Caroline Remembers Her First Mistress, Darla Ford

When I think on it, it is of joy I recall. And knowing not. Not yet. Ain’t I got a pretty little crop of niggers coming on? Do my little niggers want some bread to gnaw on? Small being what it was, our minds were full of maybes and the bread was good. White folk talk. Black folk quiet. Green leaves turn to gold then back to dirt like most things done gone by. Once the missus sliced my palm, she said just to make sure your blood was red. She cut and cut a line then dulled the embers snaking, now held my hand in mud. I could say things changed, everything was dark after that, after knowing she would cut me like a calf. I grew inward like a nail.

Tobias Finch Tells How He Raped His 11-Year-Old Slave, Clea

That girl lived in herself quiet as an instrument keeps music. How bold her stillness, her ability to remain righteous as a torn daisy no matter how I grabbed at her roots. I meant to unravel her justice, find her private place. Learn her. A slave to study. But, she was a green fruit in my mouth. A spiteful thing. How daring her silence, as if she could hide. Who could have guessed she would not flinch or beg, her eyes a trained voice, moving about like a calf. The nimble slide of her neck. Her hands small and crooked as walnut shells. How she seemed like my own child. How outrageous that she would remind me. Her naked figure nothing to me but a black stain on my clean, white sheet.

Zebedee Ponders What It’s Like To Be Sold

When they tip my head back to look at my teeth
I see—

the mouth of the iron bell
wider, wider than an iron pot.
Its tongue a black fist that makes music
though its song is always the same.

Living And Dying: Clea’s Reincarnation

Been born five times, four times black. Progress of me unsteady as a sparrow branch-gripped in wind.

That slave time, I don’t want to hear no tell. Of chains and sea trips. My missing finger. Longed for comfort to come like Jesus in the cool of the day, but there always was locusts.

My eye got shot in a war. A glass one I had, plopped it in an old jam jar that watched me when I woke.

Pretenses I had. One life spoke Creole. Wore a whiskery white suit.

Once, a saint; my soul clung to God the way an egg grips its separate parts.

Born White one time. With hands full of mathematics. My lover was numbers. Can’t say any of the bodies I had for hundreds of years was finer.

Each life walks parallel streets at the same pace. I am dead in each. Time is the devil, but I ain’t saying he’s fast. All my rooms are quiet like the dark after fire.

All things go on past. Jesus be with me to the end. To die and live outside my mind without a mirror. Show me roots below the hours. The heart in its jerky box. Driving rain holds the answer. Go on and be glad I think I’ll be.

Gather up my thoughts, scatter like wasps. In my hand, a broken bowl.

Edwin Stanton’s Aside To His Wife

I’m having a wedding dress made for your burial. I have chosen the silk. It is soft as melon. No corset nor buttons. Just a sash to buckle you in. A fistful of geraniums to fade with. There is husbandry in these last measures. I’ll speak with the seamstress. Tell her to risk gossip at the wake: embroider the bodice with Christ’s crown, for now you’re his bride. But no coming Easter, nor season will soften these gestures. (Be quiet now old self, go dark. Soon she’ll belong to the ground).

Lincoln Among the Peacocks

A cluster of them. A tumult of rigorously hued feathers caught in knots bound them to their tethers. Who thought to leash these birds? Why twine such legs to trees? To keep the orthodoxy of man and animal would Lincoln have thought? If he were me. I’d like to be boxed in that skin for a day, that hour in the garden with the peacocks. Lean as tooth root and just as white with my beard skin-stitched. Just try to pluck it. I’d plant my feet on the lawn and grab blue necks. Hold them tight. Cut them loose easy as crushing glass in my fist. All the while aware of my body in his body, my hand in his hand. In black suit I’d be ornament among the feathered gowns now trailing free of hindrance. Forget Lincoln, I’d be a peacock. My coverts would dazzle. My headdress a torch song. The rigor of my gait untarnished by him who held me by the throat.

When I began conducting research for this project, I found many of the slave narratives I read, and the interviews I listened to, frightening. One that I will never forget was a recorded interview of a former kitchen slave who could not speak but sang all of her answers to the interviewer’s questions; she sang bits of old spirituals, and she never once answered a question directly.

I was most interested in the strong ideas slaves held about proper burial. Many believed that if you were not buried, you were forced to stay amongst the living in some way. You could not enter into any kind of restful afterlife if you remained unburied and did not have a funeral. In some ways, this isn’t so different from our own culture: American funerals today are often about telling stories about the dead as a way of honoring them, of remembering their good parts and quirks. I thought that if I wrote about a group of slaves, it would be a way of honoring them, of honoring their lives, however dismal. My characters were not to be buried correctly by fellow slaves; they were to be “buried” or “sent off” by me, in poems.

I continued to research about slavery and then stopped after a while because what I discovered as I read deeper and deeper into the history of slavery was simply unbearable. I began to look at everyone I passed on the street, imagining us as we might have been during slavery: that person would be a master, that person would be a slave; who would I be as a light-skinned “mulatto”? Those kinds of questions began to trouble me a great deal. I started to really distrust white people, for example, an especially bothersome feeling as I am half white. To continue writing, I had to stop researching. I felt I knew enough about what had happened during the history of slavery for my poems to continue to come from an authentic place.

I had wanted to ask my father about his great-grandmother, a former slave. When I was a child, the only thing my father ever said about her was that she was very violent, very mean. My mother advised me against asking about my great-great-grandmother—and I heeded her advice. About a week later, I had a dream in which a group of slaves was standing at my kitchen window, looking in. I felt certain that those dream slaves were real, and they were asking me, however silently, to write about them so that they could have their peace and rest. I also felt certain that the slaves I was writing about were somehow related to me, and that I would discover my ancestors by writing about them. I trusted these people would come to me via writing the poems, and they did. I determined that as someone who is half African American, I hold the experience of slavery somewhere in my unconscious mind. I also decided that if I focused only on writing about it, my hand would unearth whatever was hidden in my internal historical memory. Sometimes, I think I was Clea, the main voice that arose in this project, that I am just a continuation of her life, and that I wrote her story from personal experience, a personal experience that was uncovered by my difficult foray into research about slavery.

Plaque commemorating Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sojourn on Schoolmaster Hill. Photograph courtesy of the author. Click to enlarge.

A Walk in Franklin Park

An entrance leads into some nondescript woods, to a dale where a dilemma presents itself: to follow the enticing stairs up the rocky hill into the forest, or the path into the tunnel? The path enters a wall of puddingstone, reminiscent of grottoes at Tivoli, which you can hear the traffic passing over. Olmsted marked his parks with the crushed concrete of skyscrapers, to accent the green.

A grotesque frame for the “magic wardrobe” effect: on the other side of the tunnel you discover countryside as Browne or Repton might have sketched it. “Country”: a broad open green, a valley that curves invitingly upward, toward masses of trees on the outcrops, framed by giant oaks. One half-expects flaky-coated sheep to edge into the open. But instead, here and there, the isolated figure of a golfer.

It is the hour of the conjugal stroll. Couples on bicycles, debriefing the day. The TB patients wear hospital smocks. A facility operated by the Massachusetts State Department of Public Health was built at the foot of Olmsted’s park. Public open space is vulnerable to schools, low income housing, hospitals, zoos . . . all such “spoils of the park.” It can be a lovely situation for the convalescents.

As one follows the rim of the gentle valley, traffic whizzing up the carriage way to one’s left, a textbook succession of beautiful landscape views, only missing the sheet of water, unfolds. (Yet something a touch rough, even savage, haunts this composition. The materials are not quite “right,” American picturesque.) Olmsted preferred to speak of his parks in terms of music.

A poem at Schoolmaster Hill commemorates Ralph Waldo Emerson’s stay there, while teaching school in Roxbury: “Long through the weary crowds I roam; A river-ark on the ocean brine.” The poem includes references to frozen hearts and hasting feet, driven foam, secret nooks, frolic fairies, and groves “Where arches green, the livelong day,/ Echo the blackbird’s roundelay.”

An origin myth for Olmsted? On spiritual maps an “origin” can mask the true point of emergence. From the bench—the best view at Franklin Park—watch the golfers tee off in succession. To exit the park, follow a curving path. It curves some more. Follow it, curving. You are getting Olmsteded. It’s like watching an accident unfold in slow motion. Nothing you can do about it.

Olmsted’s park designs are delightful when you have leisure but a nightmare when you have to get somewhere. (Can I have some leisure please?) You see a greensward at the end of the curve and can only hope against all odds that it is not the same greensward you just left. You spend a lot of time going nowhere. There is something monstrous about the loop.

For all your study of this park, see how lost you are? Your knowledge of the park is only as good as your knowledge of the neighborhood. Those “planned neighborhoods” one sometimes mistakenly turns into, when trying to get across town. And the refreshing life of the unplanned. What lurks beyond the green screen? How do I get out of this damn park?

General Scheme of Power Distribution of the Niagara Falls Power Company, The Niagara Falls Electrical Handbook: Being a Guide for Visitors From Abroad Attending the International Electrical Congress, St. Louis, Mo., September, 1904. Published under the auspices of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, 1904. Courtesy of the SUNY Buffalo Library, Buffalo, New York. Click to enlarge.

The Power of the Falls

In the 1870s Olmsted and Vaux marked the head of the Niagara River, and by association all the waters of the Great Lakes, with Front Park. In the late 1880’s they would mark the landscape where those waters drop over the Niagara Escarpment on their way to Lake Ontario—a major hydrological and aesthetic power spot, the Goat Island Niagara Reserve.

By 1882, seven mills along the Niagara Gorge north of the American Falls produced power for Jacob Schoellkopf’s Hydraulic Power Company. Partly thanks to Nikola Tesla and his alternating current transmission system, this power reached Buffalo in 1896—completing a loop of water and electricity, sent back upstream, the first long distance transmission for commercial purposes.

Buffalo soon became the City of Lights. Frederick Church, whose huge painting “Niagara Falls” was first shown in 1857, lectured sometime before 1869 on the Falls’ impending ruin: mills, flumes, shops, icehouses, signboards, hotels, and fences defaced and crowded the once natural riverbank. People paid a fee to look through holes in a fence to see the Falls.

Olmsted drafted and delivered a report in 1865 that articulated the philosophical basis for state and national parks, advocating that portions of natural scenery be guarded and cared for by government. To simply reserve them from monopoly by individuals was not enough. They also should be “laid open to the use of the body of the people.” Magnificent natural scenery was a commons.

Olmsted’s and Vaux’s report for the Goat Island Reserve mentions the changing public attitude toward natural scenery: a century before, the Falls might have been termed hideous or awful, while sixty years before, they were looked at chiefly as a source of power. Now their particular weather was sublime. Niagara Falls, once Onguiaahra, the Strait.

In 1763, Seneca Indians killed eighty citizens and British soldiers who were transporting material along the Niagara Gorge. John Stedman, one of two survivors of the Devil’s Hole Massacre, claimed the land and islands above the Falls for himself. In the 1770s, he raised a herd of goats on “Goat Island.” Listen to the Falls under the creamy white blossoms of the basswood.

To make peace the Seneca ceded to the British a four mile wide strip of land along the east side of the Niagara River from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie. The paths and walks at Niagara Reservation are calculated to draw the walker back from the sublime, to linger in beauty, just as Olmsted led Richardson on a long, teasing walk before letting him see the Falls.

The pools, riffles and rapids by Luna just above the Bridal Falls are intimately seductive, without effective barrier. A terrifying intimacy, when you know where it leads: “the densest region of shade merges its identity into a desperate kiss.” The design invites “an all-consuming thirst for open air and danger.” Listen, and you will hear the massive ground tone of the Falls, just downstream, offstage.

The state cops keep an eye on “people they see standing in the same place for long periods of time or walking about aimlessly, muttering to themselves or looking distraught.” One study has logged 20-25 suicides a year, and notes that the most popular time is Monday at 4pm. Honeymooners flock to the pools above the Falls in a spirit of contradiction.

Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated several miles above me, as I waited for a taco in Niagara Falls’ economic drop-out zone. Here is where Elon Hooker built the ideal workers’ village, on a toxic waste dump. Here also is heroism, where Lois Gibbs organized the Love Canal Homeowners Association, nursing her children in front of national television cameras.

Amidst land scraped bare by retreating glaciers and thrust under the sky, tabula rasa between two Great Lakes, Niagara Falls channels one-fifth the planet’s fresh surface water. Maybe it’s the ions, static in the gorge that lifts the hair from your skull. The park has its rangers and its Mennonites, and its group of communicants, receiving instruction from the Cave of the Winds.

The Canadians played it right. It was only a matter of time before the USA would preserve Goat Island, and erase industry along the gorge, restoring a natural look to the Falls, as seen from the other side. Where Canada’s Frankenstein lifts a Clifton Hill cheeseburger, grinning back at the toothless storefronts of Niagara Falls, USA, the economic gradient feels steep.

In a gentler dell, at a wooded bit opposite Crow Island, upstream of Bridal Falls, the watery mirrors cause us to reflect on the mythology in the course of our lives. Thanatos holds our ankles as we contemplate the riffles. Tesla suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by visions.

The “American Electrician” gives a description of an early tesla coil wherein a glass battery jar, 15 x 20 cm (6 x 8 in) is wound with 60 to 80 turns of AWG No. 18 B & S magnet wire (0.823 mm²). Into this is slipped a primary consisting of eight to ten turns of AWG No. 6 B & S wire (13.3 mm²) and the whole combination immersed in a vessel containing linseed or mineral oil.

“It’s called the reverse waterfall. Essentially, the shape of the land underneath the surface of this very narrow inland bay. It’s really deep in the middle, much more shallow on the sides. So, when the tide changes, the middle surges upward and turns into this churning white water, in the midst of a very smooth, placid sort of flow on either side.”

In 1926, Tesla commented on the ills of the social subservience of women and the struggle of women toward gender equality, indicating that humanity’s future would be run by “Queen Bees.” As she talks to you, the Falls make their own weather. The weather drifts. At the heart of power and contradiction, a delicate spiral rises turning toward the sky.

“Design Map of South Park,” Olmsted Job #718, South Park, Buffalo, NY, F.L. & J.C. Olmsted Landscape Architects, 1888. Olmsted Lithograph Collection. Courtesy of the National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, Brookline, Massachusetts. Click to enlarge.

South Park

Here is a view of the Niagara River from the Robert Moses Parkway, south of Niagara Falls. Here is a pumping station. Here is Front Park, that once overlooked the head of the river, at Lake Erie, now best seen from I-90, the thruway that obliterated the park. Here is a view of Riverwalk, zig zagging into the Lake. Here is a broad view of the shallowest Great Lake, from the Skyway.

Olmsted honors the lake, courses of waterways and associated wetlands, and employs them as a principal resource in his design, seeing the landscape as the Kahkwa or Seneca did. As part of the whole. Water takes the place of turf, in the kind of landscape composition he has mastered but is eager to adapt to a watery environment, where park goers enter by boat rather than foot.

Olmsted’s Northern designs also shelter memories of the bayou and the “restful, dreamy nature of the South.” These dreams of a lagoon interface with a Great Lake would not mature with Buffalo’s South Park. Even though Buffalo got called the Venice of the North. In the Buffalo South Park proposal, packet boats were to ferry park-goers through islands marked out by windmill-powered lights.

“At intervals there will open long vistas over water under broad leafy canopies . . . verdant grottoes . . . spacious forest glades . . . nurseries for song birds.” The plan is unique for balancing water with land, in an imbricated yet simple pattern, including secluded picnic spots and migratory bird exclosures. Bridging the bounded with the open horizon, Olmsted’s parks are harbors for possibility.

As the 1888 design entailed excavating more than half a million yards of land, Buffalo’s park commissioners deemed it too expensive. Olmsted’s son John and his partners in the Olmsted firm took over the project. Their 1892 plan outlined a smaller inland space, in the “English deer park” mode, that eventually would include a water feature, a conservatory, botanical garden and arboretum.

Olmsted considered the Buffalo parks his “best-planned” system, due to the city’s extensively realized parkways. We drive around in circles, past Father Baker’s Basilica, where the stations of the cross are lit in neon, looking for South Park. After asking directions of a woman and her granddaughter, who give me three tomatoes from their garden, we find the entrance to the park.

Olmsted decries “the present railroad evil” and “the barbarity of a great number of deadly grade railroad crossings.” What fuels growth chokes off life. He proposes a counter-system of parkways, “not to be dealt with on the principle that they are local affairs any more than the parks with which they connect.” Olmsted’s logic was reversed when Robert Moses turned his parkways into high speed thruways.

It is a deer park in the midst of residential and industrial South Buffalo, between rail yards, scrap yards and brownfields, a few miles north of the Ford Stamping Plant. The trees are decidedly less well kept here. Dead snags stand at the edge of the water feature, which is lily choked. On the way out of the park, I photograph a mysterious mailbox, standing in the grass.

I have always regretted the use of a private automobile to reach the park. As part of Buffalo’s emerging master plan, the bicycle paths running up the Niagara River from Tonawanda will be connected to South Park. But who will fill the border vacuum? Who will draw a view of Buffalo from the Niagara River, from the breath of a green artery, from the social dance on a packet boat seen from outer space.

Photograph courtesy of the author. Click to enlarge.

The Foundation of All Wealth

Come to the park bent and unbending
stimulate exertion of parts
receive pleasure unconscious
to influence the mind of
imagination

The lawn curves back of thought
sound minds in sound bodies
all the art of the park
not fully given to words
or enameled flowers

The daisy we did not stop for
therapeutic for the masses
not interrupting us or calling
out gave a more soothing refreshing
sanitary experience

Statement of Poetic Research

My research poetics are less invested in biography than in geography, less focused on rhyme than on response. Crucial to my sense of literacy, of documentation and of history, is an extension of these terms to cover the traces and signs written in the land, or produced in the wraparound space of our environments. Gary Snyder reminds us that, “A text is information stored through time. The stratigraphy of rocks, layers of pollen in a swamp, the outward expanding circles in the trunk of a tree, can be seen as texts.” If by “information” we also mean a nexus of social, ecological and political concern enmeshed in an aesthetics, then we might say that the landscapes realized by our landscape architects are texts, disguised as “nature,” and vice versa: and how do we respond to these?

Research then occurs along a continuum from the depths of the archive to depths of the ramble. Walking and writing become extensions of the same investigation. Of course, a continuum on one plane is seen as a series of strata from another, so the poetic researcher attends to how documents get sited, reinforcing established ideologies or inserted disruptively into other planes of meaning, context and conduct. A lot of the poetics of research has to do with re-siting the archive. Or citing the archive in a way that exposes it as non-site. Words need to be carried outdoors, or a bit of earth brought in, lodged in a climate-controlled box. Librarians become exceptionally wary around poetic researchers, for good reason.

The current project, Spoils of the Park (named after a pamphlet Olmsted published in 1882, lamenting what had become of his Central Park), began when I wondered, what would happen if we read Frederick Law Olmsted as we might read one of the great American poets? Olmsted’s art has been overgrown by its successes: many of his closest readers do not even realize that his parks were made, nor have they ever heard of Olmsted. In Olmsted’s own words, “This may seem a contradiction in terms. It is not. When an artist puts a stick in the ground, and nature in time makes it a tree, art and nature are not to be seen apart in the result.” Olmsted’s own writings are too focused on the practical to be classed as literature or art; many of his words and actions paint him as a reformer, concerned with public health in an age of hygiene. (Olmsted headed the Sanitary Commission during the Civil War.) Yet Olmsted clearly saw himself as an artist.

Olmsted’s parks aim chiefly to affect, beyond the body or the faculty of reason, the imagination: “A great object of all that is done in a park, of all the art of a park, is to influence the mind of men through their imagination.” Olmsted saw his parks as settings for “unconscious or indirect recreation.” In his designs, he sought an effect on the human organism by “an action of what [the park] presents to view, which action, like that of music, is of a kind that goes back of thought, and cannot be fully given the form of words.” Olmsted frequently resorted to musical metaphors when describing the effects of his park designs.

Like the poet, the artist or the composer, the park-maker works with materials of the unconscious, and in particular with what we now might call the environmental unconscious (ecocritic Lawrence Buell coined this phrase). In an essay on trees, Olmsted compares a wild flower on a grassy bank to an imported flower blooming under glass in an enameled vase: “the former, while we have passed it by without stopping, and while it has not interrupted our conversation or called for remark, may possibly . . . have had a more soothing and refreshing sanitary influence.” What touches our senses peripherally most affects our health.

The popularity of Olmsted with the urban planners and their social engineering fantasies took a hit in the 1970s. We now live in a time when the eccentricities of Olmsted’s vision can better be appreciated, its successes balanced with its failures, and when a broader view can be taken of the variety of factors contributing differently in the specific case of each park—much as Olmsted himself might have approached his works, more than a century after his death. We also live in a time when the spatial productions of democracy, i.e. public spaces, are fast eroding. Olmsted’s nuanced, “impractical” yet wholly pragmatic approach to the complex politics and economics of public space during a Gilded Age may be more relevant than ever.

Much as archives lie in the dark or only come to light through the specialized discussions of researchers (still dark to the public at large), whole greenswards and entangled banks of our urban environments lie just beyond the field of public attention. As Olmsted’s principles make clear, in the case of his parks this is partly by design: the therapeutic agency of his parks works most precisely through indirection, unconsciously. In his manifesto, Investigative Poetry, poet Ed Sanders urges poet researchers to “leave well-defined gaps in the text or in the presentation equal to the circumstances concerning which they have no knowledge: that is, their AREAS OF DARKNESS.” While we have at least four biographies, several book-length studies, and a score or more of coffee table volumes illuminating the work of Frederick Law Olmsted, it turns out that poetry may have work of its own to do, in the greenswards and entangled banks.

If the poem is itself an archive, then its legibility may constitute an anti-archive, or “anarchive,” of suppressed or marginalized histories. Poetry begins to generate its own unearthly light precisely when, as Sanders notes, it dives into areas of darkness. Poems (and I consider Robert Smithson’s great essay, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,” to be a kind of poem) seem especially suited to sounding and communicating the effects and contradictory vectors of Olmsted’s compositions. Only the poet, furthermore (and I consider a scholar such as Walter Benjamin, attuned to the semiotic and surreal surfaces of human cities, to be a kind of poet), grants him or herself permission to bust out the archive in public places, and to detonate public concerns within the linear orders of the library. It is the poet, who is “always on,” who remains uncontained enough to attempt wholly impractical acts of reading.

Olmsted’s vision, his history, and the history of which he was a part, are vast, complex and ramifying in cellular and indirect fashion, like his parks. Poetry as a mnemonic device, and as a kind of oral record, might help to affix and circulate some of this history, to make it a more active part of the common discourse. I recognize the contradiction in suggesting that we lay bare the device that functions best through camouflage; but the critical ecological pressures of our times call for a more deliberate approach to our environments, to those environments supposedly in a “state of nature” as well as to the environments clearly bequeathed to us by the designs of artists. Poetry also can retain an echo of, and deploy within its own sonorities, the non-linear juxtapositions embodying gaps, the breaks where the poem’s charge sparks.

The poetic form of this research project is evolving. I have written and spoken elsewhere of the lyrical impulse at the heart of research, especially in the context of natural history research around the intersections of poetry and bird song. With Olmsted, where the materials are more patently historical, I have found the lyric line somewhat intractable. Information, especially of dates and places, of acts and speeches, gets unwieldy around the line break. Or it may be that the expansiveness of Olmsted’s designs calls for a more expansive rhythm, a response at the level of phrase and sentence rather than syllable and word. Much of the project is first drafted as prose and documented through photography and field recording. These layers of the project are accessible at my blog: http://olmstedsparks.wordpress.com

Poems emerging from this prose currently settle into kind of regular, isometric stanza—like boxcar windows on Olmsted’s prospects. I have taken some inspiration from the movement of minimalism in land-based contemporary art, literature and landscape design, where geometric forms are considered more effective (than “squiggly lumps and bumps”) in focusing attention on natural scenes. There may be one other explanation.

Much of the travel for the field work conducted for this project occurred by rail—another underfunded public resource. I wanted to see the landscapes much as Olmsted might have, as he traveled tirelessly from site to site (during his work on the Biltmore grounds, Olmsted even had the use of Vanderbilt’s private rail car). I have aimed to keep track of the class tension, the global effects of the rail industry and the mobility of capital that funded and built these parks.

What does it mean to claim a “poetics” from Olmsted’s designs? To oppose a set of facile analogies—rectilinear, orderly, industrial, urban as prosaic; curving, random, green, rural as poetic? To locate, against the stop signs of the city, a landscape without punctuation marks? Investigative poetry troubles the binaries, such as work vs. leisure, and the associated logic of capital that obviously undergirds so much of Olmsted’s project. Yet what one finds, in doing the research, is that Olmsted himself has already troubled the distinctions.

Further reading

Gary Snyder discusses what he calls “Nature’s Writing” in the essay “Tawny Grammar,” The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco, 1990). There are many books written at the nexus of walking and writing; two valuable studies are Roger Gilbert, Walks in the World: Representation and Experience in Modern American Poetry (Princeton, 1991) and Jeffrey C. Robinson, The Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image (Norman, OK, 1989). On “site” and “non-site,” see Robert Smithson, “A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites” (n.d.) and “The Spiral Jetty” (1972), in The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley, 1996), which volume also contains the key 1973 essay, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape.” Many of Frederick Law Olmsted’s writings first appeared as self-published pamphlets, such as Spoils of the Park: with a few leaves from the deep-laden note-books of “a wholly unpractical man”(Detroit, 1882), or as documents produced by agencies like the Boston Parks Department, which published Notes on the Plan of Franklin Park and Related Matters (Boston, 1886). This latter essay includes the comment on parks working like music; thanks to Mark Swartz, U.S. Park Ranger for the Olmsted National Historical Site, for drawing my attention to this passage. The essay “Trees in Streets and in Parks” was published in The Sanitarian X,No.114 (September, 1882). The other Olmsted quotations in my statement can be found in Civilizing American Cities: Writings on City Landscapes, ed. S.B. Sutton (Cambridge, Mass., 1971). For the “environmental unconscious,” see Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1995). Jane Jacob’s sociological critique of the Olmsted approach to park design helped tarnish the legacy of his parks during the 1960s and 70s: see The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York, 1961), especially the chapters “The uses of neighborhood parks” and “The curse of border vacuums.” Ed Sanders wrote the definitive manifesto for poetic research, from an activist standpoint, published as Investigative Poetry (San Francisco, 1976); there have been subsequent versions and refinements, such as “Creativity and the Fully Developed Bard,” in Disembodied poetics: annals of the Jack Kerouac School, ed. Ann Waldman and Andrew Schelling (Albuquerque, NM: 1995). For the therapeutic agency of parks, see Olmsted’s publication, Mount Royal, Montreal (New York,1881), where he calls “charming natural scenery” a “prophylactic and therapeutic agent of vital value.” A more thorough discussion of Olmsted’s park psychology can be found on my blog, www.olmstedsparks.wordpress.com (Day 3, Part iii). Also see Robert Hewitt, “The Influence of Somatic and Psychiatric Medical Theory on the Design of Nineteenth Century American Cities” (University Park, PA, 2003). On poetry as “anarchive,” see Stephen Collis, Anarchive (Vancouver, 2005). Both for its attention to the semiotics of the city (including parks and gardens) and for its practice of citational montage, Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (trans. Rolf Tiedemann, Cambridge, Mass., 1999) has been inspirational to my own practice of poetic research. While Eric Havelock has written eloquently on poetry as oral record and mnemonic device, in The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven, CT: 1988), Susan Howe has taught me more than anyone about the critical vitality gaps and breaks bring to poetic history; see, for instance, The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Hanover, NH, 1993). On the role of minimalism in land-based contemporary art and landscape design, see Peter Reed, Groundswell: Constructing the Contemporary Landscape (New York, 2005), where Reed cites landscape architect Martha Schwartz, on the “humanism” of geometry in landscape compared to “the disorientation caused by the incessant lumps, bumps and squiggles of a stylized naturalism.” Too little has been written on the economics of the Olmsted Firm parks (not to speak of urban ecology, more generally). Two exceptions are “Place-based urban ecology: A century of park planning in Seattle,” by Sarah Dooling, Gregory Simon and Ken Yocom (Urban Ecosystems9, 2006) and Eden by Design: the 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew plan for the Los Angeles region, by Greg Hise and William Francis Deverell (Berkeley, 2000). The best critique of the prosaic urban/ poetic rural dyad, from a Marxist standpoint, is Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, especially the chapter “Pleasing Prospects” (New York, 1973).

Vanishing Point

In the great valley between Hwando and Yazoo City,
laborers tend opium poppies and cotton,
Dying of yellow fever. But on the heights, there is a calm
incense of roasting pork, a delicate mist of flesh
Lovers stroll through to the platform at cliff’s edge
Where they gaze down like diligent scholars
At a landscape falsified precisely for their pleasure.
From there, a faint pentatonic music skirls
Up from the valley floor, where we overseers hone
blue notes from invisible instruments stroked
With the abrasive bow of coal smoke and acid rain.

A Reconciliation

And they were happy in the end, if by happiness
you mean everything was forgotten.
Time had been deeply layered in their bodies
like the ruins of Troy in a hill. Now the innocent
Cattle waged war on milkweed in a pasture,
while a formation of geese wedged harmlessly
Into the evening air. What had they fought about
endless years ago? Time clarifies nothing,
But buttresses of worked stone dissolve in its weightlessness.
Nothing now to defend except their bodies,
Which survived, growing lighter and more translucent
and more useless. In the night sky, stars convened
In images of gods and humans, watching for a sign
of any remnant of passion, a recognition of blood
Transcendence: old Helen fucking ruined Menelaus.

Statement of Poetic Research

The Skandalon of History

“Vanishing Point” and “Reconciliation” are from a forthcoming book of poems called Skandalon (LSU Press, fall 2014), a word that has in English only a ghostly existence in the realm of theology, where it means, as The Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “A stumbling-block, cause of offence, scandal”—scandal here meant in the ordinary sense, but also in a larger sense: anything that distracts a soul from salvation is both a stumbling-block and a scandal. So, for a heroin addict, heroin is a skandalon; for a potential saint, the stamp collection over which she obsesses, to the detriment of devotion, might be one. Dante’s Paolo and Francesca each are a skandalon to the other. In Christian terms, the entire fallen world is a skandalon—a distraction, and a metaphysical scandal—and so all of human history is one.

Obviously the Greek word skandalon is the root of the common English word scandal. In ancient Greek, skandalon denotes the trigger of a trap, and so all the meanings dissolved in the word by Christian theology, as is so often the case, are metaphorical. The little lever in a mousetrap where one puts the cheese is a skandalon: the cheese distracts the mouse, and scandalously draws it on to destruction. So the politician’s attractive aide might be like the lever in the trap; so, to Everyman, the whole “fallen” world, all of history.

Unpacking this odd word (and there is much more in it to unpack than present space permits) led me, if not to the writing of a book, at least to a means of giving form to one, which may be said to be the same thing. Unpacking a word’s etymology is of course a mode of historicizing, and language being, as Emerson famously put it, “fossil poetry,” I have found myself, over many decades of practice, often following the thread of etymology through the maze of my own perception of the historical.

Meditating on the maze in which we are fated to wander—take it out of the Christian frame and the consequences of the skandalon are neither better nor worse; it shifts its reference perhaps to the existential, and the trap is the void—has allowed me a fruitful process of casting and recasting the net of process. In “Vanishing Point,” the history of privilege is scandalous; in “Reconciliation,” the act of reconciliation in the face of fact is.

After the conquest of Troy, Helen and Menelaus returned home and resumed their marriage, “history” tells us. How is that possible? In Euripides’s play Helen, the two are united for eternity on the Isle of the Blessed. Why? And for the rest of their lives—for the rest of eternity—what on earth (for earth is the ultimate skandalon) must they have talked about?

In the narrative of the fate of these two, what is “history” exactly? Helen and Menelaus are—even on the Isle of the Blessed—the ghosts of a scandal. “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” we are told, but we may equally want to beware of gifts bearing Greeks. Every “fact” of history is—as historians and poets learn to their sorrow—potentially a skandalon.

1. Tracts Trace Fissure

I pick up a fragile, aging photo, asking, “Who is this?”

“No idea.”

Names slip out of records or protected—

No completely legible family Bibles or cornerstones engraved. Conversion over bloodline, family branches missing or far flung. The fissure passed down: this Tract Society—

Question to begin: when no known ancestors of mine were, previous to the 20^th century, here present, how do I connect to American history, to the imaginary of the American nation?

One answer might be found by de-spatializing the “here,” by looking to Seventh-day Adventism, the 19^th century American religion adopted by my Estonian family while in Estonia, my newly arrived German immigrant great-grandmother in New York City, and my first-generation American grandfather on my mother’s side, one of two brothers who converted and subsequently stopped passing on any stories of their blood families—all “non-believers.” The only thing I ever heard about his mother, my great-grandmother, is that she was not an upstanding woman: “She had many different men over to her Brooklyn house.” I have never known her name.

2. The Autobiography of Elder Joseph Bates

Catalogued in the American Antiquarian Society library, I discover this book written by an early Adventist missionary.

Am I imagining that my grandmother spoke about her mother meeting him once in person?

While trying to find, I fear my fiction grows.

Search: Adventism, American. Find: a new religion, new country, new self. An emphasis on text and religious scholarship (memory of the shelves of Bible concordances to the right of the fireplace) when none of these ancestors had ever been to college.

Religious literacy as religious liberty as cultural rebirth and upward mobility. Lines drawn away from the old country away from family toward a church family toward:

The Word.

The missionary movement: to spread The Word.

Did this Elder Bates make contact with my Estonian grandfather? No, the dates are wrong. But when did the Adventists go to Europe?

Failed search: No matches found for Baltics, Baltic, Estonia, Magi. The shame of my autobiographical obsession. Why do I want to find evidence of this first contact?

If I could read the record of the capture of my grandfather’s imagination, his conversion, could I then write my way into complete release?

3. A New Body

There is an image of my mother as a baby printed up on a postcard and distributed to raise church funds: with every pound she grew, members would pledge more money.

Physical growth converts to church growth and the spread of The Word is the work, is how to be a good Adventist and healthy.

Bodies of belief are bodies valued: therefore the later devastation of her polio.

She survives, graduates eighth grade pictured under a banner reading, “The Value of Hard Work” and visibly changed: face drawn, weary for her age. It is The Depression and school equals work, a promise to plug the dam of uncertainty, of dis-ease.

“My father would not touch me in the hospital” she once told me because she had never figured out that her own parents were always also afraid.

Known or sensed: anxiety. A root, a subtext. Against which, prayer—

4. Scanning

I have already written about Adventism.

In Threads I wrote about my Estonian grandfather’s dangerous religiosity during the World War II German and Russian occupations of Estonia. The story is that he had to leave Estonia because he was an outspoken Adventist minister.

I also wrote “pillow of no tradition—resting there” which is autobiographical: I am firmly apostate. I risked the connection, slipping out of that world of The Word—

Now, I am spit out: it is nearly impossible for me to read The Autobiography of Elder Bates. I download the file, open it several times, and note my faith in the rhythm of the double click, my readiness to learn. But I read nothing and make no decision to continue to try.

Instead, I find myself searching this scanned 19^th century book for torn edges, errant spots on blank pages, places where a librarian has made marks, and places where those marks have bled through.

Available for the entire virtual world to read, I already know the history of the disappointment of the advent movement and even so, my ancestors believed. In light of this, I cleave to the illegible.

5. In a Shaking Hand

In my grandmother’s belongings, I find a love letter from my grandfather, written two days before he passed away, written in a shaking hand—

Of his devotion to her and to the church and how surely they will see each other again in His kingdom.

Holding this letter, I think of bindings—imprinting—shared vocabularies—

What hope holds me to my family of origin, and to my beloved, the family I now make? What if there is no sacred vocabulary? No beyond?

Or, how much is my “pillow of no tradition” a pillow still marked—

Perhaps I wear this religion’s imprint in ghostly reverse—something seeping through, as when I listen to my landlord’s Friday prayer meetings in the basement below my apartment, not able to hear the exact words, but familiar with the cadence of the voice, praying, wondering if he is also—

6. “I have begun to pray again.”

The above sentence is from section one of a manuscript entitled GIFT. This sentence marks my entrance into an inquiry that does not privilege the secular and mock the sacred.

This writing is the second section: “I have begun again to read as I was taught.” Subtitle: “Literacy, religion, and textual practice.”

This is what I call a gift reading practice from my childhood:

I would open my Bible to any passage of the Psalms and read. A feeling that this chance operation was divinely directed to give me a message I needed then, at that moment.

Or I would read the Psalms when I had a stomachache. The pains would go away. I would read Psalm 27 when I was nervous about school. I prayed before every test and attributed my good grades to divine guidance.

This is now the image that I need to read:

I trace this remnant mark, find pleasure in its edge and shape, its pixilated borders, its mistake. Sitting at my desk, I almost recoil at the sensuality of this mark and its electricity: my now pulsing body, a transfer has occurred.

7. Prophetess

Ellen Gould White, the prophetess of this religion I was born into, had an immense literary output yet she only had three years of formal schooling. She wrote at night, from 1 or 2 am until dawn, when she felt she was most susceptible to hearing and recording the word of god.

It is rumored that she plagiarized Milton.

She was hit in the head with a rock as a little girl and after that she had visions. And so she received messages from god or Milton.

She predicted god would come in 1844 and this did not happen.

How do I read poetry now when as a child I was taught that it was our human purpose to wait and disappointment only renews resolve?

I grew up and out of the religion and I developed a disdain for her, Ellen White—the religion felt, to me, an absolute folly.

8. Shame

If this is my first lesson in reading and authorship, text and purpose, then how to enter literature in college, cleanly, while secretly stained.

Whether I belong—now an author—this, persisting—

9. Communities of Desire

Now, telling the story of these practices about which I rarely speak: how faith is gradually entering back into my literacy. Why engage remembering?

One answer: I want to make a connection from a sacred past to an experimental literature in the present. No one expected me to be a poet and write as I do, but it is not such a far flung idea, given that:

Literacy situated in religion is—

An emphasis on study. Growing up, we had lesson “quarterlies” for weekly study. My parents asked me, nearly every day, “Did you study your lesson?”

An emphasis on memorization and therefore sounds. Early memories of star stickers affixed to a chart listing the Bible verses I had memorized correctly. Always in the King James Version, the sound of the poetry of the beginnings of modern English.

There are titles like The Desire of the Ages, The Great Controversy, Steps to Christ: books by Ellen Gould White filled our home. Spiritual handbooks. The word “desire.” How to. The time of the end, “the time of trouble,” approaching. Fear and courage mediated by text.

10. To instill anxiety and then relieve this tension is to read.

A lesson in scripture: contraction and release. Worry and faith.

To believe that signs are everywhere—”wonders and signs”—and a thin veil separates spirit and world, thin line between prayer and breath.

List everything you are thankful for, quickly, under your breath in case the end of times comes and you are found ungrateful.

To skim is an acceptable way to read and “seek and ye shall find” because a book is always unbound, aglow, alive, and my mother told me to never put anything on top of my Bible.

To read while making marks: underline, highlight, margin notes. My childhood Bibles are full of these.

My grandfather marked up several Bibles. There are notebooks of his sermons in three languages: illegible marks made legible because of context. The message was always the same on any side of the Atlantic, in any language.

11. Reading the Remnant

That religious belief and religious tracts and texts will draw people together and pull them apart.

Idea of remnant or outsider: we, “a remnant people,” who will be saved, who may be fringe.

A son or daughter might be on the edge of the fabric or ripped from their family for their righteousness or for their sinning.

How, a continent away from America, one side of my family converts to this American religion leads to my father picking my mother, also an Adventist in his new country his new city.

At mid-20^th century, when most Adventists were white, religion trumps ethnicity and the difference between native/refugee. All are together, called the same, “the remnant.”

Yet the individual breath and body is always a potential wedge in what is broadcast from the pulpit. A micro-remnant, even if momentarily, making the smallest utterance. Reading, listening for this divisibility—the desire for invention, the desire for belonging—is this my poetics, inadvertently gifted to me by family who took this American religion and read themselves into earthly and heavenly citizenship?

This article originally appeared in issue 12.4 (July, 2012).

Jill Magi’s text/image, poetry/prose hybrid works include SLOT (2011), Cadastral Map (2011), Torchwood (2008), and Threads (2007). Two recent collaborations can be found on-line at Drunken Boat and The Michigan Quarterly Review. She was a resident artist at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council writer-in-residence, and is currently a recipient of an arts grant from the city of Chicago. Jill will start a post as visiting writer in the MFA program at Columbia College Chicago this fall.

Marcy Norton’s marvelous, prize-winning book brilliantly investigates the cultural meanings of two related comestibles that would eventually become hugely profitable industries in Europe: tobacco and chocolate. She first illuminates what they meant in their original contexts of the Caribbean and Mesoamerica, and then in their transplanted context of Europe, which in this case mainly means Spain (more on this below). “What, exactly, did it mean,” Norton asks, “for Europeans—bound as they were to an ideology that insisted on their religious and cultural supremacy—to become consumers of goods that they knew were so enmeshed in the religious practices of the pagan ‘savages’ whom they had conquered?” (3). The answers (and there are many) to this question lead Norton to upend the conventional understanding of the relations between the Old and New Worlds. Or as Norton puts it: “In asking this question, I am reframing the history of the Atlantic World” (3).

The conventional narrative is that the encounter between the Old and the New Worlds was an entirely one-sided affair in which European soldiers and explorers devastated native American people and cultures. Norton demonstrates that this narrative seriously mistakes what actually happened, and in its place, Norton proposes that the Atlantic World (note that the phrase collapses the Old and New Worlds into one entity) is characterized by “syncretism,” meaning the “amalgamation of beliefs and practices emerging from different cultural traditions” (9). The reception of chocolate and tobacco, Norton argues, “exemplified the process of syncretism that was going on everywhere” (10).

But to understand the reception of chocolate and tobacco in Europe, we first have to understand their original cultural and material meanings, which is Norton’s project for approximately the first third of this book. Using a variety of primary sources, including traveler reports and illustrations from the Florentine Codex and from one of the few surviving pre-Columbian Mixtec books, Norton shows how tobacco and chocolate had both social and sacred meanings for the Aztecs. They were “essential accoutrements to courtly society” (27) and they “served to create and symbolize [social] bonds” (29). They also functioned as political tribute and tribute “expected by and hankered after” by the gods (31). Chocolate was seen as a “blood surrogate” and tobacco “was identified with the act of creation itself” (35, 36), which sounds lovely until one realizes that sipping chocolate and smoking a pipe also formed part of human sacrifice: the victim, physically perfect, was forced to circulate through the streets while “playing the flute [and] sucking [the smoking tube]” until he ended by having his heart ripped out (32).

Given such a lineage, one would imagine that Europeans would reject chocolate and tobacco as irrevocably tainted, but that, Norton shows, is not at all what happened. Or rather, initially, that is exactly what happened. In hisGeneral History of the Indies (1535), Gonzalo de Oviedo mentions tobacco as “the material embodiment of ‘bad’ Indian culture” (56), and while chocolate had an easier time being accepted, for some it was still a “disgusting drink of barbarians” (60). Spanish culture very quickly appropriated both chocolate and tobacco for purposes that, fascinatingly, continued some of their original uses. Europeans embraced tobacco’s healing properties, just as the Aztec did, and the consumption of chocolate in European culture “simultaneously served to fortify social bonds and underscore, or even confer, distinction” (174). The European understanding of chocolate and tobacco’s cultural meanings built upon and transformed their original usages, demonstrating syncretism rather than an absolute break. Thus a 1710 tile painting from Barcelona showing aristocrats consuming chocolate, among other diversions, echoes “the Florentine Codex, [which also] depicts ritualized chocolate consumption within its broader social context” (178).

Another example of how the European understanding of tobacco continued rather than replaced its original meanings: in 1571, the Spanish physician and merchant, Nicolás Monardes, published the second edition of hisTwo Books [concerning] those things brought from our West Indies that are useful to medicine. In this work, Monardes brought together his two careers: medicine, and trans-Atlantic trade (which included trade in human beings; the man sold slaves as well as other goods). Relying on “indigenous expertise for their knowledge about useful medicaments” (113), Monardes gave tobacco pride of place in this work (the first edition does not mention tobacco at all, and his “understanding of tobacco’s physiological effects largely derived from Amerindian knowledge that migrated through colonial and Atlantic information networks and that were confirmed and tested through direct experimentation by Monardes and others in his milieu” [115, 116]). Monardes’ interest in native remedies also posed an interesting challenge to his humanist ambition to imitate the botanist, Dioscorides, whose De material medica“brought him more fame than if he had conquered many cities with his military arms” (quoted on p. 113). But Monardes’ project led him away from humanist imitatioand toward the nascent discourses of what we today call science, meaning, he paid attention to empirical observation rather than previous authorities, and anticipating Francis Bacon by about fifty years, he declared: “If someone had the motivation to investigate and experiment with all of the kinds of the medicines such as are sold by the Indians in their markets, it would be a thing of great utility and benefit” (quoted on p. 114). Thus, as Norton writes, Monardes’ “entry on tobacco exemplified the syncretism that resulted from the encounter between two long-autonomous traditions” (115), i.e., European humanism and native medical lore.

Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures is far too rich a book to adequately summarize within the confines of a short review. The examples culled above represent only a small fraction of the many moments in this book when one pauses to say, “I didn’t know that” and “I didn’t knowthat” (such as the fascinating fact that the Portuguese Marranos, whose religion was an unstable mixture of Catholicism and Judaism, were central figures in the importation of tobacco [212-23]). The book also has the added virtue of being as lucid as it is learned.

Yet, ironically, Norton’s encyclopedic knowledge of her subject leads me to my one semi-criticism of this book: its exclusive focus on Spain and the Aztecs. I can’t help but wonder if the same complex mélange of cultures also occurred when Europeans collided with native cultures and civilizations less urban, less developed, than the Aztecs, such as the native tribes in New England. The reception of tobacco in England, for example, seems to have followed a different course even as tobacco consumption rocketed. King James VI/I, for example, tried to dissuade his subjects from consuming tobacco by asking them to “consider what honor or policy can move us to imitate the barbarous and beastly manners of the wild, godless and slavish Indians” (A Counterblaste to Tobacco, 1604). Also, Norton notes that in Spain, “women, of the highest as well as the lowest social classes, were habitual consumers” of tobacco (161). Yet in early modern England, smoking constituted a male privilege, forbidden to women. Hence the frontispiece for Dekker and Middleton’s wonderful play, The Roaring Girl (1611) about a cross-dressing heroine named Moll who upends all social customs, shows her with a pipe in her mouth. Given how much Norton has given us, it might seem captious to ask for more, but an acknowledgement of European diversity of reception, even in a note, would have been nice. I also can’t help but wonder how the Aztec uses of tobacco and chocolate came into being. Who had the brilliant idea of stuffing the dried leaves into a tube, setting them on fire, and inhaling the smoke? And how did chocolate drinks come to be “frothy”? And why?

More seriously, no discussion of tobacco today takes place without explicitly acknowledging its addictiveness and terrible cost in disease and death, but Norton argues that nicotine does not account for tobacco’s phenomenal popularity in Europe. She dismisses the “Big Fix” theory of tobacco’s spread. She may be right. Yet nicotine’s insidious qualities manifested themselves in seventeenth-century Spain. A Cordoban apothecary confessed that “friends of mine (not once but many times) have diligently renounced [tobacco], thrown out their snuff boxes with the intention of never returning to it; but it has such a hold on their hearts, that later they return, seeking its forgiveness” (238). Even more chilling is the story of how the Dominican friar, Tomás Ramón, thought he had persuaded some “learned men” to quit, but they quickly returned to their habit: “when [Ramón] asked them why, they responded that they could not help it” (238).

Experiencing the Many Panics of 1837

Common-place asks Jessica Lepler, author of the 2013 book The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis, about the historical literature on panics, the experience of the panic for ordinary Americans, and the experience of writing about one financial crisis in the midst of another.

The argument of  The Many Panics of 1837 starts with the premise that historians have gotten the chronology wrong. What had they missed, and how does The Many Panics correct the problem?

Historians are especially attuned to the fact that time only moves in one direction. If time machines worked, our discipline would not. Faith in chronology allows us to interpret evidence and make arguments about change over time. We have to know when something happened in order to make arguments about why something happened.

With a year in its name, the timing of the Panic of 1837 sounds like it ought to be obvious. When I began my research, I discovered that both the chronology of the Panic of 1837 and what was meant by this name were inconsistent in the existing literature. In some books, the Panic of 1837 was an economic depression provoked by American politics that began in New York City on May 10, 1837, and lasted approximately seven years. In other books, the Panic of 1837 was a financial crisis that began in the banks of London, reached New York City after New Orleans, and lasted from late 1836 through mid-1837. Moreover, few of these accounts of a panic featured anyone who seemed remotely panicked. So in different accounts, the same event had different causes, started in different places at different times, varied in length by six years, and despite being called a panic lacked any account of actual people panicking. The secondary sources ignored these striking inconsistencies.

The Many Panics of 1837 identifies and corrects these “problem[s]” by documenting the actual experience of panic in New York, New Orleans, and London in 1837. It argues that panic was plural. Individuals panicked differently. Communities dealt with their own independent yet interrelated local crises. And, although the United States of America and Great Britain shared transnational trade, they did not share the same national political economies. Moreover, the singular Panic of 1837, the event that had been so inconsistently defined by the secondary sources, was invented during the many panics of 1837 as panicked people transferred blame from their own behavior to systems larger than any individual. Some blamed the American political system; others blamed the transnational financial system. Both of these stories were specifically crafted to erase the individual experience of panic from the history of the Panic of 1837. Thus, the people of 1837 told multiple competing accounts of a panic-less Panic of 1837. These stories, in turn, shaped the way later scholars understood the history of this event and the concept of the business cycle.

So, it turns out that historians’ inconsistent chronology had not actually been “wrong”; it was incomplete. The chronological inconsistencies are only a “problem” if we expect the Panic of 1837 to be a singular event. If we accept, as The Many Panics argues, that the panic was plural from the very beginning, we gain a window not only into many previously undocumented experiences of financial crisis but also into the writing of history.

In many ways, the story of the Panic of 1837 seems to have been as much about information imbalances — both because of time lags and secrecy — as it was about economics or policy. Yet the financiers in New York, New Orleans, and London all worked in an environment where the same was true in flush times. What went wrong in 1837 with respect to communication?

Previous histories of the Panic of 1837 have focused on the political or macroeconomic causes of this event. By recognizing the plurality of not only the experience of panic but also of the event itself, The Many Panics was liberated from the quest for a single cause. Instead of why, the book answers the question how. How did the financial system work? How did panic spread? How did people panic? How did many panics become one Panic of 1837? It turns out that the answers to all four of these interrelated questions are based on information and interpretation.

Sometimes historians use negative evidence to demonstrate the existence of something otherwise invisible in the sources. Social historians, especially scholars of sexuality, look to the passing of laws to prevent certain socially taboo behaviors to prove that those otherwise undocumented behaviors existed. Similarly, financial crises offer the historian a special opportunity to render visible the ordinarily hidden world of financial communication. Merchants and bankers did not spend their time documenting and describing the system that enabled enormous transatlantic trade to occur in the 1820s and 1830s; they were too busy running it. But when confidence faltered and credit markets crashed in the spring of 1837, these same people wrote texts in private letters and public newspapers hoping to figure out what went wrong. In doing so, they cast a visibility charm on the structures of financial communication. Suddenly, the historian could see how the system operated when everything went right. By studying communication during a financial crisis, The Many Panics enables us to understand how, in more ordinary times, the financial system relied upon information and interpretation.

The Panic of 1837 is a particularly good subject for studying the flow of financial information because it happened after the United States became the globe’s leading supplier of the key raw material of the industrial revolution (cotton) but before the invention of electricity-based communication technology. It was a far-reaching paper-based panic, and as such it produced voluminous evidence that would be nearly impossible to find for later panics. This evidence demonstrates that one reason why the experience of panic in 1837 was long and plural was because of extraordinary winds that kept vital transatlantic news at sea. Londoners were desperate for news from the United States, and Americans acted in ignorance of British policy changes. Within the United States, New Yorkers were closer than New Orleanians to both England and Washington, D.C.; they used this geographic advantage to save their city’s reputation. Another reason for the panic’s plurality was the imprecision of the language used to describe local events. Different interpreters came to different conclusions about similar phenomena. Intense partisanship and nationalism colored the news; correspondents manipulated news for their own profits. Even a merchant’s own well-maintained ledger could not evaluate all the circulating goods and paper it documented because prices were in a state of flux. Like the old joke, the news in the spring of 1837 was bad and there was not enough of it. The uncertainty proved overwhelming. Incomplete and inaccurate information precipitated and, to some extent, constituted panic.

The paper trail from 1837 enables the historian to see the problems of information imbalances and interpretation, but paper did not catch every communication that spread panic. The whispers that instigated financial crisis evaporated nearly instantaneously after they were spoken. Nevertheless, we can find their evidentiary ghosts: the gossip of bank tellers caught by investigative committees, the rumors spread over gin slings in smoky barrooms echoed in newspaper articles, and the vituperative fights of bank directors whose minute books recorded the existence but not the substance of debates. From these traces of oral communications long past in combination with the paper trail, we can imagine how panics spread from person to person and from place to place. The Many Panics figures out what went wrong in 1837 and in the process helps us understand the instrumental role of cultural factors in the financial system in both good and bad times.

The story you tell in The Many Panics largely focuses on the action in major political and economic centers, though you move away from a traditional structure that overemphasizes the role of political elites. Can you say a bit more about how the events of 1837 looked from the vantage point of ordinary Americans?

Although Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, Nicholas Biddle, and the usual cast of Jacksonian and Victorian elites play a part in The Many Panics, the majority of the book is about less well-known characters: rioting workers, scheming speculators, anxious overseers, absconding debtors, failing British bankers, exhorting ministers, partisan editors, apologist textbook authors, repossessed slaves, doubt-ridden abolitionists, and even a very tired pigeon. Different people experienced panic differently, and perhaps even more importantly, one ordinary person’s panic could influence the panics of many other people.

Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee provides a compelling example. While such classic writers of the American Renaissance as Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville struggled to find publishers and readers during the spring of 1837, Lee found a ready audience for her bestselling novel, Three Experiments of Living: Living Within the Means, Living Up To the Means, Living Beyond the Means. Lee’s book garnered praise from literary critics in a wide range of journals. Ralph Waldo Emerson noted in his diary that 20,000 copies of the novel had been sold in its first three months. With a novel that served as a “how to” manual on surviving or better yet avoiding financial catastrophe, Lee hit upon a recipe for profit amidst panic. Male imitators produced numerous spin-offs and were publicly accused of “sucking sustenance through their goose quills.” Lee triumphed as a panic profiteer because her message that individuals could control their financial destinies empowered her readers.

Thomas Fidoe Ormes had the opposite experience; the powerful messages he conveyed led to the spread of uncertainty and personal disaster. As a junior clerk at the Bank of England (BOE), Ormes knew that the information he and his colleagues in the Bill Office handled was incredibly valuable. By processing the paper financial instruments that enabled Anglo-American trade, the BOE’s clerks had their hands on the pulse of global trade. The clerks were forbidden from discussing the confidential details of their jobs, but as the credit crisis began, the potential failure of a large mercantile house proved too shocking for silence. A grizzled senior clerk, who had nearly gone blind in his service to the bank, whispered rumors that he had heard in a tavern to a nearly deaf colleague. Eventually, the rumors reached Ormes. On a trip to a toilet in a public portion of the BOE, Ormes (whom I call the leaky clerk) spread the office gossip “in confidence” to a stockbroker friend. Newspapers published the rumor; confidence in the credit system wavered. The BOE launched a full investigation of the leak, and despite the fact that some truth supported the rumors, punished all the clerks involved. No one paid a harsher penalty than Ormes, who suffered the dishonorable loss of the salaried job that had supported four generations of his family. His severe punishment reveals the power this ordinary man wielded in spreading panic.

Other people felt entirely powerless in the face of panic. For Théodore Nicolet, a Swiss-born New Orleanian merchant, panic was overwhelming. Nicolet had amassed both prestige and a fortune by 1837. A man with nearly seventy shirts and sixty handkerchiefs of imported silks, he was an elegant bachelor who lived in a mahogany world. His bed, washstand, armoire, armchairs, shelves, safe, sofa, chairs, dining table, sideboards, desk, and even his commode were composed of the expensive wood. He served as a consul for his native nation and helped found the first Francophone Evangelical Church in New Orleans. But as the crisis began, he quickly descended into a mire of debt and fear. In the spring of 1837, he begged his creditors for time. His mortgaged slaves were repossessed. Rumors spread that he was insolvent. He decided to escape the calumny of financial dishonor. On the morning of May 3, 1837, the forty-six year old man walked to a friend’s house beyond the city limits and “blew his brains out.” The uncertainties of failure trumped Nicolet’s concerns about eternal damnation. People immediately blamed Nicolet’s death on the crisis. One New Orleanian newspaper editor asked, “When will this fatal madness end? Is there no honorable method of regulating a man’s affairs but by abandoning them?” Newspapers around the nation reprinted news of Nicolet’s death, prompting concerns about an epidemic of panic-induced suicides. For years after his death, Nicolet’s survivors struggled to sort out the financial fallout that he “abandon[ed].” Death might end one person’s panic, but it spread financial uncertainty.

Lee, Ormes, and Nicolet did not have the political or financial power of Jackson, Van Buren, or Biddle, but these ordinary people did have power in the midst of panic. These examples show that ordinary people should not just be interesting because they saw panic from a variety of vantage points; they should be historically essential, because by allaying and spreading panic, they contributed directly to the events of 1837.

For a historical monograph, The Many Panics of 1837 has a particularly strong resonance with the present, which you note in your conclusion. Did the contemporary recession of the last six years directly shape your argument? And how do you hope that people might use your arguments and research in discussing contemporary economic issues?

The central argument of The Many Panics was the product of historicizing the difference between the financial crisis in 2008 and that of 1837. In 2003, when I first began researching the Panic of 1837, I had no idea that I was living in the biggest boom of my lifetime. By the time I defended my dissertation in mid-2007, I could see the bust on the horizon. The housing market had reached its peak and subprime loans were starting to face serious scrutiny. As classes started during my first semester at the University of New Hampshire in the fall term of 2008, panic set in: credit markets threatened to freeze, financial institutions teetered on the edge of failure, and the stock market plunged. I felt like I was watching my dissertation unfold in real time and was terrified by the similarities. I knew that the aftermath of the panic in 1837 was years of hard times; I hoped that history would not repeat itself.

My hopes were founded on my historical training. As much as the Panic of 2008 seemed similar to the Panic of 1837, I knew that much was different between panic in the mid-nineteenth century and panic in the twenty-first century. Jacksonian Americans and Victorian Britons lived under systems of political economy that would seem foreign today. While twenty-first century Americans were worried about the effects of the crisis on the value of the dollar, nineteenth-century Americans dealt in thousands of different denominations of state-chartered bank notes. There was no EU, World Bank, FDIC, or Federal Reserve; panicked people could neither invest in mutual fund retirement accounts nor count on unemployment insurance. The nearly 200 years between the subject of my dissertation and my own life saw the development of innovations and institutions that were responses to intervening panics. Despite recent innovations that increased ordinary people’s involvement in and exposure to global financial markets, structural responses to past crises protected the present generation from many of the ravages of financial crisis faced in 1837.

As I allayed my own concerns by thinking historically, I began to rethink the assumptions I had made about what it meant to panic in 1837. While bad news played important and underappreciated roles in both crises, the content of that information, and even more importantly, how panicked people interpreted the news, changed dramatically. Nineteenth-century panicked people had not yet developed and adopted the ideas of “capitalism” or “the economy.” They could not possibly have looked for the same indicators as today’s market analysts. I realized that just as economic and financial institutions changed over time, the intellectual and cultural systems for making sense of financial crisis had changed too.

In my dissertation, I had traced the flow of panic; my book would have to figure out what it actually meant to panic in 1837. In January 2009, as I began a post-doctoral fellowship year at the American Antiquarian Society, I made the radical decision to isolate myself from the ideas that explained panic in the twenty-first century and to learn to see financial crisis through the intellectual context of 1837. Instead of my morning newspaper, I read thousands of print sources from 1837 to try to figure out the cultural tools with which my historical subjects would have interpreted bad news. Ultimately, I discovered that panicked people suffered not only from financial uncertainty (not knowing whether they would fail) but also from economic uncertainty (not knowing what caused their failure). The experience of panic changed the way panicked people understood their economic lives. And, even more relevant for our own times, these changes in economic thinking had ramifications that continue to affect the way we understand financial crises in the twenty-first century.

I hope that The Many Panics will revise our understanding of the Panic of 1837, but even more importantly, I hope that this case study of the role of culture in a financial crisis will teach us that there is never one simple story of panic. We get to shape the stories and thus the meanings of our panics.

Another major intervention of the present into your work was Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans, including its historical archives. From working in New Orleans during that period, how did that experience shape The Many Panics, and looking back almost ten years later, how are the archives you worked with recovering?

My summer 2005 research trip was a tour of early twenty-first century disasters. In New York City, I stayed with friends who lived near Battery Park, a few blocks from Ground Zero. After two months in New York, I arrived in London on the morning that the copycat Tube bombers were caught. And later that same summer, as I sat in a British Library reading room, I learned that the levees in New Orleans had been breached. Most of my worldly possessions, including all of my research for this book, were housed in that city in an apartment a few blocks from the Mississippi River. As I waited to be allowed to return home, I turned to writing as a source of relief. I immersed myself in the primary sources that I had gathered during the summer of 2005 and escaped into the Panic of 1837. When I finally made it back to New Orleans, I discovered that my apartment was in good shape, but the lowest levels of the Tulane University library had been flooded. The portion of the collection affected by the flood included the manuscript records of the Citizens’ Bank of Louisiana, the key New Orleanian bank in The Many Panics.

Able to transport only my most cherished belongings (which, of course, included my research), I moved out of New Orleans in the fall of 2005. As I was packing, I learned that I had won the inaugural Dianne Woest Fellowship from the Historic New Orleans Collection [THNOC]. When I returned as a fellow in the spring of 2006, the exquisite THNOC reading room, located in the French Quarter, was up and running with no perceivable damage. Although I could not access the Citizens’ Bank records, which had been freeze-dried and shipped to preservation specialists in Texas, I was able to continue my research in the bright and airy reading room of Tulane’s Special Collections. But as I drove to the campus of the University of New Orleans [UNO] near Lake Pontchatrain (an especially hard-hit area), the flood’s wrath was visible in the gutted and abandoned houses, dead lawns, and barely drivable roadways. The UNO library building, which houses the manuscript Louisiana Supreme Court papers, did not have running water, but it did preserve all of its collections. On that research trip, I did not revisit the City Archives at the New Orleans Public Library or the Notarial Archives, but I believe that these valuable collections survived as well. The city of New Orleans may have been devastated by Katrina and its aftermath, but its historical records, with a few unfortunate exceptions, were remarkably well preserved.

Over the years, I have occasionally checked up on the progress of the preservation of the Citizens’ Bank records. Some papers have returned but not all of the ink is legible. Nearly a decade later, as far as I know, the marbled minute books of the Citizens’ Bank of Louisiana that recorded the mortgages collateralized with enslaved human property, the narrow votes on regulating the city’s paper money supply, and the secret meetings designed to stave off panic remain frozen in time and in Texas.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.1 (Fall, 2014).

Jessica Lepler is an associate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire. Her book The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (2013) was a co-winner of the 2013 James Broussard Best First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and a finalist for the 2013 Berkshire Conference Prize. She is currently working on a book project on the intersection between collections law and commercial expansionism in the early American republic.

Something is going on in the world of contemporary poetry—history is flooding in. Poets are pursuing history and its dilemmas head-on; they are using primary source material to flesh out social, political, and lyric imaginaries; they are ransacking the tools of historiography to provision all manner of aesthetic expeditions. Within the last ten years or so, such creative inclinations have quietly evolved into a major, and pervasive, mode of literary production. History lovers, take note: these poets’ research work is thorough and driven, their archive instincts are free-range, even feral, and their use of historical source runs from the beautiful to the bizarre.

Why are so many twenty-first-century poets weaving American history into their process and product? What are the effects of this literary-historical groundswell? The answers are forthcoming, issue by issue, here in Common-place. Each edition of this new column will present the work of a poet whose creative process is deeply engaged with historical research. We will read their poems. And the poets will also give us something new, something the literary world hasn’t asked for yet, a Statement of Poetic Research—poets’ own descriptions of history’s influences on their art, how they approach (and are altered by) research, and the new ways they hope their work brings history to readers.

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The Common-place Web Library reviews and lists online resources and Websites likely to be of interest to our viewers. Each quarterly issue will feature one or more brief site reviews. The library itself will be an ongoing enterprise with regular new additions and amendments. So we encourage you to check it frequently. At the moment, the library is small, but with your help we expect it to grow rapidly. If you have suggestions for the Web Library, or for site reviews, please forward them to the Administrative Editor.

http://www.emilydickinson.org/

In the technological fervor of the 1990s, the online archive was the primary site for early digital humanities work, the next stage for librarians and archivists, and the unfamiliar to traditional analog material-driven scholars. According to some, digitization has reignited the canon wars, with the most “prestigious” (sometimes misread as “deserving”) authors being fitted for online outfits. It was in this period that the canon of digital preservation projects began forming, with some of the earliest being the William Blake Archive housed at UNC-Chapel Hill, Stephen Railton’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture (hosted at the University of Virginia) and the Walt Whitman Archive, currently led and edited by Ed Folsom (University of Iowa) and Kenneth Price (University of Nebraska). The Web became a new frontier for many scholars, extending the presence of the now seemingly ubiquitous digital humanities, and providing alternate methods to facilitate research for academics still focused on the text. With this phenomenon came new discussions of textual scholarship and editing practices, an increasing awareness of how encoding was an act of interpretation, and the theorization of the material as it moved from analog to a digital format.

Amidst these discussions was the Dickinson Electronic Archives, a repository for Dickinson’s writings and a site for born-digital scholarship directed by Martha Nell Smith at the University of Maryland. The DEA holds encoded images of the manuscripts or transcriptions of Dickinson’s writings, including correspondences, and the writings of family members like Susan Dickinson (Emily’s sister-in-law). In addition, the DEA has produced critical exhibitions on various topics in Dickinson scholarship. Smith has long been a voice in the digital humanities community, presiding over the DEA since its inception amid the archive-mania of the 1990s, as well as advocating for digital work as being just as research-driven and rigorous as traditional literary scholarship. This is represented by some of the earlier exhibitions from the site, like the born-digital examinations of Emily Dickinson’s correspondence which, alongside representations of the manuscripts, seeks to demonstrate how Dickinson’s writing, no matter the medium, seemed to come under the influence of her poetic abilities. The DEA was not just a place for the hosting of manuscript images and transcriptions, but also served as an active producer of scholarship and a resource for researchers to find new arguments, theses, as well as teaching tools for Dickinson studies. And impressively, the site has not ceased updating and producing.

It is noteworthy when an online archive goes against what seems to be the expectation of abandonment in the digital sphere and continues to reinvent itself in the face of newer technologies, methods, and ideas. The DEA has been such an example, with its recent redesign, a complete facelift for the archive, accompanied by a feature of a new daguerreotype thought to be of Emily Dickinson. A new image of the poet seems the perfect fit as an introduction to a new look for the archive, but the updated version of the DEA represents more than a simple aesthetic makeover. The new DEA maintains Smith’s consciousness of the evolution that scholarship undergoes online, presenting two new exhibitions at the time of this review’s composition: “1859 Daguerreotype: Is This Emily Dickinson?” and “Ravished Slates: A Scholarly Exploration of Material Evidence,” each of which make use of the possibilities of digital technology, as one would expect of an electronic archive, with photographic slide shows, external links, and even commentary and meditation on the exploration (and contextualization) of physical archives.

But more than just reiterating the practices that Smith extolled in the previous version of the DEA, the new archive features more forward-thinking methods of literary scholarship by attempting to create an active community. The discussion forum section of the DEA was meant to facilitate and “advance the conversation” about the archive’s exhibitions, especially the daguerreotype. There is more focus on collaboration in this incarnation of the archive, with an open invitation for essays and responses from the site’s patrons, both scholarly and even “more personal and reflective,” a seeming invitation to undergraduate or classroom involvement with the site. The DEA is interested in connecting the Dickinson fans of the world; rather than being a one-way source of information for the reader, the inclusion of a space for discussion and collaboration allows for the DEA to become a place where knowledge and critical investigation can be formed in a more overt way. This view of the site is in line with Smith’s previous arguments for the viability of digital work as real scholarship, but also for centering the work of humanists on the dialogues they form around particular ideas, and transposing that into a visible online medium.

At this point, however, the discussion has not been as active as it could be. The forum for the “Ravished Slates” exhibition saw no activity other than an introductory post by Smith, though the discussion board for the daguerreotype saw a decent amount of activity, with forty-nine posts (although the last one was made on December 26, 2012). The discussion here was a collection of individuals engaged in analyzing the image, including the owner (“Sam Carlo”) of the daguerreotype, and they compared historical notes, suggested methods for inspecting the photograph, and theorized about the popular perception of Dickinson as the somber teenage girl whose portrait is reprinted in anthologies versus this more recently discovered image and its more mature subject. The thread was productive and lively because the archive enables this sort of scholarly discussion, but it would have benefitted from more voices and a longer lifespan to bring one of the largest features of the new DEA to life. With increased visibility, and perhaps more progress on the research of the new daguerreotype, this part of the site could flourish and become what it seems intended to be.

The new DEA is conscious that the old should not totally replace the new, but rather enhance and complicate it. Smith, after all, is a textual scholar and editor, aware of the qualities of the previous version of the DEA she left behind when upgrading to the new version. So that the history of the site is not forgotten, the 1994-2012 edition of the DEA is still viewable and easily found via the newer interface, giving the audience the chance to see where the newer format for the site comes from and the changes it has made, visually but especially content-wise. The content of the older site remains relegated to that section, even the writings of Dickinson, though they will also find a home in new online archives created by Harvard and Amherst College (borrowing from Smith’s XML encoding in the DEA). However, it is uncertain whether those will be migrated and become primary features of the new site, or if readers will need to find them by trekking through the older interface.

With a radical update like the DEA’s, we can see how the scholars engaged with this sort of work continue to think about their approach to digital scholarship. There is the temptation to treat online archives like monograph projects: research, write, publish, and leave behind, and the lack of funding for the continuous staff, server, and upkeep can sometimes dictate this decision. But online archives and other such projects require constant attention to remain in the forefront of the humanities’ discourse. This is what the DEA attempts to do by implementing, with its new exhibitions, a new ideology behind the way research in the twenty-first century is conducted. As the 1859 daguerreotype shows, information does not remain static, and neither should that which is responsible for holding it. Not only is the archive to be perused and drawn from, but it should invite contribution and discussion if it is to serve researchers’ needs.

Nigel Lepianka is a graduate student in English at Texas A&M University, where he works on American literature, textual criticism, and digital humanities.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lawhome.html

In recent years, scholars have increasingly strived to digitize the rich documentary history of the development of the United States. Several Websites, including Yale University Law School’s impressive Avalon Project, have made great strides in making available to the public many of the political tracts that shaped America’s founding and the creation of the national government. Few, however, match the depth and breadth of the Library of Congress’s A Century of Lawmaking For a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates 1774-1875. Part of the library’s National Digital Library Program, this database aims to “offer broad public access to a wide range of historical documents as a contribution to education and lifelong learning.” The expansion of online historical content is one component of the library’s mission to “sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations.” Living up to these goals, the database truly offers something for all interested parties.

Four sections of documents organize the Website: the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, Statutes and Documents, Journals of Congress, and the Debates of Congress. Each section is then divided into four subsections, offering further levels of organization which allow scholars to explore in-depth indexes as well as search each area by year. Subsections include the Letters of Delegates to Congress, the Journals of the Continental Congress, the Annals of Congress, and the Statutes at Large, to name but a few. A general search allows users to search the entire Website for information on various topics. A search of “slavery” returned 2,931 items, while the “Articles of Confederation” returned 819 items. For those scholars with more specific parameters, text searches can be qualified by the year, chamber, and session of Congress, as well as limited to any of the sixteen subsections.

Because many of the documents on the Website are transcripts, scholars have the ability to full-text search seemingly thousands of documents in a single, straightforward database, a feature sure to entice serious researchers examining the development of the American government. Browsing the seemingly countless full-text searchable documents, scholars can instantly access over 100 pieces of correspondence between John Adams and James Warren during the nascent stages of the American Revolution. Those interested in the debates surrounding the purchase and exploration of Louisiana will find many relevant items contained within the Annals of Congress as well as in the Senate and House Journals. Although some of these subsections can only be index-searched, the ease of navigation throughout the Website and the abundance of full-text searchable documents more than compensates for this minor drawback.

While the surfeit of searchable texts will undoubtedly attract researchers of various disciplines, the Website also caters to students, teachers, and interested citizens alike, providing links to summaries of major events shaping America’s political development. These links, combining brief summaries with apposite documentation, include special presentations on the making of the U.S. Constitution, a timeline of American history as seen in Congressional documents (1774-1873), Indian land cessions to the United States with included maps (1784-1894), and a journal of the Congress of the Confederate States of America (1861-1865), among other useful resources. The timelines may prove especially helpful for educators seeking primary sources to supplement their lectures, as the special presentations point to volumes on the site in which the issues at stake in Congress come vividly to life. Novice researchers will also appreciate the “Citation Guide” and “Using the Collection” links as they begin their research.

In addition to providing thousands of digitized documents for public use, another wonderful feature of the Website is a link to nearly forty additional resources. The “Related Resources on the Internet” link lists pertinent American Memory historical collections provided by the Library of Congress as well as links to transcriptions of the Federalist Papers, the U.S. Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps most helpful are the external Websites listed, including the aforementioned Avalon Project as well as several databases and research guides to aid even the most veteran historian. Finally, a link to the Library of Congress’s “Learning Page” transports teachers to a site devoted to essential information for professional development. Most useful is a section on classroom materials, supplying teachers with an abundance of primary source sets, lesson plans, presentations, and activities to facilitate historical learning in the classroom.

Gone are the days of poring over microfilm for weeks to find data relevant to particular research interests. With this sleek Website, a few pointed searches can unveil hundreds of pertinent published documents for scholars interested in various topics related to early American history. Produced by the collaborative effort of numerous public and private institutions to provide “a digital record of American history and creativity,” this portion of the American Memory project will undoubtedly inspire creativity among scholars for years to come.

Curtis Urban is a PhD student in early American history at the University of Notre Dame.

http://bdhp.moravian.edu/home/home.html

The Bethlehem Digital History Project (BDHP) is a model of scholarly and institutional collaboration. With its vast online repository of manuscripts and images, it makes an important contribution to the study of Moravians in early American history. While it focuses on the settlement in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 1741-1844, the project tells a larger story about the cultural transformations that took place from the colonial period to the mid-nineteenth century. Boasting an impressive list of consultants and contributors, the site has something to offer scholars, teachers, and students.

On its front page, the BDHP presents eight categories of source materials, including essays, documents, and images. The “Community Records,” “Education,” and “Personal Papers” categories are the strongest, with a generous sampling of sources. Digitized manuscripts are well organized, and in many cases, photos of the original documents allow closer examination. The site offers German transcriptions and English translations for much of the material. A number of documents in a section entitled the “Scholars Corner” are in German script only.

There are challenges involved in organizing so much material into a compact organizational scheme on a Website. Though site navigation is mostly clear, there are some user-interface (UI) issues as one goes deeper into sections. When viewing a single manuscript, for example, the visitor encounters no markers providing orientation with respect to the rest of the site. Implementing breadcrumbs at the top of the page would help in this regard. Drop-down menus also might provide greater ease when jumping from one sub-section to another. The “Site Index” page could serve as a tool for navigating through the content, but it seems more likely to be a useful reference for conceptualizing the site as a whole. Further complicating user experience, the top-level navigation menu bar alternates randomly between the left and right columns on various pages; there are also different design templates used for no apparent reason on various parts of the Website.

These minor UI quibbles aside, there is enough material here to satisfy the casual visitor and whet the appetite of a more serious researcher. Selections under “Community Records,” for instance, run the gamut from diaries to store inventories to meeting minutes. The choir diaries with brief excerpts give a snapshot of life in early Bethlehem, whereas the communal diaries of 1742-1763 provide a more panoramic sketch. Thanks to the scrupulous record-keeping of clergy, the marriage registers include detailed information about inhabitants’ provenance, relationships, vocational ventures, and death. The result is a striking 150-year biographical history of the people of Bethlehem that traces desertions, migrations, and other sundry details of community life. Even the gap between December 1775 and August 1778, a period of war and tumult, reflects dislocations in the broader American context. These documents also reveal the changes and challenges the Bethlehem Moravians experienced as they moved from a communal economy to a cash economy oriented around individual families.

The Website provides a taste of the abundant repository of sources available at the various Bethlehem archives. Such is the case with the section on education. From austere boarding school rules and startlingly pointed hygiene instructions to documents relating to the Moravian College and Seminary, we glimpse the community’s concern for the care of its children and youth.

The documents are similarly wide-ranging in the “Personal Papers” section. Divided into journals, letters, and memoirs, this part of the site displays excerpts of English translations, with longer German versions also available. The “Memoirs” sub-section contains thirty-four documents with colorful descriptions of the diverse lot of people who made Bethlehem their home. For example, we can read about the life of Irish-born James Burnside, who served at George Whitefield’s Orphan-House in Savannah for a time before landing at Bethlehem as a Moravian convert. Of the thirteen women represented here, Elizabeth Horsfield stands out as someone who could trace her lineage to the Huguenots during the reign of Louis XIV, was baptized in an Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, and made the choice to leave her parents and join the Moravians in June 1775 at the age of twenty-one. One minor complaint is that the memoirs are listed alphabetically by name, which seems a less-than-ideal way to do it. More helpful would have been a chronological ordering, with perhaps birth years printed alongside the names.

Though the scantly populated “Art” and “Music” sections pale in comparison to the abundance of manuscript material elsewhere on the site, these areas still provide a number of pictures well-chosen to furnish the imagination. Some of the images, however, would benefit by increased resolution, as is particularly the case with vivid pictures of drawings and needlework.

In the final analysis, the Bethlehem Digital History Project is a remarkable achievement. Sponsored by the Bethlehem Area Public Library and the Reeves Library of the Moravian College and Theological Seminary, with participants including the Moravian Archives, the Moravian Historical Society, and the Historic Bethlehem Partnership, the BDHP site makes available a treasure trove of information that spans over a century of Moravian community life in Pennsylvania. With Boolean search capability, links to external teaching resources, and a wealth of digitized primary source materials, the site offers visitors much to explore. The ability to obtain a bird’s-eye view of multiple sources for study and comparison, to drill down into particular details and back again, and to make rare primary sources widely available are some of the most compelling advantages of digital history—and the BDHP shines in all these respects.

Peter Choi is a doctoral candidate in American history at the University of Notre Dame, currently working on a dissertation on religion and empire in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world.