Douglas Winiarski’s Darkness Falls on the Land of Light is the latest volume in a renewed scholarly interest in the eighteenth-century culture of New England. Winiarski’s  sweeping 632-page synthesis stands in company with recent work by Margaret Ellen Newell, Hilary E. Wyss, and Shelby Balik. Collectively, these studies look to define the contours of New England’s religious identity and particular the effect that the First Great Awakening had on a notoriously quarrelsome and insular colonial region. Notably, this scholarship emphasizes the religious lives of ordinary people over what Christopher Grasso called a “speaking aristocracy”: well-educated Puritan elites who had for several generations controlled much of New England’s religious and civic life. Winiarski’s book is also reflective of a trend to focus on regional identity, rather than treating individual colonies separately.

Winiarski is primarily interested in the impact of the introduction of popular religion on New England. It will come as no surprise to scholars of the Great Awakening that he highlights the role that the 1740 arrival of Grand Itinerant George Whitefield played in unsetting an already religiously fractious New England. The erosion of the Puritan canopy by the turn of the eighteenth century, the waning influence of the clergy in civic matters, the region’s expanding connection with the commercial world, and the growth of individualism combined with a concern by New England clergymen like Benjamin Coleman that piety was on the decline among New Englanders. By 1740, Whitefield was already enmeshed in religious controversies in other regions, including his decade-long feud with Carolina Commissary Alexander Garden and the Old Side/New Side schism among Pennsylvania’s Presbyterians. Indeed, his support for Gilbert Tennent’s incendiary pamphlet “On the Danger of an Unconverted Ministry” was cause for alarm among many New England clergy and came with political costs for some. It is in this theo-political climate where Winiarski’s assessment of New England’s religious culture begins.

Darkness Falls on the Land of Light is a dense volume, drawn on twenty years of research and closely focused on the ways in which evangelism challenged and even dismantled New England’s Congregational establishment. It is subdivided into five chronological sections beginning with an exploration of religious vocabulary in the sixty years leading up to George Whitefield’s first missionary tour (23-130). Parts two through four discuss the ways in which revivalism broke down New England’s strict Congregationalist hierarchy. In particular, Winiarski convincingly documents the ways epistolary networks persuaded participants that they were “witnessing an unprecedented outpouring of the Holy Spirit” (18, 131-364). Part five demonstrates the ways revivalism brought discord to churches, but also to the followers of evangelical leaders (365-506). The religious pluralism that resulted, Winiarski argues, was so profound that it took until the early nineteenth century for New Englanders to come to grips with the change (19).

As scholars of religious history and New England studies are aware, print culture played a pivotal role in New England and had since the seventeenth century. Mark Valeri, Charles E. Clark, and others have ably demonstrated the ways in which print culture shaped public discourse. One of the book’s strengths is the thoroughness of Winiarski’s research of pamphlets, tracts, diaries, and letters. He capably marshals them into a clear synthesis of eighteenth-century religious life and the fundamental shifts New England underwent as the result of the introduction of evangelicalism into the region. His chapters feature rich storytelling drawn from extensive primary resources. For example, the third part of the volume opens with a vignette of Martha Robinson, a young, belligerent woman confronting magistrate Joseph Pitkin and  Timothy Dwight. Robinson, a devout woman who was influenced by George Whitefield’s 1740 visit to Boston, found herself pulled between her “strong convictions” and “dark periods of melancholy punctuated by fleeting glimpses of spiritual light” (210-211). Her experiences with Whitefield, and then Gilbert Tennent and Daniel Rogers in the following months, were illustrative of a young woman struggling to understand her conversion. Robinson was amenable to conversion, but the intensity of her feelings appear to have frightened her.

Winiarski is correct in his assessments of the ways in which the Great Awakening challenged and undermined both traditional New England’s piety and the ways in which it changed the roles of women, African Americans, and Native Americans in its religious life. For instance, he describes the ways that revivalism bolstered opportunities for African Americans to “enhance their social status through church affiliation,” at a time when “owning the covenant declined among whites” (184). Winiarski acknowledges that many New England revivalist preachers were proslavery, including Jonathan Edwards. Yet, in contrast with other Protestant clergy, these preachers embraced catechism of African Americans and Native Americans (185).

One of the book’s weaknesses is its tight focus on New England. Winiarski does devote the fifth part of his book to “travels,” which illustrates the decentralized nature of evangelism within New England (367-506). But, with the exception of a few brief mentions, the book remains fixated on New England. To an extent, Winiarski’s close focus is understandable. Evangelism affected the British dominion unevenly. New England was not the Chesapeake, and the southern colonies had their own local politics. And as thorough as Winiarski is, it would be a tall order for him to include some of the broader Anglo-Atlantic geographical context with the level of detail that permeates his book. Yet, news and gossip involving the Great Awakening spread from region to region. Itinerants like Whitefield sold newspapers. New England’s theo-politics were certainly different from those elsewhere in the empire, and it meant that there were differences between regions in the ways evangelism stressed, angered, and/or excited its occupants. As a result, some readers may find that Darkness Falls would have benefited from a bit more attention to the connections between events in New England and events elsewhere in the British colonies. Nevertheless, this is a fine synthesis of eighteenth-century religious life and one that will be of particular use to scholars who are new to the field.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4.5 (Fall, 2017).

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Jessica Parr teaches at Simmons College, Boston. She specializes in the history of race and religion in the early modern Atlantic world.

Mark J. Miller’s Cast Down: Abjection in America, 1700–1850 plumbs a series of interpersonal metaphors in the writings by and representations of marginalized Americans to argue that suffering is central to the tenor of dissent in the Atlantic world. As Miller argues, suffering licenses and legitimates the speech of those with limited access to print public spheres. Pain, as an entryway to publicity, is a queer agent in this study, empowering through disempowering individuals and providing them with the rationale to court a readership even as they retain positions of abjectness. This paradox—of empowerment through pain, voice through silence, and agency through abjection—runs through Miller’s book, and it allows him to offer subtle and new readings of canonical texts while also deepening our understanding of their historical contexts.

I first wish to applaud the capacious versatility of Cast Down. This versatility is best on display when Miller connects abjection to religious conversion and discourses of race and sexuality. Even more, Miller seeks to locate the operations of certain psychoanalytic categories—such as masochism—before their coherence into the twentieth-century categories we understand today. What I find of immense value to that project is his ability to work between theoretical and historical registers, in one breath distinguishing Leo Bersani’s and Judith Butler’s valorizations of subjection and then showing their bearing, for instance, on the posthumous circulation of Jonathan Edwards’s “Personal Narrative.” Although Miller differentiates his categories of analysis from more contemporary psychoanalytic concepts, he usefully suggests that his study of masochism encourages scholars to ask how “eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts and writers helped create material, intellectual, and emotional conditions of possibility for sexological and psychoanalytic taxonomies?” (7). These “conditions of possibility” suggest a type of Foucauldian genealogy that transposes in richly compelling ways what may seem like anachronistic associations between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries across to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Cast Down thus can serve as a model for future scholarship that combines theoretical incisiveness with historical specificity.

Miller’s book centers on the queerness of suffering, theorizing modes of abjection that destabilize and shift sexual and racial identifications. Following a Christian history that valorizes suffering, and explicitly describing his “book’s movement from Foxe to Freud” (12), Miller shows how “abjection can be used to create, sustain, and contest racial, sexual, and gendered identities” (6). Examining a broad archive of materials, from Jonathan Edwards’s Faithful Narrative (1737) to a printed woodcut of abolitionist icon Jonathan Walker’s branded hand (1845), and from William Apess’s reformist A Son of the Forest (1829) to martyrological figures in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Moby-Dick (1851), this book offers a textured literary history: indeed, the chapter titles themselves (“Conversion, Suffering, and Publicity,” “Indian Abjection in the Public Sphere,” “The Martyrology of White Abolitionists,” and “Masochism, Minstrelsy, and Liberal Revolution”) provocatively announce the book’s contribution to studies of race, religion, and sexuality in early America. As a brief overview of Cast Down’s historical arguments, chapter one explains that the “ambivalent embrace” of converts by an emerging evangelical public set the stage for “the colonial dispossessed”—such as Native Americans, African Americans, and white women—to aspire to public recognition (41); that prepared the way for radical Methodist William Apess to turn “toward the polite literature of the evangelical public,” as analyzed in chapter two (80). Chapter three rethinks the histories of “male access to civic abstraction” by following the representation of embodied white suffering to protest black enslavement—a gesture, Miller argues, that eclipses the very cause of abolition, wherein it permits white men to speak over black men and women (101). Chapter four focuses on “the complexities of masochism for men of color” (119) by reexamining Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, offering a nuanced reading of how it “produce[d] a more complex account of blackness than earlier humanitarian abolitionist writing” (144). Lastly, the epilogue turns to Moby-Dick’s Pip, contextualizing him within Orientalist “child pet” traditions while arguing that Melville uses this figure to highlight “the tension between the moral and the erotic” in abolitionist discourse (156).

As one might anticipate, Miller gravitates toward the strong, overwhelming feelings and desires archived in the likes of Puritan Thomas Shepard’s journal—with “his need to ‘desire Christ and taste Christ and roll myself upon Christ’” (34)—and narrated in “Pip’s extreme emotional response to Ahab’s kindness” (164). These strong feelings connect the various figures across the long temporal span of the study (over a century and a half). Even though Pip’s drive toward self-destruction at the novel’s end indicates his structural (and racialized) abjection, Miller shows how his drastic response also points toward “Melville’s refusal to allow Pip’s self-abasement to redeem Ahab” (161). More pointedly, Miller argues, because suffering shapes one’s access to a public, the public pay-off of that suffering differs according to race and sexuality. Whereas eighteenth-century figures such as Edwards and George Whitefield access redemption through their represented suffering, such is unavailable to Pip, who cannot redeem Ahab, much less himself. Put more directly, abjection has ineluctably shaped racial and sexual politics in the United States. Although this stands as irreproachable historicism, this presentation of black subjection and white agency seems somehow yet unfinished. One wonders if there are alternative readings of these power dynamics latent in Miller’s archive. Miller even approaches that possibility in his introduction, explaining that his “broader framework can help expand the horizons for contemporary queer readings of masochistic sexuality, as eighteenth-century evangelical negotiations of power, publicity, sex, and gender inform embodied and imagined pleasures in both the past and the present” (21), yet the gravitational pull of the more familiar narrative tugs the argument away from this prospect.

There is much to praise in Cast Down, in terms both of argument and method, and so to conclude I would like to gesture to one of Miller’s most prominent interventions in the fields of religion and secular studies. As noted above, Cast Down illuminates the centrality of religious discourse in constituting racial and sexual difference by reclaiming the generative possibilities of abjection. Examining what he calls “scenes of abjection” (12), a nod to Saidiya Hartman, Miller shows how religious discourse—and its representations—imbued suffering with specific meanings that reverberated with racialized implications in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To date, many books and articles have approached the so-called public spheres of early America under the guise of Habermas’s declension narrative (the fall from a disinterestedly republican eighteenth century to a compromised liberal nineteenth century). Miller’s turn to “feminist anthropological and psychoanalytic criticism” (6) to retell that story is refreshing. Thinking with Hortense Spillers’s “vestibulary publicity” (17) as a counterpoint to Habermas’s rational public sphere allows him to show how “embodied differences”—produced through structural inequities “in health, safety, labor, speech, [and] writing”—always already foreground access to publicness. Miller emphasizes how the Habermasian conception of the public sphere relies on the abjection of certain bodies that bear the marks of their exclusion. Miller imagines, instead, how “the vestibulary public reveals the trace of those most marked by abjection, as well as the structuring principles of abjection—of inclusion and exclusion—that underlie all similar structures” (18). In this way, Miller offers a vocabulary for understanding how abjection and exclusion constitute our dominant understandings of the public sphere. The surprising discoveries gained as Miller moves away from a static notion of the public sphere and toward its “vestibulary” recesses provide compelling possibilities for rethinking the sexual, racial, and religious politics of early America. Cast Down not only reads well-known narratives and novels in smart and nuanced ways but also creates an opening—we might say it casts down a foundation—through which to ask new questions about the culture and history of early and nineteenth-century America.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4.5 (Fall, 2017).

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Ben Bascom is an assistant professor of English at Ball State University, where he teaches early and nineteenth-century American literature and queer studies.

I sat the early night under watchful care of guardswomen—Lilly (who wants to be Dawn), her small girl Mary (who will become Iona) and Eve (who will stay Eve in this life, one-eye a weary cloud and one on my unveiled head)—all huddled in our dirt shed, waiting to be discovered. The night cut from both ends gave us little time for breathing, less for tracing the route in my hair. They use wool card, water and seed oil to fashion a plat. Plotting the straight and winding way, a comb made from bits of bone burns my scalp. Eve sees the route, sometimes with her good eye closed, and I was born brave—surly and wry white folks say, meaning, I must be watched for all my wandering into the wrong row, the lash, anywhere almost a country, a reckoning of its own. I am almost born a bird, say these women who saw me landed here, almost a comet—wild-eyed, strands streaked with gray, face ageless. I leave tonight with all the makings of an unknown journey. I run for a doorway, river, hearth, cave with a ladder. If I am caught, what body will return? My crown, they’ll loose me of it. If I am dragged back, they’ll burn lie into my skin. In heaven, I’ll have my body. Wade past what freedom they know. This furrow of want and the root in my hair—the patience of the wild—guiding me. The guards make me repeat what comes before the map: trace black moss along swamp’s edge, find the stone mile post at the base of the water where dying trees bend and lean. Sabbath Eve. Nothing on the path but stands of angels, also hiding, before the deep tract of living. Scarf perfectly black as skin and thin to keep the map from unraveling. Years from now, remembering this, it will seem like a dream—brief sleep in the hollow of a tree, my palm: a lover reading my hair. I am all creation: bark and mud and silver, the matter surrounding stars, undershine and crown, fire-fly wing and inlet, the dark in God’s mouth, silent altar, prayer flesh.

 

 

 

Lost Friends.

NOTE. –We receive many letters asking about
lost friends. All such letters will be published in
this column from the end of the Civil War until
those in need stop looking and, in such a case, in
perpetuity. We make no charge for publishing
these letters from subscribers to the Southeastern
Herald. All others enclose fifty cents to pay for
publishing. Pastors will please read the requests
published below from their pulpits, and report any
case where friends are brought together by means
of letters.

         ___________________________

Dear Editor: I wish to inquire for the women
in me, in the interest of my mother, father,
aunts, uncles and a great many cousins.—I want
to find my people. They were carried from us
when I was less than thought of. In their
dreams, they called me Seborn or Glory but
now I am called Still Becoming. My parents’
names are Here, Holding. Uncles names are
Sprightly, Long Gone, Whisper and Roadbed;
Aunts Hunger, Childfree, Childmany, Want
and Wanting. My cousins are like blades
of grass or kudzu and can barely be chased or
named. Some were here, some are dead.
Before the war, these women belonged to
Masters most of us have swallowed but each
eve return as odd growths under the skin. My
mother’s mother and father’s grandmother’s
grandmother were barely living in Petersburg,
Va.  There were within miles of each other
and, I fear, did not know blood was nearby.
We heard tell before then one was bought by a
family named Gee or Blackburn, the other by
some called Hyman or Knight; they died and
we fell to others. I was born and have not
heard from them since. Friends, if you have
footing on their whereabouts, please Address
me at Stillwater, Va., with letters, trinkets, any
knowledge of what’s come of us.

 

 

Poetic Research Statement

 

In July, my husband and I take our children to the new National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, D.C. It has taken six months to get tickets and the lines outside and in are still wrapped around the structure, the makeshift ropes, the Slavery and Freedom 1400-1877 exhibits. What is left to say about slavery? a woman asks loudly, her irritation palpable, as we make our way in. Before the trip, I’ve begun working on a project about my grandmothers that’s been swirling in my head for years. In a strange twist of kismet, my ancestors intersect in Petersburg, Virginia, forty years before I am born. My paternal great-great-great grandmother, Minnie Fulkes, lives in Petersburg and is interviewed for the WPA slave narratives in 1937. My maternal grandmother, Mary Knight, after birthing her first child, is given a diagnosis of “water on the brain” (post-partum was an ongoing mystery) and sent to the Central Lunatic Asylum for Colored Insane in 1940, a stone’s throw from where Minnie resides. I find this connection fascinating—two disparate women of my history, at opposite ends of their lives, converging upon the same space and time, telling their stories and ushering in the stretchstrain of folks who will usher in me. I know their lives commence long before this confluence and am determined to search for their beginnings. 

I am a poet, so I must call on history’s gatekeepers (librarians and elders) to help me. They send a confluence of archives and databases, marriage and birth certificates, books and burial plots. My inquest becomes part ethnographic, part family lore. It is difficult for most Black Americans to trace ancestors past 1865, as it is for me, so I begin looking for little-known cultural and regional history to fill in the minutia of the times. Research is often what feeds me as a poet and I am prone to follow tangents until I am given a spark. I have traced invented psychoses, living quarters, grooming and hair rituals, faith practices and maroons before my family and I arrive on the museum’s bottom floor. I pride myself on being staunch, matter-of-fact, clear, and considered when teaching my children about even the ugliness of history. I am only teacher-mother-knower explaining artifacts from a slave ship. Teacher-mother-knower near Jefferson’s ancestors, stacked as a pile of engraved bricks called the Paradox of Liberty. I turn a corner when a reconstructed slave cabin stands in front of me. I have been reading the book Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger and recognize the cabin’s slatted wood, dark entry, and dirt floor. I am mother-daughter-brokenbird, and cry in the museum’s corridor.

In early America, I am searching for what my ancestors may have seen and known. I have no illusions about finding things they might have loved because what was to love about being Black in America other than being alive? I am looking for their daily things, their living, evidence that they marked this land, were more than marked by it. I am trying to picture the physical space, so begin researching antebellum Virginia landscapes and battlefields leveled by hard-fought progress. What was bound in the trees then? I read Daniel O. Sayers’ book A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp at the same time I am combing through ads from The Geography of Slavery in Virginia, a digital repository of runaway slave advertisements and other documents from 1736-1803 helmed by the University of Virginia. While most who placed the ads believed the enslaved were running for cities or ports nearby, Sayers’ text presents a new idea for me: thousands of runaways made their way deep into the Dismal Swamp, where they created communities and lived in freedom, most never emerging until after the Civil War. Just past the cabin at the museum, I photograph objects from a Spirit Bundle, a collection of amulets that mirrors West African traditions meant to protect passageways between physical and spiritual worlds. Because there are so many people and so little time, we have to move quickly; Reconstruction is a blur and soon we are three floors up in the modern-day galleries. I am arrested by a large visual artwork, a crown of sorts made of tools used to sculpt Black hair about which the artist, Kenya Robinson, says on the object label: “For complex reasons of race, class, gender…I will probably have a hair conversation with other black women for all of my days, like some kind of not-so-secret handshake of experience and history.” I begin writing the poem “Commemorative Headdress For Her Journey Beyond Heaven” with all of these seemingly disparate encounters swirling in my mind. I imagine a woman who is having the route she must travel to escape the plantation braided into her hair. (I haven’t found evidence of this tactic being used in the U.S.; this is just hope and imagining—though I am fascinated by the legacy of Colombia’s Benkos Biho, as braiding maps into the hair of women has been reported as a method used to help others escape). The poem’s speaker is looking for a pathway into another world, here the swampland that will put her and her sistren out of reach, sight, and mind. Writing the poem I think again about what the enslaved loved, the bundle and amulets. Of course they loved even the thought of freedom, the hope and wonder of it, of being together in it, a Black kind of heaven. Hence, the title of the poem is the same as that of the visual work by Robinson, with the exception of one article (from changed to for), as the poem is meant to convey the beginning of a journey and not an ending of or looking back on one.

 

When we leave the museum, I look for things I’ve missed. Weeks later, I find a picture on my phone of thousands of well-dressed Blacks lining the streets of an unknown city with the caption “Emancipation Day Parade, 1905” and can’t remember when I took it or what was nearby, so I scour historical newspapers like the National Anti-Slavery Standard and the Norfolk Journal and Guide from the 1840s through the 1950s. What I find is a great many people searching—for good omens, legal victories, justice, faith, children, joy. The “Information Wanted” and eventually the “Lost Friends” columns, published as early as 1866, filled full pages of each standard. Freed men and women placed the advertisements to search for others lost before or during the war. In her book Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery, Heather Andrea Williams does the seemingly impossible work of following the trail of these ads, their impetus and a few outcomes. The Historic New Orleans Collection, much like The Geography of Slavery in Virginia, has digitized thousands of the columns. After reading fifty or so, I come across one by Maria Ross of Yazoo City, Mississippi, published in the Southwestern Christian Advocate that began, “Dear Editor:—I want to find my people.” And it breaks me open inside. It is so plain, please help me find my people. It cuts me to the core remembering that all folks wanted was to be together, to have someone to love and find anyone who knew to love them. The weight of my grandmothers—with all their fullness and distance—wearies and worries me. I write the poem “Lost Friends.” as an imitation of the column but with modern-day connotations of those left wanting by their absence. There is pleading, because I am desperately searching, there is birthing and blood and loss, there are figurative names that tell our stories juxtaposed against family monikers that most likely belonged to the slaveholders we are ever trying to cast off. Something about sifting through pieces of the once-living lends itself, in my brain, to various types of abstraction. I know no matter how many details I uncover, there is still a breathing wanting left out of all I’ll find. The poet’s job (i.e. the poet as historian, as opposed to other undertakings such as poet as soothsayer, poet as family arbiter, poet as line dancer and the like) is to make the dead become the living. I hope these poems, and all the summer’s discovery, will eventually become a larger body of work, a book of poems in the voices of those journeywomen  illumining the voices of the times they endured. Perhaps, for someone in the distance, the poems will blossom and be: a Spirit Bundle, a trove or pathway, what there is left to say, an alternate kind of history.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4.5 (Fall, 2017).

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Remica L. Bingham-Risher earned an MFA from Bennington College, and is a Cave Canem fellow and an Affrilachian poet. She is the author of three books: Conversion (2007), What We Ask of Flesh (2013) and Starlight & Error (2017). She is the director of Quality Enhancement Plan Initiatives at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

Few in the history profession, at least in the academy, can confidently assert that brighter days lie just around the corner. Economic historians in particular have had much to lament. In a recent essay, Sven Beckert observes that economic historians now reside almost exclusively in economics departments. Others have documented the decline of economic history relative to other sub-fields in the last forty years as shown in a survey of U.S. history faculty listings in the AHA’s Directory of History Departments, Historical Organizations, and Historians. Amid this wholly justifiable sense of malaise and decline, there are a few signs of promise. The history of capitalism sub-field, which burst onto the scene in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent Great Recession, has brought renewed vigor to the study of all things economic.

The latest publication from historian Sharon Ann Murphy, Other People’s Money, affirms the import of financial history through a survey of money and banking from colonial beginnings to the Civil War era. Murphy writes, “money and banking played a critical role in the lives of everyday Americans in the nineteenth century, shaping the society in which they lived and worked,” adding that understanding the financial history of this period “broadens and deepens our knowledge of the Early American Republic” (7). For Murphy, capturing Americans’ long-standing and complicated love-hate relationship with banks requires us to look back to the formative years of the early nineteenth century and Civil War period, years that presaged our modern financial system.

Chapter 1 introduces the reader to basic economic concepts like barter, inflation, taxation, and public debt, showing how debates over these issues informed many of the most important episodes in the colonial and revolutionary eras. In chapter 2, Murphy uncovers some of the unresolved issues involving charters of incorporation that stemmed from the Constitution’s ambiguous language. It is in chapter 3, entitled “How Panics Worked: The Era of the Bank War,” that the author finds her groove, buttressing and enriching her analysis with salient primary sources. Consistent with recent scholarship emphasizing the global dimensions of the history of early modern capitalism, Murphy explains that the movements of specie and credit overseas, combined with peculiar domestic factors, produced disruptive financial panics in 1819 and 1837. The tipping points occurred when confidence and predictability, those elusive and intangible characteristics that greased the wheels of finance both then and today, suddenly evaporated. Murphy shows us in chapter 4 that early Americans fiercely debated the wisdom of fractional reserve banking, activist monetary policy, and the mixing of for-profit, commercial lending alongside the storage of public revenue in one financial institution. This was a notable feature of the nation’s early central banks, the First and Second Banks of the United States. Chapter 5 offers an overview of the struggles faced by both Union and Confederate governments in raising revenue during the Civil War, including the printing of greenbacks and establishment of a nationwide system of federally chartered banks.

Other People’s Money takes its name from the title of a book written by Progressive Era reformer, future Supreme Court justice, and intellectual godfather of the Federal Reserve, Louis Brandeis (165). Early twentieth-century reformers like Brandeis faulted the “money trust” for leveraging public money and depositors’ savings into high-risk bets, too often making off with riches while the majority suffered. The Panic of 1907 was a case in point. For Murphy, there was a common thrust between those who lambasted the immense concentrations of wealth and power epitomized by robber baron J.P. Morgan and the impetus behind Andrew Jackson’s Bank War. In both instances, average Americans knew that the game was rigged. The wealthy were picking winners and losers in violation of the principles of free market capitalism (167).

Murphy is concerned less with the degree to which financial institutions contributed to, and were shaped by, the early stages of the industrial revolution—a historiographical debate explored by previous scholars—and more with how early Americans experimented with new financial mechanisms and institutions through a process of trial and error. Often it was a calamitous financial panic, such as the famous one of 1837 that bankrupted the South’s plantation banks, or some other convulsive, watershed moment, such as the Civil War, that impelled financiers to rethink their assumptions and opt for a more efficient system. In other instances, important developments emerged gradually. Such was the case with investment banking—brokering and underwriting stocks and bonds, often to overseas investors—which capitalized much of the nation’s transportation infrastructure, or the interbank cooperation and clearinghouse systems that made the Panic of 1857 less damaging than it would have been otherwise.

One of Murphy’s contentions is that historians have described the political dimensions of major conflicts like the Bank War without providing sufficient economic context. Political cartoons of the era, she notes, tended to focus on the political battle between Jackson and Nicholas Biddle while only a few raised broader concerns about the economic implications of Jackson’s policies (96-97). One can agree with this claim in the main while at the same time holding that Murphy might be overstating the case. Even when biographies and histories of the antebellum era have maintained a predominantly political focus, they have, by necessity, delved into the economic conflicts that helped define the presidencies of Jackson and others. Specialists will find some overlapping content with Howard Bodenhorn’s excellent 2003 study, State Banking in Early America, particularly in the earlier chapters, and may at times yearn for the inclusion of a few more secondary sources in the endnotes and “suggested further reading” section. On the other hand, Murphy’s book, the latest release in the How Things Worked series published by Johns Hopkins University Press, is not a monograph. The abbreviated notes and suggestions for further reading reflect an editorial decision in consideration of the book’s targeted audience, and specialists, being specialists, already know where to look for more information. Other People’s Money, thus, works in a variety of educational settings. First-year graduate students who show an inkling for financial history (gasp!) will find a useful primer here. Professors teaching specialized classes in business history, the history of capitalism, and economics for non-economists (this class should be more widely taught) can assign it. Because the sheer number of different financial institutions and credit instruments of this era is daunting even for experts, they can keep this on their bookshelves or digital devices as a quick reference. Non-academics interested in early American history will also find this book accessible.

The strengths of this work are numerous. In addition to narrating some intriguing vignettes on Abigail Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Herman Melville, this book contains a fascinating array of cartoons and images of credit instruments, many of which are drawn from the author’s extensive personal collection. Murphy’s writing is also straightforward; her analysis, insightful. Financial history presents many challenges. To grasp its intricacies, one needs to know, for example, how a bill of exchange worked; what reserve ratios are; how panicky borrowers, reacting to information asymmetries, can imperil an entire economy. It requires immense skill to take complex, abstract, and highly technical accounting principles and explain them to the reader in digestible ways. Murphy is more than up to the challenge. She summarizes a great deal of content and manages to pack a lot of information into a few words with lucidity and clarity. Economic concepts are explored in this book, but without the intimidating formulas and regressions that would normally send students accustomed to a predominantly narrative-driven discipline running for the hills. Importantly, Murphy demonstrates an agile, dexterous familiarity with financial terminology so that she can explain definitions succinctly without sacrificing complexity. At the same time, she shows how these definitions fit together—a clear improvement over some of the more convoluted works of financial history that came out of the mid-twentieth century. This is economic history as it should be written. 

Post-2008, understanding the relationship between banks and recessions became paramount. There continues to be no shortage of craven politicians and pundits who fear-monger about debt and inflation while deliberately minimizing social welfare. Each year their apocalyptic predictions fail to materialize, but sadly, their platforms remain. When expertise that scholars have worked decades to develop is cavalierly dismissed as “elite” while abject ignorance is touted as a defining feature of what it means to be a “real” American, a back-to-the-basics, jargon-free approach to financial literacy is more essential than ever. In the world of antebellum-era finance, to find out how things worked, as the series title indicates, here is an ideal place to start.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4.5 (Fall, 2017).

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Stephen W. Campbell is a lecturer in the department of history at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is the author of articles that have appeared in American Nineteenth Century History, Ohio Valley History, Perspectives on History, and Missouri Historical Review.

Each year, enslaved men, women, and children across New York and New Jersey’s Dutch communities would receive time off to celebrate Pinkster—the Dutch version of Pentecost or Whitsuntide. Pinkster had been a predominantly Dutch church and folk celebration that Dutch settlers and their descendants brought to the Dutch colony of New Netherland, and which they continued to celebrate after the English took control of the region. Initially, their enslaved laborers participated in this Dutch tradition, but by the early nineteenth century, Pinkster had become a predominantly African American festival, usually with an African king in charge of the celebration. In Albany, where New York’s most famous Pinkster celebration took place, this king was known as King Charles, who served as “master of ceremonies, whose whole authority is absolute, and whose will is law during the whole of the Pinkster holidays” (60). He would parade through the streets of Albany, collect revenue, and only after he arrived on the Pinkster Hill, now the location of New York’s state capitol, the festivities could commence. For days, participants would make music, dance, drink, and play various games.

Pinkster has attracted the attention of several scholars, including Natalie Zemon Davis, Peter Burke, and Shane White, yet much remains unknown about the festival’s events or origins. Why, for example, were enslaved laborers allowed to gather in large groups during Pinkster, while on any other day they were prohibited from meeting with more than three fellow bondsmen or women? Why were they allowed to consume alcohol, even in excess, when they were not allowed to purchase alcoholic beverages on any other day of the year? And what were the origins of this celebration? Was it Dutch, African, or something new altogether? 

Jeroen Dewulf’s The Pinkster King and the King of Kongo addresses these questions, and in doing so he provides a welcome addition to the scholarship on this festival. It combines most known sources on Pinkster, and it incorporates analysis of primary sources in multiple languages. The book is well-written and highlights an important part of American history that has not yet received the attention it deserves. One of this work’s greatest contributions lies in its comparisons between Pinkster in New York and similar celebrations elsewhere in the Atlantic.

The book argues that Pinkster originated in West Central Africa, not in the Dutch Republic, as most scholars have claimed. In particular, Dewulf suggests that the origins of Pinkster could be found in the “mutual-aid associations in the tradition of Afro-Iberian brotherhoods established by the charter generation” (10). Dewulf contends that the practice had been brought to North America by its first generation of enslaved Africans who were predominantly of West Central African descent. He argues that subsequent generations of Africans adapted to the already existing practices introduced by this West Central African charter generation. In order to prove his argument, Dewulf investigates Pinkster traditions and similar celebrations in the Netherlands, West Central Africa, and the larger Atlantic world.

The book is divided into six chapters. The first chapter examines Pinkster celebrations in the Dutch Republic. It shows that the Dutch folk festival of Pinkster had various elements in common with the American Pinkster celebrations. Chapter two discusses slavery in New York and New Jersey, and examines how the African American community celebrated Pinkster. Chapter three explores the origins of Pinkster. It argues that the Dutch folk festival of Pinkster could not have survived in North America, and instead connects the North American celebration to Catholic, Luso-Kongolese traditions. The fourth chapter argues that the origins of Pinkster can be traced to the confraternities of the Afro-Iberian Atlantic and West Central Africa in particular. The fifth chapter links New Amsterdam’s West Central African charter generation to the later Pinkster celebrations. It argues that the social foundations of Pinkster in the early nineteenth century can be traced back to this seventeenth-century African community. Finally, chapter six examines the “demise and legacy” of the North American Pinkster celebration. Not only does this chapter explore how Pinkster came to an end, it also examines how the festival influenced North American culture in venues ranging from music to literature.

Dewulf is right to address the important West Central African influences on North American celebrations such as Pinkster. West Central Africans played an important role in many American slave communities, as several scholars have shown in recent years. Even the West Central African influence in New Netherland has been highlighted by a number of scholars, including Linda Heywood, John Thornton, Russell Hodges, Willem Frijhoff, and myself. Although the West Central African influence in the region’s culture is undeniable, the book’s argument that the Pinkster celebration is rooted exclusively in the cultural ways of the charter generation’s West Central Africans is not entirely convincing. After reading the book, the question remains how a relatively small African population in Manhattan laid the foundation of an elaborate festival that took place in Dutch communities all over New York and New Jersey. Especially so, because no persuasive evidence links these early nineteenth-century communities to New Amsterdam’s West Central African population, or shows a satisfying progression of the celebration over the course of the eighteenth century. 

Although this book is an interesting and worthwhile read, the reader should be aware of its limitations. The book relies predominantly on printed sources, many of which have already been used by other scholars, and in some places the book relies heavily on primary source quotations from other secondary sources without consulting the original sources. The author does not appear to have done much archival research; such research could potentially have uncovered new information. More importantly, on some occasions evidence is missing, making it impossible for a reader to verify certain claims. For example, Dewulf asserts that when the Pinkster Ode, an early nineteenth-century published poem about Albany’s Pinkster festival, mentioned the burial of Dinah, it likely referred to the enslaved girl named Dean who was executed for the Albany fire and who according to Dewulf was “buried in the African cemetery near the place where the African American Pinkster celebrations occurred” (162). But he does not provide any evidence for either of these claims. The book also misrepresents the historiography on several occasions. In chapter six, for instance, Dewulf claims that Bradford Verter, in his article “Interracial Festivity and Power in Antebellum New York: The Case of Pinkster,” has suggested that an author known only by the initials of A.B. “possibly refers to Aaron Burr, who habitually signed his correspondence with this abbreviation” (165), when Verter actually wrote the following: “The likelihood that Burr was himself the author of the article on Pinkster is rather remote.” Such inaccuracies or missing evidence undercut what is otherwise a worthwhile read.

Although the book presents an interesting approach to studying Pinkster, it does not convince the reader that it is more likely that the early nineteenth-century Pinkster festivals originated in the traditions of a relatively small African American community in New Amsterdam than in Dutch medieval Pinkster celebrations. Although Pinkster has many elements similar to West Central African traditions, it also resembles festivals elsewhere in Africa and Europe. While the book does not provide any conclusive answers to the outstanding questions, it does bring needed attention to this part of early American and Atlantic history.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4 (Summer, 2017).

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Andrea Mosterman is assistant professor in Atlantic and Early American History at the University of New Orleans. She is currently completing her manuscript on the interactions between enslaved and free New Yorkers in the region’s Dutch-American communities.

Jenna M. Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater, and Popular Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760-1850. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. 328 pp., $55.

Jenna Gibbs’s Performing the Temple of Liberty begins with a fanciful invitation to the reader to accompany her on a “stroll along the Thames River,” past the scene of slaves being led to ships that will transport them for sale overseas, towards taverns and coffeehouses where Londoners might have been discussing the Haymarket Theatre’s current production of Colman’s Inkle and Yarico. She juxtaposes these two images—shackled black bodies en route to the Americas with a play featuring white bodies in blackface debating the moral evils of slavery—to offer a point of entry into her larger subject: a comparative study of performance culture and abolitionism in London and Philadelphia during the latter part of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century.

Over the past twenty years, theater scholars have argued for the importance of performance culture in shaping political thought in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world. For example, Jeffrey H. Richards’s 1991 study, Theatre Enough, explores the metaphor of politics in America’s revolutionary ideology. Additionally, scholars such as Peter Reed, Daphne Brooks, Gay Gibson Cima, Lisa Merrill, Douglas Jones, John Frick, Amy Hughes, Marvin McAllister, W.T. Lhamon Jr., Tracy Davis, Sandra Gustafson, Sarah Meer, and Shane White (among others) have paid careful attention to the ways in which transatlantic performance culture engaged with issues of race, and particularly questions of liberty and slavery.

Gibbs’s seven-chapter study (divided into three parts with an introduction and a conclusion) shifts back and forth between London and Philadelphia as two poles of antislavery activity in the Atlantic world. In chapters one, two, and three, she explores the origins of what she labels “oral blackface,” or a “new genre of racial ridicule, with [a] free exchange between theatrical, print, visual, and civic culture” (49). She examines the ways in which the dialogue of popular blackface characters such as Mungo (from Charles Dibdin’s popular play The Padlock) infiltrated rhetorical and visual practices beyond the playhouse—whether in political cartoons or even costumes worn to fancy-dress balls (65). She suggests that even as Mungo and some of his counterparts (like Harlequin Negro) were adopted by antislavery activists, they also provided fodder for those who opposed abolition by offering infantilized or clownish representations of black characters. As Gibbs, Brooks, Reed, Nathans, and others have noted, depictions of African or African American characters were often co-opted by groups with diametrically opposed goals and invoked to demonstrate that slavery was inherently evil or that it protected those too simple to fend for themselves.

 

 

This paradox of representation lay at the heart of much antislavery performance culture in the Atlantic world. Communities of activists on both sides of the Atlantic sought a resolution to this seemingly inescapable contradiction by building grandiose visions of a return to Africa as a solution for British and American slavery and the repatriation of stolen African peoples, as well as a natural site for both territorial and evangelical expansion. In chapter three, Gibbs mentions William Dunlap’s adaptation of George Colman’s The Africans, or War, Love, and Duty as an example of a transatlantic drama that draws on a wider lexicon of sermons, histories, and other representations of Africa circulating in British culture. And while Colman and Dunlap (who was a secretary of New York’s Manumission Society) both championed the antislavery cause, Gibbs argues that each did so while both implicitly and explicitly “trumpeting white cultural superiority” (101).

Chapters four and five examine the rapid increase and expansion in the performance of urban blackface—connected to the proliferation of print and theatrical circulation in the wake of the War of 1812. Urbanization and early industrialization in the U.S. widened the racial spectacle(s) on display for British theater-goers in America, as they encountered new incarnations of familiar black characters. As Gibbs notes, “The urban picaresque and proto-variety vaudeville genres were … used to critique slavery even as their characters disparaged black freedom” (117). As theater scholars Nathans, Frick, Hughes, Meer, Jones, and Merrill have noted, part of the challenge of publicly critiquing African slavery onstage was that both British and American audiences had a long history of violent protest against unpopular ideas—protests that periodically resulted in the destruction of performance spaces or even bodily harm to the actors and orchestra members. Thus even the most passionately abolitionist managers, performers, and playwrights often framed their messages in more palatable or unthreatening forms.

And while black characters continued to be played by white actors in blackface (and often British actors in blackface, most notably in the case of Charles Mathews, which Gibbs discusses in chapter five), more and more United States-inflected representations of African American characters were emerging in the Atlantic circuit. As United States-based characters began to populate the theatrical, visual, and literary landscape, they underscored the “British critique of American democracy,”—a theme Britons had invoked since the Revolutionary War when Americans tried to justify their own battle for liberty alongside the continuation of chattel slavery (176).

Chapter six/part three begins with a fascinating consideration of how British cosmopolitanism combined with the “full-blown scientific racism embedded in the mockery of black slavery” to highlight “a dialogue between the burlesque and the utopian” (178). Gibbs argues that far from existing as inherent opposites, “blackface minstrelsy and revolutionary utopianism did not merely take the stage side by side; rather blackface minstrels became part of the performance of revolutionary utopianism” (179). The turmoil of the 1830s spawned a number of “coded figure[s] of contested meanings” on London and Philadelphia stages, from the heroic Spartacus to the clownish Jim Crow (205). For Gibbs, as for other scholars of theater history, the slave revolts of the 1830s offer a pivotal moment to reexamine the relationship between the representation of slavery and blackness in white Atlantic culture, as well as a renewed investigation of black agency. For example, Gibbs analyzes Robert Montgomery Bird’s familiar 1831 play, The Gladiator (a tragedy that the author acknowledged offered a natural association with the Nat Turner uprising), and considers it alongside Bird’s lesser-known novel Sheppard Lee (1836), which also traces the history of an uprising—this time one set in the South, rather than ancient Thrace and Rome. The juxtaposition underscores the ways in which Bird tempered his message to suit the medium of performance (as well as the personality of star actor Edwin Forrest, for whom the play was written).

Chapter seven and the conclusion examine the consequences of decades of building “radical agitation and sociopolitical unrest” (212). In this chapter, Gibbs pays particular attention to George Dibdin Pitt’s Toussaint L’Ouverture, or The Black Spartacus and novelist George Lippard’s Washington and his Generals; or, Legends of the Revolution. Both call for a “radical and racially inclusive social and economic regeneration” through the black heroes in their works (214). Including Lippard in this chapter is a particularly intriguing choice given his reputation for writing works that hit close to home among his fellow Philadelphians. The theatrical adaptation of his Monks of Monk Hall was reportedly so scathing and scandalous that it had to be pulled from the stage before its opening. As Gibbs notes, both Pitt’s Toussaint L’Ouverture and Lippard’s Washington and his Generals address the challenge of the growing white underclass (a theme scholar Peter Reed has explored as well). Gibbs also probes British audiences’ interest in the American-born black performer Ira Aldridge. Britons appreciated the ways in which Aldridge combined familiar tropes of minstrel performance with antislavery themes (224). As theater scholar Bernth Lindfors has observed, it was not until Aldridge “escaped” the Atlantic circuit and began performing elsewhere in Europe (most notably Prussia and Austria) that he began to be known as a classical actor.

In her conclusion Gibbs turns (perhaps not surprisingly) to the work that galvanized and transformed the performance of race and slavery in the Atlantic world: Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe’s controversial novel was rapidly adapted for the stage in a bewildering array of genres, from the minstrel burlesque to tragedy, and produced a proliferation of images, pamphlets, and objects (such as china figurines of Uncle Tom and Little Eva) for audience consumption on both sides of the Atlantic. Uncle Tom’s Cabin demonstrated the inability of Atlantic performance culture to contain or control images of blackness or slavery, a point further underscored by Gibbs’s astute use of the image “Our Goddess of Liberty” (1870), representing a range of female faces, including white, Irish, African, and Native American, and punctuated with the query, “What is she to be? To what complexion are we come at last?” (250). This image offers a nice counterpoint to Gibbs’s invocation of the various “goddesses of liberty” or “Spirits of Columbia” that she cites throughout the text, tracing their trajectory alongside the young nation’s discourse on race relations and the role of whites in uplifting enslaved African populations.

As a minor note, the study is peppered with some factual errors related to dates of performance, as well as occasional chronological confusion among the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources that Gibbs cites. Nevertheless, this is a well-written and comprehensive work that should help scholars of British and American history imagine how they might integrate an understanding of performance culture into an examination of race and slavery in the pre-Revolutionary and antebellum periods.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 15.3.5 (July, 2015).

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Heather S. Nathans is the author of Early American Theatre from the Revolution to Thomas Jefferson: Into the Hands of the People (2003); Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787-1861: Lifting the Veil of Black (2009); and Hideous Characters and Beautiful Pagans: Performing Jewish Identity on the Antebellum American Stage (under contract), as well as numerous other essays on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American theater. She is the president of the American Society for Theatre Research and the series editor for Studies in Theatre History and Culturewith the University of Iowa Press. Nathans is professor and chair of the Department of Drama and Dance at Tufts University.

Between 1790 and 1860, New York’s population increased dramatically, from under 35,000 to over 800,000. Gergely Baics examines how the city’s food system provided or failed to provide for its inhabitants as an infrastructure of public markets ceded to a deregulated sprawl of private purveyors. Feeding Gotham will be of interest to students of urban planning, geography, and social and economic history, as well as those engaged with the history and politics of food systems. In his conclusion, Baics pays special attention to the concept of “food deserts” in cities as a contemporary vocabulary for understanding problems of urban food justice and malnutrition, and he offers several comparative examples of how other cities have regulated their food supplies.

The book is organized into three parts. In part I, Baics explains the rationale for municipal public markets to provide citizens with access to food, narrating their emergence from colonial community institutions to their eventual deregulation through the Common Council’s 1843 repeal of market laws. These laws excluded unlicensed vendors and non-market butchers, whose success in spite of restriction had challenged the legitimacy of public markets. Gradually, many consumers came to believe the fees and rents associated with public markets increased the price of food unnecessarily. For their part, public officials began to question the cost of maintaining market infrastructure. Part II assesses how well the public market system fulfilled its objectives from the 1790s to the 1820s, concluding that it was largely successful in providing abundant and quality food for the city’s growing population. Throughout his analysis, Baics focuses primarily on meat, which he argues was a dietary staple, most susceptible to problems of quality and supply, and thus most constitutive of the municipal regulatory regime.

Part III narrates the debates leading to the emergence of the free market system of provisioning from the 1830s, which he subjects to the same standards of evaluation applied to the public market system. Baics has new insights into the so-called “antebellum paradox” explored by economic and demographic historians: that is, that increasing morbidity and decreasing standards of health accompanied rapid economic growth and rising per capita income. He pays special attention to the negative effects borne by poor New Yorkers by deteriorating availability and quality of food supplies, noting that deregulation introduced a “more complex, uneven, and riskier terrain of provisioning” (228). He concludes that “the liberalization of food markets propelled a formerly more egalitarian resource to become another structural layer of inequality, much like housing and sanitation” (235).

Baics observes that the deregulation of food provisioning did not signify a total movement toward liberalization or attenuation of municipal government. Rather, the infrastructure of public markets competed with the Croton aqueduct and other public goods and services for revenue, generating a bifurcated antebellum political economy. Against histories that attribute deregulation entirely to free market ideology, Baics argues that “the question was not whether the municipal government had an important role to play but rather in what areas of economic and social life public investments and regulatory oversight should be extended and where free-market relations should prevail” (4). While water became a municipally managed public utility, food provisioning was wholly deregulated.

Why then did food follow a path of extreme liberalization? Baics emphasizes aspects of the debate related to market supply, price, competition from independent vendors, and the cost of operating public markets. He focuses his analysis on prominent interest groups, including subscribers, licensed and unlicensed butchers, and the City Corporation, which owned and managed the public markets. In his analysis and selection of evidence, Baics prefers William Novak’s concept of a “well-ordered market” to E.P. Thompson’s “moral economy” because of the former’s narrower focus on regulatory frameworks and supposed lack of normative implication (25-6). Apart from the question of whether Thompson’s framing is applicable to nineteenth-century New York, some will object that markets cannot be understood apart from ideological, normative, and affective forms of politics that constitute them. Some readers will crave more discussion of the broader context of these debates, including the roles of commodity price fluctuation, Democratic and Locofoco movements for free markets, and instances of public demonstration and rioting in shaping public debate over access to resources and their proper government. Historians of the early republic will seek to connect the debates over public markets to a now rich literature on responses to the Panic of 1837, proliferation of paper currency, and the role of informal markets in structuring the antebellum economy.

Baics identifies his as a “history of food access” rather than “a history of food” (6), distinguishing his approach from social and cultural histories provided by Cindy Lobel’s Urban Appetites, for example. This is a useful way of communicating to readers why he focuses on public markets and butchers as the principle points of food access for antebellum New Yorkers. It also justifies his focus on meat, which occupied an outsized share of urban diets in this period. Baics provides new estimates of meat consumption for the period, which constitute a significant contribution to our understanding of urban diets and provisions. 

The formulation of “food access” nevertheless concedes the legitimacy of defining food primarily in terms of supply, security, or availability. Once defined purely in terms of food quantity and basic nutrition, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. now interprets “food security” as stable and universal “physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food that meets their dietary needs and food preferences [emphasis mine] for an active and healthy life.” In the case of the antebellum United States, dietary preference was for high consumption of red meat, a relatively expensive source of calories. The abundant supply in public markets justifies Baics’s assessment that they succeeded in supplying the city’s growing population with fresh and abundant food. He does not choose to explore the long-term sustainability of this consumer taste, or the cultural values that informed the choice of meat as a dietary staple. Similar analysis could be applied to the choice of wheat over rye and maize as staple grains, and to diets consisting primarily of meat and grain.

Inasmuch as food is a cultural object in addition to a biological requirement, histories of food may help to explain why this necessity of life followed a different regulatory path than water or housing. Histories of diet, cooking, eating, and restaurant culture thus provide complementary rather than disparate approaches to Baics’s analysis of access. Chronologically, it pairs well with Katie Turner’s account of the emergence of a federal regulatory system for food quality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also complements an emerging literature linking the feeding of captive populations and worker-citizens in the modern nation state. These related histories of food cultures offer to broaden Baics’s analysis beyond cities and to the world food systems in which they are embedded.

The great gift of Feeding Gotham is its methodological innovation and its painstaking tabulation and analysis of data. Baics showcases the potential of geographic information systems (GIS) as a tool for historical analysis, using GIS to reconstruct New York’s public market system and the proliferation of private food shops that followed its deregulation. The exciting collection of color maps provides visualizations of the meat supply system from slaughterhouse to point of sale over the course of the antebellum period. This creative use of quantitative analysis is a model for how historical geography can provide new insights into economic development and urban history, as well as the opportunities provided by the large-scale digitization of archival records. Baics draws on geospatial data compiled from digitized city directories, fire insurance atlases, and geo-referenced historical maps in the collections of the New York Public Library and New-York Historical Society.

Baics has reflected elsewhere on the promises of GIS as an analytic tool. Given the author’s creativity and command of these methods for historical analysis, one also wants to hear him reflect on their possible limits, and the challenges of following “the spatial turn.” Baics identifies cities as centers of conflict over political economy because of their scale and novelty, and the extremity of problems that emerged as a result. Even so, recent urban environmental histories such as Catherine McNeur’s Taming Manhattan have reminded us that cities are inseparable from the natures in which they are embedded. Most immediately relevant here is New York’s reliance on outlying areas for its food supplies. Baics’s analysis of urban crisis and reconfiguration invites new histories of provisioning that break down the imagined boundaries between urban and rural and the political economies they justified.

For the social historian, one of Baics’s most exciting chapters is his study of the Catherine Street market, derived from a close reading of the nineteenth-century New York butcher Thomas F. DeVoe’s history of municipal food markets. Baics bookends this chapter with DeVoe’s account of popular dance contests staged at the market, hosted by the butchers and featuring slaves and free blacks from Long Island to New Jersey. Baics argues that these exhibitions reiterated the social hierarchy of the market. Exploitative entertainments sponsored by the butchers helped structure the community’s performance of market rules. His analysis brings to mind Brian Rouleau’s account of minstrel shows aboard Commodore Perry’s 1853 naval expedition to Japan. Here also, entertainments featuring racist tropes and hierarchies provided the context for diplomatic negotiation and market relations. Notably, Baics uses the metaphor of “neighborhood ecology” (125) rather than economy to characterize the Catherine Street market, suggesting that political economy, geography, or supply-and-demand are insufficient optics to understand how the legitimacy of markets and community loyalty to them were secured.

Ecology demands a rendering of social relations that are often flattened by quantitative and cartographic representation, and it is to Baics’s credit that he includes the study of the Catherine Street market in a book that pursues synthetic geographical approaches. Here and throughout the book, Baics grounds his analysis in a careful reading of the lived experience of New Yorkers of all walks of life in pursuit of their daily bread or meat. The result is a careful attempt to understand how one major city managing massive demographic growth reconfigured access to food. Baics’s primary concern is to understand the benefits and costs of public markets and their deregulation for the living standards and material well-being of all of the city’s inhabitants. These questions remain essential.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4 (Summer, 2017).

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Courtney Fullilove is associate professor of history at Wesleyan University and author of The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture (2017).

You suggest in the introduction that the African Americans who started newspapers in the nineteenth century did so because of their sense of “black chosenness.” Can you explain what you mean by that term?

“Black chosenness” is shorthand for the belief that African Americans are God’s chosen people. This belief gained purchase and power among black communities in the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and rests in a comparison between African Americans and the biblical Israelites, whom the Bible marks as God’s original chosen nation. The Bible records numerous instances where the Israelites suffer slavery and oppression. We’re perhaps most familiar with the period when the Egyptians enslaved the Israelites, which is recounted in the book of Exodus, but in later periods the Israelites were enslaved by the Assyrians and the Chaldeans, a civilization typically represented through its capital city of Babylon. African American preachers and writers repeatedly pointed out the obvious parallels between the Israelites in slavery and enslaved black people in the United States, and often argued that if black Americans were the modern manifestation of the biblical Israelites, then they too could claim the mantle of God’s chosen nation.

A faith in black chosenness often brought with it a sense of responsibility to act in a certain way (what I call “acting chosen”), though what exactly acting chosen meant in terms of on-the-ground behavior could change depending upon specific circumstances. But most importantly, perhaps, black chosenness contained within it a certainty that black Americans would eventually be free, since God would not allow his chosen people to remain in bondage forever. The when and how of freedom may have been uncertain, but black chosenness guarantees the fact of black liberation.

 

I don’t want to suggest, though, that black editors began their newspapers because of their faith in black chosenness. In each of my chapters, I try to flesh out in as much detail as possible the specific circumstances that led to the founding of particular newspapers. But black chosenness became a fundamental, if at times subtle, theme of the black newspapers that I take up in my book. Newspapers allowed black editors to apply their faith in black chosenness to specific circumstances, and those circumstances in turn affected the precise contours of black chosenness. For example, in 1848 Frederick Douglass and his staff used the North Star to explore the relationship between black chosenness and the anti-monarchical revolutions that rocked Europe during that year. And as it connected black chosenness to an international revolutionary movement, the North Star stretched the boundaries of the new chosen nation to include black and white revolutionaries located within and beyond the confines of the United States. As a medium in some ways designed to translate abstract ideas into concrete plans for action, the newspaper was an ideal way for black Americans to put the theory of black chosenness into practice. 

How many newspapers were published by African Americans during the antebellum era? How did you decide to focus on the five you selected for the book?

I hesitate to even offer an estimate about the number of black newspapers published in the antebellum era. Frankie Hutton’s foundational book The Early Black Press in America lists seventeen “extant antebellum black newspapers,” but scholars continue to find references to papers that we have not yet recovered. For example, Thomas Hamilton is perhaps best known as the editor of the Weekly Anglo-African, a newspaper that I focus on in my book. But according to his contemporaries Hamilton also edited the People’s Press sometime in the 1840s, and I recently discovered references to a short-lived Tri-Weekly Anglo-African, also edited by Hamilton, that ran for a single week in 1865. Now, Thomas Hamilton was a well-known member of New York City’s black elite, and still we’re missing entire publications that he produced. So I have to imagine that there are also as-yet-unrecovered black newspapers published in small cities and towns across the northern United States that we don’t even know we’re supposed to be looking for. And if we decide to consider black newspapers published in Canada and the Caribbean (I think we should), the number grows even larger. All of which is to say, there is still an immense amount of work to be done recovering and analyzing early black newspapers, and I always intended my book to be an entry point into a vast archive, rather than a comprehensive study.

I decided to focus on the five newspapers in my book for practical as well as thematic reasons. I wanted to be able to write about newspapers with runs of at least a year, and as much as possible to be able to read each paper’s entire run. So when narrowing down my archive I was immediately confronted by problems of archiving and access. At the time I began my work on this book, only a single issue of newspapers like Martin Delany’s Mystery was extant, while multiple years of Frederick Douglass’ Paper were either missing or incredibly difficult to access. On the other hand, nearly full runs of Freedom’s Journal, The Colored American, the North Star, the Provincial Freeman, and the Weekly Anglo-African are all relatively easily accessible, either on microfilm or (for a select few) digitally.

But beyond such practical concerns I chose to write about these five newspapers together because the publications and the people who made them were intimately connected to one another. One reason I decided to focus on newspapers published over a relatively short time period (about forty years) and small geographic area (the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada) is that the women and men who made and sustained these papers knew one another personally. Thomas Hamilton’s father, for example, helped found Freedom’s Journal, a newspaper that profoundly influenced Philip Bell’s decision to start The Colored American (where the teenage Hamilton worked as a newspaper wrapper). John Dick, who printed and contributed numerous articles to the North Star, later emigrated to Canada and helped produce the Provincial Freeman, edited by Mary Ann Shadd. And Shadd’s good friend and neighbor Martin Delany had his novel Blake published in the Weekly Anglo-African. In addition, because the editors of the papers I selected engaged in numerous activities besides newspaper editing, they met and interacted with one another in a variety of venues. For example, Samuel Cornish, Philip Bell, Charles Ray, Frederick Douglass, Mary Ann Shadd, and Thomas and Robert Hamilton all attended Colored Conventions. Cornish and Bell served together on education committees in the 1830s, and Douglass and Ray argued over the need for a new black newspaper in the 1840s. And sometimes these cooperations and disagreements spilled over into the pages of their newspapers long after the conventions had closed. So I tried, as much as possible, to put these particular newspapers into conversation with one another precisely because the people reading and writing these papers were actually in conversation with one another. And reading the five newspapers I cover in my book together, I want to suggest, offers us a far richer sense of a community that existed in person and in print than we would get if we read any one of the papers in isolation. Some of the newspapers that I focus on have been written about by other scholars, in helpful and important ways, but there’s much more work to be done teasing out the collective and collaborative nature of the early black press, within and across individual papers. My hope is that my book offers one example of what that kind of work might look like.

Throughout the book, you note that the editors of these newspapers saw their publications as vehicles to regulate or channel the behavior of African Americans. Why did they believe that their newspapers would be a successful avenue to pursue that goal?

It may be impossible to overstate the importance of the newspaper in the nineteenth-century United States. As the era’s dominant form of media, I tend to think of the newspaper in the nineteenth century in relation to television in the twentieth or the Internet in the twenty-first. When conducting research for this book, I read through a number of travel accounts from European visitors to the United States, and without fail the authors expressed their astonishment at the sheer number of newspapers in the U.S., and the influence that these papers exerted over the populace. The most famous of these accounts is probably from Alexis de Tocqueville, who devotes an entire chapter of Democracy in America to the place of newspapers in the United States, and sees the newspaper as the key means to not only reach but also to influence a scattered citizenry. Contemporary scholars have debated whether or not the newspaper actually possessed that kind of power, but nineteenth-century advocates and critics of the newspaper alike believed that it did. This respect for the power of the newspaper helps explain why delegates to Colored Conventions spent so much time discussing not only the creation of black newspapers, but the need to support papers of, in the parlance of the day, high moral standing. The minutes of these conventions are dotted with delegates worrying about the influence that a “bad” paper could have on its readers, especially children, and urging families to subscribe to journals that would teach upright behavior.

For the black New Yorkers who founded Freedom’s Journal, the first black newspaper published in the United States, this faith in the power of the newspaper to shape the perceptions and behavior of its readers was based in personal experience. Freedom’s Journal was founded for a number of reasons, but one of them was to provide a means to counter the racist representations of African Americans that were rampant in New York’s white newspapers. And we see attempts to correct such misrepresentations present in all of the newspapers that I write about in my book, because these lies could have material consequences. Beyond contributing to and justifying the general discrimination that African Americans faced in the North, white editors could and did use the pages of their papers to stir up and organize mobs to attack black gatherings, parades, and businesses. This is not to dismiss or minimize the importance of other institutions like the church, or other forms of print like the pamphlet and book. But when someone in the nineteenth century wanted to get their message out, if they could, they started a newspaper (or many newspapers). This is true for political parties, organizations committed to causes like temperance or the abolition of slavery, religious denominations from the mainstream to the Millerites, and a wide range of immigrant groups. So the belief by black editors that their newspapers could shape the ideas and actions of their readers reflected the broadly accepted view of the power of the newspaper, which could be wielded for good or ill.

In what ways did these newspapers connect through their mission to other nineteenth-century movements, including abolitionism and evangelical moral reform? What I suggest in my book is that black newspapers applied their theories of black chosenness to a range of issues. For example, Freedom’s Journal argued that being a member of God’s chosen nation brought with it the responsibility to act in a certain way. And for that newspaper, acting chosen meant behaving according to certain class-based norms. The paper railed against working-class black New Yorkers for being too loud, too showy, for lacking decorum and humility. So in this example, Freedom’s Journal connected black chosenness to its efforts to instill what its editors called “propriety” in its black readers.

And while I decided to focus on the place of black chosenness in black newspapers, this is only one of many stories we could and need to tell about the early black press. The black newspapers that I study were not single-issue publications. Instead, they covered and commented on a range of topics. These papers were certainly abolitionist, printing speeches from well-known black and white abolitionists and consistently agitating for the end of slavery. But they were not simply abolitionist papers. The same can be said for an issue like temperance, which was taken up frequently by black newspapers in the antebellum era.

To what extent did the editors see inclusion among the American nation as a possibility for African Americans?

The black newspapers I study, with the exception of the Provincial Freeman, absolutely saw inclusion among an American nation as a possibility for African Americans. But crucially, for these newspapers “American nation” did not necessarily equal the United States of America. Instead, the black newspapers that I study consistently imagined God’s chosen people as members of American nations that existed independently of, and at times in opposition to, the United States.

We see this most clearly with The Colored American, a newspaper that at times equated the United States to Babylon, a city that, in the Bible, God eradicates because its people hold the Israelites in slavery. With this connection in mind, The Colored American speculated that black Americans would only find true freedom after the United States had been destroyed. And out of that destruction, the paper concluded, would come a truly free American nation composed of those that the United States had formerly enslaved and oppressed (including Native Americans). Indeed, The Colored American drew an explicit connection between African Americans and Native American tribes like the Seminoles, while also focusing on the history of Native nations that predated the United States. By reminding their readers, and us, that American nations had existed before the United States and will exist after it, black newspapers like The Colored American put some healthy distance between the concepts of nation (or people) and state (or government). There is a long history of U.S. Americans working hard to collapse those two concepts and portray the United States as the natural, inevitable, and only imaginable state of an American nation. But as the contributors to and readers of the black newspapers that I write about in my book recognized, that conflation is designed to eliminate the pursuit of alternative American nation-states free from the oppressive structures and conditions that constitute the United States.

 

You note, both above and in the book, the difficulty for scholars in gaining access to newspapers because so few of them are digitized. What is the current status of digitization projects for black newspapers specifically, and what work remains to be done?

When I began this project in the early 2000s, I could only access antebellum black newspapers through microfilm and a visit to the American Antiquarian Society, which holds quite a few original issues of the papers I write about in my book. At present, quite a few black newspapers, including but not limited to the five I focus on in my book, have been digitized. These digitization projects have undoubtedly made black newspapers more widely available. The caveat, though, is that the for-profit companies that have digitized and archived these papers charge subscription fees that only the richest universities can afford, and typically do not even offer subscription options for individuals unaffiliated with such institutions. Moreover, the newspaper databases that are freely accessible, such as the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America project, are woefully inadequate in their coverage of black newspapers. So we have a situation where newspapers produced by and for a people who had been bought and sold have been transformed into a commodity accessible only to scholars and students at a select few universities. One of the saddest consequences of this inaccessibility, I think, is the difficulty of bringing black newspapers into the classroom and introducing new generations to the power and beauty of the early black press.

What we need, then, is a freely accessible archive (or archives) of black newspapers (and black print more generally) created and curated by scholars, archivists, and librarians and supported by university libraries. This is a daunting task, especially for folks already overburdened by a range of other professional responsibilities. But projects like the Colored Conventions Project and the Digital Colored American Magazine are models for how this sort of work can proceed, and show that it can be accomplished, slowly, as a collective effort.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4 (Summer, 2017).

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Benjamin Fagan is assistant professor of English at Auburn University, where he teaches courses in early African American literature and culture. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literary History, African American Review, American Periodicals, Legacy, and Comparative American Studies. He is the author of The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (2016) and editor of African American Literature in Transition, 1830-1850, a collection of essays under contract with Cambridge University Press. During the 2017-18 academic year, he is a visiting research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C.

Precisely fifty years ago, on a frosty Sunday when winters were truly wintry, having little or no zest for my graduate studies, and nothing particular to divert me from the bad tidings in the Boston Globe about Vietnam and Soweto and Selma, I thought I would borrow a friend’s car and escape for a day from the poisonous effluvia of politics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So I drove out to visit Old Sturbridge Village (OSV), an outdoor history museum in central Massachusetts that recreates life in rural New England in the early nineteenth century. The fresh country air, I thought, would refresh my spirit. Little did I expect that on that day I would find a lifelong vocation in public history.

For four or five hours, I slogged through the snowy lanes of the village, in and out of wooden buildings, coming face to face with men and women wearing aprons and bonnets, broad-brimmed hats, button-fly trousers, and high leather boots that made a lot more sense than my already soaked penny loafers. In midafternoon, I took refuge in the Fenno House on the Village Common, where a kindly lady put aside her handwork and invited me to thaw out in a Windsor chair that faced the fire. She described the 1720s dwelling and suggested I look over a period newspaper, a reproduction of the Massachusetts Spy from 1820, which sat on the candlestand next to my chair. I picked it up, adjusted my eyes to its tiny font, and shifted my chair several times to catch the light from the single candle on the table, the fireplace, and the last rays coming through the windows. And though my eyes were much better in those days, I found myself reading slowly, even moving my lips. Then it dawned on me.

The architecture of the room, the physicality of the paper, my reversion to reading aloud, the lightweight chair that allowed my movement, the candlestand, the candlestick, the different sources of light—all combined to form a single cultural artifact full of rich complexity, rooted entirely in the inescapable materiality of the place. My own body became an investigative tool to probe the actions, thoughts, and feelings of people long departed, and perhaps to recover a deeper sense of their humanity. Becoming a professional historian had trained me to seek out abstract stories. I had learned to speak of “ideological origins,” “mimetic strategies,” and “nationalist impulses.” But I hadn’t until that day in Sturbridge felt the concrete urgencies of the past.

From the Fenno House, I trudged over to the cavernous Village Meetinghouse, where I instantly realized that all those Puritan sermons I had parsed at Harvard University, at the feet of the great intellectual historian Perry Miller and his disciples, had been delivered on days like this to congregants wrapped in capes, blankets, and probably the family dog. I’d been studying these New Englanders for years. Now I could no longer recall what images I previously had of them, or whether I had any at all. I started to people the room with what I knew of the social history of the time and place—the rich folks down in the front pews, the tithingman on the look-out for the flirtatious glances of the young women, a wife cutting off the snoring of her husband. The words I had decoded in the quiet of the university library were totally transformed in the theatrical and experiential actuality of this building.

 

Embarrassed by my ignorance of the palpable realities of nineteenth-century men and women, I drove back to Sturbridge the next day and talked myself into a 30-hour-per-week job, at $1.10 an hour. Dressed in those funny costumes, I could hold forth as a schoolmaster, country parson, or lawyer for an audience of families with squally toddlers and surly teenagers, well-read older folks, honeymooning couples, and many, many social-studies teachers. In my off hours, I prowled through the museum’s library, searching through massive town histories and personal narratives for stories I could impart to “my” visitors. I constantly fought against the visitors’ romantic desire to enshrine the past, physically challenging as it surely was, as morally superior. Instead, it was the dense physical complexity of every historical moment which allowed me to visit it as a site that tested my imagination at every turn. I learned most by watching how the blacksmith knew by his acute color sense “to strike the iron when it was hot,” or when the cabinetmaker pressed his chisel harder on the lathe and his foot more rapidly on the treadle, or how the passage of carts slowed as the ice melted into mud on the roads. Observing the epiphenomena of everyday life, largely unrecorded in the archive, led me to think that there was a dimension of cultural and intellectual history that had escaped my notice and that of my teachers and classmates.

Eight months later I returned to Cambridge with renewed energy to finish my PhD course work and exams. And then Old Sturbridge Village came knocking—offering a real job (at $8,000 per year) as a historian in residence, charged with providing our costumed interpreters with broader contexts for the little corners of history they represented. I leapt at the opportunity.

 

As I began my work at Sturbridge, I needed to find a pedagogy that would invite museum visitors to explore the past. At the time, there was scarcely any scholarly literature and few instructional guides in museum studies, material culture, or public history. One or two graduate programs had begun to attract students interested in museum careers, but even they relied more heavily on hands-on experience than readings and classroom work.

I began to note how our visitors moved from one encounter (with an artifact, an interpreter, or a crafts demonstration) to another. Too much of their day consisted of disconnected fragments, rarely tied to larger ideas. How did the gallery of clocks ring out with ideas about the way a sense of time changes with industrialization, and could we see the shifts in the way artisans organized their labor? What did the newly restored general store, its shelves stocked with reproductions of goods imported in that earlier era of globalization, say about the integration of local agricultural and handcraft production with regional markets? What did the taste for printed cottons teach us about the decline of domestic spinning and weaving?

The problem was built into the conventional model of almost all museums at the time. In art museums like the Met or MOMA, works were usually arranged alone, surrounded by white space, their original settings in studios, churches, or burial tombs conveniently erased, and each labeled with only minimal information about the artist, the medium, and the donor. In great libraries like the Morgan or the Huntington, long identification labels frequently shared the vitrines with treasured books and manuscripts, to be read only by the cognoscenti willing and able to understand them. In history museums, many of the objects were marvelously mysterious, like old farm implements, and required extensive description, diagrams, and period illustrations to make them comprehensible, but the interpretation of each object was disconnected from what came before and after. In all such venues, the more the visitors brought to the encounter, the more they could take away. But woe to the uninitiated and the unassisted.

 

The one-artifact-at-a-time approach to display—probably a better word than exhibition—foreclosed a more coherent interpretation of the American past. What linked the objects was their rarity, or their superb individual quality, and not how they each contributed to a lucid exposition or narrative about American history.

State and local museums then usually featured a core exhibition of a long, winding timeline. Era after era succeeded one another. The first gallery invariably focused on local Indian tribes, whose “lives in harmony with nature” were illustrated by a diorama and display case with a dozen dark brown archaeological specimens—pots and fabrics and arrowheads. Succeeding exhibition cases featured a predictable progression of Pioneers (flintlocks and wolf traps); Settlers (axes and aprons); Founding Fathers (inkwells); Inventors (patent models); Captains of Industry (engravings of sprawling factories); Immigrants (colorful folk costumes); Governors or Presidential Candidates (campaign buttons picturing men with beards); and Veterans of the World Wars (posters, packs of Lucky Strikes, ration cards). The past lay across a great divide; how we got from one era to the next unexplored. Chronology took the place of interpretation.

Though the objects on display were drawn from local examples, the story they told was generic: America was anywhere and everywhere a tale of endless economic progress, democracy, and the expansion of science and industry. A similar narrative framed the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of History and Technology (NMHT, now called the National Museum of American History), where mechanical marvels—locomotives, combines, and die-stamping presses—marched across immense galleries, proof of America’s exceptional genius. Much of the actual quotidian experience of Americans—the communities they shared, the skills they used, and the relations they had with one another—was excluded. Public history, largely inattentive to the lives of ordinary folk, was instead a celebration of the rich, the powerful, and the famous.

It seems scarcely credible today that when the NMHT opened in 1964, it displayed almost no images of African-Americans or Indian peoples. Not a single working-class home or neighborhood in the United States was then deemed worthy of preservation or interpretation. The enormous architectural legacy of American industrial places, from Maine through New York City’s Soho district and west through the Great Lakes states, was in danger of being destroyed by urban-renewal programs. At plantation museums in the South, the lives of enslaved people were invisible—“meals were served” and “cotton was harvested.” The immigration stations at Ellis Island and Angel Island were abandoned ruins. Museums of decorative arts often cut off their collections at 1820, deeming unworthy the public’s interest in machine-made furniture.

 

Coming of age in the 1960s, my generation of museum historians aimed to shatter such a simplistic teleology and to explore themes that took a more critical stance on our nation’s history. As devotees of the new social history, we wanted museums to open for investigation the everyday experiences, perspectives, and agency of ordinary people in the past. Not to leave visitors gawking at their weirdness, but to have them put themselves in the shoes of Americans dealing with the threats and promises of their times—a boom-and-bust economy, intergroup rivalry and conflict, shifting family roles, as well as more powerful disruptions like enslavement, immigration, impoverishment, violence, epidemic, and dislocation.

The answer to fragmented visits and implicit teleology had to be both pedagogical and historiographical. At Sturbridge, I had experimented with coaxing visitors to participate, through a variety of hands-on experiences, in “thematic” tours about Family Roles (should farmers send their daughters to work in textile mills?), Work (how did mechanization transform the skills of rural people?), and Community Development (who would benefit if the town built a high school?). At the end, the visitors’ “findings” represented the heart of the “wrap-up.” The great cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner taught us that visitors would take away more of what they said and did than what we offered, so it was important to get them to “externalize” their understandings.

After leaving Sturbridge, I joined in 1980 with my friend Sam Bass Warner, a great historian and public citizen, to create the American History Workshop, a collaborative of scholars, educators, curators, designers, and media producers working to bring fresh scholarship, imaginative design, and effective pedagogy to supplement the staff resources of cultural institutions. The workshop has since been the vehicle for my professional career, through more than 500 projects in thirty-four states and the District of Columbia.

 

In each case, we have construed the museum visit as an experience in time as well as space, a performance in which the visitors played the leading roles. My first artistic love had been the theater, and increasingly I saw the museum space as a stage, but with a more flexible toolbox for engaging visitors. Our exhibitions could present a range of historical evidence that far surpassed the texts that our academic colleagues discussed—artifacts, remnants of places, sounds and images (through film and video), and gestures (in performances and demonstrations incorporated into the visitors’ pathway). Technical aids have been continually proliferating: beautifully rendered graphic panels, audio-visual programs, computer-interactive devices, role-playing and simulation exercises, and stagecraft that recreates historical spaces, moments, and situations.

Over the course of the 1980s, however, it became clear to me that we were failing. Visitors did not exactly warm to these exhibitions of the new social history. They did not identify with “ordinary people” in the past, and they quickly wearied of social-science generalizations about urbanization or deindustrialization. A turning point came when we started to outline the tour programs of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Instead of an interpretive exhibition that would explore the evolution of working-class life in New York City’s famous gateway neighborhood, the museum decided to animate its six-story 1864 brick building at 97 Orchard Street with apartments that would recreate the lives of distinct immigrant and ethnic families—one for German Americans and others for Irish, Eastern-European Jewish, Italian, Chinese, and African-American families. Teams of historians were enlisted to construct composite, “typical” life histories for the families.

 

The results were disappointing. Our historical consultants painted the facts correctly, but in overly broad strokes. All their imagined Irishmen, of course, worked on the docks, the Germans in furniture, the Jews in shmattes (garments). Each community was composed of diverse sub-ethnic groups (Sicilians, Neapolitans, etc.). The ambitious sons in each gravitated to influential positions in different niches of public and economic life—the Irish to Tammany Hall and the police, the Germans to the shooting society on St. Marks Place and the unions. Added together, the family patterns our historians described had a sameness that threatened to turn the museum into a repetitive “soap opera” of how immigrants overcame adversity, group after group, year after year.

At that point, a genealogist working for the museum discovered the 1883 petition of Nathalie Gumpertz, a tenant at 97 Orchard Street, asking New York’s Surrogates Court to declare her husband Julius legally dead. She said that Julius had gone to work one day in the depression year of 1874 and never returned. Informed that he could now inherit $600 from relatives in Prussia, Nathalie asked the court to declare Julius dead and to grant her the money. The census returns confirmed Julius’s presence in 1870 but not in 1880. Then the fun began. Who was Nathalie? Was she Roman Catholic, Jewish, or freethinking? What could she do to support herself and three daughters when her husband vanished? As we researched those questions—learning about the education of German-American girls in New York City, the technology of dressmaking, and other subjects—we fleshed out the dilemmas of a household led by a single mother.

The Gumpertz narrative became a template for other tenement museum apartments, as we sought to construct stories around the lives of actual residents of 97 Orchard. Josephine Baldizzi, a daughter of Sicilian immigrants who had grown up there during the Great Depression, came forward to donate detailed stories as well as her father’s tools, which he’d used for the odd jobs he scratched together to make ends meet. We found that visitors empathized and identified with these individual stories of real people more intensely than they ever did with the composite figures fabricated by historians.

The project taught me that narratives always trumped themes. Public history is far more than the dissemination of scholarly research to a wider audience. It is itself an alternative method of intellectual discovery. Visitors did not come to museums to get an M.A. in social history but to engage their hearts and minds, skills, and self-images, in an encounter with human situations structured by a time and place different from our own. Thematic exposition thus evolved into what I have come to call a “storyscape.”

Working on interpretive plans for the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, several American Indian cultural centers, and Holocaust museums also pressed me to acknowledge the political implications of cultural and historical recovery. I learned that almost every important new museum project had to bridge two roles—serving as the cultural expression of one ethnic group or another and contributing to a larger American narrative about socioeconomic power and its limits.

That didn’t mean scoring political points with long didactic labels—usually less likely to make an impression on visitors as they might on scholarly review committees. Our goal was to maximize the visitors’ opportunities “to see themselves in the story,” to represent multiple perspectives in the working-out of the historical events, and to leave the ultimate conclusions open-ended.

 

We had our best chance to display this methodology in a series of six blockbuster history shows for the New-York Historical Society in 2005-2011. In the first, Slavery in New York (2005), we avoided editorializing about “the nefarious trafficking in human beings” in favor of demonstrating how fundamental the institution was to the economic and physical development of the city—a surprise to most  New York visitors, Black as well as White. Even more important, the exhibition drew visitors slowly away from an outsider’s view toward embodying the perspectives and voices of its African and African-American citizenry. “Curating the silence” became our byword, following in the footsteps of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1997).

Visitors entered the next show, New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War (2006), under a hanging replica of a 500-pound bale of cotton, suggesting the dominance of the cotton trade on the politics and culture of New York City in the antebellum period, against which the city’s community of free Blacks and sympathetic Whites fashioned a crusade for abolition and racial equality. In succeeding exhibitions, we tackled the construction of American nationhood in the nineteenth century through events like Lafayette’s tour in 1824-25 (French Founding Father: Lafayette’s Return to Washington’s America, 2007) and the creation of the U.S. Army (Grant and Lee, 2008). In Lincoln and New York (2009), we dug deeply into the domestic civil war in New York City between Copperheads and Republicans, and its influence on the much more familiar national scene. Our final show at N-YHS, Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn (2011), aimed to construe the effects of the eighteenth-century political upheavals, and particularly the Haitian Revolution, in delegitimizing social hierarchies.

All this experience informs my advice for young people aiming to carry their passion for history beyond the academy. In making that transition myself, I had to overcome three hurdles. First, I had to redefine what I meant by the “audience” for my work—not only in its greater diversity but also in its role. At its best, public history engages the visitor’s active curiosity with the curatorial and interpretive resources of the scholar. Much contemporary academic scholarship argues over issues that are of only remote concern to the wider public, like the exchange of gifts between English and American Indian groups in eighteenth-century Georgia. It gives long-winded answers to questions laypeople would never raise, like the congruence of FDR’s economic policies with earlier currents of academic research.

 

Our history workshop begins by doing “content research” with our potential visitors: What do they now understand about the idea of “revolution”? What could make them see the federal Constitution as a jerry-built construction, with procedural compromises to overcome deadlock? How could they serve as witnesses for the resourcefulness of families in moments of economic distress or social exclusion? Incorporating the urgencies of potential visitors is not a matter of dumbing down the interpretive message, but of respecting museumgoers as thinkers.

The second hurdle was learning my trade. A museum historian doesn’t have to master the design of computer programs. Working on a film doesn’t mean that one needs to handle a camera or an editing suite. But it is critical to understand how design decisions, filmmaking techniques, or software protocols influence the narrative and the interpretation we are seeking. Many architects, designers, and media producers would rather that the historian simply turn over the research, and let them create the script or the space. We established AHW precisely to insist on the centrality of the historian to all stages of the interpretive work, from the initial concept to the choice of objects and interpretive devices, and even to the color, light, and ambient sound of the final installation. Early in my career, I had decided I would not be satisfied as a “consultant.” So in assuming the producer’s chair, I had to learn how to set performance criteria for my subcontractors and keep the project on budget and schedule. I had to lean heavily on friends in design offices and advertising agencies, and to spend many weeks carefully observing how their projects evolved, in the service of learning the ropes.

The third hurdle was to grasp the organizational culture of my work. Taking courses in museum studies and public history can usefully sharpen a student’s sense of the scope and focus of professional work beyond the academy. And by now there has been an explosion of writing, teaching, and public commentary about museums. Some of it aims to “theorize” the museum, often using it as evidence of everything that is disappointing in contemporary social and intellectual life. Others take the current museum as a given, recommending “best practices.” Though I’ve enjoyed dipping into this literature, it has had only limited influence on my work. There is no substitute for immersion in the very different institutional world of the museum, the public-broadcasting station, or the art center. Seminar papers are very different from the sequence of proposals, alternate concepts, interim drafts, and final scripts that mark the stages of a public history project.

Ultimately, however, public historians are actors in the same intellectual milieu as their academic colleagues. Beyond their work as interpreters of the past, public historians today share perplexities that are both peculiar to our trade but also rooted in our wider intellectual landscape.

I see three great challenges confronting our work today.

 

Do we still value attentiveness? I grew up worshipping at the altar of attentiveness. It was, after all, the means to every good end. If you wanted success in school, or in learning to appreciate literature or music, you had to pay attention and stick with it. To my generation, the wandering mind was a dangerous outlaw. Though I loved watching Sesame Street in its early years with my young son (I was more attentive than he was), commentators blamed the program for abbreviating the attention spans of children. There followed the epidemic of attention deficit disorder, especially among young boys who might have been dubbed restless or obstreperous in earlier times. Economist Herbert Simon worried publicly about the danger of brief attentiveness to rational decision-making. But more recently, intuition, instinct, and snap judgments have made a cultural comeback. Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, argues that effortful and rational thinking, or what he calls “System 2,” is not only slower and more biased, but even more likely to be wrong, than “System 1,” or intuition. The book has sold over a million copies since its publication in 2011. Malcolm Gladwell’s racier Blink: the Power of Thinking without Thinking (2007), a celebration of intuitions, attracted an even larger readership. Psychologists, behavioral economists, sociobiologists, and spiritualists have converged on the idea of yielding to “gut” feelings, jumping to snap judgments, and eliminating extraneous filters that could lead to labored reasoning.

As I’ve noted, much of my museum career has been an effort to overcome the discontinuous nature of attentiveness. If anything, ubiquitous smartphones and social media have now made distraction even more tempting. It is so easy for our visitors to lose focus in attending to an ever-proliferating “elsewhere.” We know that the museum experience—unlike film, theater, or even classroom instruction—is inherently built around intermittent encounters. Over the years, however, we have learned to acknowledge and turn potential distractions to our advantage. We help parents guide their children. We provide seating and contemplative spaces to relieve the physical strain of intensive looking and reading, and so on.

Can we now reinvent the rhythms of museum engagement to integrate new media into the process of learning and aesthetic pleasure?

The tyranny of immediacy. Timothy Wu’s brilliant and breezy 2016 book The Attention Merchants traces “the epic scramble” of technology promoters “to get inside our heads.” With the advent of recordings of live interviews and commentaries captured in the midst of an occurrence—first on radio and then television, then via audio and video recorders, and now on smartphones—our distance from global and local events has vanished. Immediacy has become the chief criterion of importance. No other source is more compelling than a report from the scene, bringing us that face-to-face encounter with a world-changing event, just as it happens, in the voice of ordinary participants or eyewitnesses. How desperately we’ve missed such testimony about the great events of the past! And how much we’ve tried to compensate for that gap by re-creating dramatic moments in individual lives. In some ways, that’s been the capstone of my creative labors in museum design.

But slowly, perhaps insidiously, “immediatism” has undermined the value of other kinds of information. Aren’t there other actors, other actions, other causes and consequences that are worth interpreting? Is what happened on 9/11 only what happened at the tip of Manhattan or at the Pentagon or at Shanksville, Pennsylvania? Do the 2,500-plus “Portraits in Grief,” capsule biographies of the 9/11 victims first published in The New York Times and now exhibited at the memorial museum in lower Manhattan, give us the whole story of what occurred that day? Of course not, but it’s difficult to reinsert other voices—registering longer-term perspectives and contexts to tell us what the eyewitnesses miss—when our media privilege first-hand narratives.

Slowly, gradually, the insistence on immediacy has altered the role of public historians. Erasing the distance between the past and the present, between the witness and the observer, has turned up the heat in historical presentations. The pain of enslavement, or social exclusion, or economic exploitation, now pushes to one side the exposition of its contexts in historical conditions. Immediate reactions and consequences squeeze out slowly emerging causes. Public historians treating difficult subjects—racial violence, for example—themselves absorb the suffering of historical victims. As historical distance is effaced, the traumas of lynching are visited on those who study and interpret it for the public, and the public too may be deliberately exposed to the pain.

Public historians want history to be relevant and personally meaningful. But they also need to help visitors, viewers, and readers to step back and detach themselves from history’s horrors. My generation of historians and curators has worked hard to claim a space for critical history in our museums and historic sites and, at the same time, to make our storytelling emotionally compelling. We don’t want museums to become “books on the wall,” dense and dreary with arid generalizations, but we have to resist the alternate danger, that we become uncritical shrines or memorials, or weak substitutes for community social service agencies.

Can we make coherent sense of our fragmented storylines? Our old triumphalist narrative of America masked a lot of troubling episodes, construing the story of a segment of mostly White, middle-class men as THE story of America. Two generations of historians have recovered many of the missing pieces of our diverse national experience. But today synthesizing the history of our nation in any way has become as daunting as overcoming the fragmentation in our politics. The New Left’s suspicion of “the system” has converged with the New Right’s antagonism to big government, amounting to what the historian Daniel T. Rodgers describes as “the narrowing down of institutional society into word-pictures of isolated individuals.” We have millions of great stories, but what do they add up to? For every saga of a dream fulfilled we seem to have another heartbreaking tale of a life impoverished or lost.

 

By the end of the Obama years, many historians may have grown complacent about the value and challenge of stronger narratives. Fragmentation could plausibly be read as diversity. Was that not a good thing? Then, quite suddenly, the 2016 election revealed a huge hole in our profession’s thinking about the nation’s character and evolution. Where had this Trump coalition come from? Where had it been hiding all these years? Other fissures appeared. How could the triumphalist narrative of the civil rights revolution—a staple of museums across the nation—survive in the wake of renewed attention to police shootings of Black men or, more broadly, in the attack by Michelle Alexander and others on mass incarceration as The New Jim Crow (2012), yet another chapter in the control of Black men? How could longstanding narratives about prosperity survive the evidence of growing inequality and wage stagnation, even in the midst of a very long economic expansion?

All these phenomena—Trump, Black Lives Matter, and the disappearing middle class—warn us against grasping at “happy endings” in our public history narratives. Can we develop storyscapes that show how they relate to deep and persistent patterns in our national experience? Will institutions dependent upon public support—whether tax-supported or market-driven—accept presentations of the unresolved, incomplete, and even ongoing tragedies of American history?

Perhaps one day a history department will reframe its program to help its students address these questions and seize the opportunity to answer them, but after a half century I’m doubtful. In many graduate schools, there is now much talk about public history as an alt-career, a fallback in the very real likelihood of missing out on an academic position. But few departments actively assist students in gaining the skills, the perspectives, and the sensitivity to institutional cultures that are needed for success beyond the academy. Few members of history faculties have the personal experience to guide students in finding new ways to do history beyond the university. And unlike many other fields, the faculty-development system in history has made it impossible to recruit senior practitioners of these historical arts as mentors.

I often get phone calls from graduate students desperately seeking advice. Some say, without knowing how reckless it sounds to me, “I want to do what you’ve done.” But my example is probably irrelevant now. I had the fortunate opportunity to finish my PhD dissertation while I worked full-time in a museum. When I got my degree, at age 32, I had already completed seven or eight years of museum work and built a network of colleagues I could rely upon for a lifetime of collaboration and companionship. Instead, I refer my inquirers to the brave young historians I know who’ve more recently jumped ship and struck out on their own. Some have found work in museums or with documentary-film projects, but others are developing apps, websites, podcasts, and games, writing books and curricula, collaborating on public art projects, and creating and leading tours. All of them would agree that doing this work well couldn’t wait until one has tried and failed to succeed as a university professor. In sum, my advice is: Start now.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4 (Summer, 2017).

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Richard Rabinowitz is founder and president of American History Workshop. His most recent book, Curating America: Journeys Through Storyscapes of the American Past, is published by the University of North Carolina Press. Illustrations by Richard T. Hoyen. All images courtesy of the author. All rights reserved.

The next morning I was discussing My Bondage

and My Freedom with the Frederick Douglass

t-shirt spread out on my bed like a flag.

I’d climbed out of the sheets believing myself

a slave to various pornographies of style

(hair, language, demeanor), and because

I wanted the glamor of the mythic black man

with a blasting afro and fortified stare to adorn

my vulnerable heart that day, I said to the t-shirt,

“I don’t know if it’s the guy who wears

eyeglasses that’s me, the guy who wears contacts,

or the guy who wears nothing at all.” Frederick

Douglass wrote, “I prefer to be true to myself,

even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule

of others,” but the t-shirt was silent.

I know it seems odd to converse with a garment,

but I have no one else to talk to these days,

plus I think it’s great that I can talk to a t-shirt

when I am not confessing to a sheet of paper.

Most people are not so lucky; some only have

conversations with God, money or bodies.

Last night I dreamed my father had shed

like 200 pounds. Shirtless, the muscles

he’d had in his twenties when he met my mother

and me were restored and made me ashamed

because in the dream I realized he’d never been

comfortable enough to walk bareback

through his own house. “Titties,” my mother called

them before he moved out of their bedroom

and began to dress and undress downstairs.

“I say nothing of father, for he is shrouded

in a mystery I have never been able to penetrate,”

Frederick Douglass wrote. In the dream my father

smiled when I told him he looked good with no shirt,

but the truth is, growing up, I was happy

he did not walk around shirtless. He was so large

I feared the flesh hanging from his chest

would remind me of a woman’s breasts.

 

I told the Freddy D tee the infant that would become

our first black president nursed at the breasts

of a white woman from Kansas and the shirt replied,

“Naturally, the mother was a tapestry of nurture,

who does not desire that? I was born Frederick

Augustus Washington Bailey into slavery

on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay,

and still remember that my mother’s touch,

before I was taken from her, was like cloth

the shape of my future, all the threads of decision

and consequence to come; how her spirit

filled me with elaborate dreams, extraordinary clarity,

and doom as I moved among the so called pilgrims

in the kingdom of God.” “A man’s character

always takes its hue, more or less, from the form

and color of things about him.” FD also said,

“My first wife was the color of my mother

and the second, the color of my father.” Color,

it turns out, is fluid. Some of us sweat History

more than others. Frederick Douglass was married

to the black underground railroad abolitionist

and laundress, Anna Murray, for 44 years

before she died, but no t-shirt honors her visage.

Later when he slept beside his second wife,

a younger, very white woman named Helen Pitts,

he did not once stroke the downy hair along her

arms without the embarrassment of an erection.

She would be asleep when it happened, the touch,

the erection, and in the dark the great black man

would reach beneath a fabric as plush as the fabrics

his first wife laundered before and after marrying him.

The children with the first wife likely considered this

the worst of their father’s abolitions. The mind longs

to abolish misery, but unfortunately who can say

whether a mind can actually abolish anything.

A mother’s clutch, marriage, slavery, heartache:

it all lives in the thread. I believe nothing

can be abolished, that’s my problem. Not fear

in this universe of cost and erasure, the death inside

everything, not fear of the world’s dark avenues

and adventures, not fear of other men and women,

the Zimmermans, the plain clothes cops, the handcuffs

and malice, blame, bullets, bruises, and blues

alighting the skin, slipknots, silk cloth, mischief—

nothing can be abolished, though we agree,

Frederick Douglass and me, slavery nearly abolished

our ancestry just as it nearly abolished our families.

 

I wanted to wear the Frederick Douglass t-shirt

because it’s as close as I’ll ever be to Frederick

Douglass. I wanted to appear revolutionary

and decorous entering the day like a needful star,

superb in love and logic. My mother often says

she’s so happy she didn’t kill me when she found out

she was pregnant. She’s so glad she didn’t give me

to the old woman who asked to adopt me.

When sweat weeps along the sides of my ribs

from the two great stains yellowing my shirt pits,

I’m like a man ashamed by his own tears.

I used to keep my arms clamped at my sides

the hot days of my adolescence in South Carolina,

oh Carolina, peace was not the word I knew there.

The last time I visited my mother told me how,

when her handyman gave the waitress

sweating before them a ten dollar tip, the waitress

gave him in return the keys to the apartment

she lived in with her delicate 20 year old son.

He whined “Why mamma” exactly like a daughter

anticipating the heartache her mother was courting,

“Why would you let somebody you barely know

into our house?” “He used to turn all the heads in town,”

my mother told me, and though he was fatter now

because of the drugs he took with a mind to change

himself into a woman, he was still easily mistaken

for a girl in a sundress with his milk-less breasts,

and gooseflesh swaddling his belly and biceps.

Two months later the handyman and the waitress

broke up. He was not even that handy, really,

he was just out of work and hired by my mother

to repair some leak or shamble and because

she did not pay him much, sometimes she’d take

him to lunch. I was the shade of perspiration

imagining his fingers sliding over a woman

whose mouth straightened, curled and puckered

as if she was praying or giving birth. Taffeta

is the kind of cloth that makes a sound

when you touch it. It sounds like flowers

being painted on a dress. It falls in a crush

by the bed and the tongue folds around

a lonely center and because of it,

your son changes his name to Taffeta

when he becomes female. We’re all so full

of envy. Nature’s favorite color is green.

Taffeta’s dress is covered in flowers.

At sixteen I wore my mother’s dress to school

and stood on a stage with three other boys

in lipstick lip-syncing to the Mary Jane Girls.

I loved the feel of cloth folding around

my movement. That dress still hangs somewhere

waiting to be worn, its sheen and she-ness

shameless. There’s a yearbook photo

to prove I wore it though it’s true a photograph,

especially when it’s an image of flesh,

grows over time, more and more strange.

You are not you for long. I am not trying

to change the world, I am trying to change

myself so that the world will seem changed.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.4 (Summer, 2017).

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Terrance Hayes is the author of five collections of poetry, including How To Be Drawn in 2015, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2015. His website is terrancehayes.com.