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.

click for full list of links

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.

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.

https://www.nyhistory.org/web/africanfreeschool/. Site content developed by Anna Mae Duane and Thomas Thurston. Website developed by Columbia University Digital Knowledge Ventures. Reviewed November 2011 to January 2012.

In recent years, there has been a sharp increase in scholarly studies about the history of childhood. In 2003, for example, the Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society (edited by Paula Fass) was published and included over 400 articles about issues pertaining to the history of children. Moreover, in 2008, the Johns Hopkins University began to publish the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth to share new academic research about the history of children. Examining the history of childhood can be tremendously challenging, however. As leading historian of childhood Peter Stearns has pointed out, children rarely leave written records or speak for themselves.

In an effort to address the challenges of finding primary sources by and about children, a Website hosted by the New-York Historical Society showcases a treasure trove of school records created by black children in nineteenth-century Manhattan. Examination Days: The New York African Free School Collection is a beautifully designed site that provides digitized documents from New York City’s African Free School.

The history of New York’s African Free School is a fascinating one and reveals much about the experiences of African American children. White abolitionists of the New York Manumission Society founded the first African Free School in 1787 to teach children subjects like reading, arithmetic, grammar, geography, and lessons in morality. The white founders of the school had a complex relationship with the black students. Whites claimed that it was their responsibility to rescue the children from lives of primitive culture, vice, and immorality. In spite of this paternalistic bent, however, African American students and their parents embraced education, hoping that schooling would improve the future lives of black children.

Examination Days: The New York African Free School Collection contains four types of material: digitized images of students’ schoolwork, a historical overview of the African Free School, biographical sketches of black leaders who graduated from the school, and two classroom guides. The digitized images come from one of the four volumes of African Free School documents housed at the New-York Historical Society, the Penmanship and Drawing Studies, 1816-26, Volume 4. Choosing to digitize the schoolwork images seems like a wise choice given that they provide insights into the experiences of black children themselves. The Website does not showcase the other three volumes of archival material, which primarily contain meeting minutes, reports of visiting committees, and public addresses. Until now, the four volumes of material from the African Free Schools have only been available for use within the New-York Historical Society manuscript collection.

The Website is simply elegant. Developed by the Columbia University Digital Knowledge Ventures (recently reorganized as the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship), the Website is extremely easy to navigate. Users can view thumbnail images of the primary documents, which have been meticulously prepared and organized. Once a document has been selected, a larger image of the original appears along with a description of the document and a transcript. Moreover, visitors can limit their search to specific genres of schoolwork, including cartography, literary work, or mathematics.

In addition to including these digitized documents, the Website also includes a thorough historical overview of the school, including a timeline of black history in New York City and an interactive map of black New York. This contextual information helps visitors to understand the racial climate in the city when the school opened.

The Website also contains biographical sketches of prominent graduates from the school, including controversial activist Henry Highland Garnet as well as Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge. The site also provides a biography of Charles Andrews, the white schoolmaster who was dismissed for his support of colonization. Through these short biographies, the Website reveals the historical controversies over the goals and curriculum of the African Free School.

The materials on the site are useful for both researchers and secondary teachers. The site contains two classroom guides for use with students in grades 9-12. The lesson plans are extremely thorough and include primary documents from the Website as well as clearly articulated learning activities. The lesson plans could also be used in a variety of courses, including American History, English Literature, or African American History.

Examination Days: The New York African Free School Collection should be considered a model Website for showcasing archival material for both researchers interested in the history of children and K-12 classroom use.

Jane Dabel is an associate professor at California State University, Long Beach, and editor ofThe History Teacher. She is the author of A Respectable Woman: The Public Roles of African American Women in 19th-century New York City, and is currently working on a project about the experiences of black children in antebellum New York.

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.

Few American authors have been as identifiable as Mark Twain, with his all-white suit, push-broom mustache, and unruly hair. A century after his death, many Americans recognize his photograph. However, most people probably do not know that in addition to writing, lecturing, and fashioning himself as a living myth, Twain also dabbled as an inventor of new technologies, eventually securing three patents. In fact, Twain was so keen on science and technology, and especially on the advance of printing technologies, that he sank $300,000 (nearly $7.6 million today) into the Paige typesetting machine, which was to revolutionize the printing industry. But the machine failed to take off, and in 1894 Twain filed for bankruptcy.

It seems fitting, then, that in the most recent chapter of the printing revolution—the Age of Digital Publishing—scholars, documentary editors, and archivists have taken their own innovative approaches to establishing an online presence for all-things-Twain. In the process, two Websites have set a new standard of excellence for digital archives and literary scholarship, essentially taking two important Twain collections out of their academic settings and offering them to the general public. The first, the Mark Twain Project Online (MTPO), is the database portion of the Mark Twain Papers & Project [http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/MTP/], a documentary editing venture started in the 1960s at the University of California-Berkeley; and the second, Mark Twain in His Times, is an interactive online archive and exhibit digitized from a portion of the University of Virginia’s Barrett Collection of American Literature.

The Mark Twain Project Online

According to its “About the Site” section, the Mark Twain Project Onlineis the product of “four decades’ worth of archival research” at Berkeley and elsewhere. In time, the efforts of that research, amounting to seventy volumes ofThe Works and Papers of Mark Twain (thirty volumes have been published), will be completely available online. For now, however, the MTPO is a good beginning, a functional resource that suggests how indispensable users will find the finished product.

From an aesthetic standpoint, the MTPO is very attractive, featuring a user-friendly home page with a two-column interface. Within those columns users will find information about the site and the project, a detailed user guide, and a link (“innovative technology” in the “About This Site” section) to a lengthy “Online Technical Summary” which explains how the creators of theMTPO conceived of and realized the site.

The heart of the MTPO, however, appears in a horizontal navigation bar at the top of the screen. There, users find links to the various databases maintained by the site, including “Letters” (incoming and outgoing), “Writings,” “Images,” and “Biographies” (featuring links to nearly seventy biographical sketches of Twain contemporaries who appear in the databases). While the databases are all searchable (and contain helpful searching tips), many of them also feature a left-hand sidebar that allows the user to browse by decade, material format, names, repository, or availability (since only a small, but growing, percentage of Twain’s papers are available in full-text or as digital scans).

The breadth of material in the MTPO is seemingly limitless, and though the site would be useful for any one with an interest in Twain or in nineteenth-century American literature in general, the potential searching and browsing combinations could overwhelm even the most seasoned researcher. Fortunately, the design of each database is fairly straightforward and, in fact, seems to encourage cross-database queries.

For example, one could use the “Letters” section to browse through Twain’s correspondence from the 1870s (3,622 of the 31,000-plus letters indexed on the site) to discover communications with other writers, and become interested by the literary and cultural views of the critic and novelist William Dean Howells (257 letters in the 1870s, 909 letters total). After reading a few exchanges between Twain and Howells, the user might become eager to learn more about their friendship. Conveniently, the user could visit the “Writings” section to searchThe Autobiography of Mark Twain (a surprise bestseller published by the University of California Press in November 2010) for anecdotes about Howells and other contemporaries.

Mark Twain in His Times

Though no less valuable than theMTPO, the University of Virginia’s Mark Twain in His Timesopts for a more exhibit-oriented approach, aimed at “readers, scholars, students, and teachers.” Curated by Professor Stephen Railton of the UVA Department of English, the site includes images of manuscripts, contemporary reviews and articles, games (such as a “Memory Builder” game Twain designed to help his children remember the English monarchs), and descriptions of Twain collectibles (including dolls, flour, shoes, and cookbooks).

The layout of the home page is clear and easy to navigate, featuring twelve boxes containing links to mini-exhibits on important aspects of Twain’s professional and personal identities. Six of the boxes pertain to Twain’s most famous publications, including Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Three of the boxes address other aspects of Twain’s life and career (one on Twain the Lecturer, one on the marketing of Twain’s books, and another on the divide between Twain’s public and private personas). The remaining three boxes are included for navigational purposes. “About the Site” allows the user to learn more about Mark Twain in His Times and offers tutorials about how to use the site. “Sample This Site” gives the user a broad idea of what types of information are contained in the archives. “Search” links to not just one search function, but five. The user can search: 1) the entire site; 2) Twain’s works; 3) reviews of his books and lectures; 4) obituaries of Twain; or 5) the texts, reviews, and obituaries together.

These features are significantly supplemented and enhanced by hundreds of well-chosen illustrations. Browsing, the user may find articles about the representation of Jim in Huckleberry Finn, supported by the abhorrent cartoons used in the book’s earliest editions. One may find reviews of Twain’s lectures, replete with photographs and audio from his never-ending circuit tour. Or one might come across an article about the marketing of Twain’s books, featuring images of the sales prospectus used by door-to-door salesmen as they pitched Tom Sawyer to readers in Abilene and elsewhere.

In designing easy-to-use, comprehensive digital archives on the life and times of Mark Twain, the teams at Berkeley and UVA have provided users with two definitive online resources for all-things-Twain. One of the main reasons the sites are so valuable is that their creators have shown an implicit understanding of the importance of user accessibility, one of the key elements in maintaining successful digital archives. Thus, it seems safe to say that as long as both projects maintain focus on the user, their digital archives will remain vital resources for the abiding legions of Twain fans.

Ryan A. Ross is an archivist at the Illinois History and Lincoln Collections in the University of Illinois Library at Urbana-Champaign.

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://cdrh.unl.edu/projects/projects_publications.php.

Although the Center for Digital Research hosts nearly thirty different Website projects, this review focuses on two of those particular projects. One is titled “American Indian Treaties Portal,” and the other is titled “Omaha Indian Heritage.” Each provides valuable services to a wide range of parties in terms of content. However, the delivery of that content is not as accessible or effectively organized as one might like.

The “American Indian Treaties Portal” appears to be the creation of Dr. Charles D. Bernholz, the Government Documents librarian at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Clicking on the title link brings the reader to a page that lists eight different topics related to American Indian treaties. The diverse topics range from nine early agreements not included in Charles Kappler’s famous published collection of treaties to a textual analysis of all 375 acknowledged Indian treaties using software known as TokenX. Similarly, the method of presentation includes everything from a brief biography of Charles Kappler to a list of links to articles written primarily by Bernholz about treaties mentioned in federal court cases. In that respect it would first appear that there is something for everyone on this site. Civil War aficionados may very well be intrigued by the link to all of the treaties negotiated by the Confederate States of America with the Indian nations residing west of the Mississippi River in Indian Territory in 1861. For specialists in American Indian history, the in-depth analysis of the variations of the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 is both informative and comprehensive.

Yet even as the breadth of information presented is wonderful to see, the organization of the material needs improvement. In short, it is not clear if there is a specific target audience for the site. More than anything, the collection at the moment appears to reflect the particular interest and focus of Dr. Bernholz more than it does the demands of any specific audience. For example, while a comprehensive textual analysis of all the Indian treaties recorded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is enlightening, the information is presented within a technical discussion that makes most of the important conclusions too difficult to find.

By clicking on the project description found on the “Omaha Indian Heritage” site, the reader sees that it is “an effort to make Omaha artifacts and photographic images more available.” This effort is represented by four categories of materials. First, the online texts section contains links to twenty-one articles written since 1881 on Omaha life and history. The second and third categories are photographs from the 1850s to the 1930s, and artifacts from a host of domestic and international museums and historical societies. The fourth and final section provides links to additional online cultural and historical resources for those interested in learning more about the Omaha people.

As with the Indian treaties portal, the intended audience for this site is not altogether clear. Perhaps the goal is simply to create a platform for further investigation by anyone who wants to learn more about the Omahas. If that is the case, however, more direction is necessary. The photographs, while interesting, have very brief captions that at times identify the individuals in the image and provide nothing more. And while the collection of artifacts is impressive, the descriptors given for each image appear to be only the cataloguing information crafted by each holding institution.

Each of these two Websites contains important information for anyone interested in the respective histories of treaties and the Omaha Indians. Both are easy to navigate, and the overall presentation of the material is straightforward. At the same time, however, the sites themselves do not contain the structure and direction necessary to make all of that information as accessible and valuable as it could be.

John P. Bowes is an associate professor of history at Eastern Kentucky University and the author of Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West (2007).