head bobbing up and down from subject to paper, subject to paper, his hand moving agitatedly upon the pad’s surface, conveyed a revulsion barely kept at bay. At least, that was John Antrobus’s interpretation when he entered the viewing room and espied the sketch artist crouched amid the marble slabs.

When the young coroner’s deputy saw what he took to be distaste creasing Padlin’s features, a heavy gob of emotion slid up his gullet. Suppressing a shudder, he nonetheless felt wonderfully relieved. His own horror at Padlin’s horror had been a reawakening of the grief that he thought irretrievable after this long first month of escorting every cholera fanatic and Tammany slug in the city on tours of the new morgue. A month of so many hushed “ohs” and “ahs,” so many seemly silences betrayed by popping eyes, so many genteel applications of kerchiefs to flared nostrils, so many semi-swoons with crinoline gowns crackling concentrically up against the tile floor–so much civil distress expressed by types for whom grotesque death was the stuff of Barnum’s Museum and not the sordid experience of the streets.

Antrobus’s job, as his superior instructed him, was to reassure the populace. The visitors to the morgue didn’t want to know about the histories of these victims of horse-car accidents, domestic strife, or disease. They came for one purpose and one purpose only: to be assured that they would not suffer the same fate as these unfortunates. They came to visit the new structure along the East River like picnickers viewing a battlefield from the safety of a ridge or bunker, to witness death close at hand while remaining secure that they were shielded from its effect.

The trouble was that Antrobus had chosen this unorthodox calling for the express purpose of notreassuring the respectable classes. Having conscientiously mapped the landscape of corruption and misery during his years at the Yale Medical College, upon graduation he had packed a nightshirt, several hard collars, and his Bible in a carpetbag, filled his stiff leather satchel with instruments and pills and elixirs, and carried them, along with his new expertise and spiritual mission, to the slums of New York’s Five Points. For a year, he ministered to the poor from the House of Industry (replacing the Reverend R_____, who had succumbed to the area’s melancholy and mania, leaving his post a hopeless inebriate).

For a year, Antrobus supervised the sewing work of those few wretched women who entered the missionhouse for employment; he cajoled and purchased the meager attendance of neighborhood children at his Sabbath classes; he inspected the hovels surrounding Paradise Park to uncover cholera nests; he withstood the howling threats of the Papist gangs that soared through his window every night. And to what end? To watch the contributions from uptown sponsors recede to a trickle and the Points inhabitants grow more and more surly and resistant to his good works? He prayed for guidance–and, finally, his prayers were answered by a revelation. Albeit a peculiar one.

One dark night–dark only in the hopelessness of the moment, for the illumination from the taunting Mulberry Street Boys’ torches played upon his bedroom wall from dusk to dawn–one long, sleepless night, young Antrobus suddenly realized that if he was failing to arrest the terrible fates of his putative flock it was possibly due to a kind of directional confusion. What if he forsook the lives of the deserving and undeserving poor and took a reverse course? What if he started with death and worked backwards, exposing the gruesome lessons of the corpse to enlighten the uncaring, exploiting fear of infection to wrest the attention of patrons?

No, reassurance had not been Antrobus’s goal when he won the position of coroner’s deputy. Instruction, life lessons, death lessons: these were closer to what Antrobus had in mind. The coroner, however, was a pragmatic man who maintained his post through connections with Tammany Hall and had no use for missionary zeal. So, torn between countering the coroner’s aim and keeping his job, Antrobus opted for a wary vigilance, searching for an opportunity to further his mission, hoping for another revelation. In the meantime, he steeled his emotions to the task at hand.

And here now, before him, crouched the possible agent of his deliverance.

“‘For the love of God, Padlin, all your damned people look the same! They alwayslook the same!'”

 

Editing

Padlin enjoyed drawing animals–largely because they did not require the particularity of the human visage. If two pigs looked alike his editor wasn’t going to complain about it. And Quidroon complained plenty about Padlin’s people.

“What we seem to have here,” Quidroon would say at the start of a typical critique, Padlin having laid a sketch before him, “is a medical phenomenon.”

Padlin, of course, would admit nothing.

Quidroon would then embark on a more intense survey, his head moving over the drawing in a manner that reminded Padlin of a rodent exploring the possibilities scattered over a kitchen floor. “Quite a spectacle,” Quidroon would murmur. “Astounding. Astonishing.”

Padlin would remain mute, although his eyes (strategically obscured in the gloom cast by the brim of his perpetually donned hat) trembled violently in their sockets.

“How shall we caption this sketch, Mr. Padlin?” Quidroon would finally ask as his head ceased its meandering scan. “Would ‘The Grand Mili-tuplet Convention’ be an appropriate title?”

Padlin had no penchant for neologisms, not that he would give Quidroon the satisfaction of saying he failed to get the joke. The editor’s meaning was clear enough. So Padlin stood there, his rage beginning its inevitable descent toward resignation as this ritual lurched toward its familiar outcome.

Meanwhile, his stab at malicious, if arcane, wit having been blunted against Padlin’s obtuse silence, Quidroon would then expend a number of sighs while patting the top of his head. The effect, from Padlin’s vantage point, was not unlike watching someone trying to stamp out a spreading brush fire–although there was little enough to burn on Quidroon’s bald pate. The conflagration, however, was gathering force within that naked and reddening skull. Sometimes Quidroon would patter and sigh for seconds, sometimes for minutes. Eventually, the flames burst forth:

“Are you following my drift, Mr. Padlin?” Quidroon would suddenly shout. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Quidroon would finally glance up at the Special Artist’s somber face. “For the love of God, Padlin, all your damned people look the same! They always look the same!”

And with that, Quidroon would summon, in a stentorian voice, Little Waddley. As his diminutive colleague made his entrance (having stood ready in the wings, awaiting his superior’s call), Padlin would turn away, never sure of his ability to withstand the sight of his sketch kidnapped once again. Outwardly, Padlin continued to exhibit his indiscriminate scowl, maintaining the expression into which his face had configured as soon as he’d entered the newspaper’s offices. But, as he walked away to the discordant music of Quidroon and Waddley’s conspiratorial prattle, Padlin burrowed into the nether reaches of his mind, his vision blurred in a viscous cloud of shame and helplessness.

“The sketches were gruesome, wonderful.”

Subjects

Things were going well for Padlin in the morgue. He scanned his work with satisfaction. The dankness of the dreadful place, a clamminess pierced by dagger thrusts of disinfectant, the loneliness of the sound made by his pencil on the rough paper–the terrible, stark atmosphere of the place had transferred perfectly from his psyche into his hand. Every one of his pencil strokes struck home.

The sketches were gruesome, wonderful. He’d got the light just so, the murky illumination of the gas jets above the slabs. The geography of the room was accurate, and he’d captured the inert solidity of the dark walls bearing down upon the viewer, as well as the ghastly impression of the water jets extending from the ceiling like a row of spiders spewing foggy webs. Padlin’s lines were all efficiently placed, the shading exact. He was quite pleased with himself, and the confidence did not flag as he moved from sketch to sketch. It was only due to force of habit that discontent remained on his face.

And then this pale, starched clerk appeared to ruin everything.

“May I be of help?”

Padlin, crouched over his pad, twisted around awkwardly. A man, dressed in black, stared down at him. The blackness appeared to have migrated up from his clothes into his face. He wore a dark, unkempt beard and long straight hair, oiled and brushed severely across his scalp, the combination seeming to hover just above the blanched flesh. Only the two bruises that marked his cheekbones gave his features any depth. Standing in the entrance to the morgue, his hands placed one over the other across his pelvis, this one looked like he teetered at another, more celestial threshold.

No, Padlin said. Or, actually, gestured: his head jerked to the left and then to the right. A fairly emphatic negative, Padlin thought.

He returned to sketching, working out details on the far wall: the wrinkled remnants of clothes hooked at the head of each specimen. A plaid suit and beige derby, the crown sliced in half (matching the cleft in the corpse’s skull). A filthy, crumpled dress, its gingham checks faded in spots, stained coppery in others.

“Why don’t you draw the faces?”

Right behind Padlin’s right ear, like a wheeze from one of the bodies. It made him flinch.

The clerk stepped around and bent down to face Padlin. His breath was warm and sour. Padlin conjured a vague image: this clerk bent over bodies, sucking up morbidity. Grimacing, Padlin averted his eyes.

“It’s difficult, I know, so difficult to confront them. But for the sake of your readers you must.”

He grasped Padlin’s arm and gently tugged him upwards.

“I have to,” Padlin heard himself mumble, “I must complete my sketches.”

“Yes. Of course.” The clerk had him by the elbows, escorting Padlin in a shuffling waltz past the bodies. “And it is my duty to regale you about our institution. Please take note of our washable stone walls, our tile floors. You’re not to miss these marble slabs,” he swept his arm over two callused feet, “or the preserving jets of water. And I must not forget to remark on the plate glass partitions that separate the viewing room from, shall we say, the meat.”

Then this clerk stopped short. “No, pray–” he threw up a hand as if to ward off an intervention from miserable Padlin, although the sketch artist was merely looking for an exit.

“Pray,” he repeated, slowly lowering his arm, “bear with me.” He took a breath, like Forrest waiting for the Bowery Theatre audience to settle down before ending a soliloquy. “You think I underestimate you. No, you need not contradict me. I can see it in your eyes.”

Padlin doubted his eyes were visible, shadowed from the overhead gaslights by the brim of his beaver hat.

“You are an artist. You crave more than the dimensions of a warehouse, or, for that matter, an abattoir. Your mission is to capture the essence of a scene, not the barren facts. And the essence of this wretched place, sir, is the metropolis.”

Padlin worked his features into the most disagreeable configuration possible, but it only seemed to assure the clerk that he was on the right track.

“Look at these dead. They are the sum of the errors of the humanity beyond these walls. They possess the secrets of the city, secrets that must be rooted out. Consider this man–“

The clerk released Padlin and paced over to the head of one marble slab. He bent to the skull of the corpse, the cove with the split cranium, and placed his two hands, gently, on either side, cradling the ruined pate. He raised his own face up to the gaslight and gazed determinedly at Padlin.

The sketch artist still stood where he’d been left, at the foot of the slab. Padlin glowered back. Through the haze created by the spray of the water jet drumming against the dead man’s chest, the clerk, as he caressed the cracked noggin, looked like some revivalist preacher performing a monstrous baptism.

“This man,” Padlin’s captor now said, his words more selective, stamped out in meaningful jabs, “I surmise that this man was vanquished soon after his arrival on these shores. He is a foreigner, I’m sure of it, most likely from the continent. Look at his mustachio. Look at his clothes.” Padlin glanced at the waxed hair on the corpse’s upper lip, at the broad plaid of the wrinkled suit hanging behind the clerk, re-examined the bisected bowler. “But we’re interested in the soul here, in the heart of his demise. To ascertain the fatal combination of this man’s spiritual weakness and this city’s terrible strength.”

The clerk’s hands slapped together, making a puffy pop in the heavy atmosphere. He eyed Padlin, a schoolmaster assuring himself that he had his pupil’s undivided attention.

“And now,” the clerk nodded, his black eyes transfixed on Padlin’s countenance, “this city, finished with the wretch, has disgorged his miserable wreckage. Look: he bares his teeth in death, snarling at the world that abandoned him to so sorry a fate.”

Despite himself, Padlin looked at the corpse’s mouth, his gaze fastening for an unpleasant instant on the rictus leer stretching the dead lips. He turned away, less from distaste than from a barely conscious realization that the expression bore no small resemblance to one of his own hallmarked expressions–and, for the first time, really looked at the neighboring corpse. The owner of the gingham-check dress.

Padlin blinked.

Was it possible?

The clerk caught Padlin’s preoccupation and smoothly moved to the head of his next victim. “Another one of the day’s catch, dragged from the river. So young, yet marked by an immorality thrust upon her by this damnable metropolis.”

The spray was like a fog muffling her features. Padlin stepped over to the clerk and squinted down at the face.

“Nameless, parentless, no kith or kin care to claim this poor wretch–“

Padlin shook his head hard and looked again. It was her.

“What’s the matter?” The clerk reached up and placed a consoling hand on Padlin’s shoulder. “Did you know this one?”

Padlin clenched his teeth, clenched his fists, fearful that he’d knock down the intrusive fool if he said another word, one more word, he’d knock him down.

The clerk persisted: “I understand. At least–” he faltered for a moment, “at least be consoled that now she’ll have a name to place over her grave.”

“No.” Padlin spat the word out, in place of a blow.

“No?”

“No. I knew her.” He took a deep breath of the soggy air. “But I never caught her name.”

The water flowed incessantly from the pipe suspended from the ceiling, cascading upon her bosom, sending a fine spray over her face. It had been a pretty face. To be sure, she’d carried the mark of her race in her wide upper lip, in the brevity of her brow. Yet, to Padlin, ever aware of his incapacity to represent them, the fine carving of her features had, in an unsettling paradox, subverted the blunt outlines.

But the face no longer exhibited any beauty. Padlin would have preferred the usual slackness of dead flesh, the hint of festering to come, anything, to what lay before him. For her countenance now seemed locked in some terrible, fatal moment. It was an alabaster mask, frozen in angular and creased horror.

The clerk’s pale, blue-veined hand suddenly appeared, hovering over the terrible wreckage. “Take care,” he said, and Padlin viewed an all-together new expression on his torturer’s face. “Don’t get too close.” He reached within his heavy black jacket and pulled out a handkerchief. “Here,” he handed it to Padlin, “cover your nose and mouth.” He nodded down at the girl. “Cholera.”

But,” Padlin stammered, “you said she was fished from the river.”

“Yes, deposited there after she died. That’s my guess. But it’s cholera, no doubt. Her face is the terrible evidence.”

Padlin shook his head in vehement denial. No. This did not resemble the arid, shrunken result of the disease. He knew what cholera looked like, knew it all too well. Padlin shuddered. The remembered vision captured in his mind’s eye was terrible, but the awful face before him was the detritus left in the wake of something worse, far worse.

Go to The Hungry Eye, Episode 2

 

This article originally appeared in issue 2.2 (January, 2002).

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Review of Evans Digital Edition, 1639-1800, produced and distributed by Readex/NewsBank, Inc., in cooperation with the American Antiquarian Society. Chester, Vt., 2003. Introduction | Cathy N. Davidson | Jay Fliegelman The digitalized Evans provides the scholar of early America with a tool as revelatory as the medical MRI. The slightest browsing provides a provocation to original thought. Searches can be limited by date or targeted by means of a wonderful array of pre-selected and assembled categories—captivity narratives, economics and trade, law and crime, facetiae (humor and pornography), Welsh texts, Dutch texts, subscribers lists, booksellers catalogues etc. One can search titles or full texts. But the real value of the search engine is in full searches precisely because such searches are inherently interdisciplinary. Key word, phrase, or proximity searches allow one to see the myriad of contexts in which a key term appears, without prejudging that term as fundamentally legal, social, theological, economic, or otherwise discipline specific. Thus a search potentially allows one to see the archeological connections, the larger discourses or metaphorics that undergird seemingly disparate texts. Scarlet woman makes several appearances in surprising locations as does nation, jollity, independence, plot, romantic, and paths of virtue. The micro discovery may carry macro explanatory power. A user comes to appreciate the dialectical character of words (as in the five or six different meanings of the word character or the doubleness of state as condition and state as geographical entity). Searches, say, for Livy force the user beyond the simplistic category of influence or even authorization, to see how Livy is deployed in one text versus another and to what ends. Astrologymakes so many appearances (within and beyond almanacs) as to suggest it is a counter discourse to providentialism. Revelations 12offers a proof text to quite different scenarios of millennialism and catastrophism. Latin searches make possible interesting etymological discoveries. Merce or price pushes both in the direction of mercy (Christ pays the price for all) and merchant (as in the buried pun in Shakespeare’s title). All this is to say that all search engines remind us that texts are the strategic collocation of words. In that sense the Evans Digital favors the close attention to specific language, a level of critical attention that is traditionally the primary province of English departments. If the codex form (as opposed to the scroll) owes some of its origin to Christian typology which favors a format that allows one to flip back and forth from to New Testament to Old and back again, the search also permits the particular pleasure of a rocking rhythm of back and forth reading. Of the thirty-six thousand Evans items (the Evans Digital has scanned only a third as of now) many of course are not American texts, but American editions of British, French, and German works. Thus a search in the 1770’s will include a search of important texts like Paradise Lost and Pope’s Essay on Man. This is a crucial corrective and challenge to hermetic studies of texts written by Americans. But this cosmopolitanism butts heads with itself. One cannot search Mather’s Magnalia because, of course, it had no American edition in the eighteenth century. Mather both sought a London audience and realized the difficulties of producing such a folio in Massachusetts in 1702. The publishing history of Edwards cannot be appreciated without knowledge of the Edinburgh editions of his works, or the Paris editions of Jefferson’s Notes or the London editions of Adams’s Defense. Though rumor has it that this now has been corrected, the most annoying facet of the Evans Digital is that when a page comes up with a searched word in it, that word is not highlighted. One must speed read the page to find it. And even with the zoom feature, some of these scans remain hard to read. A winning feature is that the user can form her or his own library of texts to search: a private library for personal browsing and engagement. As Hester and Pearl enter Governor Bellingham’s hall, Hawthorne calls attention to the fact that “on a cushion lay a folio tome, probably of the Chronicles of England, or other such substantial literature; even, as in our own days, we scatter gilded volumes on the center-table, to be turned over by the casual guest.” The Evans Digital comes complete with coffee table books.

 

 

This article originally appeared in issue 3.3 (April, 2003).

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William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature and Culture at Stanford University, Jay Fliegelman is currently completing a book entitled, Belongings: Dramas of American Book Ownership, 1630-1860.

Review of Evans Digital Edition, 1639-1800, produced and distributed by Readex/NewsBank, Inc., in cooperation with the American Antiquarian Society. Chester, Vt., 2003. Introduction | Cathy N. Davidson | Jay Fliegelman In the history of technology, it is customary to greet the new by waxing nostalgic for the old. In the 1940s, critics worried that sensory overload from the new medium of television would stifle the imagination stirred by the mysterious voices and sounds emanating from the radio. In the 1920s, social arbiters were sure that the radio would spell the demise of reading. So goes the generational parade, with excitement for the new coupled with mourning for what has been superseded. The reception history of technology is almost always part paean, part eulogy.

Nonetheless, I hold no nostalgia for the microform technology that preceded the Evans Digital. During the ten years in which I researched Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, a decrepit green microform reader hulked in the corner of my office like some giant ogre reminding me daily of more blurry pages to be read, more mind-numbing hours of searching ahead. I’m sure there are scholars of my generation and before who tingle when they recall the smell of wet copies oozing forth from a micoform printer (a friend once called it a “whiff of the void”), but I do not.

To be sure, in 1955 when the American Antiquarian Society launched its project to micropublish Charles Evans’s American Bibliography, it performed an inestimable service to scholarship, making virtually every book, pamphlet, and broadside published in America from 1639 to1800 accessible to those of us who lived away from major libraries. Without it, we would not have learned all we did. However, the technology itself was downright user-hostile. If the Evans Digital has rendered its microfiche parent obsolete, there’ll be no eulogies from me.

The Evans Digital will soon make 36,000 works and 2,400,000 images available and searchable to anyone who is a member of a library that owns the database-driven Website. Over fifty libraries had purchased the Evans Digital by the end of 2002. I can attest that the pages are as clean and clear as their microfiche parent and paper grandparent allow, with impressive high-resolution zoom capabilities that far exceed any microfiche magnifier. One can also download text or make copies that float out of one’s printer in an odorless dry form, ready for marking up or filing. Best of all, I was able to visit the Evans Digital site in my pajamas at 5:00 a.m. on a national holiday. This may be as close to scholarly nirvana as one can come.

More than convenience is at issue here. The Evans Digital inspires ideas. Without even trying, I find myself getting deliciously lost in the Evans Digital site in the same way that one can become lost in the stacks of a library. Time flies before I realize I’m reading from the 1744 journal of Daniel Horsmanden of the “proceedings in the detection of the conspiracy formed by some white people, in conjunction with Negro and other slaves, for burning the city of New-York in America, and murdering the inhabitants.”

This title was found through serendipity, as I was trying out different browse and search functions on the Evans Digital. A user can browse by genre, subjects, author, history of printing, and place of publication. Within each category, there are many additional secondary and then tertiary headings. Under Labor in the subject browser, there are five categories relating to slaves and slavery, and I immediately began clicking and searching, turning up scores of interesting titles.

As much as I love using the Evans Digital, three notes of caution should be sounded. The first is conceptual. Browser categories are a wonderful tool for grouping areas of knowledge and for inspiring intellectual associations, but they also can miss whole areas and, in this way, help determine what areas do or do not receive attention. I am particularly surprised and disappointed, for example, that women and gender are underrepresented as browsing categories in the Evans Digital, especially considering the importance of feminist scholarship of early American culture and society produced over the last decades.

A second caution has to do with completeness. No search of machine readable text will turn up every instance of the word for which one is searching. The Evans Digital has a wild card function to help locate words with variant or irregular spellings and to compensate for the long S of early American printing, but instructions for how to use this should be made more prominent. Even with wildcards, some words will be missed. It’s the best tool we have but students need to be warned (with the Evans Digital as with everything in the Information Age) that abundance is not completeness.

The third caution concerns the price of the Evans Digital. Surprised that my own library (which is aggressively sophisticated technologically), had not yet purchased the Evans Digital, I contacted them to find out why. The high price tag relative to other databases, plus a few kinks still to be worked out of the search engine, decided to make them wait a while before buying. The librarian with whom I discussed this noted a one-time payment of more than $50,000 plus a $2,000 annual access fee. When I put the same question to the folks at the Evans Digital, they noted a sliding-scale fee based on size of the institution and whether one had already purchased the microfiche Evans (which could be awarded “trade in” dollars). The price I was quoted ranged from $28,000 for small historical societies to $107,005. Unfortunately, that price tag could put a wonderful tool outside the reach of many institutions.

On the other hand, the microfiche Evans was also expensive in its day and lasted since 1955. Will the current Evans Digital have as long a shelf life, given the rapidity with which technologies change? No one can say. However, because it uses something techies call “dirty ASCII,” its machine-readable copy promises to be adaptable even as new and improved software emerges, without the necessity of redigitizing. The producers of the Evans Digital also welcome feedback about any glitches or ideas about areas of improvement so that they can make it as useful a tool as possible. For example, apparently I am not alone in regretting that the convenient “My Collection” bookmarking log disappears once one exits the Evans site. Perhaps Evans Digital will find a way to allow one to keep these bookmarked documents as one does an account on eBay or Amazon.com.

The Evans Digital by no means renders the physical archive of the library obsolete, but adds a wonderful new tool to our scholarly toolbox. As I printed out page after page of texts found on the Evans Digital, I again wondered whatever happened to that promise of a paperless society. Electronic publishing is a cumbersome and inefficient way of reading an entire book (rather than doing research in texts). The area of history of the book scholarship focusing on the materiality of books is also beyond what any database can provide. One of the great moments in my academic life was sitting in the American Antiquarian Society gazing in wonder at everyedition of Charlotte Temple owned by the library. Dozens of them, in different sizes, spanning well over a hundred years in the life of this bestseller provided a visceral, visual history of printing in America. Opening these books, one learned specific features about ink, paper, and binding, and even found evidence (from inscriptions and marginalia) of actual readers.

Those who criticize technological change do so out of a conviction that technology changes how we think. They are correct in that assumption, which is one reason I’m thrilled by the Evans Digital. “Pipes” and “content” (media and message) are not easily separable. The Evans Digital encourages us to make connections that would have been exceedingly difficult (if not impossible) before. It will facilitate new areas of research that could not have been accomplished in a lifetime spent only in the library or bent over a microform reader.

 

 

This article originally appeared in issue 3.3 (April, 2003).

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Cathy N. Davidson is Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English, director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, and vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke University. An expanded edition of her Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York, 1986) will be published by Oxford University Press in 2004.

During the early twentieth century, Charles McLean Andrews (1863-1943), the most influential early American historian of his time, spent several years in British archives making detailed calendars of documents relating to the British colonies. (The Carnegie Institution sponsored this research.) These documents were then unknown in the United States. His “organized attack” on British archives resulted in the publication of three thick volumes (in 1908 and 1912), which listed hundreds of archival collections. The books covered not only the most obvious repositories—the Public Record Office and the British Library—but local repositories as well.

While teaching as a Fulbright lecturer at Nankai University, Tianjin, China, this past academic year, I engaged in a similar quest, for much the same reason—to introduce and make primary sources available to a new audience: in my case, Chinese scholars and students of early American history. Nankai University is a fabulous place for an American historian: it has a good library, excellent Web resources (“JSTOR,” “Early American Imprints,” and “Early American Newspapers” among them), and seven U.S. historians on staff! But Nankai is nearly unique among Chinese universities in this regard. Soon after arriving in Tianjin, I attended a conference on American history that Nankai sponsored. Talking to Chinese colleagues, I discovered that their universities have few printed primary sources on early America, much less subscriptions to expensive online collections. Many do not even subscribe to “JSTOR,” that critical online collection of journals. The databases Nankai does have barely served the interests of the graduate students in my classes.

The Internet contains everything from newspapers and magazines to travel accounts, from maps to sheet music, from woodcuts to oil paintings, from novels to critical essays, from the proceedings of governmental bodies to the intimate details of family life.

To help students and faculty at Nankai and elsewhere in China, I began to compile a list of free, Web-based primary sources on early America (generously extended to 1877). I wrote short descriptions of each Website, analogous to the essays Andrews composed in his archive bibliographies. Since I thought the key resources were relatively few, I believed the project would take a day or two—but after several months I had compiled a list of more than 1300 free sites containing tens of thousands of digitized primary sources, most of which I had had no idea could be found online. Early America is, verily, free and on the Web!

The list is being prepared for the Web and will be hosted by Common-place; you should be able to use it within the next year. It will be valuable to anyone interested in our early past, from university professors writing books to high-school students searching for materials for term papers to Common-place readers who want to explore old or new historical interests. It covers every discipline in American studies: history, literature, law, art, music, science, medicine, politics, religion, economics, anthropology, sociology, demography.

What did I find? The Internet contains everything from newspapers and magazines to travel accounts, from maps to sheet music, from woodcuts to oil paintings, from novels to critical essays, from the proceedings of governmental bodies to the intimate details of family life. Searchers can find materials on every imaginable topic: Civil War hospitals; the Salem witchcraft trials; Revolutionary and Civil War battles; proceedings of the Continental Congress, the Constitutional Convention, and the U.S. Congress; slave resistance; Indian battles; the abolition and proslavery movements; the beliefs and religious practices of Evangelicals and Unitarians; the Lewis and Clark expedition; westward migration; economic development and immigration; and the writings of Cotton Mather and Walt Whitman, to name but a few. In sum, there are far more primary sources on the Web than in public libraries (except the greatest) and community college libraries, though many fewer than in the libraries of research universities.

Hercule Poirot Searches the Internet

My Web bibliography grew as I gained proficiency in finding sources in obscure (and not-so-obscure) places. I began by looking at sites known by most U.S. historians—the Library of Congress’s American Memory sites; the Making of America site; Yale Law School’s Avalon Project site; and the Websites at universities noted for their commitment to digitizing U.S. history (Cornell, Michigan, Virginia, and Northern Illinois) and organizations whose digital databases I had used (Colonial Williamsburg, Maryland Archives). I went on to look at major cultural institutions like the Smithsonian Institution or Harvard, knowing that they had probably digitized something of interest. Google searches were trickier since Google looks for words, not concepts: putting primary sources in a search returns sites with those words but not necessarily sites with primary sources. Nonetheless, when all else failed, I tried Google searches. The sites these searches uncovered often contained primary sources or pointed the way (linked) to other sites and to detailed Web bibliographies (like Voice of the Shuttle or compilations of home pages of history museums). Following these links to additional linked sites, my list began to grow exponentially.

The Web is a vast puzzle that would trip up Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. I had to use all my historical skills to think like the folks who put digital materials on the Web. Many times I searched for sources I thought must be on the Web but came up empty. No obvious place proved fruitful. I often found what I was looking for when looking for something else. For example, I searched repeatedly for digital versions of Pennsylvania Archives, a multivolume collection of printed primary sources published from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. But it appeared to be missing. I finally found a link to a free version of the Pennsylvania Archives when searching for Revolutionary War pension records at “footnote.com” (a subscription service geared to genealogists).

Other times, I had to find the right search terms. I knew, from a student paper completed for my Revolutionary-era course, that many Revolutionary War pension records had been digitized, mostly by genealogists. Because the veteran had to prove his service, the records often contained memories of enlistment, battles, camp life, and geographic movement after the war; widows who applied sometimes included thick social history details to prove their marriages. But repeated searches came up empty. Then, I changed the search terms from revolutionary war pension records to revolutionary war pension applications. That search reached a few digitized records. When I went to the root directory of those records, I discovered the USGenWeb Archives Pension Project: Revolutionary War, a collaborative genealogical project, which, as of this writing, contains transcripts (some just summaries) of over 1700 pension applications from all the states.

More often I figured out a strategy to uncover resources. After discovering that art museums often digitized their collections, I searched Websites of such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the National Gallery; when I found an online index of art museums, I looked at all the listed institutions. I proceeded similarly when searching for documents about early universities. I had found several early university charters, records of boards of trustees, and catalogues. I figured that many others must be available on the Web. But I did not have a list of early colleges, particularly those begun in the post-Revolutionary decades. I discovered a 1962 article by Walter Eells from the History of Education Quarterly in “JSTOR” that reprinted a list the Connecticut Journal published in 1817, complete with founding dates of colleges. From there, I searched the libraries and archives of every listed institution (and their successor bodies) and discovered primary sources on fourteen of the thirty-five schools, including all but one college (Columbia University) founded in the colonial era.

Perseverance sometimes paid off. Much searching had uncovered few digital primary sources on the early history of Jews in the United States. Surely the “people of the book” wanted to document, on the Web, their historical presence (however small) in early America. Granted, several Jewish history museums digitized pictures of liturgical implements—but I could find few texts. I searched all the obvious places, including the archives of the three major Jewish theological seminaries (Hebrew Union, Jewish Theological, and Yeshiva). One last try uncovered the right search terms at the Jewish Theological Seminary, whose library has digitized a large collection of early newspaper clippings and one hundred pamphlets, a third published by 1870. Since I first accessed this database, the Jewish Theological Seminary has redesigned their Website and has not yet assigned a URL to these databases. Such are the perils of anyone constructing a Web bibliography!

The Common-place Web bibliography will always be a work in progress. Since broken links like those for the Jewish Theological Seminary site abound, users will be able to report them on the Website. I know, moreover, that I missed much good material. Web calendars of archival collections demonstrate, for instance, the existence of many local Roman Catholic materials, but I found none digitized. Neither online compilations of New England town records nor transcripts of Quaker meeting records appear to be on the Web, despite the vast numbers that survive. They may be hiding in cyberspace, waiting to be found. Users will be invited to send in URLs and short descriptions of new sites and to write reviews of any of the listed sites. That way, the bibliography will become a vital, living, and growing resource.

What Digitized Primary Sources Tell Us about History and Memory

I learned a great deal about history and memory in contemporary America while looking for Websites. I would like to share some of my discoveries with readers of Common-place. When one looks at the list as a whole, one sees a vision of the history of North America from the colonial era through Reconstruction similar to that of college-level survey text books. But the Web is not a place where resources float in ether; they grow from the concerted efforts of hundreds of institutions and thousands of individuals. Putting materials on the Web is a time-consuming process: they must be discovered, digitized, indexed, and uploaded. Historians, archivists, librarians, curators, genealogists, and institutions like the Library of Congress all put historical sources on the Web. These individuals and institutions have competing interests and hold widely contrasting views of American history. As one looks in detail at Web primary sources, one senses great conflict and contests over the meaning of our past, over the historical memories they wish to sustain or suppress. Who holds the keys to our history—historians, archivists, preachers, politicians, ordinary citizens?

I did not begin my search with preconceived ideas about the type of history I would seek, and I looked in many areas (like history of science) about which I knew little. Nonetheless, the list in its totality resembles the agenda historians (particularly those influenced by the “new social history”) have followed over the past several decades. Web resources emphasize the social and cultural experience of ordinary people: their life stories, values, beliefs, politics, family relations. For instance, there are numerous writings on the Web by and about African Americans, Indians, and free white women. The proliferation of such sites reflects the urge (in the phrase of the 1960s) to do history “from the bottom up,” which, in turn, grew out of historians’ support of the civil rights and women’s movements. Other subfields of social history are also well represented: histories of urban places, popular culture, warfare, religious practice, popular politics (particularly political campaigns), and social reforms (abolition and the women’s movement).

Historians have increasingly turned to images—paintings, popular art, woodcuts, objects, maps, photographs—to explain the worldview, daily life, and beliefs of the country’s rulers, ordinary folk, and subservient groups. (See, for instance, “Revolution in Print: Graphics in Nineteenth-Century America,” the April 2007 issue of Common-place.) The Web is crammed with images. Not only can users find digital copies of works by Copley, Stuart, Audubon, and the Hudson River School, but they can also find popular Currier and Ives prints as well as George Caleb Bingham’s political genre paintings. Thousands of early maps, starting in the sixteenth century, have been digitized. Searchers can find numerous photographs of Indian ceremonial objects and of African religious statues. Early photographs, particularly of the Civil War, are extraordinarily plentiful, including portraits, battle scenes, and cityscapes.

The “new social history,” so widely practiced by American historians, followed the interests of the French Annales school more than those of the British “people’s history” school, with its stress on class struggle. In its quest for the sources of social conflict, the latter tended to study workers, farm laborers, deviants (like criminals), and the poor. There are many fewer online primary sources about American farmers, deviants, and the poor (of whatever race) than about Indians or African Americans. British historians and archivists have placed far more primary materials about poverty and deviance on the Web than their American colleagues. Tellingly, materials on the Salem witches, the one thoroughly documented group of colonial deviants, provide rich materials about free women.

But surely one of the primary determinants of what ends up on the Web is less ideology than simply academic fashion. For example, quantifiable materials (probate inventories, population census manuscripts) are scarce. One can find samples of censuses and transcripts from Plymouth Colony and probate inventories from Virginia but few other local examples. Such absence can be traced to the decline of quantitative history. Several decades ago, historians published many studies using probate inventories and censuses, but, by and large, the historical guild abandoned quantification a decade or more before the rise of the Internet.

Similarly, much of what does end up on the Web does so less out of any sense of civic obligation or educational engagement than out of the specific needs of specific researchers. My own labors demonstrate this. I needed Peter Force’s voluminous and ill-indexed nine-volume set of documents from the pivotal years 1774-1776, called American Archives, for my work on farmers in the American Revolution. Since it is a set of great value to anyone studying the coming of the Revolutionary War, my colleagues at Northern Illinois University libraries and I were able to persuade the NEH to fund its digitization. These documents are now available at the American ArchivesWebsite.

Historians of science and medicine have placed extensive research materials on the Web. One can find medical texts (both European and American) and most of the works of world-famous scientists like Newton, Boyle, and Darwin on the Web. Early American scientists (though less well known than their European contemporaries) are well represented; works by Louis Agassiz and by Joseph Henry, for instance, have been digitized. Sites devoted to the social history of science and especially of medicine are more accessible to a general public: several sites examine Civil War hospitals and medicine or women doctors; those who want to learn about the work of a country physician can consult Patients’ Voices in Early Nineteenth Century Virginia, which includes letters to two Fredericksburg doctors, 1816-1830.

Many others, with interests and politics far different than those of most academic historians, have placed primary sources on the Web. Genealogists and social historians are often interested in the same records (census records, land records, tax lists, military records) but for different reasons: genealogists search for particular individuals; historians seek patterns and data. Many genealogists (or organized groups like ancestry.com) and the state archives where genealogists work have Websites indexing the names on those records. But these sites often have little original data and can rarely be used to compile numerical estimates (age of soldiers, fertility rates, or similar measures).

Evangelical Protestants, seeking to nurture believers and attract converts, have digitized Protestant Bibles and Reformation classics, including works by Luther, Calvin, and other reformers, in English translation (Christian Classics: Ethereal Library, for instance). Seeking a return to the purity of their colonial forefathers, orthodox Calvinists have placed many Puritan texts on the Web, with such titles as “Fire and Ice“. They have placed sermons of prominent early American preachers such as George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, Isaac Backus, Charles Finney, and Barton Stone and Thomas Campbell on the Web. Almost as if in response, mainline and liberal denominations have digitized their canonical texts (the Book of Common Prayer, Quaker testimonies, classic Unitarian and Universalist texts).

Ideological conservatives and libertarians, who believe history should emphasize the great achievements of great men, have placed the voluminous writings of the founding generation on the Web. The Liberty Fund, a libertarian group, has been particularly active; their Library of Libertyincludes hundreds of works of political philosophy, political theory, economics, and religion, with heavy coverage of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including a big collection on the American Revolution. Ideologically similar Internet libraries (at American Colonists’ Library and founding.com) collect digital versions of books the founders read, from antiquity to their own time.

Americans of all political views consider the political thought and activities of the founding generation of great significance. Just as conservatives seek to preserve our revolutionary heritage and liberal historians seek to have the fullest possible historical record, ordinary Americans buy popular biographies of the founders by the hundreds of thousands. Understanding the popularity of the founders, the Library of Congress, through its “American Memory” collections, has invested heavily in creating digital versions of their works. That huge site includes digitized versions of manuscripts from Washington (and see also the Fitzpatrick edition of printed letters), Jefferson (and see also the Thomas Jefferson digital archive), and Madison in facsimile and sometimes typescript. (There are extensive collections of Franklin, John Adams, Hamilton, and Jay papers elsewhere). “American Memory” also includes digital editions of Max Farrand’s authoritative edition of the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention, Elliot’s debates on state ratification, and one of many online versions of the Federalist Papers.

What do digitized primary sources, as a whole, tell us about public interest and historical memory? A few individuals and social movements have garnered overwhelming support, across the social and political spectrum. Abraham Lincoln is the most popular earlier American denizen of the Web. Countless sites reprint his correspondence and speeches, reproduce digital images of his portrait, or document his life, assassination, and times. These sites come from a wide variety of places: the Lincoln papers at the Library of Congress; an edition of the Basler edition of Lincoln’s writings; Abraham Lincoln Net, with documents, images, and sounds concerning Lincoln’s Illinois years (including the Lincoln-Douglass debates); and an extraordinary number of portraits, political cartoons, and other images, many made possible by the spread of photographic technology (see, for instance, the Indiana Historical Society’s Lincoln collections.)

Both historians and the general public seek information about the most dramatic events in American history, no matter its historical significance. A site with primary sources on famous trials includes such high drama as the Salem witchcraft trial, the Burr conspiracy, the Amistad trials, the John Brown uprising at Harper’s Ferry, and the Andrew Johnson impeachment trial. Multiple sites cover the Salem trials, the Lewis and Clarke expedition, the overland trails, and the California gold rush.

It is also worth noting the heavy representation of amateur historians on the Web, particularly among sites devoted the Civil War. Many families still have Civil War records in their attics, and some of them (particularly those working on genealogies) transcribe letters and diaries and put them on the Web. Libraries and archives know that the Civil War fascinates their users, and institutions from coast to coast, from Duke to Bowling Green State to the University of Washington have digitized parts of their Civil War collections. Reenactors are more interested in the details of war and battles; they not only have their own sites but can find a complete digital set of the War of the Rebellion at Cornell’s Making of America site (go to browse monographs at bottom of page) along with innumerable muster rolls on the Web (three volumes from Maryland are digitized).

No longer can high school students (or their teachers), much less those in colleges here and abroad, complain about a lack of original sources on the first two and a half centuries of our history. Send students to the Web and watch term papers improve! Instead of bemoaning ordinary Americans’ ignorance of their past, members of Congress and their conservative allies should get busy and tell their constituents about Websites that preserve our heritage. Common-place is doing its part by sponsoring the Web bibliography, an announcement of which will appear in your in-box soon! The ball is now in your court!

This essay is dedicated to the memory of my Northern Illinois University colleague (and Common-placecoauthor) Tara Dirst, whose technical direction of the “Abraham Lincoln” and “American Archives” Websites have enriched all users of the Web, and to my Chinese colleagues (especially Zhang Juguo) and students (especially Dong Yu and Ye Fanmei) at Nankai University, without whom I would neither have conceived nor compiled my Web bibliography.

Further Reading:

Charles Andrews would feel right at home in the world of Web bibliographies. See his two books, Guide to the manuscript materials for the history of the United States to 1783 (Washington, D.C., 1908) and Guide to the materials for American history, to 1783, 2 vol. (Washington, D.C., 1912-14).

Readers can trace some of my detective work by following the Web searches I describe. The Eells article mentioned in the text is Walter Crosby Eells, “First Directory of American Colleges,” History of Education Quarterly 2 (Dec., 1962) and is available to those with access to “JSTOR.”

There is a great need for teaching and research guides to large Websites that highlight the most important resources contained in them. For examples of what can be done see the lesson plans at Northern Illinois University’s Lincoln/net. Common-place’s own “Tales from the Vault” occasionally highlights Web resources. See, for instance, Tara Dirst and Allan Kulikoff, “Was Dr. Benjamin Church a Traitor? A new way to find out,” in the October 2005 issue, and Mary Beth Norton, “Salem Witchcraft in the Classroom: With bewitching results,” in the January 2006 issue.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 8.1 (October, 2007).

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