Major Sullivan Ballou’s last letter home has become something of a sacred text. Penned days before the first major battle of the American Civil War, the major’s words enjoyed an outsized afterlife when they became part of Ken Burns’ immensely popular documentary The Civil War. Read by Paul Roebling and paired with “Ashokan Farewell,” Burns created an indelible scene. Ballou, an officer in the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry Regiment, used soaring rhetoric to anchor his devotion in country and family. He declared his love for his wife Sarah “deathless,” bound by cables that “nothing but Omnipotence could break.” Yet his love of country came over him “like a strong wind” and moved him inexorably to the battlefield. Burns concludes the stirring segment by relating Ballou’s sad fate: mortally wounded at the Battle of Bull Run. But his story did not end there.

Ballou’s body, buried in late July 1861 at Sudley Church near the Bull Run battlefield, did not rest in peace. Sometime after the battle, rebel soldiers dug up the remains of United States troops. According to local Blacks who witnessed the scene, the Confederates first searched for buttons as souvenirs. Their work then turned far more macabre. They started collecting bones. One soldier proclaimed that he intended to use a skull as a “drinking-cup on the occasion of his marriage.” Bull Run initiated many a soldier into the bloody world of combat. Horrified and exhilarated by the encounter, they transferred their mixed emotions into the collection of objects with violent histories. However terrible these acts, Sullivan Ballou suffered a worse fate: Confederates disinterred, beheaded, and then burned his corpse.

Ken Burns never related the fate of Sullivan Ballou’s body. To do so would have spotlighted an uncomfortable part of Civil War history marked by violence and brutality. Perhaps the master documentarian should not be faulted. The incident, well-publicized during the war years, has largely been forgotten. Simon Harrison, one of the few scholars who has written about the collection of bones in war, maintains that the “Confederate soldiers and their supporters who collected Northern skulls did so because their political interests were predicated on representing Southerners and Northerners as two different peoples.” Harrison’s argument is convincing. But the incident also speaks to a broader cultural shift. The existential crisis of civil war challenged, though never overturned, the nineteenth-century’s prevailing culture of romanticism. Soldiers’ reports from the front, citizens’ encounters with the aftermath of battle, and the circulation of objects with violent histories created narratives of war that were marked departures from conventional accounts of war grounded in heroism and glory. Only by placing Ballou’s sentimentalist letter in tension with his dismembered body can Civil War Americans’ layered discourse be fully revealed.

It is worth pausing here, though, to note that the removal and display of human remains intersects with a long history. On the one hand, white Americans, and their English forebears, had a history of taking and displaying skulls as acts of domination. New Englanders affixed the head of Philip, a Wampanoag leader, on a post outside Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1676. And in 1838, Dr. Frederick Weedon took the personal effects of the Seminole warrior Osceola and then removed his head. At different points in the American South, enslavers displayed Blacks’ heads as warnings against resistance. On the other hand, Europeans and Americans had long kept bones as relics or artifacts of curiosity. Beginning around 1200, the new Gothic architectural style within European churches accorded privileged spaces for the body parts of saints. Holy relics and human remains were essential parts of religious life. Much later, during the Revolutionary era, avowed Loyalist David Redding was caught trying to steal muskets at Bennington, Vermont. He was executed for the crime in 1778. A local resident, Dr. Jonas Fay, collected the body and preserved the skeleton. After being conveyed to another family, the bones ended up back in Bennington at the Historical Museum before eventual reburial. Thomas Paine’s skeleton suffered a similar fate. Disinterred from an American burial plot, the bones ended up in England. They were distributed among different people, some lost or destroyed, others collected and displayed.

Confederates’ quest for bones thus connects to a bizarre history of the use, and misuse, of human remains. Bones from the Bull Run battlefield were taken as acts of domination and displayed as trophies of war. However macabre, human remains became part of the deeply variegated material culture of war. The gravity of civil war and the conditions it generated resulted in “a massive traffic in objects,” as historian Joan Cashin observes, “prompting the redistribution of millions” of objects of war. Bayonets and bullets, fragments from famous trees and notable buildings, articles of clothing and military accoutrements all featured prominently. Human skulls were another matter entirely.

By the time Northern citizens visited the Bull Run battlefield in the spring of 1862, word of the rebels’ atrocities had already circulated. The acts were being used, even exaggerated, for political purposes and publicized in the Northern press. Congress launched an investigation. Ohio Senator Benjamin Wade delivered a summary of the committee’s findings. He framed a key portion of the report around the “treatment of our heroic dead” and punctuated his case by methodically documenting the “fiendish spirit” of the rebels. Wade wisely focused on a theme both familiar and important to nineteenth-century Americans: the care, burial, and memorialization of the dead which formed key elements of the Good Death. Civil War Americans saw the human body, even in death, as central to selfhood and individuality. Bodies were fastidiously prepared and carefully buried. Yet war had called everything into question. Acting with practicality and alacrity, Americans hastily dug and imperfectly marked graves. Corpses were often comingled in long, anonymous trenches. Soldiers North and South watched on with trepidation as they worried about their potential fate. North Carolinian George Battle, writing to his mother in July 1861, described the Bull Run battlefield as a “most horrible sight.” He came to a Yankee soldier “who had only a little dust thrown over him.” Worms were “eating the skin off his face,” and Battle shuddered “to think that perhaps I may be buried that way.”

The antebellum era saw the rise of rural and garden cemeteries. Battlefields not only obliterated the boundaries between the living and the dead but also threatened the sanctity of human remains. Frederick Scholes of Brooklyn, New York, visited the battlefield in April to find his brother’s body. He met a Black man, Simon, “who stated that it was a common thing for the rebel soldiers to exhibit the bones of the Yankees.” Scholes surveyed the area and found the disturbed grave of a Zouave. He then uncovered a long trench containing bone fragments. In one instance, he found a sawn shinbone. “From the appearance of it,” Scholes conjectured, “pieces had been sawed off to make finger-rings.” Another visitor to the area, G. A. Smart of Cambridge, Massachusetts, went in search of his brother. He found the uniform—homemade by their mother—but “no head in the grave, and no bones of any kind.” Scenes from Bull Run shattered any hope that the Civil War’s Union dead would be treated with the dignity that cultural norms demanded.

Soldiers, citizens, and the enslaved encountered the aftermath of battle for the first time in the summer of 1861 and spring of 1862. The harrowing photographs of the Antietam battlefield, which forever changed public representations of war, were still months away. Most Americans understood battle in a highly idealized form later captured in the lithograph, “Battle of Bull Run,” by the Chicago-based firm Kurz and Allison. Although wounded men are present, there is a total absence of blood. Those figures portrayed in the act of being shot are gallantly posed. And the neat, tidy lines of soldiers romanticize the chaos of combat. (Figure 1)

We usually think of the artist-ornithologist John James Audubon, gun on shoulder or pen in hand, as a man with his eyes on the sky. Audubon, after all, was the special chronicler of North American birds. But from time to time, Audubon looked at the ground. Like many naturalists of his generation, he raided burials or picked up human skulls he found. He then sent them to Dr. Samuel George Morton, the Philadelphia craniologist we remember as the father of “scientific racism,” the idea that cranial capacity mirrored racial hierarchy.   

Our recent racial reckoning and the harassment of Black birder Christian Cooper in New York’s Central Park took me back to Audubon’s contribution to Morton’s skull collection. Audubon sent Morton five skulls from Texas—the heads of four Mexican soldiers and one “Hispano-Indian,” bullet-riddled and left unburied in the aftermath of the Battle of San Jacinto.

Statement of Poetic Research

“If not yourself, whom would you like to be?  No one.”

—Anandibai Joshee, 1883, from a mental photograph in Theodocia Carpenter’s autograph book, New Jersey.

In 2017, I was researching South Asian history for a long lyric poem I was writing on the racism I had experienced as a child while growing up in Minnesota in the early 1980s. In this poem, I wanted to confront a childhood bully with facts and dazzle him, to let him know that my family wasn’t the first to have come from India, so that his words, “go back to where you came from,” would ring hollow. It had always been convenient for me to slip into the notion that I was the “other” and that America wasn’t my actual home because I hadn’t seen myself or my history reflected in my surroundings. This led me on a wild goose chase of sorts to find out who was the first woman from India to touch American shores. And suddenly there she was, seated in a sepia-tinted photograph, next to two other women, dressed elegantly in a saree, her Mona Lisa-like glance following me everywhere, her lips curled up in a half-smile, her image radiating such fierce determination that I had to know more. Who was this woman and how did she get to Philadelphia all alone from India in the nineteenth century and why? How did she break away from that iron grip of tradition where women were largely homebound tending to family and manage to cross kala pani, those black ocean waters that were considered tainted? I was riveted and literally felt a shiver—of acknowledgment and discovery, this validation of knowing that all along there had been others before us. This was how I stumbled upon the extraordinary life of Anandi Gopal Joshee, known more informally as Anandibai (bai, a term of respect for Marathi women), the first Indian woman to have come to the United States to pursue a medical degree in 1883. Until very recently, Anandibai’s story was limited to her geographic community in India and had been told through the lens of her husband being her advocate and guide. I wondered if I were to tell Anandibai’s story through poems in her own voice, what would that mean? How would it change the narrative? Would it give her agency back to her? Would it give South Asian Americans a deeper sense of roots and history? And supposing it did, was I the right person to undertake this task? I was a poet after all, and not a historian. 

It is with these hesitations that I began my research and poem-making. And stopped. And started. And stopped. And began again. For four years, Anandibai would simmer in the back of my mind like a pot of dal on the stove. I was intimidated by what I found and what I hadn’t. There was a biography written in Marathi, Anandibai’s mother tongue, of which I barely knew a few words. There was also a Marathi novel that had been translated into English that captured the era well, but painted a picture of Anandibai that seemed weak, helpless, and at the whims and mercies of her mercurial husband. It barely mentioned Anandibai’s time in the United States. Drexel University’s Legacy Center Archives brought me a little closer to the person that was Anandibai. It was here that I came across that iconic photograph of three women from three different countries posing in their native dress—a saree, a kimono, a headdress of coins—gathered in Philadelphia to become doctors and then return home to serve the people of their respective lands. (Figure 1) Yes, this photograph echoed exoticism, orientalism and the West’s fetishization of the East, and yet it exuded a kind of power that seemed to turn the notion of empire on its head and hint at an allyship and sisterhood that went beyond the church and state. The image had gone viral in 2017, but there were more photos of Anandibai. One, a side profile with her signature in both Devanagari and English (Figure 2), and a letter in her long, slanted writing stating why she would be an ideal candidate for medical school, a newspaper clipping celebrating the arrival of the first woman medical student from India, and more. She was becoming more real by the second. Yet every twenty-first century article on Anandibai I came across espoused the same narrative: 

India’s first woman doctor. Born in 1865. Married at nine to a widowed man sixteen years older who was zealously progressive. Pregnant at twelve or fourteen, Anandibai loses her child (a son) ten days after giving birth due to lack of medical care. The loss fuels her desire to become a doctor, only there are no medical schools for women in India. Anandibai’s husband does everything he can to help her become one, including pleading with American missionaries and possibly converting to Christianity. An American woman in New Jersey hears of Anandibai’s plight and offers assistance. Anandibai goes to America, all by herself, despite the protest of her own countrymen and women. Anandibai returns to India as a doctor and is celebrated/hailed for her bravery but dies of tuberculosis before she can practice. 

So where was Anandibai in all of this? Trapped between the narrative of the husband as savior and the white wo/man as savior was Anandibai’s own voice and it resounded so loudly in my mind and heart. Could no one else hear it? 

Two women, a century apart, had heard Anandibai’s voice and had tried to capture it in their own ways in English. The first, Mrs. Caroline Healy Dall, a feminist writer and reformer, had met Anandibai while she was in America and after their first meeting had written in her journal: 

She looks like a stout, dumpy mulatto girl not especially interesting until her yellow face lights up, and light up it did as soon as she gathered from a helping word of mine, that I was familiar with the customs of her people. I cannot describe the effect. It was magical. She speaks seven languages, of which English, Sanscrit and Mahratta are three. Her English is exquisite. There is hardly a flaw in pronunciation or construction. If I had not known, I should have thought her born in this country. 

On first reading, I found the journal entry offensive, and it brought back memories of my own childhood where I was told how flawless my English was by white Americans, marveling at how I didn’t have an accent. But on closer examination, I was fascinated by the paradoxes within the journal entry. Anandibai had clearly made an impression on Caroline Dall. So much so that she would meet Anandibai several more times and go on to write her biography within a year of her passing. While this was a biography of an Indian woman through Western eyes and carried the author’s own cultural biases, it incorporated several of Anandibai’s letters along with comments from those who were close to her along with a narration of incidents and events. Anandibai’s voice was on almost every page through her letters that Dall had collected from various people—a polite and trusting voice, a strong and confident voice, a voice that wasn’t afraid to ask questions and share her concerns, a voice that seemed wise beyond her teen years. Best of all, this book, The Life of Dr. Anandabai Joshee, A Kinswoman of Pandita Ramabai, written in 1888, was available on the internet, copyright free. I downloaded and printed it twice in four years, between the several stops and starts of this project. This would be my go-to book, as I read it repeatedly, scanning for nuggets of gold, a chance sentence or fact that might reveal a unique facet of Anandibai’s personality or experience. Anandibai had visited Tiffany’s flagship store in New York. She had also gone to the Barnum & Bailey Circus show with a classmate and had written that she didn’t care for it, but hadn’t specified why. In 1883, Anandibai held an Indian feast for her host family and their friends where the women all dressed up in Anandibai’s Indian clothes and sat on the floor eating with their hands. She had even given her host and her daughters Hindu names, and they had remarked they were all turning into Hindoos. Anandibai’s favorite color was white, her favorite place Roselle, New Jersey, and after that, heaven. This she shared in an autograph book at her host’s home. It was the smallest details I was looking for and this biography offered them.

The other book I would turn to was published more than a century later, A Fragmented Feminism: The Life and Letters of Anandibai Joshee by Meera Kosambi, published in 2020. Meera Kosambi was an Indian sociologist who, like me, was in search of the real Anandibai. Like Anandibai, Kosambi was also from Maharashtra and had access to works and letters in Marathi. She also had access to Dall’s biography and drew much from it. Kosambi brought her own critical analysis and questions to the fold, pointing out how Anandibai’s husband’s ideas of reformation were contradictory and that it was only through the distance of many oceans that Anandibai could come into her own and see that her relationship with him was a difficult one, among other things. With her scholarship, Kosambi connected the dots that Dall never could have. And yet I still felt that something remained to be said. Both these women had captured Anandibai’s life; one with a nineteenth-century Western reformer perspective, the other looking more deeply through a twenty-first-century Indian feminist lens, with Anandibai’s words to support their respective theses.

Perhaps poetry was the medium that could fill the critical gap between these two important representations of who Anandibai Joshee was, especially if it was poetry imagined in “her” own voice, from a woman who had inhabited both worlds, a person who had lived both in India and the United States, a woman who, like Anandi, had been torn between traditional expectations and the desire to find out who she was, apart from what others expected her to be. I second-guessed my intentions and yet I continued amassing a small pile of facts and images, as the task lay before me of how to translate a woman’s life into poems. How much to show, how much to tell, and how much to discern from what was between the lines? How much research was enough? I looked to others who had undertaken the monumental task of bringing voices of the past to light and drew inspiration from the poems of Tyehimba Jess, who in his extraordinary polyvocal book, Olio, had given voice to unrecorded African American performers in the eighteenth and nineteenth century in innovative ways and forms I had never seen before. In searching for women’s voices through historical persona poetry, I discovered Dominique Christina’s searingly powerful book, Anarcha Speaks: A History in Poems, in which she gives voice to Anarcha, a nineteenth-century enslaved black woman on which Dr. J. Marion Sims, the so-called father of modern gynecology, performed horrific experiments in the name of science. Later in my journey, I would come across Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ The Age of Phillis, a collection of poems and scholarship that took my breath away in its retelling/imagining of the life of Phillis Wheatley Peters, the very first African American woman who wrote and published a collection of poetry in the eighteenth century. (See Jeffers’ Commonplace piece here)

As I pondered and processed all of this, the pandemic broke out and raged. My life came to a standstill, while Anandibai’s came alive. In the quietness of a sequestered world, I was able to let the past in. The poems started coming out in a voice that didn’t seem like mine—quiet, contemplative, slightly formal, but insistent. To my astonishment, in the span of nine months, I wrote over forty poems, all in the imagined voice of Anandibai. Had she finally come through? The interiority of such undertakings is often part of a solitary journey. But during a pandemic, it felt like living a whole other life despite being grounded. I am eager to share what I have discovered and written, to let Anandibai’s voice and story touch everyone, to reclaim the past in a bid to understand better who we are. I hope you will join me. 

THEY CALL ME LADY OF THE ORIENT

Philadelphia, September 1883

Though the darkest one in the room, I’m the brightest of them all

in a red Pitambar saree deemed Pompeiian, belle of this ball— 

and as I shake their hands, five hundred pairs, wearing gloves to protect me 

they regard the spray of pearls hanging from my nose, my filigreed wrists 

of bangles glinting gold, the tiny kunku dot on my broad forehead 

drawing stares and praise, for this young Brahmin lady so brave

having come all the way alone from Serampore to the city of brotherly love 

to earn her doctor’s coat. Majhe nav Anandi aahe, I want to say in my native tongue 

so that I don’t forget who I am, the young girl whose books once lay tattered 

in the cowshed, whose baby lived barely ten days—I float like an Indian rose 

among a dull sea of cinched waists and bonnets, in the parlor of the Dean 

of the Women’s Medical College, smiling till my cheeks hurt as they stumble  

out a new version of my name, Ananda Bye, remarking how exquisite is my English

Kunku/kumkum (Marathi/Hindi): A red powder dot worn by married Hindu women in the part of their hair or forehead

Majhe nav Anandi aahe ((Marathi): My name is Anandi

A MENTAL PHOTOGRAPH 

A found poem from Anandibai Joshee’s entry in Mrs. Theodocia Carpenter’s Autograph book

September 3rd, 1883

I was ravenous

shoving the open mouth

of my mind with morsels

of knowledge held

by my husband’s hand

that after crossing two oceans

when I should be asked in the parlor

of my sponsor, a kind American woman

whom I call Mavshi—mother’s sister

in my native tongue, but whose love is

like a mother’s itself—what my favorite things are

I am truly overcome with joy

no one has ever asked this of me

(Not even I), And so I write

in the album of Mrs. Theodocia Carpenter

of Roselle, New Jersey, ever so carefully

answers that introduce me

to myself

Color—White.

Flower—The Rose.

Tree—The Mango.

Object in Nature—Mountains.

Hour—Sunrise and set.

Season—Spring.

Perfume—Jasmine.

Gem—Diamond.

Style of beauty—Perfection of form and manner.

Name, male and female—Rama, Tara, Annie, Gopal, Vishnu, and Chrishna.

Painter—I love all.

Musician—Those who play on the violin and lyre.

Piece of architecture—The Taj Mahal.

Poet—Pope, Manu, and Kalidasa.

Poetess—Muktabai and Janabai.

Prose author—Goldsmith, Macaulay, Addison, Shastree Chiploonkar.

Character in History—Richard Coeur de Lion.

Book to take up for an hour—The Bhagavat-Gita

What book, not a Bible, would you part with last? The History of the World.

What epoch would you prefer to live in? The Present.

Where would you prefer to live? In Roselle now, hereafter in Heaven.

What is your favorite amusement? Reading.

What is your favorite occupation? Whatever is necessary to the common comfort.

What is your favorite trait of character? Sincerity.

What trait do you most detest? Dishonesty and infidelity.

If not yourself, whom would you like to be? No one.

What is your idea of happiness? Faith in God.

What is your idea of misery? To follow one’s own win.

What is your bête noire? Slavery and Dependence.

What is your ideal pleasure: To be rewarded for what I do.

What is your distinguishing characteristic? I have not yet found out.

That of your husband? Benevolence.

What is the sublimest passion? Love.

What are the sweetest words? Love, charity, truth, and hope.

What are the saddest? Lost, forsaken.

What is your aim? To be useful.

What is your motto? The Lord will provide.

A DRESS FOR ANNIE

Favorite Name, Male and Female—Rama, Tara, Annie, Gopal, Vishnu, and Chrishna.

-From a mental photograph of Anandibai Joshee in Mrs. Theodocia Carpenter’s Autograph book, Roselle, New Jersey, 1883.

1883

Sometimes I wonder what might it be like 

to don a bonnet, my black hair twisted into coils 

fringing my forehead, and the corset though it looks 

most uncomfortable, would define my waist more  

what might be the color of the dress to go with it 

what type of ruffles and how big the bustle? 

and what if they called me Annie instead of Anandi?

Aunt tells me time and again to wear hers 

Though she is taller and larger than I am 

I have lifted her dress in my arms 

dancing with it as if a ghost, but never 

have I worn a western dress, and if ever 

it were to be, I should wear my kunku, mangalsutra and bangles 

for without them, I would feel my worth forsaken

what I fear most is the ridicule, and also the thought 

that I might actually like it, and then what will I tell him—

he whose letters arrive from thousands of miles away 

informing me I have changed, though he is not my witness

Kunku/kumkum (Marathi/Hindi): A red powder dot worn by married Hindu women in the part of their hair or forehead

Mangalsutra (Hindi/Marathi): Auspicious thread/necklace in Hinduism, which a groom fastens on his bride during their marriage ceremony signifying the joining of two souls. 

WHEN THE GUESTS SUP AS GODS: A GHAZAL

Roselle, New Jersey, 1883

In my wildest dreams, never do I fathom tonight  

that I should turn them into feasting Indians tonight

not those whose vast plains they call their own 

but proud Mahrattas from my faraway native tonight 

all the fair ladies draped in woven bordered sarees 

hands bangled, necks spangled, shining bright tonight

as they swish across the inlaid floor like princesses

in my colorful trousseau that belongs to them tonight

eighteen squares hand-drawn in red and white powder

on the dining room floor where guests sup as Gods tonight

set with plates stitched from broad buttonwood leaves 

a rich meal of spiced vegetables and fruit await all tonight

after a Sanskrit prayer blessing this feast is chanted

all eyes look up to me on how to proceed tonight

no spoons, no forks, nor knives, just their pale bare hands

sampling eighteen exotic dishes prepared by myself tonight 

fashioning small balls out of their food with pink fingertips

they pop them into their mouths like all of India does tonight

the meal ends with a serenade and sprinkling of rosewater

bouquets of freshly plucked flowers given to each guest tonight

Oh Anandi, see the red kunku on all their white foreheads

how the love of my new sisters makes this heart swell tonight

Mahrattas: A member of the upper castes of the Hindu kingdom of Maharashtra in central India.

Kunku: A red/vermillion powder worn on the forehead of Hindu women as a symbol of being married

A DISTINGUISHED BRAHMIN LADY VISITS TIFFANY & COMPANY

New York City, 1883

With a lurch and clop of the horsecar, we are off to take in the sights of the city, its hustle and bustle stirring my heart, reminding me of home. We are riding through the Ladies Mile at Union Square, New York, and everywhere my eyes rest—women dressed so fine, their bonnets bobbing, and corsets cinched tight. This is where the American gentry come to purchase garments and sundry and window-shop at stores like Lord & Taylor, Siegel-Cooper, and Macy’s. I am a speck among these massive multistory buildings of iron, glass, and stone. The Prince of Wales once stayed here on 5th Avenue, Aunt tells me, before we alight at 15th, the tentacles of empire so far reaching, when suddenly we halt in front of a giant statue of Atlas almost naked, greeting us with a clock in his hands instead of the earth. We are at the entrance of Tiffany and Company—a modern palace of jewels, telling all who pass it by, we have all the time in the world.

Inside, behind dark walnut wood counters, there is a swish of activity—formalities are exchanged as they ascertain our purpose. Aunt introduces me as the distinguished Brahmin lady who is studying medicine to uplift the women of her nation and they usher us in like royalty. I let her words slide off my shoulders, remembering how when I left, my countrymen deemed me a traitor for desiring to cross black waters. My brooch of rubies and pearls catches the jeweler’s eye, as does my emerald and gold bracelet, my saree of silk pinned to the side, they remark most elegant. And after much admiration, they ask me to regard the treasures they have, displayed in endless ebony cases—silver teapots, opera glasses, and pale gold watches of the wrist and pocket, 18 carats. We discuss the purity of gold and precious stones, how Burma has the best rubies, when they bring out their possession most prized, encased in satin, the Tiffany yellow diamond, found in the colonies of Southern Africa. I think of how far it has traveled, how it was rough when they first found it; its brilliance revealed after being polished—82 extraordinary facets—and feel a strange kinship with this object, the subject of so many eyes. We leave after a few hours without making a purchase, where time stilled as we feasted on such opulent treasures, feeling the fullness of a thousand meals consumed, without our lips having touched a silver spoon.

SCORCHED RICE & COCKERELS

Women’s Medical College, Philadelphia, October 1883

Yesterday the rice was undercooked and today I almost burned it, 

smoke filling my room like a ghost. I was so tired and hungry, I ate

it without remorse. I am getting used to being my own mistress, 

attending to my own will. The classes are rigorous, but not difficult. 

Every free moment I get, apart from the daily routine of toilette, cooking, 

and correspondence, my face is pressed to my books, the day’s learnings.

Though I feel lonely at times, I am accompanied by the ticking 

of this alarm clock which Carpenter Uncle bought me before leaving Roselle. 

I have never seen anything quite like it—Five inches tall, almost 

four inches wide. On one side, a small bowl like the ones we serve 

ghee in our native which houses the alarm bell. On setting the hour 

and then winding the hand, the clock rings sharp and shrill at the 

appointed time. It rouses me each morning as if a mechanical cockerel. 

EBONY, IVORY & SILK

1884

Over my doctor’s white coat

and the black-beaded mangalsutra

that lays snugly against my chest

as proof of marriage— 

tips of ivory in each ear

connected by tubes wrapped in fine silk

forming a parabola, a conduit of sound

from which hangs an ebony medallion 

confirming proof of life through the steady gallop

of beating heart and burbling lungs

And I wonder how this is not considered

a type of precious jewelry as well

the stethoscope worn by a rare few of my sex

Mangalsutra (Hindi/Marathi): Auspicious thread/necklace in Hinduism, which a groom fastens on his bride during their marriage ceremony signifying the joining of two souls. 

BRACELET OF GOLD

Philadelphia, 1886

Some would say this a bad omen, buri nazar

penance for crossing waters dark as kohl  

to live alone among people white as snow

Still unused to these harsh northeast winters   

I miss the patch of ice that shines like a mirror 

and my right-hand lands first to brace the fall 

Though no bones are broken, all my bangles shatter 

in the manner of a Hindu widow, bits of green glass 

pressing into my skin, drawing out the red 

When my husband finds my wrist 

unadorned, lacking any ornamentation 

he slides into place a bracelet of gold 

cold like the touch of his fingers 

and if every fall would bring as much gold

would you consider it a misfortune? 

I call it so, wishing instead an instrument 

more useful or a book more instructive

* Lines in italics taken from Anandibai Joshee’s letter to Theodocia Carpenter

CRAZY (QUILT) WORK

New York, July 1886

Resourcefulness knows no nationality

among women tending the hearth—

we are mistresses of improvisation

magicians of the ordinary

those fabric scraps whose warp 

and weft seem exhausted, we collect

like leaves till they are plenty 

a motley come together haphazardly

no symmetry, no intentional design

just hardworking fingers patching

together what seems out of order

this crazy work, an American pastime

becomes this Mahratta woman’s way

to pass a summer filled with anticipation 

and premonition, so much to be done

so little the time to do it, these gifted 

blocks of cloth, beating bright with

love and generosity, become a quilt 

that covers my unseasonal chills, my 

malaise for which no cure fits

* Lines in italics taken from Anandibai Joshee’s letter to Theodocia Carpenter

This article originally appeared in October 2021.

Shikha Malaviya (www.shikhamalaviya.com) is a South Asian American poet, writer, and publisher. She is co-founder of The (Great) Indian Poetry Collective, a mentorship model press publishing powerful voices from India and the Indian diaspora. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and featured in PLUME, Prairie Schooner, and other fine publications. Shikha has been a featured TEDx speaker and was selected as Poet Laureate of San Ramon, California, 2016. Shikha is a six-time AWP poetry mentor in their Writer-to-Writer program. Currently, she is a Mosaic America Fellow, committed to cultural diversity in the San Francisco Bay area and beyond. Her book of poems is Geography of Tongues.

Benedict Arnold (1740/41-1801) was a member of the Revolutionary generation whose life and legacy took a different turn from the men with whom he was most closely associated. (Figure 1) Before signing the Oath of Allegiance to the United States of America in 1778 at Valley Forge (Figure 2), Arnold had lived his thirty-seven years as a subject to the British Crown. In a few short years full of activity, Arnold became George Washington’s most capable field general, someone Washington came to trust and depend on. But in 1780, feeling slighted both financially and professionally, Arnold attempted to give over both Washington and West Point to the British in exchange for money and a higher rank in King George III’s army. The plan, which would have divided the colonies in two, was discovered at the eleventh hour when evidence incriminating Arnold was found in his British accomplice John André’s boot. Arnold’s oath and material world evaporated overnight and his name became a synonym for “traitor.” Arnold’s image and name are regularly revived in popular culture and in our image-steeped digital media environment as shorthand for treasonous behavior. Even if they don’t know much about the Revolution, many Americans know that to be a “Benedict Arnold” is not a good thing.

Historians have examined the many aspects, both positive and negative, of Arnold’s impact on the course of events leading to the establishment of the United States. Yet the largely unanalyzed material culture of his existence—the objects he acquired and the buildings in which he and his family resided—can offer us much more about the contours of his life as he fashioned it, and how others crafted his historical memory. Arnold’s unceasing efforts to elevate himself in society through marriage and professional work can be viewed through the lens of the houses he bought or built throughout his life. This essay looks at the cultural landscape of one of his homes, the New Haven, Connecticut, house he built and resided in from 1769 until wartime. Through an analysis of the choices Arnold made in location, size, and architectural style, I identify how Arnold began to construct his identity not only as a member of the urban merchant class, but also as a gentleman. The building of the home reads as material evidence of his desire to establish his identity and place in society, but equally the abuse and destruction of Arnold’s house is a parallel to the untimely end of a life and career he worked hard to obtain.

The first house Arnold built for himself and his family (although not the last) was a material symbol of the life the merchant aspired to. He chose New Haven, already a center for maritime trade and education by the mid-eighteenth century, as the locale from which to design this life. Arnold came to New Haven after having served as an apprentice apothecary in Norwich, Connecticut, the town of his birth, fifty-six miles east along the Atlantic coast. His father died from alcoholism, forcing Arnold to learn a trade rather than attend Yale College, as did many other male Connecticut residents of his age and class. Arnold’s shop in New Haven grew prosperous thanks to his vision of Sibi Totique, meaning “for himself and for everyone” in Latin, which he had painted on his shop sign. (Figure 3) Arnold himself sailed on many trading voyages to the West Indies, becoming a proficient sea captain and gaining skills he would later transform into an ability to lead armies on both land and water during the Revolutionary War.

Little documentation exists for the construction of the New Haven house and Arnold did not write about it, except to refer to his life during these years as one of “domestic ease and happiness.” In a view of the house from its rear façade, looking out over Long Wharf, the city’s earliest and most important wharf, it becomes clear that Arnold shaped himself materially in a way that his father could never manage. (Figure 4) Before Arnold left to join the Continentals in Lexington and Concord in 1775, he returned to Norwich, where he was born, and sold his father’s house, forcing his unmarried sister to live with his family in New Haven.

Arnold’s attempt to craft a genteel life for himself is demonstrated when looking at the details of the house itself, as first seen in a photographic postcard from the last quarter of the nineteenth century. (Figure 5) Built before the American Revolution and part of the British Atlantic World, it was a large wood-frame eighteenth-century house with a hipped roof, fanlight over the doorway, and central Palladian window. There were unusual Greek Revival decorative details over the windows and the flat area of the roof likely had an addition called a monitor. Some architectural historians question the mix of details and suggest it may have been “Federalized” in the 1790s, perhaps by Noah Webster while the author of the first American dictionary wrote several chapters of his massive work in the front rooms.

Arnold’s house was not the largest, nor the most expensive in New Haven. But its architectural style and geographic location suggest that Arnold, like many ambitious men across the Atlantic World, in the words of Stephen Hague, “employed their houses in precise ways across a range of settings to project power and define status.” In other words, building a gentlemen’s house and marrying a woman from a solid New Haven family provided Arnold with the respectability that he did not have in Norwich. As a young man, Arnold would often bring his inebriated father home from the tavern; everyone in town knew him as the son of a drunk. In New Haven, Arnold became a prosperous—if argumentative—town leader, elected to the high-status Freemasons and accepted as a member of the oldest church which dated to the town’s 1638 founding. Although neither a floor plan nor interior images of the house survive, tantalizing hints remain of what the interior may have looked like during Arnold’s life. A few architectural elements such as a lock and key, a doorknob, and a mantel exist at the New Haven Museum, the last of which was reused in an office space when the current Colonial Revival structure was built in 1930.

The story of Benedict Arnold and his houses is more complicated than his childhood home in Norwich and his “starter” home in New Haven. During his rise in fame and an early brush with infamy—he was court martialed for misusing government property while serving as military governor of Philadelphia—Arnold bought a larger house in that prosperous center of American colonial life and society. Philadelphia was also the home of his second wife, Margaret “Peggy” Shippen, the daughter of a household with Loyalist sympathies. The house, called Mount Pleasant, is much larger in scale and more ornate in material and decoration than the New Haven house, and although of the same Neoclassical Georgian flavor, it was built in stone instead of timber frame, and was positioned on a cliff overlooking the Schuylkill River. (Figure 6) For Arnold, the Philadelphia house had a pedigree he also did not have access to in New Haven. The architect-builder was Thomas Nevell, an apprentice to Edmund Woolley who had designed Independence Hall. Today the house is administered by the Philadelphia Museum of Art as a decorative arts museum in partnership with Fairmont Park, an arrangement which John Adams, a visitor in 1775, would have agreed with. Adams had called Mount Pleasant “the most elegant seat in Pennsylvania.” And for a very short time, the house was Arnold’s.

In Philadelphia, Arnold might have become an older, more successful, and perhaps wiser member of elite society. He had the beautiful Peggy Shippen at his side, he was the father to eight children (seven of whom were boys), and he had purchased Mount Pleasant, recognized as a prize by others. But none of this came to pass. The Arnolds, in fact, owned the house for only a year, and Arnold never lived there himself. Wounded twice on the battlefield, he was dissatisfied with his administrative role in Philadelphia. Angered by his reprimand from George Washington, stressed under the weight of his debts and now in conversation with John André on behalf of the enemy, Arnold petitioned Washington for his re-appointment as Commander of West Point, and thus began to unmake his carefully crafted Anglo-American life.

After Arnold’s defection in 1780 and later his death in London in 1801—barely noted on either side of the Atlantic—the New Haven house remained somewhat of a local landmark. In 1890, towards the end of the house’s existence, the New Haven Register described “some grey-haired citizens who remember it when it was one of the show places of the town . . . with an orchard, and grounds laid out in handsome terraces.” Perhaps the house appeared as it does in a romanticized nineteenth-century painting that is in the collection of the Second Company, Governor’s Foot Guard (which Arnold once captained). It depicts him standing in contrapposto in front of the house, gingerly keeping weight off his right leg, wounded for the second time at Saratoga. The same journalist noted that the house had a “highly ornamented English style wallpaper” which could be seen under layers of more paper. Not surprisingly, during the era of antiquarianism and the Colonial Revival, the Arnold house became a site for relic hunters.

The final straw was the abuse of the house by the W. A. Beckley Lumber Company, which had the house’s Classical front doorway removed, with the open space of the central hallway serving as a driveway of sorts to the rear. One newspaper reported that these changes signaled the “triumph of the material spirit of the time over sentiment.” (Figure 7) The house was gutted to create space for stacks of lumber. One journalist noted that it was a shame the house had been altered so painfully, and then eventually torn down about 1910 because the house was a “relic of New Haven’s past.” Further, with an unusually balanced view of Arnold, the same journalist reported that the house could be “handed down to posterity as a memorial of one whose name is to be forever identified with the struggles of this nation.” But this view was shared by few, in either New Haven or the rest of the country. Arnold had been branded a traitor, a label that sticks to this day. Any efforts he had expended in the cause of liberty erased, his name and personhood becoming a symbol, and the contours and material culture of his personal life relatively unknown. (Figure 8)

A century later, this area of New Haven is so completely changed by redevelopment that it is hard to imagine Arnold’s house in situ at all. The foundations and brick-made basement are possibly located today under an asphalt parking lot. There is no historical marker and in a recent biography of Arnold, a photograph of a different house altogether is erroneously presented as the New Haven house. In terms of historic preservation in the United States, which began life around the houses of the Revolutionary generation, if Arnold’s house had survived, the historic maritime character of Water Street and the Fifth Ward might have survived, too. Although Arnold’s New Haven house was not destined to “take its place among the historic mansions of New England” as the New York Daily Tribune suggested, the architectural, social, and biographical history of Arnold’s New Haven house survives in fragmented form. Knowledge of the house is contributing evidence to a story that continues to fascinate, a real story in which both a man and his house were made and unmade.

Further Reading

Under the leadership of historic site staff and scholars, the interpretation and presentation of Loyalist houses in the United States and Canada continues to evolve. Because he was a traitor, Benedict Arnold’s houses have received far less attention than those of his Patriot or Loyalist contemporaries. For an understanding of the Atlantic world context in which Arnold built his first house, see Stephen Hague, The Gentleman’s House in the British Atlantic World, 1680-1780 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Although there is no narrative publication for domestic architecture and social history in New Haven beyond Elizabeth Mills Brown’s New Haven, A Guide to Architecture and Design (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), the history of Arnold’s Philadelphia house can be situated in Mark Reinberger and Elizabeth McLean, The Philadelphia Country House, Architecture and Landscape in Colonial America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015). Biographies of Arnold have appeared since the early nineteenth century. The most recent is Joyce Lee Malcolm’s The Tragedy of Benedict Arnold, An American Life (New York: Pegasus Books, 2018). For a popular account of the relationship between George Washington and Benedict Arnold, and their shared personal and professional aspirations, see Nathaniel Philbrick, Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution (New York: Viking, 2016). Finally, it should be noted that many publications exist to teach Americans about the Revolutionary generation through their historic houses such as Hugh Howard, Houses of the Founding Fathers, The Men Who Made America and the Way They Lived (New York: Artisan, 2012). By not including houses which no longer stand, nor the houses of those deemed unworthy of preservation and interpretation, the information given out is partial at best, contributing to the false view that the American Revolution was a straight-line trajectory, instead of the continuously evolving, bloody transition where real people made difficult decisions affecting their own lives and the society we live in today.

This article originally appeared in October 2021.

Laura A. Macaluso researches and writes about material culture, monuments, and museums. In 2021 her essay “Spiel mit mir!” (Play with Me!) will appear in the volume Was denkt das denkmal? (What does the monument think?) edited by Tanja Schult and Julia Lange (Böhlau Verlag). She is finishing work on the book A History Lover’s Guide to Alexandria and South Fairfax County and serves as a History Interpreter at George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Laura has a Ph.D. in the Humanities / Cultural & Historic Preservation from Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island. See more of her work at www.lauramacaluso.com or on Twitter at @monumentculture.

Recounting a scene from her childhood in Bermuda, Mary Prince describes the following,

I recollect the day well. Mrs Pruden came to me and said, ‘Mary, you will have to go home directly; your master is going to be married, and he means to sell you and two of your sisters to raise money for the wedding.’ Hearing this I burst out a crying, – though I was then far from being sensible of the full weight of my misfortune, or of the misery that waited for me.

This moment reads as one of Prince’s earliest memories of living through a vast system of exchange. “Though I was then far from being sensible” of it, she claims, her following response, to “burst out a crying,” suggests that even as a child, she knew of the “weight” around her. Indeed by the time she narrated her story to amanuensis Susana Strickland and editor Thomas Pringle from London’s Anti-Slavery Society, she consistently framed this “weight” in terms of resources and “money.”

The first narrative published in Britain portraying a Black woman’s experiences of enslavement, The History of Mary Prince (1831) is also severely mediated, making the question of Prince’s specific word choices impossible to settle. (Figure 1) Within the narrow rhetoric of antislavery politics that shape Prince’s narrative, however, steady articulation of money markets, repeated reference to financial transactions, and descriptions of resource accrual stand out in a declared autobiography, a distinctly literary production. Indeed, in this early scene from the text, Prince repeats financially inflected terms from “recollect” to “raise money” to “misfortune.” By signaling changes in location from where she is when Mrs. Pruden arrives, to her subsequently “go[ing] home,” to the implied setting of the upcoming “wedding” event, she takes stock of the geography of capital. By keeping “the wedding” ever imminent and foreshadowing all “that waited for me,” she calls attention to time, implying the role that the future plays in determining value. For Prince, such accounting contains at once economic and narrative valences. As this dynamic unfolds over the course of The History, money and resources become sites through which she exerts authorial agency when transcription and revision, and the larger politics of literacy, confine and control her voice. In this way, Prince speaks back to the history of Atlantic world accounting that has subjected her to the ledger or written her off completely. The following traces a genealogy that moves from the middle passage to the passage of trade laws, to dwell in the entangled histories of financial economics and literary narrative, and contextualize Prince’s distinct mode of recounting.

In this history of accounting, before Mary Prince, there was Thomas Phillips, commander of the slave ship Hannibal. Once “entered into the[. . .] service,” and “accepte[d]” “upon [the] account” of Sirs Jeffery and John Jefferys, Phillips begins at once his work in the Atlantic slave trade and in his own journal of accounts. On the clock every moment from 1693 to 1694, he enumerates, entry after entry, all that his work involves: his time setting off, the patterns in wind and ocean currents, locational coordinates as soon as they change, and carefully traced profile sketches of upcoming landmasses. As the voyage of the Hannibal continues, however, Phillips’s accounting increasingly stalls and swerves. From the Leeward Islands, he remarks,

From noon yesterday we stood off shore, lying up W. by S. and W. S. W. till four; then in again lying S. S. by S. till six; when reflecting on the time it might cost me to endeavor to get into cape Lopus, (where I design’d to wood and water) by reason of the uncertainty of the winds, and the current setting us to leeward; which together with my negroes dying very fast, and the want of some provisions I was in, made me resolve to stand over for the island of St. Thomas, about 40 leagues distant . . . Accordingly . . . We lay up west, W. by S. and W. S. W. at night, till six this morning; when the wind scanted to S. W. by S. and S. W. so that we could lie but W. by N. and W. N. W. till noon this day.

By the time Phillips explicitly records the slave trade work of the Hannibal, his sailors have started fighting over food and “[his] negroes [are] dying very fast.” Perhaps taking advantage of a surge of wind, or at least staging one, Phillips surrounds the Hannibal’s enslaved peoples with delirious navigational readings, in essence throwing the winds all around and dissembling the “negroes” at the center of this account. As the lethal conditions of the hold palpably manifest and the harsh scrambles of slave markets insistently approach, Phillips’s account continues to avoid the present scene, and increasingly crumbles into a nautical shorthand until, in the journal’s final pages, he compresses the last four months of the voyage into six tight columns that range from date to distance covered, and states brusquely, “This Table is so plain, that it needs no illustrating.” (Figure 2)

Even before slave ships left Europe for trade on the west coast of Africa, however, the prophetic foresight of insurance and its undergirding logic of credit guaranteed that whatever happened, the bottom line would prevail. Since parties agreed to the payoff of the voyage in their contract, Ian Baucom explains, “exchange . . . does not [ultimately] create value,” but “retrospectively confirms it, offer[ing] belated evidence to what already exists.” According to Baucom, this practice of underwriting, or the accounting of commodities trade, stands as an early installation of the workings of “allegorization” that Walter Benjamin would later interpret. Through each successive exchange, Baucom infers, subjects increasingly “signify not themselves but some superordinate ‘value.’” Indeed, this accrual of value through repeated exchange spurs a process of abstraction that ultimately presents the subject not as itself but as a symbol of itself, its social as much as financial currency on track to grow and grow. Markets thus perpetually allegorize the subject, degrading its reality to the point of outright dissolution. Steadily increasing value this way relies on steadily increasing absence; when the subject of exchange disappears entirely from transactions, commodities trading, of material commodities, meets finance capital. “As if by a sublime trick of the imagination,” Baucom explains, commerce starts to “breed money from money,” as though allegory upon allegory, and trade becomes “a constant oscillation between monetary and commodity capital,” between allegory and reality, each driving as much as interfering with the deemed value of the other. If for Phillips accounting appears in his dramatic efforts to conjure the wind and blow away the scenes of slavery, then, with the rise of eighteenth-century finance capital, the scenes are almost pushed away completely, through an elaborate scheme of accounting’s trajectory from the superordinate towards an unhinged ideal and the promise of the bottom line.   

Though the draw of the superordinate gradually displaces the material presence of slavery, the elaborate fantasies of finance capital can still be said to manifest materially in the form of natural history, a practice and a genre both organized around gathering, arranging, and exchanging the many, many “curiosities” of apparently exotic ecologies. If accounting so far appears as entries in the trader’s ledger and as notes in the pockets of metropolitan investors, then the innumerable sketches of equinoctial trees, the poetic blazons on migrating birds, and the lengthy observational lists, together index empire’s attempt to account for the entire Earth. Indeed, “reality was fantasized here as well,” writes Édouard Glissant on such enthusiastic efforts, by which, he goes on, “conventional landscape [is] pushed to extremes . . . particularly in the islands of the Caribbean.” Thus in natural history projects, we see a “propensity to blot out . . . the shudders of life, that is, the turbulent realities of the Plantation, beneath the conventional splendor of scenery.” Alongside Glissant, Jamaica Kincaid calls attention to this distinct form “blot[ting] out” or overwriting, explaining of her native island, “Antigua is beautiful. Antigua is too beautiful. Sometimes the beauty of it seems unreal. Sometimes the beauty of it seems as if it were stage sets for a play.” (Figure 3) By accounting for everything, by “collecting the world,” and insisting on a luminous and knowing beauty seen only in surrounding nature, imperial and colonial agents of natural history gradually displace “the turbulent realities” surrounding them. Writing over this reality, in a purported attempt to account for everything, natural history becomes a cluttered “stage” that covers over the coerced labor of those who make such excursions and extractions possible. The genre, in fact, comes to crowd out the world as it really is. (Figure 4)

A series of late eighteenth-century British laws increasingly revealed the central presence and politics of slavery in early modern exchange and life. The first Slave Trade Act passed by the British Parliament in 1788 set strict regulations on the ratio between square meters or ship tonnage, and the number of African peoples who investors, captains, and sailors enslaved and transported to the Americas. This moment is often framed as the result of increasing antislavery and abolitionist movements across the Atlantic world, and as a distinct event representing, if not advancing, Enlightenment ideals. “But [accounting] is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous,” to quote Michel-Rolph Trouillot on the insidious reach of power. Anti-slavery advocates at the time of course worried that instead of abolishing the slave trade and slavery, the Slave Trade Act would only signal that endlessly changing regulations were sufficient. We might also read the Act as an expansion and mutation of the same financial accounting it purportedly strove to undo. If not in intent, then in consequence, in promising to reduce mortality rates among enslaved peoples, the Slave Trade Act ultimately made it possible to reduce the margin of error insurers calculated, to stabilize valuation, and to make the industry’s accounting more predictable and the industry more profitable.

From journaling to underwriting to overwriting to legal declarations, the literary accounting of the New World has routinely concealed the economic accounting of slavery. For Mary Prince, the occasion to recount sees her reframe such subjection to trade as a means for authorial voice. When she was first “put up to sale,” Prince explains, “[t]he bidding commenced at a few pounds, and gradually rose to fifty-seven, when I was knocked down to the highest bidder; and the people who stood by said that I had fetched a great sum for so young a slave.” Repeating “I” and “I,” Prince emphasizes her person within the “few pounds,” the “fifty-seven,” the final “great sum.” When she is enslaved on hire at “Cedar Hills” in northern Bermuda, she states, “I earned two dollars and a quarter a week, which is twenty pence a day.” From keeping track of changing bids to breaking down her wages, Prince increasingly shows a practiced study of money and numbers. (Figure 6)

With literary literacy routinely denied her, from Bermuda to London, Prince expresses a decided numeracy that reclaims accounting as her narrative form. As she draws out her “I,” she also shifts from the passive voice, “I was knocked down,” to the active “I had fetched,” and in doing, pushes presence into dynamic being—she made money move that day. When she calculates her wages, she is clear about her agency—“I earned”—and signals her authority beyond a single day’s pay; her impact lasts weeks, months, lifetimes. Prince extends her financial literacy into a practice of reappraisal when she describes her labors on Turks Islands and details the relentless periods she spent raking for salt, diving for rocks, “cut[ting] up mangoes to burn lime with,” and “break[ing] up coral out of the sea.” Nodding towards the accounting principles of natural history that list ecological phenomena one after another and state their myriad potentials as commercial and luxury resources, Prince reframes the “splendor” and “scenery” that might otherwise result by insisting, with each gesture towards fruit or mention of sea creatures, on the brutal conditions and forced labor that determined these collections. Finally, Prince’s numeracy continues as a critique of larger economic spheres when she describes how a former enslaver, Mr. D—, later negotiates with Mr. and Mrs. Wood. Prince relays, “I was purchased by Mr Wood for 300 dollars, (£100 Bermuda currency).” Though she shifts into the passive voice, “I was purchased,” her conversion of “300 dollars” into “(£100 Bermuda currency)” suggests as much her ease with managing accounting across international borders, as her keen sense of her impact on global markets and world history.

Can we sit easily, though, with Prince’s recounting and numeracy as an endpoint in this genealogy, when we know such accounting still signals an entanglement with violent systems that emerged and continue at her expense? “Are the merchant’s words the bridge to the dead or [are they] the scriptural tombs in which the [dead] await us?” Saidiya Hartman asks. “It is not possible to undo the violence that inaugurates the sparse record of a girl’s life . . . or [to] translate the commodity’s speech,” Hartman continues. Prince’s numeracy might be, then, a “stor[y] one tells in dark times,” that is, the accounting of and for the “meantime” between “a narrative of defeat” and “an alternative future.” The project of reparations, Prince makes clear, is as much about how to spend cash as what stories to tell.

Further Reading

Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

James Delbourgo, Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017).

Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation Trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010).

Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 1-14.

Christopher P. Iannini, Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2012).

Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988).

Kris Manjapra, “Necrospeculation: Postemancipation Finance and Black Redress,” Social Text 37, no. 2 (2019), 29-65.

Jennifer Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).

Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2006).

Thomas Phillips, “A Journal of a Voyage made in the Hannibal of London, Ann. 1693, 1694, from England to Cape Monseradoe, in Africa . . . ” A Collection of Voyages and Travels, some Now first Printed from Original Manuscripts, others Now first Published in English, 3rd ed., vol. 1 (London: 1744-46).

Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince (London: Penguin Books, 2000).

Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015).

This article originally appeared in September 2021.

Katrina Dzyak is a Ph.D. Candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Over the last two years, the Commonplace team has migrated our back catalog to a new URL and reorganized the content with a fresh, feed-based layout. While we are proud of this work, we also know that our readers have been waiting patiently for new content. I am pleased to announce that we are moving to phase two of our relaunch and will begin publishing original material this month. Look for new articles, review essays, and creative writing on various aspects of vast early America before 1900 to post every other Tuesday. If you have questions about submitting your work or want to pitch an essay, please reach out to commonplacejournal@gmail.com.

Before we move forward, it is a good time to look back on the history of Commonplace and its place in digital humanities over the last two decades. In September 2000, editors Jill Lepore and Jane Kamensky launched their new digital publication with a piece that introduced the site by answering the question, “Why a Common-Place?” (Figure 1) Aside from explaining that Common-place would attempt to walk the line between scholarly journal and popular magazine for American history before 1900, they specifically addressed their vision for one of the first exclusively on-line history journals. Even though “we have no film footage, no photographs, no videos or phonographs to load up with Real Audio or Real Player,” the editors did not want to see early American history left behind on the web in favor of modern history sites that featured a ton of bells and whistles. So, they concluded, other than “a few daguerrotypes (invented in 1839) Common-place won’t dazzle you with snazzy graphics,” but would focus instead on “bringing people together to discuss ideas” about early American history.

It is remarkable to see how many of the same concerns that publicly-facing scholarship wrestles with today informed the Common-place mission statement more than 20 years ago. How much should a digital humanities project focus on public interaction? Is this a conversation between scholars and the public or a primarily a venue for presenting an academic argument? How much and what sort of technology should be employed to disseminate research? Such questions often operate in tension as online projects are planned and executed. As Commonplace has evolved as a digital publication over two decades, it has grappled with these questions about audience engagement and the role of technology on the front and back end.

One desire of the early Common-place team was to reach out to the public and create a community to collectively engage in historical inquiry. The mission statement even introduced an online message board feature for readers to post replies to articles and “participate in an on-going discussion.” The message board, dubbed the Republic of Letters, never really got going and was retired within two years. (Figure 2) Rebranded as the Common-place Coffeeshop to serve as a welcoming place for readers to discuss articles, make announcements, or chat about anything related to early American history, the new forum likewise failed to become an online destination for community conversation. The Coffeeshop served its last cup in 2009. (Figure 3)

With these attempts to forge an online community sputtering, Common-place joined many digital publications in the aughts and created a blog. Jeffrey Pasley had been an occasional contributor to Common-place, using his Publick Occurrences column to situate his observations of contemporary politics in an early American context. His 2001 piece called “Losing one to the Gipper,” for example, discussed Ronald Reagan and Grover Norquist’s attack on the size of government to explain why Alexander Hamilton “has long been the least loved of the Founders.” (Figure 4) Little did he know what was coming a decade and a half later. Beginning in 2008 and continuing to 2015, Pasley converted his column into the blog Publick Occurrences 2.0. (Figure 5) His occasional musings covered everything from the election of Barack Obama to musical acts with historic names (such as 1990s power pop band Cotton Mather). With its more personal and light-hearted tone, the blog produced a different type of content, but also failed to generate the type of commentary or engagement to make it a jumping off point for a wider communal discussion.    

The inability to inspire a broad digital conversation about early American history between academics and the public did not lessen the quality of the site’s scholarly work, but it did stand out as an unrealized promise of the project. In her William and Mary Quarterly article reflecting on digital humanities and early American studies, Sharon Block even gently noted that Common-place “did not quite succeed in creating an online community” in the way that some high-profile bloggers managed to do during the same years. She went on to explain that “in contrast to an earlier emphasis on producing charts, numbers, or statistics,” these attempts at engagement are part of a “new digital humanities [that] is marked by outreach and dissemination,” rather than the simple application of back-end technology.

Commonplace has been proudly and explicitly digital since its inception, but it has not always been comfortable with how to use technological tools as part of its outreach and dissemination. As we saw, its mission statement explicitly declared its intent to deemphasize visual and multimedia features. Original web designer John McCoy explained in 2004 that the editors requested that the site take its design inspiration from “seventeenth and eighteenth-century broadsheets—large sheets set in an unvariegated sea of tiny columns of text . . . in many ways the opposite of Web pages.” One result of this design plan is that much of the back catalog is largely textual, with only some graphic examples used for explanatory purposes. (Figure 6)

Over time, more visual and material culture articles appeared on the site, especially after Catherine Kelly became the editor of Common-place. Kelly explained in 2011 that the approach was to take traditional research, “reformatted for a different medium and with a different audience in mind. In other words, the crucial issues hinge less on technology per se than on translation.” There were attempts to expand this model. Joshua Brown’s Flash-based graphic novel “Ithaca” is one notable example (Figure 7), as is Christina Michelon’s “Touching Sentiment,” an article analyzing the tactility of nineteenth century valentines that includes video clips of an 1875 valentine being opened and a GIF of a beehive card being pulled out. (Figure 8)

Not every plan to utilize new multimedia tools has been as successful in the long run. Nine years ago, I wrote a piece about a labor note issued by Josiah Warren’s Modern Times, a planned community on Long Island in the 1850s. Conceived as part of a new “Notes on the Text” column that featured items housed at the American Antiquarian Society, I digitally marked up the note so that a reader could interact with the item through my nonlinear narration. Using a plugin called qTip², a reader could come to the page, scroll their cursor over a section of text or image on the labor note and up would pop a paragraph that I had written analyzing that portion of the bill and its place in the history of capitalism, labor radicalism, and utopian communities. (Figure 9) This was a cool idea for a piece in late 2012. It engaged the public and allowed the viewer to control their experience with the text. However, it turned out to be hard to read and maneuver on mobile phones. The bigger problem was that the designer of the qTip² plugin stopped maintaining it in 2016 and the page became functionally inoperable on most browsers shortly thereafter. The current low-tech version of the page shows the labor note followed by explanatory paragraphs corresponding to different portions of the image. (Figure 10)

However, hoping to avoid front-end tech issues doesn’t save you from back-end problems. Publishing an electronic journal necessitates the flexibility to keep up with changing technology standards and Commonplace has been pushed to alter its platform several times in the last 20 years. When Common-place launched in 2000, John McCoy built each page individually in HTML to resemble an eighteenth-century broadsheet. This labor-intensive project solved a short-term design preference, but it also hindered the long-term stability of the site as browser and operating system updates meant that even minor issues could cause problems and lead to broken links, features, or pages. Hoping for standardization and more flexibility, the site adopted a new XHTML/CSS design in 2004 (for a reminder of how long ago this was in web years, an announcement at the time reminded Common-place users to upgrade their browsers because Netscape 4.x and Internet Explorer 5 for Windows would not render CSS properly). This technology too began to show its age and in 2015, the site was completely redesigned on WordPress by a new editorial team at the University of Connecticut. (Figure 11) Unfortunately, the plan to fully utilize this stability and migrate the pre-2015 material to the new platform was not completed; by early 2019, forty percent of the Common-place back catalog was missing or inaccessible.

Luckily, this material was not completely lost. As part of a transition to a feed-based model and a new WordPress platform in 2019, it was recovered using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and a bit of detective work. The one gap in the back catalog was Jeff Pasley’s Publick Occurrences 2.0. The blog updated sporadically and separately from the rest of the issue-based articles, so its contents were not contemporaneously preserved. Likewise, the Wayback Machine only takes snapshots, and often months can go by between those backups (May 16-Sept 13, 2008). (Figure 12) There is something of a sad irony that a feature of the site created to foster public engagement is the one incomplete part as the project shifted to a new model meant to make it easier for the public to engage with the site’s content. That tension between dissemination and technology reared its head again.

The scale of reconstructing the site, reformatting the back catalog, and remaking it with a feed-based organizational structure was so great that it also contributed to the dramatic step of moving the site from www.common-place.org to a new URL, commonplace.online. (Figure 13) Rebranding a 20-year-old digital humanities site is not a step taken lightly and it highlights the difficulty in keeping up with changing technology trends and standards. But it is more than that.

Many digital history projects are conceived and designed to utilize particular technological tools and present discrete data and analysis. As such, these projects spend ample time pinpointing the best approach to disseminate their content and considerably less time thinking about their scalability and durability. This makes sense given the narrow scope of the projects and the reality that the resources and time required to build something with an indefinite shelf life are not often available. While corporate creators of databases spend time and money to make their products scalable in the anticipation of future expansion, growth, and revenue, many scholarly practitioners of digital humanities eschew this profit motivation and don’t spend enough time planning for the distant future of their work. Aarthi Vadde notes that “few scholars working in the humanities today will immediately recognize scalability as a virtue. Some may even see it as a vice.” However, if scalability is merely, as Vadde explains, the “ability of a system, network, or project to handle growth without changing its governing principles,” it needs to be a central component of any digital project that desires longevity. Allowing a project to grow or even persist over years and decades means planning for technological realities that don’t currently exist. This is not a new concept for scholars of public-facing projects, but I do think the example of Commonplace is a useful one when considering what it means for digital humanities moving forward.

I want to close by highlighting a 2016 essay by Cameron Blevins from Debates in the Digital Humanities. He writes that many historians fall into the trap of framing “digital methodology in terms of its future potential.” Talking about what technology might soon do may seem cutting edge, but it obscures how digital projects spend so much time on their plans for data visualization, dissemination, and outreach that they sidestep academic argumentation. This is a common debate in digital humanities today, but I want to argue that Commonplace demonstrates that there is also counter narrative. Online projects with engaging subject matter also need to think more about the future. Digital Humanities is inherently material and merely creating smart front-end content won’t sustain your project in the long run. There is not one answer or model for how to best keep pace with the changing technological landscape over multiple decades, but it is vital for practitioners of Vast Early American projects to think about flexibility and scalability. Time spent preparing for evolving internet standards and a future that can’t yet be fully imagined is certainly a better option than trying to go back and retrofit a project years after the fact.  

This article originally appeared in September, 2021.

Joshua R. Greenberg is the editor of Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life. He is the author of Bank Notes and Shinplasters: The Rage for Paper Money in the Early Republic (2020) and Advocating the Man: Masculinity, Organized Labor, and the Household in New York, 1800-1840 (2008). He taught at Bridgewater State University for many years. On Twitter @joshrgreenberg.

Matt Kish’s Moby-Dick blog began with a sparse preamble: “Because I honestly consider Moby-Dick to be the greatest novel ever written, I am now going to create one illustration for every single one of the 552 pages in the Signet Classic paperback edition. I’ll try to do one a day, but we’ll see.” That same day, August 6, 2009, Kish posted his first illustration.

“Call me Ishmael” was the preordained choice for Kish’s page one illustration. We have seen other Ishmaels before, like Rockwell Kent’s patrician Ishmael with the slender nose and sloping brow. In contrast, Kish’s Ishmael is all head, no body: a rectangular lucha libre mask with wide-set eyes and a peaked line of blue ocean waves where his mouth might have been.

Hovering above the Ishmael-icon in the upper left corner of the image, toxic yellow clouds part to issue a single word on a rainbow beam: ISHMAEL.

Kish’s cautious introduction (“we’ll see”) belied his assiduous self-discipline. Kish carved out time for the Moby-Dick project around his full-time job as a librarian and the long commute that bracketed his work day on both ends. Nevertheless, he met each deadline, creating and posting a new drawing every day for over a year and a half on the Website One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick. He was inspired to tackle every page of the book by the contemporary artist Zak Smith, who made a drawing for every page of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Kish intended for the Moby-Dick project to be personal: in creating the images, he mined his memory for the imagery of comic books and prog rock album covers that surrounded him in his youth. Kish imagined his audience to be a small circle of family and friends interested in his work, and he did nothing to advertise the project to others. But his project attracted attention almost immediately. He received his first interview request before he completed a week’s worth of illustrations. The interviews multiplied, the links proliferated, and before long, Kish’s Website was attracting a wide and loyal group of online viewers.

Kish recreated Melville’s novel as a psychedelic dream world in which every character, creature, and ship is a monster. Rather than retelling the story of Moby-Dickthrough pictures, as if creating a graphic novel, Kish based each drawing on a short passage from each page, illustrating not just concise plot points and famous quotations but some of Melville’s most exotic figures and similes. Kish created a visual world from each textual fragment in the way that a DJ makes a song from sampled tracks, or a preacher extracts a long sermon from a single scriptural verse.

The set of 552 images is impossible to describe as a single body of work, but the illustrations cohere. Recognizable figures and graphic motifs recur and interlace through otherwise alien and disparate fantasy landscapes. The blog’s followers learned Kish’s visual vocabulary for Moby-Dick as he produced it: we came to recognize Queequeg by the azure of his intricate tattoos, and Ishmael by that laconic mask.

Ahab is a helmet—blunt, hulking, and riveted like an ironclad.

The white whale himself is never the same: sometimes he is a fairy-tale sea monster, sometimes a white mass streaked with black veins, sometimes an enormous mouth crammed with lurid human molars, sometimes a sinuous figure traced with swirls as fine and intricate as lace.

This Moby-Dick is not, to put it mildly, a work of realism or rigorous historical interpretation. Matt Kish was not thinking about the history of American whaling when he illustrated Moby-Dick. He told me that he actively avoided doing any kind of historical research at all while creating the illustrations. “It’s not that I don’t have any specific interest in the nineteenth century, but I made no attempts to be historically accurate… Rather than try to create this historically accurate version of Moby-Dick, I really wanted to go very, very internal, and create an almost symbolic and fantastic rendition.”

Kish’s Moby-Dick chronicles the kind of experiment that Thoreau tried out at Walden Pond: an experiment in living deeply within a world that is both bounded and infinitely rich in meaning and detail. The 552 pages of Melville’s book became Kish’s world. Matt Kish has a knack for locating echoes of the nineteenth century in the technology, aesthetics, and humor of the twenty-first. He brings the arcane world of nineteenth-century whaling into camaraderie with the esoterica of twentieth and twenty-first century cultures: machines, comic books, street art, and album covers. Kish even practices his alchemy on the genre of the blog itself, creating a daily marvel out of an arbitrary assignment—one drawing for every page, every day. In a blogosphere that rewards the story of the minute, Kish’s project is a monument to sustained attention, rigorous discipline, and long, old, thoroughly material books.

It is hard not to make something out of the fact that Matt Kish is a librarian. After all, it is a Sub-Sub-Librarian who introduces the “Extracts” at the beginning of Moby-Dick: “…this mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and street-stalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions of whales he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane.” Before Kish started his project, he said he personally identified with the Sub-Sub-Librarian more than with any other character in the novel: “This nameless person assembling all of these mosaic pieces of information: it always seemed like a curious way of introducing the novel to me. I found it endlessly fascinating to read all of these extracts and put them together in a different order. I could see myself as that kind of explorer—not only through Moby-Dick but in general. That was, up until this project.” After the page-a-day project, though, Kish felt he had established a personal relationship with the whole novel, and not just with the Sub-Sub.

Whether or not Kish still identifies with the Sub-Sub, they have much in common. It might even be said that they share certain extraordinary library practices. The “poor devil of a Sub-Sub” who introduces the Extracts had become “hopeless” and “sallow,” but there were adventures in his past. He had been a librarian in the way that Indiana Jones was an archaeologist: he traveled worldwide to collect his whaliana. Kish is by no means hopeless or sallow, but like Melville’s Sub-Sub, he also started his project with a collection that he culled and saved over several years: a supply of found paper on which he drew most of the Moby-Dick illustrations.

Kish acquired his own trove of extracts long before he began the Moby-Dick project, and his library—like the Sub-Sub’s—is the trophy of a long and varied adventure in collecting. He worked in a used bookstore during grad school and rescued visually interesting pages from books that were doomed for the trash heap. Kish gravitated toward orphaned repair manuals, engineering textbooks, and anything that featured elaborate and inscrutable schematics. During the bookstore years, Kish did not have a purpose in mind for the growing stack of pages, but he began using them as soon as he started illustrating Moby-Dick. He told one interviewer that his earliest illustrations were done on the pages of obsolete electronics repair guides. “Something about those old diagrams fascinates me because their symbols and all those lines and drawings and letters look almost alchemical to me. Magical. So the thought of all that unfathomable information, a bit buried but lurking just beneath the paint and ink really spoke to me. It hinted at the deeper themes and mysteries of Melville’s novel as well as the mysteries lurking beneath the sea.”

Most of the diagrams are barely visible underneath the illustrations—a mumbling hint of flow-chart bubbles, arrows, tables, and numbers under boldly colored monsters that demand all the attention.

Sometimes, the found paper works in direct service of the illustrations. The image for page 94 illustrates Ishmael’s description of the foggy weather on the morning he and Queequeg boarded the Pequod and sailed out from Nantucket harbor: “It was nearly six o’clock, but only grey imperfect misty dawn, when we drew nigh the wharf.” The stylized clouds and muted sun are drawn on top of a weather map showing precipitation and pressure centers: weather illustrating weather.

More often, the relationship between Kish’s illustration and the found paper is occult. But even the most alien diagrams sometimes accrete meaning in Kish’s illustrations: flow-chart arrows and bubbles start to resemble harpoons and whales, and the flat page dissolves through the infinite regress of whales and harpoons, whales and harpoons.

For Kish, the printed matter in the background of his illustrations represents and preserves a world of print culture that is being washed away by digital information and imaging. Digitally created imagery “leaves me cold” says Kish, who cherishes analog print technologies. “My decision to use predominantly found paper from old books—most of which I have picked up at the used bookstore, but also in library discards—[was] a real overt attempt to connect the art and imagery I was creating to the world of print …. I felt it was very important that the viewer would be consciously aware of the print behind the illustrations and the relationship of the image that I was creating to that older, more hand-made approach to creating stories.”

These days, Kish sees a lot more books headed for the trash heap, as libraries work to build and shore up digital collections. He is no Luddite—he appreciates the power of digital resources—but he believes that books and analog print culture have not yet outlived their usefulness. “I see bin after bin after bin of books being sent out the back garage of the library, no longer useful. I thought it was important to do at least a symbolic gesture to this world that did exist and does still matter.”

Discarded books are suggestive and melancholy, not only as artifacts of a receding print culture, but as repositories for a kind of knowledge deemed no longer useful. The books that Kish rescued were marked obsolete not just because they were books, but because they were manuals or textbooks about out-of-date technologies. Discarded books embody the death of utility, the obviation of hard work and hard-won knowledge, but are they obsolete yet? These books raise questions: Have they outlived their usefulness—for what, and according to whom?

As objects that provoke questions about utility and obsolescence, Kish’s rescued diagrams resonate with one of the novel’s strangest qualities: Moby-Dick anticipates the obsolescence of American whaling, and serves as a premature shrine to an industry that had not yet disappeared.

Herman Melville went whaling in 1841, during the boom years of the industry. He shipped on the maiden voyage of the Acushnet, one of the whaling fleet’s newest and biggest vessels. Whaling was one of America’s first global industries and a major driver of domestic industrialization: oil produced by the American whaling fleet lubricated industrial machinery and lit homes and factories in growing cities.

The industry was never more prosperous in the United States than during the years that Melville experienced and wrote about the industry. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, only 324 vessels left American ports on whaling voyages, but in the 1840s, the United States dispatched more than 2,300 whaling voyages. But the booming industry ground to a halt around 1860, when a huge portion of the whaling fleet was destroyed in the Civil War. Confederate cruisers sank or captured at least forty-six whalers, and the United States government requisitioned at least forty more to sink in southern harbors in an attempt to blockade ports. (It did not work: the sunken ships—the Stone Fleet that Melville eulogized in his 1866 collection of Civil War poetry—actually served to deepen the channel.)

The whaling industry might have recovered from the disruptions of war, but the devastation of the fleet coincided with the discovery of the resource that would supplant whaling: petroleum. Oil was struck at Edwin Drake’s well in Titusville, Pennsylvania in August of 1859, and the petroleum boom began. By the end of the nineteenth century, the whaling industry had dwindled almost to oblivion.

Not that Melville knew any of this would happen when he wrote Moby-Dick. Technologies are made obsolete by their replacements, not by any palpable sense of doom, and in the decade between Melville’s own 1841 whaling voyage and the publication of the novel in 1851, whale and sperm oil were still considered superior illuminants and industrial lubricants. Despite that, Moby-Dick focuses on the elements of the whaling industry that were old, worn, and obsolete in their ways—as if he were describing an industry that had already entered its obsolescence.

For example, Nantucket had been the center of the American whaling industry in the eighteenth century, but by the 1820s New Bedford had eclipsed the island port as the capital of the industry. Ishmael passes through busy New Bedford, but decides to ship out of Nantucket out of a sense of nostalgia for that port’s earlier prosperity: “For my mind was made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island, which amazingly pleased me. Besides though New Bedford has of late been gradually monopolizing the business of whaling, and though in this matter poor old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original—the Tyre of this Carthage; —the place where the first dead American whale was stranded.” Though the whaling industry loomed large in the contemporary United States economy, Ishmael treated his own whaling voyage as if it were a voyage backward in time.

The ship Pequod, too, was a vestige of an earlier phase of the whaling industry: “She was a ship of the old school, rather small if anything; with an old-fashioned claw-footed look about her.” She was a ship trophied by past hunts, and named after “a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians, now extinct as the ancient Medes.” Matt Kish’s portrait of the Pequod evokes its inimitability and intricacy, but Melville’s own image is at least as fantastic.

The Pequod was a far cry from the huge, up-to-dateAcushnet Melville knew from his own whaling voyage. In creating the Pequod, Melville went far outside his own experience to dream up a ship “more than half a century” old, a ship not on its maiden voyage but on its death voyage. Melville was no soothsayer: he did not prophesy that whaling would crash within a short decade of his book’s publication. But Moby-Dick‘s peculiar focus on obsolescence forestalls any optimism about the sustainability of industrial success and imperial expansion. In bringing to light the obsolete aspects of a thriving industry, Moby-Dick offers a premature eulogy and a warning: obsolescence is always built in.

I learned about One Drawing of Every Page of Moby-Dick when Matt Kish was about halfway through his illustrations for the novel. I, too, was about halfway through my own long engagement with Melville and Moby-Dick: a dissertation on the cultural history of the United States whaling industry through its heyday, decline, obsolescence, and commemoration. I checked the Website every day, and every day I was reminded of the power of daily practice. Checking for a new illustration on Kish’s Website, in fact, became a daily habit, something like a threshold ritual. Each fresh illustration cleared the static noise of online distraction and propelled me back into my own work. The images inspired me through their beauty and insight, and they testified to the satisfaction of the met deadline.

For Kish, the production schedule was relentless, but for viewers, the experience of reading the novel through his illustrations was slow—much slower than reading online news stories that appear and disappear almost instantly, like bubbles in a pot of boiling water. In reality, I was racing through the novel out of order as I wrote and revised my own dissertation chapters. Through Kish’s Website, though, I was able to imagine reading Moby-Dick for the first time, working through the novel slowly, day by day.

At first, I thought of Kish’s project as an experiment in seriality, a thoroughly nineteenth-century publication practice. Serialized publication of novels in the nineteenth century constrained authors through deadlines, space requirements, and the calculation of suspense in service of newspaper sales. Kish built in his own arbitrary constraints: every page, every day. No one held him accountable to his own rules, but he faced those deadlines like a hardened journalist.

Kish’s project was a serial in form as well as in practice: each illustration took roughly the same form, appearing on the blog in the same place at the top of the page, but every day the illustration was completely new. The illustrations for the “Cetology” chapter brought a new whale every day for one week, during which Kish created some of his most virtuosic drawings. The seriality of Kish’s whales mirrored the seriality of Ishmael’s whimsical classification of whales into folios, octavos, and duodecimos. The whales are unbelievably intricate and individuated. The finback whale resembles a military plane in camouflage colors with fins like metal plates dotted with bolts. The thrasher whale is an unnerving green coil of intestines, and the sulphur-bottom whale is worm-like, decorated with rounded tiles that resemble cobblestones.

But it was not narrative suspense, exactly, that kept me coming back to the Website: I was transfixed by the spectacle of productivity. I suppose my curiosity to see how Kish would meet each brutal deadline was a form of narrative suspense, and it seemed to have been that way for many other loyal viewers. Kish said that he received unanimously positive feedback through the Website, and that most people remarked on the huge ambition of the project. “[Most people’s] first impression was simply stunned disbelief at the ambition… The farther I got into the project I got all this credibility: ‘This guy’s already done a hundred pages, it’s the real deal.’ That stunned disbelief would turn into: ‘he’s really going to do it; he’s really going to make it.’ “

Kish said that he began the Moby-Dick project in part because he hoped to loosen up his style and learn to draw faster. He had made intricate drawings and illustrations his whole life, but he was frustrated that each piece took him so long to make. He thought that the daily deadline would speed him up by forcing him to simplify. That strategy worked for a very short while: the first several images are simple and abstract, like the “Call me Ishmael” image that opened the project. But Kish fell quickly into his old habit of making intricate illustrations. “But my natural tendency in drawing has always been far, far too detailed, overly detailed. Horror vacui: it’s not quite a fear, but I do have a real natural tendency to fill all empty space with lines and textures and patterns. So I started the project, and things started out very abstractly and I was able to simplify things. But near the end I couldn’t control my natural tendency to overrender things to fill space with patterns and textures. And so in the last fifty pages you can see that coming back. But that’s a good thing, because as an artist it made me reconnect with that [habit]. It really is the way I like to draw and even though it’s slow and stultifying and static, it feels very, very natural to me.”

It is apt that an artist who abhors white space would choose to illustrate Moby-Dick, and unsurprising that the novel would work through him to reinforce that fear of the void. It is poignant, too, that the novel nurtured Kish’s tendency toward difficult, detailed work. Kish’s drive to fill white space is responsible for some of his most wondrous and emotionally affecting illustrations. The illustration for page 402 depicts the moment when the fearful ship-keeper Pip leapt out of a whaleboat during a chase and was abandoned for a terrifying stretch of time in open sea while the boat carried on with the hunt. Pip never recovered his sanity after those moments alone in the ocean: “The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs.”

That last sentence of this passage is excessive—too many heaps, orbs, eternities, and strange shapes—but in its overindulgence it is also beautiful. The verbal convolutions of the passage mimic the warping and twisting of Pip’s mind as he went insane on the open sea. After Pip’s ordeal, the crew of the Pequod considers him an idiot, but Ahab recognizes the note of divinity in his madness. Kish’s illustration imparts some of Ahab’s empathy, transmitting the experience of simultaneous wonder and terror that Pip experienced when the sea “drowned the infinite of his soul.” The illustration gives us Pip through the metonym of his vulnerable eyeball, beset by creeping and snarling sea monsters, some of which only come into view after you stare at the image for a long time. Kish wrote on his blog that the image took him four days to create (by this point in the project, he had begun working ahead whenever he could, so he could afford to create intricate illustrations while still meeting the daily deadline). A simple, swiftly-executed image would have conveyed neither the sublime terror of Pip’s experience nor the reader’s experience of Ishmael’s swarming narrative style. Kish’s perfectly overwrought illustration does both.

Kish finished his project in January of this year. The illustration for his last page mirrored “Call me Ishmael” with the same Ishmael-icon, but with “ISHMAEL” swapped out for “ORPHAN” to reflect Ishmael’s status as the sole survivor of the Pequod‘s wreck: “On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.”

The symmetry of the first and last page is gratifying, but watching Kish come to the end of his project was bittersweet for us viewers who had lived through the novel in concert with the project.

Partway through his project, Kish drew up a book contract with Tin House Books to publish the whole set of illustrations. The book comes out this fall, and One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick will become one of those solid, substantial books that Kish celebrates in his work. For those of us who followed the project as it unfolded, the book will be a souvenir. The voyage has ended.

All illustrations are by Matt Kish, to be published in October 2011 under the title Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick by Tin House Books.

Further reading

Matt Kish was inspired to illustrate every page of Moby-Dick by the artist Zak Smith, who illustrated every page of Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon. Those illustrations are collected in Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow (Berkeley, Calif., 2006).

For a thorough economic history of the United Stated whaling industry, I rely on In Pursuit of Leviathan: Technology, Institutions, Productivity, and Profits in American Whaling, 1816-1906 by Lance E. Davis, Robert E. Gallman, and Karin Gleiter (Chicago, 1997). The New Bedford Whaling Museum and the museum at Mystic Seaport house and exhibit the most important artifacts and archives of American whaling history.

The story of natural resource extraction continues with Brian Black’s discussion of the discovery and development of the American petroleum industry in Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (Baltimore, 2000).

Elizabeth Schultz offers an overview and trenchant analysis of twentieth-century illustrations of Moby-Dick in Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-Century American Art (Lawrence, Kansas, 1995).

This article originally appeared in issue 12.1 (October, 2011).

Ben Franklin’s World: A Podcast About Early American History started as an experiment. Podcasts offer an intimate form of on-demand media that satisfies the desire for oral storytelling. Historians have great stories to tell, and more than a decade of experience interacting with people at museums and historical sites led me to believe that historians could use podcasts to find and cultivate a large public audience of people who love history and who craved the chance to interact with historians. I created Ben Franklin’s World in 2014 not just as a podcast about early American history, but also as a podcast that investigates the historical process and encourages listeners to engage with it. The only question that remained: would anyone listen?

Why Podcasts?

Podcasts serve as the perfect medium for our mobile, digital age. They are downloadable and streamable audio programs you can listen to whenever and wherever you want. Podcasts emerged around 2004 when portable digital devices like the iPod came to the marketplace and the number of listeners has grown year over year since then. Edison Research estimates podcast listenership in the United States has grown from 27 percent of the American population over the age of twelve in 2013 to 40 percent in 2017. Further, the number of Americans over the age of twelve who listen to podcasts on a weekly basis has grown from 7 percent in 2013 to 15 percent, or an estimated 42 million people, in 2017.

Podcasts are popular because they allow listeners to edify and entertain themselves when they commute to work, go for a run, walk their dog, or perform household chores. Listening to a podcast is an intimate experience. When you listen to a podcast through earbuds, you invite your favorite host(s) to speak directly to you, and you alone. When you listen over an audio system, such as the one in your car, it is often because you need someone to keep you company. This intimate listening experience combined with historical storytelling, which, at its core, is about people, make podcasts an effective way for historians to humanize the past and their profession.

As for me, I discovered podcasts in 2012 when I read about them in a book. At first, I listened to podcasts about writing, productivity, and digital media. Then I looked for podcasts about history, but I could not find one I liked. No history podcast discussed my favorite period—early America—and I could not find one that offered more than a basic, Wikipedia-like article about a historical topic or a recitation of history books and articles—often with presentist commentary about those books and articles. I wanted to listen to a history podcast that offered more substance; I wanted to listen to a podcast that went beyond the basic facts and discussed history in way that told me where historians found their evidence and why they chose to interpret it the way they did. After months of lamenting the lack of such a podcast, I decided to create one.

Designing a Podcast: Format and Technique

Over a decade of experience working in public history told me that historians could use podcasts to find and expand a large audience of people interested in their scholarship and the process behind it. But how could I create a program people would listen to?

Eighteen months of research into podcasts revealed that successful shows release episodes with high-quality content, presented in a consistent format, on a regular schedule. Every episode of Ben Franklin’s World releases on Tuesday mornings at 1:30 am Eastern Time and most episodes feature the same format: a promo spot for a sponsor, an introduction to the episode, an interview with a guest scholar, a hypothetical history segment called the “Time Warp,” the guest’s closing remarks, and a brief summary of key points from the conversation.

I learned that the way you speak really matters. Listeners prefer podcasts whose hosts include them in their conversations and stories. The best hosts ask questions that acknowledge listeners’ participation. They make use of “you,” “we,” and “us” when they phrase questions and engage listeners in asides that provide the context they need to understand the conversation. I use these techniques in Ben Franklin’s World.

For example, when I interviewed Lonnie Bunch, the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in December 2016, I asked questions such as “When we spoke with Jim Horn about different historical sources, he told us about oral histories and how they can be great and also problematic. Lonnie, do you encounter any challenges, you know, using the oral histories about the documents and artifacts you collect as you create museum exhibits people can trust?” and, “As we’re talking, I get the sense that people really fascinate you. And I wonder if you would tell us about your first research project, which investigated leaders of free black communities in America prior to the Civil War. Was it the people who attracted you to this project?” As I engage listeners in asides like these, I imagine looking at one of them while I am speaking. Then I imagine turning to face my guest and posing my question to them. This technique allows listeners to feel as though they are in the room where the conversation is taking place (even though the “room” is fictive because I conduct my interviews remotely).

I also include listeners in the conversation by posing questions that they have told me they would like guest scholars to answer. Before most interviews, I post a call for questions in a private listener community on Facebook.

Working to include listeners in conversations adds to the intimacy of the podcast listening experience. My research made clear that the more listeners experience a conversation as though they are participants in it, the more connected they will feel with a podcast, its host, and with the subject matter featured in episodes. Ben Franklin’s World cultivates a sense that history is an enterprise everyone should support. By working to include listeners in my interviews, I am helping listeners forge a personal connection with history.

Ben Franklin’s World and the Promises of Podcasts for History

Ben Franklin’s World released its first four episodes on October 7, 2014. Although I had done my research, I released those first episodes wondering if anyone would listen. Much to my relief, the answer proved to be “yes.” It became an overwhelming “YES!” quickly.

In October 2014, Ben Franklin’s World received 288 downloads over five episodes. By January 2015, it spiked to 50,951 downloads. I cannot pinpoint the exact reason for the sharp and quick growth in its monthly download totals, but I observed two factors at play. First, iTunes featured Ben Franklin’s World on the front page of its “New & Noteworthy” category, first within the category of history and then for the entire iTunes store. Second, friends, colleagues, and active listeners told other people about the show. Listeners have been, and continue to be, the best promoters of the show, which now averages over 160,500 downloads per month.

The consistent release of high-quality content has played a large role in attracting and keeping listeners. Each episode of Ben Franklin’s World presents listeners with a detailed conversation about some aspect of “Vast Early America”—the idea that we need to think about early American history as a field that encompasses four centuries of history spread across four different continents—through the lens of a guest scholar’s discussion of a book, historic site, museum, or digital project. No episode summarizes a whole project. Rather, each episode explores one or two themes and some aspect of the guest’s methodology.

For example, in episode 136, I interviewed Jennifer Van Horn about her book, The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America. Three of the eleven questions I posed focused on her historical sources and how and why she interpreted those sources the way she did. These questions allowed listeners to get a sense of how Jennifer chose the objects she discusses in her book, why she focused on the objects left behind by wealthy early Americans and not poor early Americans, and how she analyzed and interpreted the objects she used. Further, the question that asked her to describe her analysis and interpretation also inquired why the work she does to recover the practical and metaphorical functions of early American objects matters today.

This focused technique, which explores both history and the historical process, provides listeners with a rich educational experience. Guests know they do not have to provide a comprehensive account of their entire project during our hour-long conversations and so are free to offer nuanced, thoughtful comments on specific themes the interviews pursue. Listeners love the detail guests provide because it allows them to leave each episode feeling knowledgeable about a historical topic.

The methodology questions I feature in each episode have prompted many listeners to send me questions about how historians work. These historical process-related questions inspired the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture’s Doing History: How Historians Work series, which debuted in January 2016.

On the last Tuesday of each month throughout 2016, Doing History episodes were posted in the Ben Franklin’s World feed in order to provide listeners with detailed explorations of how historians select research topics, conduct research, use archives, analyze sources, and how they organize and write about their research. The series began with a special bonus episode about why historians study history, and concluded with another bonus episode about the role of history and historians in the public. Like Ben Franklin’s World, Doing History started as an experiment: Just how interested were non-historians in investigating the process of history?

Between January 2016 and July 1, 2017, the fourteen episodes in the Doing History: How Historians Work series have received 196,355 downloads from eighty-one different countries. The success of the series prompted the creation of a second season, Doing History: To the Revolution! This series allows listeners to explore not just the history of the American Revolution, but also how scholars construct that history. The series offers listeners a chance to investigate both early American history and the process by which historians have come to know what they know about the past. Episodes in the series post from September 12 through the end of 2017.

More Than Just an Audio Program: Podcasts as Tools to Engage Listeners

Podcasts serve as a gateway to other media about history, serving as a tool for historians to engage with people who have an interest in the stories they tell. Listeners often contact me and guest scholars because we invite them to do so, providing our e-mail addresses and Twitter handles at the end of each episode. Listeners also have the option to join a free, private listener group on Facebook. They use this group as an opportunity to interact with me, show guests, and each other. They pose questions about history and share information about historical events, exhibits, and articles of interest.

Listeners also contact us about the stories we discuss in each episode, stories that inspire them to think historically about the world. Sometimes it prompts them to purchase a book or visit a museum or historic site they heard discussed on the podcast. In a survey I conducted in September 2015, 41 percent of Ben Franklin’s World listeners reported that they had later purchased a guest’s book or visited their museum or historic site after they had heard a guest speak on the podcast.

Ben Franklin’s World also has many academic listeners who use the podcast to enrich their teaching and study of early American history. K-12 teachers report that they use information communicated in episodes to enrich their classroom lessons and student activities. College professors assign episodes of the podcast and the Doing History series to students as a way to expose them to a wider array of historians, historical topics, methodologies, and ideas than they could otherwise fit in their syllabi. Graduate students use episodes to study for comps, and professional historians listen to keep up on the latest literature in the field.

So will non-historians listen to a podcast about scholarly history and the historical process? Yes, they will. Ben Franklin’s World and the Doing History series have proven that podcasts offer historians an important tool for reaching out to different publics and helping them understand the importance of studying history and of the work historians do. The success of these programs proves that scholars do not have to simplify their work to engage the public. In fact, a large part of the success of these programs is due to the detailed way scholars present complex ideas about history and make them accessible to non-historians.

Further Reading & Listening

Todd Henry’s The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment’s Notice (New York, 2011) introduced me to podcasts. Henry also has a podcast, Accidental Creative.

For statistics on podcast listening in the United States, see Edison Research, “The Infinite Dial, 2017,” especially pp. 39 and 44.

For the official announcement of the Doing History series on Ben Franklin’s World, see Karin Wulf, “Doing History,” Uncommon Sense—The Blog, OIEAHC, January 22, 2016.

You can explore Ben Franklin’s World for yourself here.

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

Liz Covart is the digital projects editor at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the founder and host of the podcast Ben Franklin’s World.

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