I. Two summers ago, we drove up the driveway of the Bennington Museum. The museum welcomed visitors with its new portico and greeted them with advertisements for its Grandma Moses collection. I wasn’t interested in Grandma Moses that day. I had come to Vermont looking for archival gems, a taste my family and friends sometimes find hard to understand. I remembered that Kenneth Zogry, the Bennington Museum’s curator, had organized a wonderful exhibit in 1995: “The Best the Country Affords: Vermont Furniture, 1765-1820.” His catalogue’s fascinating documentary references suggested that I might find an abundance of information on furniture makers and furniture owners in the museum’s archives: file folders stuffed with clippings, stories to fill out my case studies of provincial craftsmen and consumers after the Revolution. As often happens, the files were disappointing. The black loose-leaf binders held a wealth of material on the furniture that Zogry had found on his travels to private homes and local historical societies. Zogry’s files document the universe of furniture made in Vermont and, perhaps, let him make new attributions, but they did not contain the stories of craftsmen and their customers I was looking for that day. Only when I finally wandered out into the sunlit main gallery where the museum’s treasures were displayed–its objects from Vermont’s early history–did I begin to see the kinds of things that would help me understand how artisans and consumers imagined their worlds. The first thing that caught my eye was a large neoclassical sideboard, looking for all the world like a sophisticated Boston bowfront, but made in Windsor, Vermont. But the beautiful bowfront, even with its sleek lines, could not compare with the massive desk and encyclopedia-filled bookcase that dominated an entire corner of the room, where the museum staff had recreated the interior of an early-nineteenth-century Vermont home (fig. 1).

The desk, I learned, belonged to James Wilson of Bradford, Vermont. More interesting, the label stated Wilson was the United State’s first globe maker, and indeed, one of Wilson’s early globes sat in a plexiglass case in front of the display. It seemed strange to me then that a man in this out-of-the-way place had taken to making globes (fig. 2).

Or perhaps it is the people of the provinces who best understand the need for assuring a good local source for things like maps. We know nineteenth-century Vermonters were intellectually sophisticated cosmopolitans of a sort. At the other end of the room stood a marvelous musical tall clock built by a Rutland clock-making partnership. The timepiece boasted a calendar wheel and a moon dial, and it played seven tunes, one for each day of the week, and added a psalm for Sunday. Between the globe and the clock, museum curators had hung a 1795 landscape of Bennington painted by Ralph Earl, a well-known Connecticut portraitist. Earl was likely the first painter to visit the town, where he produced this very early example of an American landscape. The museum’s local treasures preserved Vermont’s contribution to the new nation’s commercial and cultural history. The objects on display were connected by their visual power and by their local historical significance, but they also recorded the curiosity and intellectual ambitions of men and women of rural New England. I left the Bennington Museum that day enthralled with the discovery of James Wilson, wanting to know more about how a globe maker could have come out of the upper Connecticut River Valley in the 1790s. As I later learned, others in the hinterlands also tried to make globes; New Hampshire shoemaker, surveyor, and farmer Samuel Lane, for example, made his own idiosyncratic version of a terrestrial globe around 1760. Lane turned a seven-inch oak sphere on his lathe, scored the painted surface, and cut degrees and continental boundaries into the painted surface, while pinning it into a pine table made in the form of a milking stool so it could revolve. I was also vaguely aware of the new scholarly history of cartography, but I had little idea how the four corners of that gallery would come together into my fascination with the Village Enlightenment. Wilson was not the only New Englander to fashion a career out of his own curiosity; in the 1790s many Americans made money satisfying country folks’ interest in the latest mechanical marvels, like the complex musical clock, or their desire to own the maps that let them see the shape and extent of their new nation.

II. Curiosity Unleashed Globes captured James Wilson’s imagination. Few eighteenth-century American households could boast owning a globe. Those who did likely purchased their globes from London manufacturers. Instrument makers, engravers, and clock makers all produced globes in Britain. Many considered “cordwainer” William Bardin the leading late-eighteenth-century globe maker. Bardin and others relied on forms introduced with Martin Behaim’s hollow wooden Nuremburg globe of 1492. Behaim’s globe making principles were codified and transmitted in print in Diderot’s Encyclopedie, the source of information contained in Wilson’s own Encyclopedia Britannica. Globe makers who followed Behaim’s example used a solid wood mould with wire pivots at each end, which became the poles. The ball was covered with successive layers of damp papier-mâché or paper. When the paper dried, the shell was cut into two halves around the circumference of the equator, an axle shaft of wood was tacked at the poles, and the globe put back together and sealed. Thin layers of plaster were applied and guidelines drawn so that printed gores could be attached. The discovery of gores–the map of the world broken into twelve sections–solved the problem of how to fit flat paper maps over spheres. In the early sixteenth century, engravers and printers began to produce gores for eager globe makers. Globe making thus sat at the intersection of woodworking, metalworking, printing, and mapmaking, as Wilson would soon discover. In the eighteenth century, globe making caught fire. Interest was fueled by the era’s expansion of geographical knowledge, thanks to traders and explorers, especially Captain James Cook. Cook’s Pacific voyages rounded out European knowledge of the world. The information he brought back gave Enlightenment globes their marked “oceanic character,” as geographer Denis Cosgrove has reminded us. Cook’s voyages captured Americans’ imagination, too. There was a growing interest in popular science and geographic discoveries in elite and not so elite circles along with a desire to display that newfound knowledge in homes and schools. Wilson shared this interest, but how did he come to make globes? Wilson was born in Londonderry, New Hampshire, in 1763. As a boy, he learned blacksmithing from his uncle. In 1795 the young James Wilson set out west across the Connecticut River to locate land for his family in Bradford, Vermont, a town located at the scenic Coos Meadows, where the Waits and Connecticut Rivers meet. Along the way, he stopped in Hanover, New Hampshire, to see a friend at Dartmouth College. According to one family story, the young man, himself eager for knowledge but without the means for securing a formal education, saw a pair of globes when he peaked through the keyhole of a locked door in one of the college buildings. The college owned three sets of globes in the 1790s. We don’t know which globes Wilson saw, but we do know that these orbs remained inaccessible to him. Wilson could not have purchased the globes, nor could he have purchased the education that would have let him study Dartmouth’s small collection. This glimpse of globes, however, fired his curiosity and fortified his desire to construct one of these unusual objects, or so the story of James Wilson goes. Before he could take up globe making, he had to settle his family. He brought his wife and two sons to Bradford to develop his homestead, and began making axes to help pay for his land purchases. Although still working as a smith, he did not forget his interest in making a map of the world, and in 1796 he made his first globe, a large solid wooden ball covered with paper, with the continents and countries drawn in pen and ink. But Wilson would not be satisfied with his hand-drawn maps. He intended to build and market a product that could compete with the European imports, making his mark and earning his living as an American globe maker. Wilson’s first effort looked something like a globe, but it could hardly compete with the European imports. And Wilson, with his limited resources, faced formidable obstacles on his way to success as a globe maker. First, he knew very little about either geography, astronomy, or cartography. However, for a man gifted with Wilson’s capacity for curiosity, the growing number of books and newspapers in the small towns of northern New England offered many sources of information. Wilson may not have had the advantages of his friend at Dartmouth, but he did have skills and products he could exchange for knowledge. He sold off some of his farm produce and livestock and purchased for the substantial sum of $130 the eighteen volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: Or a Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Miscellaneous Literature, the collection of books for which he built his imposing desk and bookcase (fig. 3).

Encyclopedias were the archetypal repository of the Enlightenment, with their compendia of all recognized knowledge; the third edition Britannica contained almost fifteen thousand pages and over five hundred plates, but Wilson would have been particularly interested in the substantial entries on globes and geography. Wilson had his encyclopedia, but how was he to translate the information he found there onto his wooden spheres? His bookcase demonstrated his skills in woodworking, and as a trained blacksmith he was a proficient metal worker. But he knew that hand-drawn globes could not compare with European imports. In order to move beyond shoemaker Lane’s effort and produce globes his neighbors would be proud to own, Wilson had to learn to engrave his maps on copper plates. Wilson knew he needed to find a teacher more skilled at engraving than his acquaintances in southern Vermont. He set out for New Haven to find Amos Doolittle, a silversmith turned engraver, who was celebrated as the man who had engraved the maps in Jedidiah Morse’s Geography Made Easy (1784), the first geography text published in the United States. After a brief stay in New Haven, Wilson returned to Vermont a blacksmith now turned geographer/engraver. But he still had much to learn about building globes. He began again with his original globe, covering it with papier-mâché, gluing several layers together, tracing continental outlines, cutting paper into hemispheres, and then gluing the hemispheres onto the sphere. He finished a first hand-drawn globe, but then spent nearly a year engraving a world map on a large copper plate, only to discover that he did not know how to project the meridians of the map, a flat plane, in their true proportion onto a spherical surface. Wilson took off once again in search of cosmopolitan training to suit his cosmopolitan imagination. This time he went to see the “Father of American Geography,” Jedidiah Morse himself, at Charlestown, Massachusetts. Morse told the globe maker that his first effort on a copper plate could not be salvaged. Wilson went back to Bradford, knowing he needed to obtain more copper but knowing too that his growing family needed the scarce resources he was spending learning to make globes. In the first years of the nineteenth century, balancing family demands and map-making aspiration, Wilson worked on his globe making. He built his own tools–lathes and presses–mixed his inks, shaped the spheres, and printed all of his own maps, probably relying on increasingly available atlases. Around 1810 he produced his first globes of paper on a paper core suspended in a birch frame with turned legs. He opened a shop to manufacture these prized items and began to sell them to his neighbors in rural Vermont. Wilson charged around fifty dollars for a pair of globes: a terrestrial and a celestial one. Vermonters were likely proud to possess one of Wilson’s impressive terrestrial globes. They measured thirteen inches in diameter, and each was signed, “A NEW TERRESTRIAL GLOBE . . . By J. WILSON, VERMONT.” Wilson’s proud signature suggests that we have entered an era that celebrated homegrown and democratized knowledge (fig. 4).

Men like Wilson made a livelihood providing useful knowledge and genteel commodities.  American globes or provincial sideboards were material manifestations of a Village Enlightenment. Clocks or globes, for example, displayed the enlightened age’s fascination with mechanical marvels and the quest for knowledge of distant explorations, while also the refined person’s desire to display symbols of gentility.

III. Curiosities for Sale Maps and globes were important products for people eager to see themselves as members of a new nation. What is surprising is that so many of the nation’s early maps came from places like Wilson’s Bradford globe manufactory. Wilson and his Windsor County neighbors formed a remarkable circle of map makers and engravers whose products graced the walls of schoolhouses and homes of Vermont and the entire nation. We sometimes picture a man like Wilson as a sort of solitary genius imagining his way into a world outside rural Vermont. But he was well supplied with coworkers. From the tiny villages of Greenbush and Feltchville a cluster of more than half a dozen rural artisans, printers, and engravers produced visual representations of Vermont, in maps, prints, and illustrated books. The men and women of this “Greenbush group,” were connected by partnerships, marriages, apprenticeships, and collaborations. Their intellectual, financial, and family connections helped spread knowledge through the countryside. They helped build a world where Enlightenment and edification were interwoven with the growing commercialization of the countryside. Maps were important components of this new world. They facilitated geographic and economic integration, but they also helped people imagine their nation. Maps have long aided political expansion and cultural consolidation. In the early Republic cartography helped establish an image of an authentically bounded nation. “After the Revolution many Americans self-consciously turned to the discourse of geography to negotiate and transform the representations of personal, regional, and political difference into material figures of national consent,” literary scholar Martin Bruckner writes. Whenever they stitched a sampler of the United States or gazed on a state map that made their homes part of a larger whole, they “enacted the nation as a participatory model of coherence.”

In fact, state maps, not globes, were the first American cartographic efforts after Independence, and Vermont was or became the first state with a map: William Blodget’s “A Topographical Map of the State of Vermont.” But Blodgett’s map did little to enhance this map maker’s finances. Scottish surveyor James Whitelaw fared far better; he succeeded Ira Allen as Vermont’s surveyor-general and kept busy securing new surveys of the state’s towns. From these surveys, he compiled his “A Correct Map of the State of Vermont,” to which he added details about the state’s commercial and manufacturing activities. The legend on Whitelaw’s map included familiar icons such as forts and meeting houses, but he added grist, saw, and fulling mills, along with grammar schools and other signs of a landscape of industrial and cultural improvement. The map’s large cartouche contained a delightful pastoral scene that featured the ongoing work of agricultural development taking place throughout the state: an improving farm with its cleared fields, a stump in foreground, and a two story farmhouse in the back (fig. 6).

Whitelaw’s publisher was New Haven’s Doolittle in 1796, but later editions (including an 1810 map engraved by James Wilson) would come from Vermont sources. About 1810, a man named Isaac Eddy established a shop in the little hamlet of Greenbush in a western corner of Weathersfield. Eddy and his son, apprentices, and business partners would turn this remote village into a significant center of early national engraving, especially cartographic work. The Eddys produced an amazing volume of maps, illustrated books, and even globes. Eddy embarked upon a modest program of imprints and engraved plates for the “First Vermont Edition” of the Bible along with a series of other local publications. His most ambitious collaboration, however, came with James Wilson on their Chronology Delineated / To Illustrate the History of Monarchical Revolutions (fig. 7).

These two rural entrepreneurs and encyclopaedists mapped the long history of the world, marrying commerce and culture together in two 36-x-21-inch sheets to be placed together, graphically representing the growth of the nations of the world from the time of Adam to the present. Eddy published this visual history to bring the allure and exoticism of its “French Historian and Chronologer” to an American audience with “the most concise and accurate system of chronology ever published,” offering the “Patrons of the Fine Arts . . . useful, amusing and ornamental” information. Eddy and Wilson obviously shared a kind of world vision. Knowledge more local sufficed for other intellectual entrepreneurs. Whitelaw’s Vermont map, for example, had a long life among other Windsor County engravers. Ebenezer Hutchinson brought out new editions in 1821 and 1824. In new editions, a vision of place transformed by enterprise and industry gradually replaced the pastoral scenes depicted in 1795 and 1810. Two cartouches graced the 1824 map; one depicted the thriving village of Montpelier from the mill point; the other was a fantastic scene looking west (fig. 8).

The wilderness with its thunderous waterfall and roving wildlife was divided by an earthen urn with the map’s title, the state seal, and an eagle above the whole, leading on to a cultivated scene with a farmer and his livestock in the foreground, a plough crossing the fields in the middle ground, and then a river with a puffing steamboat going by. Across the shore stood an urban scene. The Greenbush group innovated with new map styles and advanced production techniques. Another Eddy apprentice, George White struck out on his own with some smaller and less detailed maps of the two states straddling the Connecticut River. Lewis Robinson, yet one more product of Eddy’s workshop, pushed the manufacturing process forward, and built the first “map manufactory” in Windsor County. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, Lewis Robinson became the leading purveyor of maps in northern New England, a major producer in the entire United States, all without leaving his hometown (Fig. 9).

The little village of South Reading stayed the site of his map factory for thirty-eight years; his chief products maps of Vermont and New Hampshire. They ranged in price from thirty-three cents to three dollars, often marketed through a network of peddlers and traveling salesmen. Robinson sold nearly six thousand maps between 1840 and 1855 alone and made his little village “a thriving backwoods center of commercial American cartography,” as Vermont cartographic historian J. Kevin Graffagnino has written.

IV. Curiosity Completed Wilson continued to operate his backwoods shop in Bradford, but eventually success forced him to open an urban shop. Events deep in the Pacific and across the North American continent captured Wilson’s imagination, and as he gained new information, he corrected his globes. On “A NEW AMERICAN TERRESTRIAL GLOBE on which the PRINCIPAL PLACES of the KNOWN WORLD are ACCURATELY laid down with the traced attempts of CAPTAIN COOK to discover a Southern Continent by James Wilson, 1811,” Wilson filled out the continent with place names and river systems. In 1817 Wilson’s sons opened a factory in Albany, New York, to meet the increased demand for their globes and maps. Knowing there was a market for inexpensive maps, the Wilsons even produced three-inch terrestrial and celestial globes.

The three-inch globes offered less graphic detail than larger maps; citizens of the new nation eager to learn and display their knowledge of the world could easily afford these miniature maps. An 1828 broadside advertised the Wilsons’ full range of three-inch to thirteen-inch globes on mahogany pedestal stands. “THE CORRECTNESS OF THE GEOGRAPHICAL DIVISIONS &C. OF OUR OWN country, and the western hemisphere, renders these globes more useful and interesting to the American geographer, and gives them a decided preference to imported globes, on which this continent is greatly misrepresented.” Wilson’s globes were also less expensive than imported ones, “so schools and academies, even private families,” could take advantage, with the “popularity and usefulness of Geographical and Astronomical science,” facts so apparent to potential customers that it was not necessary to explain either their popularity or utility. Material objects like Wilson’s globes made the Village Enlightenment. They remind us that we sometimes too readily dismiss the backwoods as a source of information. The modern model of an urban monopoly on curiosity and sophistication fails to capture the intellectual world of James Wilson and his neighbors. Globes and other cartographic instruments served well as an exemplary archive of knowledge, quickly adding the “discoveries” of explorers such as Captain Cook, and modeling an ideal: the creation of a natural and orderly society. Commerce and culture came together in a process, really a transformation, that I have called elsewhere the Village Enlightenment, where men and women made a business of providing and using cultural commodities in the hinterlands. Entrepreneurs like Wilson took advantage of the curiosity fostered in schoolrooms and popular books and helped promote the democratization of knowledge and the commercialization of the countryside. This widespread movement made rural peoples’ homes looks very different in the decades after the War for Independence and celebrated the new nation’s maturity, making something European into something American and moving the center of that story from its familiar setting of Philadelphia or New York far into inland communities. Bradford, Vermont, a town perched along the upper Connecticut River where James Wilson set up his globe-making shop, was the unlikely station for such a story. The farmer-blacksmith’s remarkable saga offers a vision of one, only one of many, backwoods savants navigating among the arts and sciences to produce new commercial goods and cultural identities. James Wilson’s curiosity opens up all sorts of possibilities of learning from artifactual evidence: a lesson well worth sharing.

Further Reading: The study of Vermont cartography begins with J. Kevin Graffagnino, The Shaping of Vermont: From the Wilderness to the Centennial, 1749-1877 (Rutland, Vt., 1983) with its reproduction of maps, account of their makers, and the historical background. Many of the James Wilson documents appear in Leroy E. Kimball, “James Wilson of Vermont, America’s First Globe Maker,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 48 (April 1938): 29-48; Harold W. Haskins, “James Wilson–Globe Maker,” Vermont History 27 (October 1959): 319-30. Wilson also appears in recent studies of Vermont material culture such as Kenneth Zogry’s comprehensive survey of Vermont furniture: The Best the Country Affords: Vermont Furniture, 1765-1850 (Bennington, Vt., 1995) and Celebrating Vermont: Myths and Realities (Middlebury, Vt., 1991) edited by Nancy Price Graff. Upper Valley material culture gets important consideration in Gerald Ward and William Hosley, The Great River: Art & Society of the Connecticut Valley, 1635-1820(Hartford, 1985). For some keen thinking on the relation of provincial and metropolitan cultural relations in furniture and other material forms, see Kevin Sweeney’s “High Style Vernacular: Lifestyles of the Colonial Elite,” in Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, 1994), 1-58; or Philip Zea’s “Diversity and Regionalism in Rural New England Furniture,” in American Furniture (1995). My Village Enlightenment essay is concerned with print materials: “The Village Enlightenment in New England,” William and Mary Quarterly 47 (July 1990): 327-46. Specific studies of the “Greenbush Group” include Windsor County Engravers, 1809-1860 (Montpelier, Vt., 1982); George R. Dalphin and Marcus A. McCorison, “Lewis Robinson–Entrepreneur,” Vermont History 30 (Oct 1962): 297-313; Carl Taylor Jr., “George White–Vermont’s ‘Unknown Artist,’” Vermont History 42 (Winter 1974): 3-11; Harold Goddard Rugg, “Isaac Eddy Printer-Engraver,” Bibliographical Essays: A Tribute to Wilberforce Eames (Cambridge, 1924): 313-29. The single most important figure in the “new history of cartography” was J.B. Harley, author of The New Nature of Maps (Baltimore, 2001); the early republic has seen some good recent work by John Rennie Short, Representing the Republic: Mapping the United States, 1600-1900 (New York, 2001) and Martin Bruckner, “Lessons in Geography: Maps, Spellers, and Other Grammars of Nationalism in the Early Republic,” American Quarterly 51 (June 1999): 311-44; Matthew Edney, “Reconsidering Enlightenment Geography and Map Making: Reconnaissance, Mapping, Archive,” in David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers, Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago, 1999): 165-98. Denis Cosgrove has written a sweeping and imaginative study of the cartographic imagination and globes: Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore, Md., 2001). Finally, collectors and historians of maps and globes have been busy online. David Rumsey’s important map collection has thorough documentation and impressive graphics. Library of Congress collections are available in the American Memory collections. Two other useful Websites are the Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine with several online exhibitions and Cartographic Curiosities at Yale.

This article originally appeared in issue 4.2 (January, 2004).

David Jaffee passed away in 2017. He previously taught history and new media pedagogy at City College of New York and the Graduate Center, CUNY.

What started out as just wanting to make a few paintings of whales ultimately became an eight-year project, with still no end in sight. Whaling—or, at least, the history of American whaling—does not give up her secrets easily. And looking for reference material about one aspect of whaling often leads to other bits of whaling lore you never knew existed.

My way of thinking is circuitous to begin with, and easily waylaid. So, standing in the main entry hall of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, looking at a map that showed the global voyages of whalers over the course of several centuries, I was struck by how many boats had been lost at sea in the relentless pursuit of whales. Each of those boats had a crew of between twenty and fifty men, many of whom left behind wives, children, homes, and families.

And then off in one corner, on display almost as an afterthought, I saw a whaling logbook, and everything changed.

It took some time, but eventually I discovered that the Providence Public Library has the second-largest collection of whaling logbooks in the world. I called them up, and they invited me down for a look. Upon arrival, they pointed me in the direction of two huge bookcases, and said something along the lines of “there you go!” So I started at the beginning, and worked my way to the end, my fingers black from turning the pages. It was as though some small part of whaling was rubbing off on me, the soot from the try pots, fires that burned night and day. Melville wrote that the smoke from those fires smelled “like the left wing of the day of judgement.” The true history of American whaling is in those logbooks, and hundreds like them, written by the men who went to sea. Those pages hold the excitement of the hunt, the chase, the danger, as well as the boredom and near-constant longing for home, all of it the sum parts of whaling.  And many contained visual sketches, including studies of different whale plumes, which could be used from a distance to identify whales by type, and thus by value.

They put to sea, and hoped.

While trying to figure out what the hell I could do with the logbooks, I was painting portraits of some of the children I know on the island where we live, dressing them in period outfits and giving them harpoons or whale teeth or silhouette portraits to hold, tangible memories of their fathers, grandfathers, brothers and uncles.  Text from the logbooks also began appearing on the canvas of these portraits, further heightening the sense of these remnant sea-borne inheritances.  All those men lost at sea called themselves “The Children of Light,” because that was what they were doing: lighting the homes and streets of the new Republic with whale oil.

One day at the library, I noticed a couple of boxes on a shelf marked “scrimshaw.” Jordan, the librarian, pulled them down and opened them up. Each was packed with gray foam, and nestled into little cut-out pockets were scrimshawed teeth of sperm whales, dozens of them, carved over the long course of whaling voyages.

Of course, I had to do some scrimshaw now. Ivory, however, under which whale teeth fall, is outlawed in the United States. By chance, someone on the island needed their piano fixed, and I happened to spot a small truck with “Piano Repair” on the side while I was in line for the car ferry. I tapped on truck driver’s window.

“Excuse me, sir,” I began, “do you happen to have any old piano keys?” The man’s eyes lit up.

I found myself east of nowhere a few days later, in his “shop,” essentially a collapsing corner of a garage full of boxes and bags and old cans brimming with what might very well have been several thousand piano keys. The tails (the narrow part next to the black keys) were a dollar. The mains (the piece where the finger strikes) two dollars. “Cash Only,” of course. I went a little crazy at the ATM several miles down the road.

Wanting to make scrimshaw is one thing; figuring out how to do it is quite another. Did you know that almost nothing sticks to ivory? That, in fact, there is special Piano Key Glue available only from a company in Chicago? Did you also know that piano keys were originally bedded down with whiting, a kind of pasty nastiness that has to be soaked off, but not for too long, and then scraped away with a knife? Oh, the things I know about piano keys, and how much work it takes to make panels, prime panels, glue the keys, keep them straight, clamp them just so, then clean them up and trim the edges, fill the gaps, then—and only then—actually prepare to make a mark with a very expensive, very sharp, slightly lethal surgical needle, and hope it is a good mark, a mark that might eventually become a whale incised into dozens of small pieces of ivory.

That’s how my work gets made: in bits and pieces, one thing leading to another, then another, until the process stops.  With the whales, this hasn’t happened yet. Part of me hopes it never will. The historical materials brought an undercurrent of American narrative to this series that deeply intrigues me.  The logbooks, in particular, seeped, in many different ways, into all the work presented here.  As you can see, I even began to replicate the form of the logbooks themselves, with studies of spouts and ocean colors.

I could never have been a whaler, but would love to have been aboard a whaleship in 1856, to see how it was done, meet those men, hear their stories, somehow get it all down in my own sketchbooks and journals, my fingers black from soot, as well as ink.

To have put to sea, and hoped.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.3.5 (Summer, 2017).

Scott Kelley studied at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York; the Slade School of Art, London; and was a fellow at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Kelley’s work is in collections, including the Portland Museum of Art and the Portland Public Library. He has received numerous fellowships, including a grant from the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, which sent him to Palmer Station, Antarctica. Scott Kelley lives and works on Peaks Island, Maine, with his wife, Gail, their son, Abbott, and their imaginary pig, Lunchbox.

Nazera Sadiq Wright’s Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century is an exemplar of well-researched and innovative scholarship, an exciting book for scholars of early African American literature and beyond. This ambitious project is reflective of the field of early African American studies, built over decades of scholarship that has laid a foundation for continued and ever more exhilarating research. Wright positions her own work atop this strong foundation, also creating a new foundation of her own, on which future black girlhood scholarship might be built.

Wright’s work is interdisciplinary, situated at several methodological and historical intersections: the burgeoning field of black girlhood studies; print culture studies; childhood studies and children’s literary studies; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; nineteenth-century American studies; African American studies, and American studies more broadly. Wright’s research is as meticulous as her prose. Her careful presentation of historical facts, close readings, and analysis is accessible even to readers outside nineteenth-century African American studies, as she lays open the historical and cultural contexts for understanding the myriad texts she discusses. This accessibility and precision will be useful for those interested in both the content and method of Wright’s scholarship.

Black girlhood, Wright argues, is an overlooked but resonant category in American literary studies. While much attention has been given to the most widely circulated racist caricature of black girlhood, Topsy from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, actual black girls have been woefully under-studied. As Wright shows, black girls are fully present and diverse in their representation in nineteenth-century African American literature, where they were recognized as holding a prime political position in larger narratives of black activism and uplift. Recognizing the politicized position of black girlhood during this period will surely “prove useful to the black girls of today and the people who care about them” (22).   

In Black Girlhood, we see ideas about racial progress and black futures. Although age is an often overlooked site for discourses of intersectional identity, work in childhood studies has necessarily addressed childhood’s intersections with race and gender. Adding further nuance to theories of how childhood fits into intersectionality, Wright discusses the various “stages” of black girlhood writers have marked. Characterizations of “youthful” and “prematurely knowing” girlhood appear as age-markers and also markers of experience (10). Further, these reveal intersectional positionalities of girls as fluid rather than static. Attending to age markers not only adds another layer to these intersectional identities, but also allows us to see “the unique diversity of black girls’ experience” (14).  

Importantly recognizing the phenomenon of black girls’ victimization (and particularly their sexual victimization), Wright also shows how black girls were represented in other ways. Black girls, she demonstrates, were empowered within their communities. Moreover, black girlhood stories did not always focus on their sexuality or even their reproductive potential. African American women writers, for instance, imagined black girlhood’s trajectories beyond wifehood and motherhood. Wright also acknowledges gendered differences in how black men and black women wrote about black girls and whether their representations leaned toward ideals or interiorities of black girlhood. Not mere reflections of white ideals and representations of childhood, however, both black men and black women approached black girls as having inherent cultural and historical value.

Wright’s book traces a genealogy of black girlhood from the 1820s through the early 1900s and spans a variety of genres including newspaper editorials, autobiographical accounts, advice columns, novels, and short fiction. Each of Wright’s chapters takes up a particular historical moment for theorizing black girlhood, but her progression avoids reduction to a simple narrative of racial progress.

Wright’s first chapter shows how the editors of black newspapers like Freedom’s Journal (1827-1829) and the Colored American (1837-1841) recognized black girls’ importance to family and community. Still, black male editors overwhelmingly idealized black girls as two-dimensional models of “respectability” poised to help uplift the race. Black girls’ vulnerability presented a problem that both reflected and reproduced the economic difficulties of many black households. In this, the relationship between black girls and black mothers (both as role models and as their own future selves) was key. This focus on black girls’ relations to family resulted in less-nuanced depictions than those produced by black women themselves.

Chapter two turns to black women’s antebellum writing and authors including Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, and Maria Stewart, who explored black girls’ development and complex trajectories. In this, they represented black girls’ interiority as they formed strategies for navigating the world and its perils. By necessity, these girls departed from earlier, “respectable” domestic representations. Wright shows that these imagined futures were varied, reading “prematurely knowing” girls not only as burdened by knowledge of their own sexual vulnerability, but also as possessing a precocious understanding of their own resilience.

Reading Gertrude Bustill Mossell’s late-century advice writing for black girls in the New York Freeman (1884-1887) in her third chapter, Wright shows how precocious black girlhood was directed toward civic engagement. Following the failure of Reconstruction, the futures imagined by African Americans necessitated careful strategizing. Mossell presented black girls as contributing to both the push for national structural change and the creation of survival strategies within the black community. In these columns, the breadth of black girls’ everyday concerns and interests come into view.

In her fourth chapter, Wright takes up Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Trial and Triumph (1888-1889), a magnificent and under-read contribution to Reconstruction-era African American literature. This serialized novel offers hope and encouragement for black girls’ possible futures. In this “uplift” novel, Harper foregoes important markers of “respectability” for her girlhood protagonist, Annette—including marriage. Importantly, Harper represents black girls not only as workers for the larger benefit of the race, but as valuable in their own right, offering a model of what they might need to thrive.

Wright’s final chapter reads early twentieth-century black conduct books, which would make the difficulties of black girlhood apparent as they shouldered these burdens of racial advancement. Recognizing black girls’ importance to uplift resulted in the promotion of burdensome behavioral guidelines. In Silas X. Floyd’s Floyd’s Flowers: Or, Duty and Beauty for Colored Children (1905), sketches and photographs illustrated models of racial performance that responded to prejudice by departing from earlier caricatures of black people. The rigidity of such models for black girlhood speaks to pessimism in the nadir of America’s racist history, evidenced by other responses to anti-black violence in the work of Ida B. Wells and the anti-lynching plays of early twentieth-century African American women writers. Wright reads this pessimism with a mind toward the specific experiences of black girls in this historical moment.

As is the case with the most compelling scholarly work, Wright invites further research to meet and engage her own. She suggests studies on nineteenth-century black boyhoods as one such avenue. By offering careful readings and analysis of recently recovered and understudied texts, including Maria Stewart’s “The First Stage of Life” (1861) and Frances Harper’s Trial and Triumph, Wright contributes to the continued reimagining of early African American literature as a body of work. Wright also projects her study into later moments for imagining black girlhood, in the writing of twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors that fall outside the scope of her project, such as Nella Larsen, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Toni Morrison. This extension marks how Wright’s work anticipates and sets the stage for scholarship in twentieth- and twenty-first-century girlhood studies and for childhood studies more broadly.

Wright’s analysis further reveals the complex nexuses of the print public sphere. African American newspapers’ connections to “uplift” activism and education as well as their support for black literary publication demonstrate the great potential for interdisciplinary work between print culture and literary studies. Wright’s addition of girlhood studies to this interdisciplinary mix shows how girls were not divorced from this print public sphere but instead constitute a prominent subject within it. Her contribution is also methodological: “Mapping black girlhood as a representational strategy in early African American literature … advances understandings of the black female experience in the nineteenth century and reshapes the social relationship between African Americans and the culture of print” (17). Throughout her project, Wright instructs in reading methodologies that have long been necessary for scholarship on African American and women writers, particularly in learning to read “aright,” to consider both what is and what is not written, and to read each text “within and even against its social, political, and economic context” (9).

Wright’s epilogue extends her discussion forward, with the knowledge that girls who grew up during the first decade of the twentieth century—like Zora Neale Hurston, Angelina Weld Grimké, and Nella Larsen—went on to participate in the Harlem Renaissance. Looking to later periods, we might understand how the tropes of black girlhood that Wright outlines here helped to frame later literary attention to black girls, by writers like Toni Cade Bambara and Toni Morrison. This influence becomes clear as Wright ends her work with a discussion of contemporary critiques of black girl figures such as Malia and Sasha Obama, Gabby Douglas, and Quvenzhané Wallis, and the African American Policy Forum’s 2015 study, Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected. Wright’s study shows the roots of contemporary attacks on black girlhood. In a world in which black girls continue to be overlooked, underserved, and undervalued, Black Girlhood is both groundbreaking and refreshing in its attention to the complexity with which black girlhood was lived, represented, discussed, and shaped in nineteenth-century African American literature. 

This article originally appeared in issue 18.2 (Spring, 2018).

Brigitte Fielder is assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is writing two books, one on racial formation and interracial kinship in nineteenth-century U.S. literatures and one on overlapping discourses of race and species in the long nineteenth century.

The logical starting point for a book historian’s investigation into Native American communications systems, one assumes, would be the Cherokee Phoenixeditors’ adoption of Sequoyah’s syllabary to print the first Native American newspaper in 1828, which appeared just as “Indians” were being deemed “domestic dependent nations” by the U.S. Supreme Court. Instead, Matt Cohen’s The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (2009) focuses on the era before the first printing press arrived in New England. Common-place asked Cohen: What do we learn by examining this earlier moment?

Sequoyah is a perfect place to begin! That history, like most, will carry you backwards, not just forwards; east, and not just west. The adoption into print of Sequoyah’s syllabary changed things, not merely because of its role in its political moment and its persistence down to the present, but in its philosophical riposte to claims, made long before the 1820s and long after, for the superiority of alphabetic literacy. The syllabary is sonic, not alphabetical, in its epistemology; it was adopted and learned rapidly; and it has played an important role in intercultural politics ever since it was accepted by Cherokee people. But did the print that ensued create a “culture” of print? And if so, was it, or has it become, truly “independent,” escaping the structure of domination that Justice Marshall’s declaration of Indian tribes as “domestic dependent nations” helped impose? The alternative to assumptions about a dependent print culture may not be to imagine independence, but rather to embrace the complex ways our worlds are built upon webs of communicative habits and protocols. A step in counteracting the logic of dependency is to shift the analytical lens away from what has gone under the label of “print culture.” By mindfully bypassing narratives in which print is the pivot point, we get to ask questions that wind up telling us more and more interesting things, both about Early Americans (be they Native or English) and about how communication actually works in historically specific contexts.

One answer, then, to the question “Why turn to the early moment?” is simple: It alienates us from our own systems, allowing us to see things about communications technologies we didn’t notice before, and to see them as historically specific. But at the same time, it shows hidden genealogies or, just as importantly, resurgences, folds in time, rather than a linear forward march, in the ways humans have handled confrontations with radically new communications technologies and protocols. The old story was that human communications systems kept improving with time, and civilization was knowable in part by its progression through ever more “advanced” stages, marked by “better” media technologies. We think, for example, that we are certain that information is power—but just when we seem to have figured out what counts as “information,” the definition slips through our fingers. To take a recent example, the very speed and vastness of today’s networks of financial information exchange helped bring down the world’s economy almost overnight. The medium seems to be the message—until content resurges in the form of an online image or two, and Facebook photos ruin a politician just as effectively as newspapers and rumors could in the early nineteenth century. Is the cell phone the best or the worst thing that has happened to us? When, during King Philip’s War, an Algonquian warrior cut open Goodman Wright’s body and stuffed a Bible into him, an earlier answer to a similar question was horrifically, eloquently transmitted.

Print has had great power, and not just for colonial domination, yet one doesn’t want to reduce all minority communications history to the same story: print came and its European carriers dominated, while minorities adapted it to their own ends and persisted. And crucially, the strategic use by Native people of “orality” in distinction to writing as a culturally definitive property has in some cases produced a certain autonomy, a unique set of aesthetic innovations, and a sense of agency that cannot be underestimated. What I have tried to do, then, is suggest a reading practice, rooted in a problematic. How should we go about telling colonial history, as Harold Innis did with the history of empire-building, as a contest over communication systems, if we analyze print as part of a spectrum of interrelated media, rather than a marker of modernity, an axis of a change in consciousness, or a hegemonic lever?

When we yoke “print” to “culture,” we run risks. Chief among them is the misperception of the role of print in ethnic, racial, and religious boundary-making in the history of North America. In part this is an epistemological reflection, spurred by the way in which indigenous folks, even when they adopted print, continued to articulate it together with other media—and with things we today wouldn’t think of as media—in making meaning. Some northeastern Algonquians of the seventeenth century, for example, dug holes in the ground to commemorate events. The holes were located on paths nearest the location of the event. When travelers passed by and saw the hole, the custom was for someone to tell the history of what happened there, and then to round out the hole again to keep it clean and clear. Landscape, a network of paths, storytelling, and digging are all linked in the formal protocols for this way of recording history. We learn about this practice from the Pilgrim Edward Winslow, who wrote down and then published it not merely out of ethnographic curiosity, but as part of broader effort to learn indigenous systems in order to gain leverage in a world that, in the 1620s, still very much belonged to the Indians. What happens, such episodes call us to ask, when we think about information systems in a broad way, as sites for contests over social and economic control, rather than searching for specific technologies (or even regimes) of representation through which philosophical or ideological or historiographical claims might be made? Such an approach would not deprecate print, but would recover its complex relationships to the other options for conversing and contesting in a given place and time—relationships sometimes more similar than different across what have been called, partly because of perceived differences, cultures.

Focusing on the early period, with its evidentiary challenges and distance in time, can encourage close analysis of media in the context of larger, interrelated systems. Different sorts of senders and receivers can be communicating even if they seem not to be operating by the same rules or means, the same media or formats. This approach has plenty of risks. “Communication” can come to seem to mean almost anything (in my book, from bowel movements to wolf traps), but the case-by-case approach that would counter that expansive tendency can lead to the depiction of a series of interesting but non-exemplary episodes in media history. One way to address that problem is to focus on episodes in which the control over information flow was recognized as a source of power. Consider another moment in Edward Winslow’s account of interactions with Indians, in this case the Wampanoag: In the spring of 1622, the local sachem Ousemaquin got sick. Fearing he would die, and knowing that it was the practice of the Wampanoag to gather the entire kinship network around a leader who was about to perish, Winslow rushed to the sachem’s side. Discovering that Ousemaquin was constipated, Winslow drew on one of his own information networks in order to produce a cure: the world of domestic medicine (largely a female domain, about which Winslow disavowed any competence, despite his likely having printed at least one domestic manual as a younger man). When the cure worked, Winslow tells us, the sachem favored him with the revelation that there was a plot afoot among other local Indian groups to destroy Plymouth Plantation. Peaceful as it may seem, this exchange did not necessarily involve cultural understanding. The Wampanoag regarded Winslow’s cure (to his discomfort) as proceeding from supernatural sources, not natural ones; the Pilgrims used Ousemaquin’s revelation to justify their violent reaction to the alleged plot, killing several Indians at Wessagusset and, in a mode of communication that they shared with the area’s Natives, displaying Wituwamat’s head on a pole. But relations between the Wampanoag and Plymouth were maintained, for a time, in this as in other events, by linking a heterogeneous series of communications networks. Sometimes, to get a sense of the role of media in colonization, we must pull the lens back to consider how people in the past thought about the circulation of information itself, and how it figured in contests for power.

The period before the printing press was established in English North America—before the rise of nationalism and the spread of what we call racism today—offers other advantages for thinking about media in colonial history. Native America is filled with other-than-national histories and overlapping or unstable legal domains. The Pilgrims were surprised to be greeted by an English-speaking Indian, Tisquantum, at Patuxet; he might also have been able to speak Spanish, and one or more pidgin tongues, having traveled in slavery through the Atlantic world. Samson Occom’s speaking tour of England in the eighteenth century drew raves; his publications, like his Presbyterian colleagues’, were often directed at a global Christian audience, and he was integral to the establishment of the intertribal religious community, Brotherton.

In the fourth chapter of my book, I examine the Pequot tribe’s history of relations with its neighbors, and the role of multimedia representations in that history. The Pequots were the subjects of one of the worst massacres by the English, during a war in 1637-1638. Since the late 1970s, however, the Mashantucket branch of the tribe has made a comeback, having established a successful casino. Their massive tribal museum exhibits a complex relationship to, and depiction of, the early colonial era, constituting a different commentary on the Pequot War than that found in history books. The museum itself, part of which is an architectural riff on a famous seventeenth-century engraving of the massacre, and part of which uses techniques of deception that are eerily similar to tactics Pequots used in the 1637-8 war, exemplifies the way tribal histories can resurge, not just rise or fall. Indeed, even public accusations that the Pequots are an “invented” tribe, assembled merely out of greed for untaxed gambling income, overlook not just the complexity of tribal affiliation under colonialism, but the way in which the tribe’s success has been a function of the relationships it has built with a host of outside entities: the federal government, the State of Connecticut, more recently the State of Pennsylvania, and the original Malaysian investors in the casino and resort. Such a pattern of international interrelation, even at the cost of antagonism, was precisely what fueled the fears underlying the Pequot War in the seventeenth century. Tribes are complex, interrelated phenomena that tend to become less clearly bounded the closer you look at them. Indians both shared and fought with each other over ideas about the relationship between kinship networks and the American landscape in which those networks developed; these collaborations and debates happened at the junctions of international contests for power.

Native modes of communication took formal cues from landscape features, animal behavior, climatological patterns, and kinship structures. Whether embodied in storytelling, wampum, painting, or basket and textile designs, these orienting features together reinforced a certain way of understanding human placement within, and responsibility to, the non-human world. When we turn to such media—when we try to understand the formal properties of indigenous communication systems of the past—we lose our evidentiary bearings as scholars of literature, or law, or art. In studying other cultures, that disorientation is important; necessary, I would argue, to fold into what we imagine our histories will help our readers see and do in the world. Recent decades of scholarship in anthropology and postcolonialism have taught us about the importance of studying misunderstanding as a historical factor—but we can also learn from past scenes of simple disorientation, surprise, and even failed humor.

We often hear it suggested that print became the dominant mode of communication sometime in the late nineteenth century, or that a print mentality is one of the signatures of modernity. But it seems to me that print never became more common than speech, and that other modes of communication were continuously threaded together in people’s daily experience. Since the eighteenth century, there has been in North America a sustained, contested world of Native print, one of the many realms that have characterized the print world of North America. The Networked Wilderness suggests that story is rooted in older media contests, predating the expansion of print that seems to have made it an exemplary story of modernity. But the early period can help us appreciate the more recent media histories of indigenous nations, kinship networks, and individuals, and guide us all as we reshape our world digitally. The arrival of digital communication heralds transformations more than radical breaks. Once again, the Cherokees offer instructive challenges, so perhaps that is where to leave things. On the one hand, in recent years, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma has struggled over the inclusion of descendants of freedmen in the polity—a contest very much about race, but equally about sovereignty, as the federal government has opposed such exclusion. Much of this contest has happened in print, but much of it in other media, including multimedia digital formats, which the Cherokee Nation as a political entity has been using for years for public relations, but which is also used by the tribe’s factions to tell their stories. As we think about the relationship between communications technologies and social power among the Cherokee in the colonial period, 1492 to the present, we may both draw from and try to think beyond the conceptual equipment afforded by “print culture” or a “print public.”

Further reading:

Foundational scholarly studies emphasizing the importance of communication systems in colonial American contexts include Richard D. Brown, Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865 (Oxford, 1991); Harold Innis, Empire and Communications (Oxford, 1950); Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York, 1991); and Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor, 1995). On New England in particular, see Karen Kupperman,Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America(Ithaca, 2000); and Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500-1643 (New York, 1983).

On American Indian communications technologies, protocols, and politics, as well as Native uses of print in the early colonial era, see especially Joanna Brooks,American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African American and Native American Literatures (New York, 2004); Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis, 2008); Sandra Gustafson, Eloquence is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000); Gordon Sayre, Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997); Nancy Shoemaker,A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (New York, 2006); Robert Warrior, The People and The Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (Minneapolis, 2005); Hilary Wyss,Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (Amherst, Mass., 2003); and Wyss and Kristina Bross’s anthology of both textual and non-textual media, Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology(Amherst, Mass., 2008). On the Cherokee in particular, see the work of Circe Sturm, especially Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (Berkeley, 2002).

Influential related work in the history of the book includes David D. Hall, Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England (Philadelphia, 2008); Jill Lepore’s widely influential The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York, 1999); and two major series, the American Antiquarian Society’s five-volume series The History of the Book in America (New York and Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000-2009) and the three-volume History of the Book in Canada (Toronto, 2004-2007), which is more attentive to indigenous societies. The first in-depth history of the book in Native North America, recently published, is Phillip Round, Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663-1880(Chapel Hill, N.C., 2010).

Few of us who teach early American history can be unfamiliar with the monumental transatlantic slave trade database. Research on this scale is hard to imagine, most especially at the outset of such a daunting project, and also at the conclusion when one examines the results. It is based upon the work of dozens of scholars, made possible by a series of large research grants (from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Britain’s Arts and Humanities Research Board, the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard, the Mellon Foundation, and Emory University), and it exists only because a small group of inspired scholars were able to see beyond dusty ledgers and records books in such libraries as the National Archives in Kew, and imagine the potential of the information on the pages before them.

The physical beauty of this book seems at odds with the brutality that it records, the full scale and savagery of the transatlantic slave trade reduced to attractive cartography.

The transatlantic slave trade database is founded upon one of the greatest collective historical research efforts of our age. Beginning with works such as Philip Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census(1969), a widely disbursed group of scholars has spent almost half a century collecting and coding the records of the transatlantic slave voyages that brought tens of millions of Africans to the New World. David Eltis, Stephen Behrendt and David Richardson played leading roles in amalgamating this data, and then producing software that would make it accessible to students and researchers across the world. The CD-ROM was published in 1999, with details of some 27,233 slaving voyages. Although a remarkable achievement, the creators of this resource were already at work seeking to remedy its deficiencies. Voyages to Latin America were seriously under-represented, and new data from Spain, Portugal, and indeed all of the slave-trading nations continued to accumulate, much of it donated by individual scholars rather than grant-funded researchers associated with the project. Launched in 2009, Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (www.slavevoyages.org) is an online, freely available database encompassing records of almost 35,000 slaving voyages to the Americas.

I am humbled by this database, by the scholarly imagination that inspired it, by the scale of the work involved, and by the ways in which it substantiates one of the greatest human tragedies in modern history. I am also daunted by it. I bought the CD-ROM soon after it was issued, loaded it on my computer and perused the manual, but was never quite sure how best to employ it, either in teaching or research. I have been somewhat more adventurous with the online database, and I have begun to use some of my own calculations in research and publications. Yet it continues to overwhelm me. There is simply so much information, so many different kinds of information: ship construction, the recorded names of the enslaved, the ethnicity of ships’ captains and crews, the prevalence of ship-board rebellions, mortality rates on the Middle Passage, African ethnicity—all these and much, much more can be found in the database. Where does one begin?

One begins with this book. Already it has received numerous prizes, including the Anisfield-Wolf Award: previously won by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., this prize honors written works that contribute to the understanding of race and human culture. At first glance, the Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade appears to be a coffee table book, lavishly illustrated with nearly two hundred maps and many contemporary engravings and paintings, virtually all of them in full color. The physical beauty of this book seems at odds with the brutality that it records, the full scale and savagery of the transatlantic slave trade reduced to attractive cartography. But the maps work, and even the most casual browser is likely to be astounded by the impressionistic power of these representations to inform one’s understanding of the scale of this forced migration. For me, this book has been invaluable in helping me to understand the entire database, and all that it contains.

The authors have more data at their disposal than historians a generation ago could imagine, and they believe that the database of just under 35,000 documented slave voyages constitute just over 80 percent of all of the slaving voyages that set out for Africa. Often the data is incomplete: the intended destination of a slaving voyage may be recorded, but whether or not it arrived there-or anywhere else-may not be known. The number of slaves purchased and loaded onto a ship in West Africa may be known, but the number who survived the voyage and stepped ashore on the other side of the ocean may not. Based on their growing knowledge of the nefarious trade, the authors have added a dimension to the online database that was not present in the original CD-ROM, including their highly informed calculations of the data that is missing from extant records, but also compiling a new function that seeks to estimate the contours and character of the entire transatlantic slave trade, including the 20 percent of voyages for which no records survive.

The maps and the calculations included in the book are based on the database as it existed one year before it went online, comprising some 34,934 voyages. Surviving data for these voyages varies widely, with complete and detailed records for some and less information for others. In some cases we do not know, for example, all the ports of call for all of these voyages (both in Africa, taking on slaves, and in the New World where the enslaved disembarked). In other cases we do not know how many slaves were on board, or we might not have information about survival rates. Using the patterns that have emerged in the huge amount of surviving data, the project authors have inferred places and imputed numbers, filling in the gaps in the records. A major gap remained, however, as the authors considered the question of what proportion of the total number of transatlantic slaving voyages is reflected in the records that have survived. The answer to this question is vital in any attempt to come to grips with the overall scale of the trade. The authors have been very creative in testing the data they have accumulated: for example, the summaries of French captains’ reports of having spotted other French slave ships provided a random sampling of such voyages, and the authors concluded that over 95 percent of the ships mentioned in these reports appear in the database.

As new datasets appear and are processed, fewer and fewer previously unknown voyages have been discovered. Slave-trading voyages in the seventeenth century are, not surprisingly, less well documented, and so a somewhat higher proportion are missing, but less than 20 percent of all such voyages took place before 1700. The authors believe that the 34,934 voyages covered in this volume constitute “just over 80 percent of all the slave ventures that ever set out for Africa to obtain slaves from all locations around the Atlantic” (xxv). The online database and the vast majority of the maps in this volume are based not simply on the fleshed out records of these voyages, but on an “estimates” database which utilizes a compelling methodology to attempt to sketch out the shape and form of the likely total of all transatlantic slave voyages.

The maps in this volume are therefore intended to visually represent the scale and direction of the transatlantic slave trade in its entirety. The tables that accompany maps are very clear in showing whether they are based on surviving data, inferred data, or the relative proportions of documented and estimated Africans. Absolute precision is an impossible goal, but there are very good reasons to conclude that these maps, and the data upon which they rest, provide a more accurate portrayal of this great forced migration than most historians would have thought possible. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has described this atlas as the Rosetta Stone of the entire database, rendering a huge collection of information accessible and immediately, compellingly comprehensible. Virtually all aspects of the transatlantic slave trade are represented here: from the nationality of slave vessels; to the West African and New World regions of trade for slave voyages outfitted in Rhode Island; the harrowing maps of slave mortality and voyage length; the gender and age of slaves, and their political and ethno-linguistic regions of origin; and the representations of the size of the slave populations arriving in New World locations.

Interspersed between the maps are a series of tables, pertinent extracts from seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century writers, and contemporary maps, illustrations, paintings and engravings. At first the reader who scans this volume may look upon it as definitive, the fruits of a half-century of collaborative research undertaken in many countries. The transatlantic slave trade appears to have been done, but the more I read, and the more I thought about the information presented in the maps and tables, the more eager I was to get back to the online database for my own research and teaching. Rather than depersonalizing this sad and savage history, these maps and this data allow us to consider the scale of the human experience of the trade. This is not the last word on the subject, and it was not the authors’ intention that it should be. Their remarkable achievement has been to give us the data that enables us to ask more informed questions than it was possible to ask before. And most importantly of all, they have given us the means to answer the questions that we ask.

The Royal children have been sent a gift—
A map of Europe from 1766
Complete with longitude, painted onto wood,
Like any other map in brown and green and red,
But then disfigured: cut up into parts,
A disassembly of tiny courts
Strewn across the table. There is a key
To help the children slot, country by country,
The known traversable world in place:
Little Tartary, Swedish Lapland, France,
The Government of Archangel. The sea
Has been divided into squares, crudely,
As though the cast-iron sides of nations
Still applied (but with more attention
To geometry) while the engraver’s signature
—A circle, his name, a folded flower—
Has been deftly sawn in half. If successful,
The three young princes and the oldest girl
(This is not, after all, a lesson in diplomacy
So she can play too) will, ironically,
Undo the puzzle’s title and its claim:
Europe Divided in its Kingdoms
Shall be Europe reconfigured, whole.
They start in the top left corner with the scale
Then fill the other corners in: ‘Part of Africa’,
A scroll, the blank of simply ‘Asia’
Rolling off to hordes and steppes and snow
Beyond the boundary. Outlines follow,
Aided by exquisite lettering:
‘The Frozen Ocean’ solidifies across the map’s ceiling.
And so the Royal children spend an hour
Staring and exclaiming, clicking together
(What joy!) the angled buttress of a continent—
Their own unlikely island on a slant
By its farthest edge, and in their trance ignore
What will no longer fit: Aotearoa, America.

Statement of Poetic Research

More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colours

           —Elizabeth Bishop

Maps are aspirational documents. Flat, two-dimensional, odd, we need to learn how to read them, like alphabets. We need to be tutored in their signs. Maps signal, loudly, the differences between their own small selves and the enormous things they claim to represent, be it mountain-range, territory, country, or empire, and into this gap rushes desire. Let no Irish be spoken in this parish, declares an early English-language map of Ireland, with its badly translated place-names, and eventually it shall be so. For maps are also weapons. They have consequences. They are conduits of power. They are so freighted with internal and external paradox they are already, all by themselves, difficult to resist as poetic subjects. And then in England, in 1766, as tensions were beginning to build toward the American Revolutionary War, John Spilsbury, wood engraver and map-maker extraordinaire, hit on a bizarre idea. He drew a map of Europe on a wooden base and then cut it up into pieces so that it could be put back together again, over and over again, as a game, and the world’s first jigsaw puzzle was born.

As America wrenched itself free of British control, Spilsbury (who drew a beautiful “New Map of North America from the Latest Discoveries” in 1761, before the outbreak of war) turned his attention east, to Continental Europe, away from British controlled territory altogether, and invented an activity for obsessives, obsessively focused on the breaking and re-making of national boundaries. His “Europe Divided into its Kingdoms etc.” is exquisite, and he signed it in the middle of the sea, where no country could claim him, before carefully dismembering it. Was this a subversive act? Was it therapeutic? Was it an act of looking at what was happening to the British Empire by looking away? Is the world’s first jigsaw puzzle an objective correlative for imperial loss?

I did two contradictory things with Spilsbury’s jigsaw as I wrote about it. First, I exaggerated the complicated power dynamics intrinsic to both maps and maps-cum-jigsaws by making the solvers of the jigsaw children of the British royal family, for whom nation-building and nation-breaking may well become actual activities, later in life, and especially in the context of a Europe set on fire, in turn, by revolutionary fervor. One of these children is a girl, throwing a whole other massive and unstable element into the mix. In my head these children piece a broken continent back together again over the course of a firelit afternoon, in an airy dayroom with a high ceiling and a polished floor, and it brings them joy.

The second thing I did was to put my—by now totally overwhelmingly meaningful—subject in a box by setting the poem out as a single block of text in rhyming couplets. Poetic form is a possible way through confusion. To paraphrase Auden, adherence to form saves us from the tyranny of what we were going to say next. But form also multiplies meaning through its own formidable articulacy; it is, in itself (and rather like a map, or a jigsaw, or worse, a jigsaw of a map) profoundly paradoxical.

I wanted my poem to click down the right hand side, like the jigsaw being clicked into place, piece by piece, and I wanted it to echo an Augustan poetic sensibility: rhyming couplets, the preferred form of Dryden and Pope, suggested both of these things. Reserve is the poem’s formal hallmark: it keeps tidying itself away as it goes. It works methodically through its line-by-line description to give us the map of Europe back whole, just as solving the jigsaw eventually does too. The rhyming couplets of the poem and its subject, the map, enact, therefore, a doubled fantasy of control over language and over territory, both of which are always threatening to rebel. Content and form not only complement each other; they also work to highlight the inherent inadequacies of both maps and couplets, for the underbelly of control is always fear, and our consolations, which are both unnatural and dishonest, fraught with further difficulties.

America is free by the poem’s end and is given, delightfully, the final word. Aotearoa is the Maori word for New Zealand and means “the land of the long white cloud,” ironically transcribed of course in the letters of the English alphabet, but a word so far outside the world-view of my royal children as to act as a radical interloper in the poem. I can only gesture briefly toward “what will no longer fit.” But “what will no longer fit” is the poem’s real subject all along: my homage to revolution and to pattern-breaking, squeezed into its Augustan box.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2.5 (Spring, 2016).

Sinéad Morrissey has published five collections and is the recipient of numerous awards for her work, including a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the T S Eliot Prize. Her most recent collection, Parallax and Selected Poems, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2015, was a finalist in this year’s National Book Circle Critics Award for poetry.

“Fitter, happier / More productive”—a cybernated voice famously intones in Radiohead’s 1997 gem Ok Computer.^[1] Seeking an antidote to the post-Fordist dystopia condensed in these lines, one may easily conjure up Walt Whitman. Doing so would entail upholding the poet’s fleshliness over Radiohead’s disembodied speaker, his outpouring of vibrant free verse over the song’s automated string of decontextualized phrases, a leisurely stroll around Manhattan over thirty minutes of treadmill, nation over corporation, pleasure over efficiency. Manly Health and Training, Whitman’s lost and recovered fitness guide, troubles this approach and, with it, certain ingrained protocols for reading and teaching the Gray Bard as a sempiternal bohemian.^[2] This breakthrough addition to Whitman’s corpus refocuses his personal, poetic, and political vision while enriching current debates over masculinity, disability, affect, and the medical-industrial complex. It opens up new engagements with Leaves of Grass, helping us chart the influence, during the 1840s and 50s, of what Paul Starr has described as a battle among quacks, advertisers, folk doctors, and accredited physicians over “the right to practice medicine as an inalienable liberty” in the United States.^[3] Whitman wanted in. No less importantly, his contributions to pivotal debates over the meaning of health did not vanish with the nineteenth century. Manly Health predicts and propels neoliberal fantasies of the good life that have rendered health a performative site of capitalist consumption.

Signing as Mose Velsor (his mother’s surname), Whitman delivered this treatise on male self-improvement in thirteen installments, published in the New York Atlas between September 12 and December 26, 1858. In 2016 Zachary Turpin located the series in an obscure microfilm. It appeared shortly after in a special issue of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. In 2017, Turpin published a neatly edited volume of the series, enlivened by a prologue as well as an array of photographs, advertisements, and illustrations from 1850s printscapes. Although not a full-fledged critical edition in the manner of Christopher Castiglia and Glenn Hendler’s take on Franklin Evans, this book will entice critics and readers alike.^[4] Those unfamiliar with antebellum print cultures may sample Manly Health’s original media environment, while literary scholars and historians will no doubt be spurred to connect the dots between these articles and antebellum health cultures, other works by Whitman, and pretty much everything in Barnes & Noble’s “Diet, Health & Fitness” alley.

To start with the obvious: given the centrality of bodies in Leaves of Grass, a newly discovered guide to health by Whitman feels nothing short of providential. Here is the quintessential poet of the body weighing in on power walks, emetics, dumbbells, and oatmeal, seemingly lifting the curtain over his grappling with the corporeal and venturing into the nitty-gritty of daily self-care. Truth is, Manly Health oscillates between a supplement and a counterweight to Whitman’s magnum opus. If “Song of Myself” wonders “How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?”, Manly Health reminds us that beef indeed we should eat—“cooked rare, without grease.” This and similar specifications configure a practical—not exegetical—interplay between both texts. Whereas the miracle of human deglutition and nourishment inspires both, the latter’s repertoire of dietary restrictions, training tactics, and ergonomic tips further illuminates the scientific and popular discourses informing Whitman’s views on health and, by extension, his poems’ bodily inflections. Consequently, Whitman’s “health manifesto,” as it has been called, best reenergizes our analyses of his poetry indirectly, by suggesting additional sources and influences.

This is not to say that those invested in Leaves of Grass’s textual genealogy will not find new leads here. Case in point: the line “I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,” from the Calamus poem later titled “For You O Democracy” (1860 edition), signifies differently once traced back to Whitman’s rant against indigestion, an American pandemic without which “we should probably see the most splendid and majestic nation of men, in their physique, that ever trod the earth!” Other times, occasional outbursts of homoeroticism resonate with Whitman’s trademark anatomies: “Look at the brawny muscles attached to the arms of that young man . . . Look at the spread of his manly chest, on which also are flakes of muscle.”

Similar moments of catalogic and sensual excess defy Whitman’s self-restraint ethos, advancing a key paradox: he rarely wrote the way he worked out. Whitman’s prose, unlike the systematic training plan it articulates, is highly digressive, with themes and motifs vanishing and returning through a logic of contiguity, opposition, and free association bound to test readers’ patience. He was too busy—an excuse that personal trainers today love to hate. As Turpin explains, 1858 found the poet scrambling over endless journalistic assignments in order to support himself toward Leaves of Grass’s third edition. Whitman himself makes no secret of the fact that he churned out these articles on the go: “[W]e only throw out our views, as the Tartar shoots his arrow, passing along at full speed.” Manly Health surely bears the marks of a hasty, bill-paying job; however, there may be something of a method in its hurry. For starters, its impromptu quality echoes what we encounter in “Song of Myself” or Democratic Vistas. More interestingly, Whitman seems overinvested in explaining and legitimating his principle of composition: “Disconnected as our mode of writing has been… the reader who peruses one article only, will not see the drift of our writing.” Like Leaves of Grass, Manly Health is meant as a fluid whole, which Whitman can only achieve through endless loops and iterations. Whitman scholars and Leaves of Grass variorum experts will then have the final say on whether the scatteredness of Manly Health results from the pressures of newspaper publication or if, on the contrary, this work embodies (and expands) Whitman’s organicism.

Inconsistencies do not end at the structural level. A yin to Leaves of Grass’ “disorderly fleshy” yang, Manly Health’s emphasis on chastity, frugality, and self-discipline counters the absorptive, appetite-driven persona often associated with Whitman. He who once loafed at ease now scolds “the idler, without object, without direction … apt to brood himself into some moral or physical fever.” He who told readers to surrender to “the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life” now defends harsher routines: rise at dawn, bathe in cold water, rub your skin with a coarse towel. The tension between askesis in Manly Health and indulgence elsewhere in Whitman’s oeuvre is indeed generative and worthy of commentary; nonetheless, it also risks obscuring fascinating internal contradictions, along with the new questions and complications they bring to Whitman studies.

For example, if this is a case study in antebellum pseudoscience, as Turpin contends, where does science end and the “pseudo” begin? Differently put, why does Whitman dispel medical authority (“technical nonsense”) while remaining conversant with scientific publications? A detailed look reveals that Manly Health strives to democratize, rather than boycott, the medical profession. Health, for Whitman, deserved a shared lexicon to which every American man should be able to contribute. In his original advertisement for the series, Whitman assured prospective readers: “These articles are for the People . . . Technical and medical terms are avoided.” An “outsider” to the medical establishment, Whitman situates himself closer to the masses than a “medical man—for who ever knew one of the latter to write a treatise, except its main direction were to the medical fraternity more than any others?” The problem, then, was not praxis as much as rhetoric, since physicians’ increasingly arcane communications had started to alienate the beneficiaries of their efforts.

Through an exuberant yet personable prose, Whitman builds a charismatic persona capable of bridging this gap. To err on a presentist analogy: he speaks in full influencer mode. Unlike medical researchers, snake-oil entrepreneurs, and gym owners, he is neither a creator nor a producer. Influencers influence. Mediation is their product. In Whitman’s case, this means selecting bits and pieces from an amalgam of health-related discourses and claiming the right to organize them into a medical pedagogy of his own. Seen thus as an effort to harmonize institutional and popular science, Manly Health and Training offers one evocative example of what Sari Altschuler has described as a nineteenth-century “medical imagination,” characterized by a synthesis of empirical and humanistic epistemologies.^[5]

This line of inquiry evinces that, against what has already been claimed, Manly Health should be taken as more than a mere coda for Leaves of Grass. Hoping to reorient this reception, I enumerate here a few additional paradoxes calling for further analysis: is not Whitman’s “rational and elevated system of MANLY TRAINING” (italics in the original) at odds with his goal of arousing “the animal part of a man”? Is not his admonition of “putting on airs” at odds with his pervasive alpha-maleness? How does he negotiate his intensely nationalistic project with a global frame of comparison in which the United States often lags behind healthier nations? How do we balance his praise for the Scandinavian stock of “the English race” with his recognition of South Sea Islanders, on the opposite end of the Earth, as the “finest and best developed forms to be found in any portion of the human race”? And what about women, who only enter these pages as prostitutes threatening—and yet indispensable to—the reproduction of national health?

At the center of this wheel of opposites sits Whitman’s plea for “a revolution of habits,” an oxymoronic phrase that encapsulates the irony of pursuing health in structurally unhealthy times. Of course, habits can be revolutionized, but are they also revolutionary? Is not a habit, by the sheer nature of its repetition, doomed to lose its world-shattering force? Take Whitman’s (nonrevolutionary) advice to clerks and other office workers. Even though he regrets the injuries sedentary labor had started to inflict in their bodies and minds, his measures are always palliative, never oppositional: “Early rising, early to bed, exercise, plain food, thorough and persevering continuance in gently-commenced training, the cultivation with resolute will of a cheerful temper.” Whitman’s “cheerfulness” prophesies our adherence to a world of New Year’s resolutions, power naps, and laughter-inducing salads, a world of consumerist solutions to consumerism-derived problems. In this world, as in Whitman’s, self-discipline begets social discipline; popular discourses of health and productivity fuel illusions of sovereign agency that distract us from conditions of exploitation and privation. For all its utopian projections and postponements of gratification, Manly Health presents health as a mechanism whose mastery imbues individuals with the illusion of shaping aesthetic, political, moral, literary, and economic life in the United States. Good health wins friends and influences people—to riff on Dale Carnegie’s classic proposition. Magnetism, as conceptualized in a key entry, derives not from innate charm or the lucky end of the gene pool, but from sustained behaviors and privations central to Whitman’s notion of self-fulfillment. These privations are also monetary. When Whitman labels health “an investment that pays better than any other,” he is not being metaphorical. Health is never only about itself; it allegedly modulates every other domain in social life.

Pondering Whitman’s advice, one wonders: what fantasies do these habits nurture? And why are these fantasies endlessly protracted by the habits that buttressed them in the first place? These questions render Manly Health presciently relevant to post-WWII affective attachments to capitalist success, especially as theorized by Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, and Jasbir Puar, among others.^[6] Indeed, the confluence of affect theory, new materialisms, and transnational critiques of neoliberalism in recent disability studies work makes this an optimal moment for Manly Health to arrive. For all the historicization it elicits, Whitman’s text also adumbrates a present-day “neoliberal biopolitics” that, according to David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, “references all bodies as deficient and in need of product supplementations to treat the in-built inferiority within.”^[7] As neoliberalism gradually replaces the disability of a minority with the “debility” of the majority via regimes of compulsory consumption, indebtedness, and technologization, one productive strategy toward Manly Health is to see Whitman pioneering contemporary fantasies of the good life.^[8] Tita Chico, in her study of eighteenth-century civil society, claims that what we call “good life” today, in the face of postindustrial capitalism and the nation-state’s diminished hegemony, already constituted “a compensatory image for all it excludes” during the Enlightenment and after.^[9] In Manly Health, Whitman subjects antebellum Americans to analogous patterns of promise and negation.

To brand Whitman an uncritical champion of the good life does not constitute an end in itself as much as a way of tracking down the antagonisms and exclusions sustaining this construct. Of special interest here is the convergence of health and aesthetics. If “[b]eauty is simply health and a sound physique,” ugliness brands the unhealthy, those who fail to exert self-control and shape individual and collective destiny through their bodies. And so, Whitman flirts with eugenics—“Life without a sound body. What is it good for?”—by deliberately mixing looks and abilities: “no blotched and disfigured complexion—no prematurely lame and halting gait—no tremulous shaking of the hand, unable to carry a glass of water to the mouth without spilling it.” Ardently as the Whitman of 1858 appears to envision an impairment-free America, though, it would be more accurate to say he celebrates the body-in-flux over the fantasy of herculean immunity. In his apologia for prize fighting, in which he exults in the body’s capacity to endure a harsh beating, and in his glorification of working-class children, who man up without being “killed by kindness,” Whitman dreams of suffering rather than infallible bodies. Human mutability—not perfection—focalizes his project. The resultant tension between a projected utopia of health and a future in which American bodies still get visibly hurt unsettles the evident ableism of the text and poses a suggestive conundrum to scholars in disability studies and the medical humanities.

In sum, because it operates as a repository of antebellum medical practices and a glimpse toward the meanings health accrues in our neoliberal moment, Manly Health is best approached as a product of its era that also wishes to produce our own. For every preposterous suggestion (e.g. ban shaving), Whitman foresees a current health crisis. References to food safety, anti-vaxxers, and sports-related concussions insinuate potential connections with twenty-first-century cable news, lifestyle vlogs, and Men’s Health editorials. At a time when education institutions aim to teach “the whole person,” we notice Whitman already summoning teachers to tend to “bodily, mental, and moral developments . . . the only way, indeed, in which training can be just to the whole man.” Discussions of customized shoes, fitting garments, and skincare reveal Whitman’s proto-metrosexualism, partly understood as his awareness that health was becoming increasingly performative, a trait legible by one’s access to commodities and services. The book’s exuberant use of images underscores this point. Nonetheless, if one were to signal a flaw in this edition, these images are ornamental at best, confusing at worst. Lack of immediate contextualization for the volume’s visual apparatus matters because Whitman’s stance regarding these graphic materials—be they advertisements, calisthenics manuals, or sketches of New York City life—remains unstable, shifting from endorsement to ferocious renunciation. 

This latest incorporation into the Whitman canon constitutes a complex aesthetic and political intervention, both in and of itself and in relation to Leaves of Grass. For anyone in the practice of extending and refining the substantial scholarship on Whitman’s conceptions of the body, Manly Health represents an obliged stop. Given its proto-neoliberal framing of medicine, this text should also matter to anyone interested in the historical entwinement of U.S. cultures of self-care, health, and capitalism. The strategic parallelism in “no pain, no gain,” a motto popularized by Jane Fonda in her epochal aerobics videos, famously presents a Reaganite economy otherwise premised on the unequal social distribution of pains and gains as optimal and intrinsically fair. Manly Health and Training espouses a similar ethos, but it does so with less balance. Its chaotic mode of presentation, unsolved paradoxes, and key omissions ultimately enable a critique of the normative compulsion to be fitter, happier, and more productive then and now.

 ________________

[1] “Fitter Happier,” compact disc, track 7 on Radiohead, Ok Computer, Parlophone, 1997.

[2] Manly Health and Training thus substantiates Edward Whitley and Joanna Levin’s insinuation that, despite Whitman’s immersion in New York City’s bohemian scene during the late 1850s, the poet never gave up his desire to connect with bourgeois America. See Edward Whitley and Joanna Levin, “Introduction,” in Whitman among the Bohemians, ed. Edward Whitley and Joanna Levin (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2014), xi-xiv.

[3] Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine. The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 31.

[4] See Christopher Castiglia and Glenn Hendler, “Introduction,” in Walt Whitman, Franklin Evans, or the Inebriate. A Tale of the Times, ed. Christopher Castiglia and Glenn Hendler (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), ix-lvii. An extended version of Turpin’s introduction is available at the WWQR Website. See Zachary Turpin, “Introduction to Walt Whitman’s ‘Manly Health and Training.’” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 33 (2016), 147-183. 

[5] Sari Altschuler, The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 2-5.

[6] A minimal bibliography on this front includes Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011); Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010); Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017); and José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

[7] David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 39-40.

[8] On the question of debility as a reframing of disability in neoliberal times, see Puar, 16-17; and Mitchell and Snyder, 12.

 [9] Tita Chico, “Civil Society and Its Discontents: The Good Life.” Eighteenth Century: Theory & Interpretation, 55, no. 1 (Spring 2014), 99.

www.whitmanbicentennialessays.com

This article originally appeared in issue 19.1 (Spring, 2019).

About the Author

Manuel Herrero-Puertas is assistant professor of foreign languages and literatures at National Taiwan University. He writes on the intersection of American literature, discourses of disability, and political fantasy. His work has appeared in American Quarterly and ATLANTIS.

Governor Riggins, a leader of Boston’s nineteenth-century black community, once publicly admonished a fellow person of color, William Patterson, and took the opportunity to offer a lesson to the community at large. Patterson had purchased unlicensed liquor for some fellow African Americans, and the authorities in Boston caught him red-handed. In the midst of dressing Patterson down, Riggins expressed the hope that the “law will make you smart.” His proclamation to his fellow Afro-Bostonians—the law could be a source of empowerment for African Americans—may have been lost on Patterson, but it was a message that blacks across the United States heard loud and clear. Half a continent away in St. Louis, Missouri, the mixed-race grandsons of Jacques Clamorgan geared up to file suit and lay claim to their grandfather’s extensive lands. For them, Riggins’s message carried special resonance and an additional caveat. For the Clamorgan men, the law not only made them smart, but could also make them rich.

Did the Clamorgans have a legitimate chance to win their legal battles? In her wonderful The Clamorgans: One Family’s History of Race in America, Julie Winch answers this question by offering readers a thorough examination of the family’s past, especially their relationship with the law. She starts by examining the patriarch, the wily Jacques Clamorgan, and ends with his great-great grandchildren in the 1950s. While not much is known about Jacques’ early life, we know he was French and settled in Spanish Louisiana sometime in the 1770s, arriving in St. Louis in 1781. Over the next two and half decades, Clamorgan became a prominent businessman, funding exploration, selling goods brought north from New Orleans, buying and selling slaves, and most importantly for his heirs, acquiring huge tracts of land in present-day Missouri and South Dakota. Clamorgan’s ownership of this land was a legal fiction, as it was based on (possibly) dubious grants from the king of Spain. Clamorgan could not adequately populate or “improve” the land, and he constantly used it to pay off debts or as collateral. Nevertheless, these land grants were too valuable for his heirs not to lay claim.

Winch’s narrative focuses on Jacques’ descendants. Clamorgan never married, and instead kept at least four black mistresses: Ester, Hélène, Susanne, and Julie. While Clamorgan did not have any children with Ester—although Winch documents their contentious relationship—he did with the latter three. In all, Jacques Clamorgan had four mixed-race children, three boys and a girl, all of whom he legitimized on his deathbed. Only the daughter, named Apoline, lived long enough to have children of her own and lay claim to her father’s land. A strikingly beautiful woman, Apoline never married, and instead was a mistress to several white men. These relationships produced three sons: Louis, Henry, and Cyprian. In their attempts to be compensated for their grandfather’s land, they faced numerous obstacles, including encounters with shifty lawyers looking to steal the claims and even an act by the United States Congress barring title to some of Jacques’ patrimony. While the grandsons met with some success, most of the cases ended in failure. Instead, the two older brothers, Louis and Henry, opened a successful barbershop and bathhouse, appropriately called Clamorgans. The brothers built a reputation as having one of the finest bathhouses in the West, complete with marble tubs and serving such illustrious patrons as Edward, Prince of Wales. The light-skinned youngest brother, Cyprian, had a more transient life, eventually publishing a history of free blacks in St. Louis and getting involved in Reconstruction politics.

All these men married and had children, and it was left to the next generation to fight for the family land. By the early twentieth century, their appeal had reached Congress, which heard the matter and even started to move on it before the coming of World War I thwarted the family’s attempts. The land claims never again gained traction, but the Clamorgans, now passing as white, became embroiled in scandal and the racial politics of 1910s St. Louis. Jacques’ great-great-granddaughter Cora Clamorgan married a prominent white man, only to be accused of having African ancestry. As a result of this and other tribulations, almost an entire branch of the Clamorgan clan moved to Los Angeles, changed their name to the more Anglophone “Morgan,” and lived out the rest of their days in California.

Winch’s detailed reconstruction of the Clamorgan family could not have been easy. Not only is the study of race and family a historiographical minefield fraught with contention, disagreement, and hearty debate, but Winch draws upon primary sources in three different languages (French, Spanish, and English). As a narrative, Winch’s book does not go deeply into historiographical debates, and most of the secondary sources she uses are to provide context. Nevertheless, readers—especially those concerned with the intersection of race and the law in nineteenth-century America—will find this book fits nicely with the work of Scott Hancock, Leslie Alexander, Shane White, Joanne Pope Melish, and Melvin Ely, who examine similar themes in the same period. As for primary sources, she examines charters, land grants, newspapers, and court records. But most important for recovering the lives of the Clamorgans are probate records, which not only detail the family’s wealth and property, but also draw the outlines of the communities and networks they belonged to.

This book has many strong points. It is beautifully written and serves as model of how to write a narrative history using non-literary sources such as estate inventories, land grants, and legislation. Winch’s thesis concerning the law as a source of empowerment for the Clamorgans—not just as an avenue through which to receive their just due from Grandpa Jacques’ claims, but to navigate the precarious and ambiguous racial world they inhabited—is original and well argued. The case of the Clamorgans illustrates the hardening of racial lines over the course of American history. When Jacques Clamorgan legitimated his mixed-race children, like so many of his fellow French settlers, nobody thought twice. Less than a century later when Cora Clamorgan, who was one-sixteenth black, married a white man, it scandalized the city of St. Louis. But Cora’s case was an exception in the Clamorgan family’s history. Rarely did race prove to be an impediment to living the lives they wanted to live. They did this by successfully navigating the legal quandaries of being multiracial in America. In fact, Winch argues that to truly “understand their story,” one has to “follow them through the thickets of the law as, for generation after generation, they sought justice and vindication” (4). By using legal knowledge as the central theme of the book, the author not only gives the reader guideposts that are easy to follow and remember, but also provides a blueprint for how some African Americans resisted racial degradation.

Nevertheless, there are a few problems with the book. Winch misses some opportunities to analyze and challenge racial paradigms. Even though the book is a work of narrative history, I wish she had stopped telling the story long enough to address some of these points. Jacques Clamorgan’s estranged mistress Ester provides one of those missed moments. In order to protect his lands from being seized by creditors, Clamorgan purchased some land in Ester’s name. Ester later claimed the lands as her own, defending them from her former lover and his creditors. For help, she turned to Alexander McNair, a close friend and later the first governor of Missouri. What makes this interesting is McNair’s later career. He was vociferously pro-slavery and adamant that Missouri be admitted to the Union as a slave state, making him one of the leading provocateurs of the Missouri Crisis. Yet, not a decade before that struggle, he befriended and supported a free black woman in her legal battles. Why? What does this mean? What does it say about race in early nineteenth-century Missouri and America? Unfortunately, Winch does not address these questions.

Winch also never examines whether the Clamorgans considered themselves African American or something else. They may have been people of color, but they were also the descendants of the first settlers, white and black, of St. Louis. These “creoles” may have considered themselves something different, especially as their willingness to pass as white, marry whites, live in white neighborhoods, and describe themselves as “Spanish” suggests. Being African American means embracing black identity, which the Clamorgans did only when it served their interests. The behavior of the Clamorgans seems to suggest a different racial history of the United States, one that is not dichotomous and static, but fluid and dynamic. It is a racial story much more in line with other parts of the Americas, and, much closer to home, New Orleans. Nevertheless, Winch places the history of the Clamorgans within a national, “American” framework. In certain situations, it may have been better to use a comparative lens.

Aside from occasional lapses in interpretive rigor, this is a great book. Winch tells the story of a unique American family with grace and erudition. Given its chronological scope, it would be hard to assign the text in an American or African American history survey. It is nevertheless an important book for scholars studying race and family in the United States or those interested in the conglomeration of people inhabiting the West before U.S. annexation, their social mores, and lasting legacy. Most fascinating, Winch reminds us that there are still potentially billions of dollars worth of Jacques Clamorgan’s land grants looking to be claimed. If you can trace your lineage back to that crafty patriarch and have the legal expertise, the law could make you rich.