Rewriting the history of the early republic

Certain kinds of historical writing alter our understanding not only of people, places, and events but also of nations and eras. Sometimes historians introduce new evidence that highlights anomalies in existing explanatory schemes. And sometimes they provide perspective on issues of present-day concern. The emergence in the 1990s of a “new” institutionalism in historical writing on the early American republic did (and continues to do) both. It built on the realization by a small cohort of mostly younger historians that the regnant social and cultural paradigm that had dominated history departments since the 1960s had become unduly confining—a relic, as it were, of a very different age. This shift in historical thinking was energized by a desire to make the history of the United States comprehensible for a generation for whom the passions of the 1960s had been supplanted by a new constellation of concerns. The media, public finance, and the military are but three of many topics that, though of obvious contemporary relevance, were largely ignored by historians of the early republic until quite recently. In turning to such topics, the new-institutional historians have sought to write a history of early America that is more realistic, less sentimental, and more open to international comparisons than the history they remember learning in school or encountered in most of the textbooks taught in introductory college survey courses.

These new institutionalists, many of whom now occupy prominent places in the historical profession, are respectful of the enormous body of fine scholarship on social and cultural topics that is the most enduring legacy of their immediate forbears. Yet they quarrel with this scholarship in at least two ways. Their first quarrel concerns their disinclination to characterize the early republic as precapitalistic and stateless. The anomalies in the historical record are simply too great: to envision the early republic as precapitalistic simply does not square with what we now know about the slave trade and land speculation, to name but two of the many inconvenient truths that historians of this period often neglect. And to deny the existence of the early American state—or even to characterize it as “innocuous” or “weak”—trivializes the existence of congeries of federal government institutions in realms as different as banking, communications, and what we today would call intellectual property.

The second problem with the received wisdom is more of a matter of temperament. To be blunt, new institutionalists have grown impatient with the often-precious text parsing that has come to pass for serious historical analysis among more than a few historians who claim to have taken the linguistic turn. The new institutionalists are more interested in how things worked than in what people believed and are skeptical of historical writing that ignores huge swatches of social reality in a quixotic quest for the authentic and the pure.

An old institutionalism flourished in history departments for several decades before the Second World War. Its practitioners treated institutions as more-or-less stable entities with venerable pedigrees and wrote learned and often perceptive books and articles on particular businesses, government agencies, and cultural institutions. The new institutionalism, in contrast, treats institutions as bundles of rules that are constantly evolving and that interact with social and cultural processes in unpredictable and sometimes idiosyncratic ways. Contingency is in; inexorability is out. Old institutionalists searched for origins, which they referred to as “germs”; new institutionalists track outcomes, which they conceive of as “legacies.”

Among the most distinctive features of the new institutionalism is its practitioners’ reluctance to regard the rise of the United States as inevitable. For too long, in their view, the history of the United States has been regarded as decisively different—for better or worse—than the history of any other modern nation. No longer is the existence of a uniquely American society taken for granted. No longer are the country’s major institutions presumed to be nothing more than the stage upon which its supposedly “real” history has been played out. And no longer is the country’s institutional development assumed to have followed some “exceptional” trajectory that distinguished it from, say, Germany or France. Indeed, no longer is it assumed that there has, in fact, existed an American society from time immemorial. If the new institutionalists have a mantra, it is this: institutions beget institutions, shape social relationships, and influence cultural conventions. Specific institutions do things: in the lingua franca of the history profession, they have agency. Configurations of institutions, in contrast, are not agents, but have effects that no group or individual willed. The distinction between agency and effects was underscored over two decades ago by the sociologist Theda Skocpol in a justly celebrated manifesto entitled “Bringing the State Back In.” This essay remains a foundational text for the new institutionalism of today.

Given the indebtedness of the new institutionalism to social science, it is perhaps not surprising that some of the most suggestive recent historical writing on the early republic to take the new-institutionalist turn originated in disciplines other than history. In Shaped by War and Trade (2002), for example, political scientist Ira Katznelson delineates the centrality of the military to early nineteenth-century American state building; in Creation of the Media (2004), sociologist Paul Starr details the lasting legacy for the media of certain key decisions (or what he calls “constitutive choices”) made in the late eighteenth century; and in the Cambridge Economic History of the United States: The Long Nineteenth Century (2000), economist Richard Sylla documents how an analogous set of decisions shaped the history of public finance.

Among historians, the new institutionalism has found a home in a variety of fields. Among its champions is the distinguished cultural historian Thomas Bender, whose Nation among Nations is perhaps the most ambitious attempt by a historian to underscore the society-shaping influence of some of the nation’s largest and most powerful institutions. In pointed contrast to Gordon S. Wood’s Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992)—a locus classicus of the older, society-centered history that the new institutionalists reject—Bender neither takes the rise of the United States for granted nor assumes that its rise is rooted in social relationships that are in some mysterious way more fundamental than the institutional framework in which these relationships evolved. Bender is by no means alone. Certain insights of the new institutionalists have also found their way into at least one college history textbook: Inventing America (2nd ed., 2006), cowritten by Pauline Maier, Merritt Roe Smith, Alexander Keyssar, and Daniel J. Kevles. 

The following three essays in Common-place’s special politics issue highlight a few of the possibilities of the institutionalist turn. They touch on three topics that the new institutionalists have begun to explore: namely, the media, public finance, and the military.

The growing convergence between the new institutionalism and the large body of distinguished historical writing on social and cultural themes is cogently underscored by Sean Adams in a thoughtful essay on the shifting significance of the public career of John Quincy Adams. Once derided as a hidebound elitist hopelessly out of step with the rising currents of a democratic age, Adams has been lionized in recent years in venues as diverse as Steven Spielberg’s popular film Amistad and Daniel Walker Howe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning What Hath God Wrought. The new Adams is portrayed as a visionary statesman who, following a failed attempt as president to mobilize the federal government to promote the public good, harnessed the media to reframe the slavery issue as a struggle over civil liberties. Sean Adams (no relation) concurs. The key to John Quincy Adams’s success lay in his resolute mobilization of an institution—in this instance, the constitutionally mandated right to petition—to forge new links between the government and the governed.

The enormous significance of nineteenth-century public finance is brilliantly illuminated by Max Edling’s compelling comparison of the tax-gathering apparatus of the United States and of Mexico. In Sinews of Power (1989), British historian John Brewer famously demonstrated that the military might of the British Empire rested on the superiority of Britain’s tax-gathering apparatus over the tax-gathering apparatus of its archrival France; in his essay, Edling makes an analogous comparison between the United States and Mexico. If the early American state is compared with the early Mexican state—rather than, say, the American state during the Cold War—then it no longer makes sense to characterize it, as the influential Princeton University historian John Murrin once did, as a “midget institution in a giant land.” On the contrary, it emerges as a highly effective institution that helped the country wage war, expand its boundaries, and forestall recolonization by Great Britain or France.

Gautham Rao strikes a similar note in his tightly focused case study of the establishment in the early republic of marine hospitals in ports large and small. The Treasury Department established these hospitals to help maintain the health of the sailors who staffed the country’s merchant marine. Like the post office, the customs house, and the land office, the marine hospital was a tangible reminder of the reach of the newly established federal government. The hospitals were funded not from general revenue but rather from a tax on the mariners’ salaries, which customs officers collected when mariners came into port. By providing thousands of Americans with high-quality medical service, these institutions highlighted the vital role that the federal government had come to play in the provisioning of heath care. The rationale for the marine hospitals was not only humanitarian but also economic and military. Lawmakers regarded sea-borne commerce as a vital economic sector and, in the absence of a large navy, were determined to ensure that the government had at its disposal a cadre of highly skilled seafarers should the country find itself at war with one of the major European powers.

The consequence of state building for the Indian tribes of North America is the theme of the essay by Jeffrey L. Pasley. From the Indians’ perspective, the early American state was a powerful institution indeed. Not only did the military force thousands of Indians to relocate, most notoriously during the administration of Andrew Jackson; it also built a vast network of roads through Indian territory, which limited tribal autonomy, while establishing a large and sprawling “welfare” state apparatus to educate Indians, which devastated their culture. It is one of the many ironies of the social and cultural paradigm that its practitioners evinced great sympathy for the so-called victims of history without paying more than cursory attention to the very institutions that were responsible for their victimization. This is one of the several omissions that the new institutionalists are doing their best to correct.

Taken together, these essays show how historians are returning once again to the perennial questions of power, economics, and nationhood, questions that, with a few conspicuous exceptions, an earlier generation neglected. In this way, they aspire to write a history of the United States that takes nothing for granted. It is a history in which the rise of the nation to world power is no longer foreordained and in which its development becomes a chapter in a global history of modernity, rather than a unique event whose origins spring from a bewitching brew of social circumstances that in some mystical way set the United States apart from the rest of the world.

Further Reading:

For an up-to-date overview of recent historical writing on the early republic in the new-institutionalist tradition, see Mark R. Wilson, “Law and the American State, from the Revolution to the Civil War: Institutional Growth and Structural Change,” in Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins, eds., Cambridge History of Law in America, Volume II: The Long Nineteenth Century, 1789-1920 (Cambridge, 2008): 1-35. For a recent collection of new-institutionalist essays, see Richard R. John, ed., Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America (State College, Pa., 2006). The introductory essay to this collection includes an extensive bibliography of recent scholarship on new-institutionalist themes. Skocpol’s celebrated essay, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” can be found in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, 1985): 3-37. For a stimulating critique of the social and cultural paradigm in historical writing by an eminent sociologist who has written widely on historical topics, see the late Charles Tilly’s Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (1984).

This article originally appeared in issue 9.1 (October, 2008).

Richard R. John is a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he specializes in U.S. cultural and institutional history. His publications include Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1995) and many essays on topics in the history of communications and public life. He is also the editor of Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America (2006). He has recently completed a book manuscript on the history of early American telecommunications, which will be forthcoming in 2009 from Harvard University Press.

The yellow envelope bore a scribbled return address, and I recognized the handwriting of my former newspaper colleague, a man who gave up a steady job to write a biography of Mark Twain’s best friend, Gilded Age minister Joseph Twichell. Inside the envelope was a three-page printout from a microfilm reader and a card that read, “Saw this and thought of you. Love, Steve.”

Do we ever see the precise moment when life changes?

In May 2004, my newspaper buddy sent me a story published in the Hartford Times in January 1928, a piece he had stumbled across in the course of his own research. I was then a longtime reporter and editor at the Hartford Courant and under contract to coauthor a book on slavery in the North for Ballantine Books/Random House.

Between newspaper investigations and research for the book, I had been studying Connecticut’s relationship with enslavement for two years, eight hours a day, and most weekends. I know there is always more to learn, but I felt confident that I understood the general outline of the story of my state.

However, this nearly eighty-year-old newspaper clipping documented something I had not expected: voyages aboard three eighteenth-century slaving ships, two that sailed from New London to the west of Africa and one voyage from West Africa to the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. The article detailed the acquisition of the ships’ logs several years earlier, and described, with cheerful bonhomie, the mariners’ rough lives aboard the ships. Bound together in an eighty-page notebook or log, records of all three voyages appeared to be in the same handwriting and were made between January 1757 and August 1758.

I knew that Connecticut was a powerhouse in the West Indies trade—a story that scholars Thomas Truxes and Joseph Avitable are making clearer every day—with huge investments in exportable goods, ships for transporting those goods, and a trade system that was creating New England’s first fortunes, but no one had suggested to me that my state was also on the front lines of the slaving trade or that men from the Connecticut colony were on the ground in West Africa, buying men, women, and children.

I don’t know why I was so dismayed to learn about Connecticut’s role in the slave trade. After all, I already knew that the colony had been sending horses, livestock, food, and lumber to Caribbean sugar plantations, which the historian Adam Hochschild has described as a system of “slaughterhouses.” And I knew from months of reading eighteenth-century newspapers and court records that there was nothing benign about Connecticut’s approach to enslavement. The humiliation, beatings, and killing uncertainties of life as an enslaved person anywhere were experienced in my home state, too. But the clipping revealed what seemed to me to be a much darker part of the story.

I told my editor at the newspaper that I was going to spend a morning reading the microfilm of these voyages. The accounts have been in the collections of the Connecticut State Library in Hartford since 1920, when they were acquired from a North Carolina woman prompted by financial need to sell some of her late husband’s collection of maritime documents. I printed out a few pages of the log’s middle voyage, which described buying slaves at a place called Bense Island.

“Show Rob,” my editor said, simply. I took my small collection of pages down to Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center on Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition to show Robert Forbes, my mentor and guide and then second in command at the Gilder Lehrman Center. I could ask Rob any question, betraying my stupidity, and he would never judge me or act offended by my lack of knowledge. Instead, he would recommend reading for me in response to specific questions or scholars for me to consult.

Rob is a calm and patrician guy, but when I showed him the pages of the logbooks, he jumped from his chair, saying, “Where did you get these?” I had thought he would be familiar with my documents, but he was dazzled and began to repeat, in an amazed way, “Bense Island! Bense Island!”

In the fortuitous way that later became typical of this project, and which made me feel that God or Allah or some sort of supreme being was helping me, the world authority on Bense Island was on a National Park Service Fellowship at Yale and in the next room.

Bense Island, today called Bunce Island, is a tiny island at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River, in Sierra Leone, West Africa. It is the size of a football field, has been abandoned for two centuries, and holds the ruins of the last slaving castle built there by the English in 1796. The jetty where the shackled Africans were shoved down to the longboats—the upriver side of the island is at the limit of navigation for the ships that came from New England and Europe to trade—is still intact. The beach is still littered with eighteenth-century detritus such as Venetian beads and cowrie shells, bits of old bottles, pipes, and ship’s ballast. There are even cannon bearing the cipher of King George III, though their wooden carriages have long since rotted away.

Joseph Opala, who teaches at James Madison University, was on a fellowship at Yale to help develop a plan to explore, document, and stabilize Bunce Island.

Trained as an anthropologist and the son of a man who fought in the Polish Resistance, Joe discovered Bunce Island just before finishing a stint in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone in the 1970s. He spent the next twenty years teaching in Sierra Leone and exploring the history of the slave trade on the Sierra Leone River. Forced out during the country’s long and brutal civil war, he now returns several times a year to visit friends and his grown adopted son and to continue the work of saving Bunce Island.

Joe is sly and irreverent, a born teaser, but he went, quite literally, pale when Rob and I showed him the pages from the logbooks. “Where did you get this,” he said. “I need to see the rest!”

I began to feel that I was onto something that might be, to the scholarly world, a new piece of the story, or, at least, solid illumination of something very important. Joe said he thought he had seen every piece of original paper on the island—in London, in Africa, and everywhere in between—but he didn’t know about these voyages.

He and Rob were clear about what should happen next: I needed to verify the names that appeared in the texts of the logs, trace the paths of the voyages, and see if I could find other slaving ships and captains that might have sailed from New London during the same period. I needed to be sure that these ships’ logs were genuine and that, although they are extremely rare, they were part of a larger story of that region’s eager participation in the slaving trade.

The extraordinarily accommodating Connecticut State Library agreed to photograph the logbooks for me, so that I was able to work with a readable copy of the original. A newspaper friend who understood mid-eighteenth-century navigational techniques took a copy and plotted out the three voyages, using the longitudinal notations the log keeper made every two hours.

Benedict Arnold made the next part of my job harder because on September 6, 1781, he had burned down New London’s waterfront, destroying the New London custom house and its decades of shipping records. I couldn’t find the kind of consistent archival documentation I needed for my period and turned to New London newspapers of the era for those precious “Enter’d in” and “Clear’d out” listings under “Custom-House New-London.” I wanted to find the names of the men in the ships’ logs—perhaps at the helms of other vessels. I wanted to know whether other ships were sailing from New London to Africa.

New London’s first newspaper was established in 1758, and it was a gold mine for me. Most of the ships in the customs listings were headed for the West Indies, but in just a few short weeks of research I found other men and ships heading for or returning from Africa (sometimes dying there). In the Boston News-Letter and other early newspapers, I found references to New London men in Africa, enough to be confident that the voyages in my logbooks weren’t an anomaly.

At the same time, I spent about eight weeks, full time, researching birth, church, military, and probate records also in the collections of the Connecticut State Library. I still have not been able to nail down the identity of the log keeper, though I believe his name was Samuel Gould. The commander in the first voyage, a Middletown, Connecticut, resident named John Easton, was fully a man of the slaving trade, a man who was skilled in its practice and profited from it. I found him on slaving voyages aboard a brig called the Pompey, and his obituary in the Hartford Courant said he died of something “brief and painful.” I found his will in the state archives. He was a man who loved beautiful things, and from that last inventory of “chocolat bowles” and silver swords, I could imagine the interiors of his Connecticut River home in Middletown, which was torn down during urban renewal.

I found the captain of the third logbook voyage in state records and in a series of letters at the New-York Historical Society, grousing about how no one wanted to buy his rum. These voyages, I learned, were made at what was the high-water mark of slaving for the American colonies. The trade was perfectly legal and increasingly profitable, for both South Carolina and Georgia needed laborers to grow rice. Bunce Island, which drew captives from hundreds of miles north and south, sold people who were among the best rice growers on earth.

As I continued to learn about the world of the slaving trade and to verify details contained in the logs, a trip to Sierra Leone began to seem like the logical next step, as well as the one to which my soul was drawn. Less than five months after first reading the newspaper clipping my friend had sent, I was on a plane to Freetown, to see the long coast my narrator had described, the islands where he had provisioned his ships, and his Bunce Island.

Joe Opala, as well as a videographer and photographer, had gone over several days ahead of me to hire local men to clear the Bunce Island ruins of brush, to secure use of the boats we would need, and to make other arrangements. My newspaper, the oldest continuously published newspaper in America, old enough to have been sued by Thomas Jefferson and to have published advertisements for runaway slaves, paid for the whole thing.

You don’t show up in a predominantly Muslim country during Ramadan and just start asking questions. In addition to getting immunized, securing special visas, and making the necessary preparations before visiting one of the poorest and most war-wracked countries on earth, we tried to ready ourselves mentally. We needed to build our narrative in film, words, and photographs in just a few weeks; this was an expensive trip, and there wouldn’t be a chance to go back and get what we missed the first time. In a country described by the United Nations as the least livable on earth, we needed to stay healthy, to work hard, and to be compassionate and sensitive to the suffering people we encountered each day.

Joe Opala had suggested that, in addition to the dozens of Wal-Mart watches I planned to distribute as gifts, I bring copies of the ships’ logs that described Bunce Island to give to local African leaders.

One afternoon on Tasso Island—where eighteenth-century slave traders had reprovisioned their ships—we were entertained by musicians, dancers, and a handsome stilt walker who climbed a tree while wearing his stilts. There are several villages on Tasso, which has neither electricity nor running water, and all the people who were able came to Sangbulima Village for the festivities. Speaking in Krio, which a villager then translated into Temne, Joe introduced me to the island’s blind and ancient chief, Alimamy Rakka. Surrounded by a hundred islanders, with an inner ring of tribal leaders, I gently touched the dry, worn skin of the chief’s arm and then put my hand on the pages from the log, pages which described buying slaves in April 1757.

“Dear honored sir,” I said, “my country is very sorry for this, and we are not going to stop exploring until we know the whole story.” I felt terribly nervous and shy, and when we got home to Hartford and saw the videotape of that moment, I could hear that my voice was shaking. I said a little more, but I don’t remember the words. I do remember wanting to cry.

A little later in the ceremony, a young sub-chief in a robe and headdress of brilliant green offered to buy me. I think he was just being polite and wanted to convey that an attractive woman had come to his village, to acknowledge that in a manly way. I don’t really think he wanted to buy me, but he offered the men in my party twenty cows. My translator quickly piped up that I was “a fifty-cow woman,” which dissolved even the pretend negotiations in laughter.

Later that afternoon, I saw Bunce Island for the first time. As our little speedboat approached the island, I could see parts of the fortress through a scrim of trees dappled by sun. The air was chokingly hot and still, and because the island is abandoned, everything seemed very quiet. As I slid down off the side of the boat and waded ashore through the warm surf, monkeys began to scream at us from the treetops.

Joe Opala and I crossed the jetty and then walked up a short rise through thick vegetation. Suddenly, we were at the empty doorway that led into the fortress proper. The ruins are roofless, and trees grow up through windows and holes in the walls, but you can see the layout of the fortress—where women and children were held in an enclosure separate from the men, where captives were examined for sale, and where their armed captors sat with guns. There is a small enclosure where gunpowder was stored, and it still has its roof. In 1791, Englishwoman Anna Maria Falconbridge visited the island and saw naked men in chains crouched around a tub of rice.

I could hear my heartbeat in my ears, and the brick walls seemed to tower above me. I knew that this place of heat and buzzing insects was a place of terror and suffering and the grief of exile. From the 1680s until the end of England’s involvement in the slave trade in 1808, Bunce Island was a place where human beings were sold. Unlike Cape Coast Castle or Senegal’s Goree or the dozens of slaving operations on the West African coast, the fortresses on Bunce—I visited the last one—were not converted from military or other uses. This island was always about slavery. (Because of the island’s history and the fortress’s extraordinary state of preservation, an international effort is underway to stabilize and protect the ruins and the island itself. The desperate poverty of current Sierra Leone, however, and the difficulty of getting to the island—one must rent a boat in Freetown—complicates every effort. Joe Opala told me very recently that the eighteenth-century cannons that once guarded the fortress are being stolen and sold for scrap metal in Malaysia.)

“Lying at Bense, taking in slaves, wood, and water,” my log keeper had written in 1757. I kept that on a slip of paper in my pocket.

A few days later, we returned to the island, and I walked to the small graveyard where white traders and mariners are buried. I saw the grave of a man mentioned in the first voyage in the log—an English slave trader named William Cleavland whose schooner had passed close enough to the Africa to hail the New London ship and call out that he had thirty slaves on board. Thomas Knight, an Englishman who supervised slave trading on Bunce for eighteen years, was also buried in this cemetery.

Using paper and graphite I’d brought from Connecticut, I tried to trace the words on his headstone, but the stone was rough and in the sweltering heat the graphite was melting onto my hands before I could rub it against the paper. In frustration, I pulled the paper away from Knight’s worn gravestone and saw that only one word was legible: Memory.

Further Reading:

A special supplement on this trip was published in the Hartford Courant in April 2005. The story, photographs, and maps can be seen on its Website. For firsthand accounts of the slave trade, readers can consult John Atkins’s A Voyage to Guinea, Brazil and the West Indies in His Majesty’s Ships, the Swallow and Weymouth (first published in 1735 and reprinted in London, 1970); Alexander Falconbridge’s An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa (first printed in 1788 and reprinted in New York, 1977); Anna Maria Falconbridge’s Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone During the Years 1791, 1792, 1793 (reprinted in Liverpool, 2000); as well as Robert Harms’s The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (New York, 2002). Scholarly descriptions of the trade include Christopher Fyfe’s Sierra Leone Inheritance (London, 1964); Bruce Hancock’s Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 ( New York, 1997); and Bruce Mouser’s A Slaving Voyage to Africa and Jamaica: The Log of the Sandown, 1793-1794 (Bloomington, Ind., 2002), which manages to be both a first-hand account and a scholarly book with helpful descriptions.

This article originally appeared in issue 10.1 (October, 2009).

Anne Farrow is the managing editor for the Encyclopedia of Connecticut History Online, a project of the Connecticut Humanities Council, the Office of the State Historian, and a consortium of Connecticut museums and libraries. She is the coauthor of Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged and Profited from Slavery (2005).

“Bubbles, Panics, & Crashes: A Century of Financial Crises,” Baker Library Historical Collections. November 10, 2009-May 3, 2010, Harvard Business School, Baker Library. Curator: Dr. Caitlin E. Anderson.

The beautifully designed exhibition “Bubbles, Panics, & Crashes,” currently to be seen at Harvard Business School’s Baker Library, aims to enhance our modern-day conversation about financial crises with an assemblage of items from the library’s historical collections. The exhibition both resonates with today’s headlines while reminding us, as well, of oft-ignored experiences from the past. At the heart of a campus training the next generation’s top business executives, this space—which is usually devoted to more upbeat themes—has been given over to the darker aspects of the modern economy. Structured around four historical panics (1837, 1873, 1907, and 1929), the show covers a century of economic trauma. Without a heavy-handed interpretive framework, it nonetheless provides fascinating glimpses into the workings of American business and identifies a confluence of factors that caused each recurring collapse, among them asset overvaluation, negligent banking practices, erratic government policy, and the ebbs and flows of global capital and trade.

Even avid students of American history will learn new things from the exhibition’s focus on not just the central drama of these crises, but on various overshadowed affairs and subplots. The panic of 1837 is most often presented in the context of Andrew Jackson’s Bank Wars, and visitors will accordingly enjoy a display of the plethora of privately issued bank notes whose reckless proliferation, according to some accounts, precipitated the crisis. At the same time, the exhibition includes a section on the lesser-known failure of two of New England’s most eminently conservative banking institutions, a result of their misguided investments in Maine timber lands in search of better returns. The curators also attend to the collapse of numerous merchant houses around the world that was the result of the panic. We thus learn about the global reach of American commerce by reading a transoceanic correspondence between Boston merchant John Perkins Cushing to his partner, the Chinese merchant Houqua, observing that the “immense speculation in wild lands” in the American West meant “every description of property has fallen in a most alarming degree.” The partnership dissolved when Cushing shifted his resources and energy to financing railroads, a logic which guided many who were similarly prompted by the crisis to channel their money away from maritime trade and toward industrial investments.

Most textbooks cite the failure of Jay Cooke’s banking house in New York as having triggered the crisis of 1873. But “Bubbles, Panics, & Crashes” widens our perspective beyond the immediate national context by shedding light on the destabilizing role of European investment in American railroad securities. In this light, the United States appears as less of an industrial power in its own right and becomes something of a developing nation, flooded by foreign capital during a European credit bubble, and then left teetering when the money supply swiftly contracted. Thus, alongside images of the Northern Pacific Railroad cutting through vast, sparsely settled territories, the exhibition traces the web of capital to Germany, whose leading financiers helped underwrite that railroad’s construction. The hand-drafted contracts establishing Cooke’s business presence in London (a common practice for all major American financiers), and forming an all-star financial syndicate of American and English banking houses (including Cook, Morgan, Barring, and Rothschild), again highlight the global scope of business in those decades.

The sections on the later panics continue to treat the vagaries of modern business practices. Financial innovation, “much of it unregulated and poorly understood” (the curators thus echoing recent punditry), was deeply implicated in the panic of 1907. In the years leading up to the crash, life insurance executives had an almost free hand in investing some $20 billion of their policyholders’ savings. While enjoying lavish society balls that made a mockery of their presumed stewardship role for “orphans and widows,” industry leaders kept lax accounts, traded their clients’ money with little or no supervision, and were even known to purchase securities from syndicates in which they had a vested interest. Trust companies, which used aggressive investment strategies to produce high yields for much wealthier customers, were also caught “overextended” when crisis hit in October 1907, leading, most notably, to the failure of New York’s Knickerbocker Trust and the suicide of its president, Charles T. Barney. Whereas the crash of the New York Stock Exchange remains the emblematic event of 1929, the exhibition redirects our attention to smaller, regional stock exchanges, such as Boston’s, which thrived in a nonexistent regulatory environment. The urban real-estate bubble of the 1920s in cities like New York and Miami, whose foreclosures began to mount in 1926 and peaked in 1933, also receives its due attention.

If nineteenth-century crashes traditionally examined within national and local frameworks are treated here with an enhanced emphasis on their global dimensions, the approach is reversed when we move into the twentieth century. Worldwide crises like the Great Depression are perhaps counter-intuitively traced back to local causes: real-estate ventures and regional stock exchanges. The point, in both cases, is the same, namely, that the interconnectedness of the economy meant that no crisis was a contained incident. They all transcended geographical boundaries and cut across industries and economic sectors. World-encompassing flows of investment could cause devastation on the local level, just as “overvalued” real estate in particular locales could trigger instability that reverberated all over the globe. Indeed, economic panics are telling historical moments that reveal the structural complexities of the interdynamics between the global and local. The exhibition points to their usefulness for scholars who aim to broaden the frameworks of their analysis beyond the nation state.

More generally, the exhibition is most striking for how it sheds light on business “as usual.” Crises bring the architecture of the world economy into sharp relief and often signal important turning points. In this sense, massive collapses are to be found on the same continuum as the smaller ones that occur daily under the “perennial gale of creative destruction,” to use Joseph Schumpeter’s all-too-familiar phrase. The show is less illuminating when it recaps conventional wisdom about the roots of these crises, casting them as diverging from the otherwise rational workings of a stable market environment. The scholarly literature on the question leads to what seems to be an analytical dead end, alternating between the immutable (“financial crises have happened before, and … will happen again”) and the entirely contingent (“historically specific accidents under irreproducible conditions” [my emphasis]). This interpretive impasse might account for the exhibition’s many references to avarice, ignorance, and duplicity, which in themselves offer little in the way of a fully historicized explanation.

The reliance on psychological or deviant factors to explain economic crises taps into a venerable trope that is as old as the boom-bust cycle itself and is inscribed in the very terms “panic,” “speculative bubble,” and, more recently, “irrational exuberance.” The notion that human passions distort rational market behavior has only recently gained traction in the discipline of economics itself, but, as we can see in perhaps the most interesting aspect of this exhibition, it follows in the footsteps of a long line of institutions and individuals who sought to protect the market from the ruinous effects of crowd psychology. “Bubbles, Panics, & Crashes” nods to this tradition when it refers in positive fashion to institutions such as Boston’s Suffolk System, an antebellum regional central banking arrangement that “curbed the excesses of the rural banks” of Massachusetts, or Lewis Tappan’s Mercantile Agency, which in the wake of the 1837 panic began to offer credit information as an effort to systematize lending practices. It features Elizur Wright’s life insurance tables, based on mortality data, that aimed to scientifically manage the industry’s risk, and Harvard Professor James M. Landis, whose work inspired SEC financial regulation. There are many more who deserve a place in this important tradition, including the president of the Second Bank of the U.S., Nicholas Biddle, mugwump reformers Henry V. Poor and Charles Francis Adams Jr., banker J.P. Morgan and President Theodore Roosevelt, and continuing on up to today’s chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke.

Symptomatically, the involvement of Wall Street’s most respected firms in the events of the past few years—and in every historical crisis included in this exhibition—shows that ostensibly conservative private actors can hardly claim to have had a stabilizing role in the marketplace. These institutions always had access to the best information and mathematical models, so there is little reason to believe that better science would have made a difference. Even in the case of publicly appointed regulators such as former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, who at a recent hearing seemed to be at a loss for words in explaining the crisis, pinning it on a “once-in-a-century credit tsunami,” the cure can sometimes be as bad as the disease. Government oversight could be effective, to a degree, and a welcomed necessity. However, the longing for an authority capable of policing that ever elusive boundary between irresponsible speculation and legitimate business tactics will remain painfully unrequited.

This article originally appeared in issue 10.3 (April, 2010).

Noam Maggor is a Ph.D. candidate in History of American Civilization at Harvard University. He studies the history of American capitalism, and is currently writing a dissertation on urban governance in the late nineteenth century, with a particular focus on the lower middle class.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was never very good at staying focused, especially on current events. Even his “Lecture on the Times” only mentions “the Banks; the Tariff; the limits of Executive Power” and other topics from the newspapers, before insisting that we should never let the news determine what is central to us in the first place. “Centrality. Centrality,” he writes in his journal—what’s the point? So in response to charges that his “reading is irrelevant,” he replies, “Yes, for you, but not for me. It makes no difference what I read. If it is irrelevant, I read it deeper. I read it until it is pertinent to me and mine, to nature and to the hour that now passes … [I] find footsteps in Grammar rules, in oyster shops, in church liturgies, in mathematics, and in solitudes and in galaxies.”

Few of us are as willing as Emerson to admit that it makes no difference what we read or that what is relevant to us or ours may exclude most everything of relevance to anyone else. Instead we have gotten in the habit of insisting on the value of relevance, especially when university funding seems increasingly to depend on external measures of utility and social consequence. Academic readers are asked to justify our function in ways that confirm our worth to the public; we calculate the long-term economic benefits of a liberal arts education, or we borrow from other fields—from cognitive science to economics and politics—whose public impacts are more tangible. Sometimes we aspire to the civic goals—”the sharpening of moral perception” or “the fashioning of an informed citizenry”—that Stanley Fish notoriously challenged in the New York Times because the humanities “cannot be justified except in relation to the pleasure they give” (though his pleasure, for him, is worth subsidizing). So while Emerson is happy to say that his interests are important for him, we say that our interests are important for the perspective they give on the emerging shape of our contemporary moment. While Emerson is satisfied with an “oblique and casual” relationship between his reading and his world, we want to believe that our reading is contingent on an aspect of the present it reveals since only from our current vantage point can the works that we read come to mean what they do.

We have gotten in the habit of insisting on the value of relevance, especially when university funding seems increasingly to depend on external measures of utility and social consequence.

In his late essay “Perpetual Forces,” Emerson describes his fondness for reading works that have survived for sufficiently long periods of time that certain properties just “adhere to them,” such as “persisting to be themselves, and the impossibility of being warped.” If these texts, for Emerson, feel less like books and more like “elemental” forces in the natural world, this is not only because their effects are so pervasive, but also because their meanings never change or yield to human “tampering.” Or as he puts it, “How we prize a good continuer!” By Emerson’s reckoning, we may need to wait another millennium or so before we can know just how much of a “continuer” he is or whether his readers will find in him the “power of persistence” (“which never loses its charm”). For now, we try our best to keep him relevant.

Emerson never appears more central than at the moment he is being read. The editors of the recent collection, New Morning: Emerson in the Twenty-first Century (2008), say their book “[underscores] the relevance of Emerson’s thought to contemporary issues as varied as the environment, race, politics, spirituality, aesthetics, and education.” An anthology from 2004, The Spiritual Emerson, promises only his writings with “the greatest relevance in today’s world.” Emerson was also timely in 1971 for the editors of Emerson’s Relevance Today, and Floyd Stovall was arguing for his relevance in 1942 in “The Value of Emerson Today.” Given that almost fifteen years have passed since Robert Richardson, in Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1996), showed the enduring “timeliness” of Emerson’s thought, it is probably just a matter of time until Emerson appears as a subject in Yale University Press’s recent series “Why X Matters,” in which each book (Why Arendt Matters, Why Poetry Matters) presents an “argument for the continuing relevance of an important person or idea.”

What does it mean to read for relevance? The urge to make Emerson relevant speaks to anxieties that shadow any discipline or institution that values the persistence of things that rarely seem to fascinate the contemporary public. Insisting on relevance may be, of course, a sign of resignation about the fate of “serious” or “deep” reading in an accelerated culture of information on-demand (see Nick Carr’s recent book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, or Matthew Brown’s provocative discussion in this column of Sven Birkert’s The Gutenberg Elegies); but it is also the expression of a hope that any prodigal texts that feel meaningful or important to us can be brought back into the fold of the present. In the case of Emerson, such an effort may only require a little updating around the rhetorical edges of how we understand his project. At the start of World War II, Emerson is relevant as a “true exponent of democracy,” while in 1971 he matters because his ideas stand behind “the youth movement of the 1960s,” and today he is acknowledged as a champion of environmentalism and global human rights. But like any figure whose critical reception endures over long periods, the importance of accumulating relevance has little to do with “why X matters” at a given moment. In fact, Emerson’s relevance as an icon of national identity in the 1940s is probably all but irrelevant to many of his subsequent readers in the 1960s and today. Relevance is a short-lived phenomenon that must keep changing to be what it is.

Whenever we make a claim for a text’s relevance, we are not just signaling our belief in the significance of our reading, but also registering a faith in its utility and timeliness within an economy of knowledge that demands constant novelty and shifting sites of interest. Now even newspapers are finding it hard to match the pace at which all news becomes old news. Search engines employ sophisticated “relevancy algorithms” and tracking services provide real-time “Web analytics” to make sure that sites like Google News or Yahoo direct their users to the stories that are drawing the most traffic at any given instant. News aggregators or RSS feeds on Google Reader deliver continuously refreshed streams of information that have been stripped of extraneous items so that we can concentrate on what is relevant and exclude the various features (local interest stories, advice columns, classified ads) that in retrospect make newspapers appear so archaic and inefficient. The imperatives of “just-in-time” production—which responds immediately to customer demand to avoid the “waste” of inventory—have come to pattern many forms of cultural and intellectual work outside the academy and within it. We are told there is less patience, and perhaps more importantly, less money for knowledge that sits around in books, libraries or humanities departments without addressing the public’s interests now.

This may explain why Judith Halberstam worries, in a story on “The Death of English” for Inside Higher Ed, that the New York Times has stopped dispatching a reporter to the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association to write up its yearly mockery of the conference (with its “wacky” paper titles) and to savage the “sad efforts of earnest English profs to look hip, cool and vaguely relevant.” For Halberstam, we need to “update our field” or it won’t even be worth insulting, and she argues that literary scholars in particular have not “kept up” with emerging areas of focus (on empire, for example, or popular culture) that could replace traditional fields as they become “irrelevant as areas of study.” She wants her arguments to provoke and scandalize, not just to make English a vital discipline in a “rapidly changing world,” but to make sure that it stays newsworthy too: “Let’s hope that in another decade The New York Times … is forced to spend the entire year reporting in meaningful ways on the reinvigoration of the humanities.”

Is newsworthiness the same as importance? This was one of the questions posed in a lecture by Kirk Citron at the TED2010 conference in Long Beach, CA; the lecture was recently posted on TED’s (Technology, Entertainment, Design) website. Citron compares top AP stories of the past year (the “Miracle on the Hudson” plane landing and Michael Jackson’s death) with less prominent news of scientific discoveries (nanobots fighting cancer from within the bloodstream) or endemic global problems (resource scarcity in the developing world) that he thinks may be timeless enough to stay news. His point—which for the purposes of a TED lecture he communicates in a succinct, non-Emersonian three minutes—highlights the degree to which we attribute newsworthiness not to important information but to information whose relevance is just a function of our immediate interest in it. Thus relevance, as an expression of recency, crowds out almost every other factor that we could use to sort through information for what matters and what doesn’t.

The contemporary nostalgia for newspapers often trades on the idea that there was once a common set of issues that the public widely recognized as important or, as Emerson might say, relevant to you and also to me. But for many figures in Emerson’s period—who were among the first to witness our modern practices and institutions of the news take shape—the fact that newspapers had to satisfy a community of readers with divergent interests in their moment always meant that the importance of the news was in part a fiction that its currency made possible. Newsworthiness described a category of information that did not so much assert the universal relevance of some topics in respect to others, but rather answered to a restless, individualized demand for knowledge about a world already understood from the perspective of a particular and fleeting present. Indeed, we might even see the emphasis on the novelty of the news as not just its distinguishing feature for readers in nineteenth-century America, but as an expression of the foreshortened experience of temporality it promised to a democratic public that could, in fact, share almost nothing of importance besides the current events of “the Times.”

In Democracy in America (1835-40), Alexis de Tocqueville writes, “When the bonds among men cease to be solid and permanent, it is impossible to get large numbers of them to act in common … The only way to do this regularly and conveniently is through a newspaper. Only a newspaper can deposit the same thought in a thousand minds at once.” For Tocqueville, individualism is particular to democracy, a product of the disconnectedness intrinsic to a society of equals who—leaving behind the attachments and sentiments of their “caste, profession, or family”—are free to pursue their self-interests. The American way of life is by abandonment: the solitude which weighs on every individual and “[throws him] back upon himself alone” is also the cause of his restlessness. Instead of cultivating social ties whose meaning depends on staying in place and letting time give sense and continuity to the texture of civic life, Americans, Tocqueville says, are always “on the point of departure.” The “love of well-being” that has become the “national, dominant taste” means they are always chasing more wealth and pleasure and “always in a hurry”; “[grasping] at everything but [embracing] nothing,” they have no time for stable attachments and, in any case, a population which “itself changes from day to day” comes to “love change for its own sake.” So when Tocqueville writes that only newspapers can get large numbers of American to act in common “regularly and conveniently,” he suggests that what Americans have in common is the “constant need for novelty” that the daily news delivers and that the news satisfies this need in the shortest amount of time. After all, he writes, “nothing is less suited to meditation than the circumstances of a democratic society,” and newspapers are what Thoreau calls “easy reading” or “little reading”: they yield up their content to a commercial people whose “habitual inattention” (Tocqueville’s phrase)—whose habit, that is, for being unhabituated to reflection—was more conducive to consuming or digesting than to thinking.

While the promise of the news for Tocqueville is precisely its ability to bring a sense of association and common life to an isolated citizenry, he nonetheless confesses that he does “not feel toward the freedom of the press that complete and instantaneous love that one grants to things that by their very nature are supremely good.” The press may be “the most important, indeed the essential, ingredient of liberty,” where liberty is the experience and expression of individual differences on which political life—as a negotiation of differences—depends. It may at times function like the newspaper in the right corner of George Caleb Bingham’s The County Election (fig. 1), which points to a reflective immersion in the larger political drama that fills the scene. As the three men share the news, they become a model for how a disaggregated group of democrats—Whigs, farmers, gentlemen, even an Irishman in red at the top of the steps—may become a pluralistic community of voters and a deliberative audience of readers. But then, in America where, as Tocqueville says, “there is very little interest among us now in political questions” since “the entire country is busy doing business,” elections can become just “the daily grist” of newspapers for an agitated public averse to boredom. Theodore Sedgwick writes to Tocqueville about the excitements of a cheap press that sweeps all politics into a perpetual, rapid succession of mere events: “Today there is a general war in Europe, tomorrow a war in Mexico. The future of the Union is in danger and there is uproar about a poor runaway slave, and then the next day there is a financial crisis,” and so on. Maybe the civic engagement that the newspaper represents in the corner of Bingham’s picture speaks more to the way that politics have been relegated to the margins of a formless democratic society. “Politics,” Tocqueville writes in a letter to his father about the American press, “occupies only a small corner of the canvas … What space remains is monopolized by discussions of local interest, which feed public curiosity without in any way causing social turmoil.” For Tocqueville, like Habermas much later, the modern idea of the newspaper in the nineteenth century meant both the decline of a deliberative public sphere and the depoliticizing of American life; no longer a political or party organ, the newspaper’s claim to impartial and factual reporting rested on the social consensus and apathy that Tocqueville found in a shared culture of liberal individualism. If, as Kierkegaard writes, no events or ideas “catch hold of the age” and politics in the press are just “a form of sensual intoxication which flames up for a moment,” then maybe the true image of the newspaper in Bingham’s picture is the mirror image in the corner at the left: a drunken democrat imbibing spirits at a drinking table. Newspapers “offered at every corner like cheap spirits,” says Henry Ware Jr. in 1846, “are little else than poisonous stimulants.” 

Democracy in America appeared the same year as the most successful of the early penny dailies, James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald. As media historians observe, the penny press marked a turn away (more or less gradual) from the partisan and trade papers that provided weekly content to audiences of subscribers who shared political and public interests. Now the dailies reached a mass readership that demanded information at accelerating speeds and increasingly invested in the commodity of news itself. Political and editorial comment were separated from the reporting of current events and, for the first time, the “news” became the main business of the newspaper. So when Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, writes in 1855 that the newspaper’s primary purpose is “to give the news” or when another observer writes in 1867 “that the word newspaper is the exact and complete description of the thing,” there was no redundancy since the news is what was new. “There is,” Bowles says, “a great deal more news nowadays than there used to be.”

Newspapers began to emphasize events over ideas. If in 1800 readers might find five to 20 items in a four-page paper—mostly foreign correspondence, editorials, and political essays, many running for more than a page and continuing from one issue to the next—in 1850, a four-page paper contained 35 to 40 brief items about events (since each day was now essentially eventful). “The newspapers,” writes journalist George Lunt, “bear us along with them, abreast of the rapid flood of passing events.” Papers competed with one another to produce “extras” and “late editions” that were hawked by newsboys on the streets; earlier events diminished and gave way to the succession of later events; and, after 1846, the telegraph and wire services made events seem nearly concurrent with their transmission so that the “news” meant, at the same time, the medium and the message. The press claimed to represent “The Spirit of the Age” or “The Spirit of the Times” (fig. 2) in the free and complete unfolding of information that made the newspaper, as Walt Whitman called it, the “mirror of the world.” And reading it—indeed the act of reading it suggested as a daily practice—would be nothing less (and nothing more) than a reflection of the moment one was in. One could say that the newspaper in the mid-nineteenth century aspired to the role that Hegel defined for the philosophy of history when he called it “the spirit of the age as the spirit of the present and aware of itself in thought”—except that Hegel, who worked as a reporter and editor and loved the newspaper, had made the connection himself. For Hegel, the newspaper was one way for the progress of history to reveal itself to readers every day and then for readers, in turn, to see themselves reading as part and parcel of, and relevant to, its progress. “Reading the morning paper,” he writes, “is the realist’s morning prayer. One orients one’s attitude toward the world …” 

In fact Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) appeared the same month that he left the academy and took up his new post as a newspaper editor in Bamberg. We might think of the newspaper as not only the place where, in Hegel’s words, “the writing of history and the actual deeds or events of history make their appearance simultaneously,” but where “they emerge together from a common source”—the self-recording, self-narrating “spirit of the times” as it is realized in the everyday life of the newspaper. Thus as Susan Buck-Morss points out, Hegel’s devotion to newspapers speaks to the ways in which a philosophy of mind becomes the expression of the world-historical context that the newspaper manifests and records every morning. “The journalist, recording … the thing that has come to pass,” writes James Parton in 1866 about the American press, “is Providence speaking to men.” Who would want to “bury himself” in academic thought, asks Schelling in a letter to Hegel, “when the movement of his own time at every turn sweeps him up and carries him onward,” a movement that Hegel—who, as Buck-Morss describes, “never left the shores of the continent” and yet wrote a “Philosophical History of the World”—could nonetheless observe in the advances of Napoleon or the revolutions in Haiti but only by way of the press. The newspaper, Parton says, “connects each individual with the general life of mankind, and makes him part and parcel of the whole,” which is why Lunt writes in 1857 that “the newspapers bear us along with them”—to resist “may seem to some little better than rank heresy to the spirit of the age and its main instruments of thought.” If the goal of the press, according to one newspaper’s motto, was “to show the very age … its form,” then perhaps the new shape of knowledge in the age of news is the “self-consciousness” Hegel feels when he orients his attitude towards the world every morning at breakfast. At least, he says, when reading the newspaper, “one knows where one stands.”

These days it is safe to say that our contemporary attitude towards newspapers is considerably more profane than Hegel’s. Major city papers are folding, subscriptions are plummeting (fewer than 20 percent of Americans between 18 and 34 read a daily paper), and Philip Meyer predicts, in The Vanishing Newspaper, that one day in 2043 we will throw away the final edition of the last newspaper. Newspapers are marshalling resources to scale up their online enterprises and hoping that more ad revenue will follow, but some speculate these efforts are also likely to fail, and that short of funding from the government or large charitable foundations, we may need to concede with Charles M. Madigan in The Collapse of the Great American Newspaper, that “it seems, it’s just about over.” So while Judith Halberstam marks the “death of English” because the New York Times ignores us, it might be the case that English departments will outlive “the Times,” if only by a few years. (Who better to find them interesting when they have lost their relevance?)

Still, we continue to value the idea of the newspaper in terms that Hegel and the nineteenth century would appreciate: we look to the news as a “window onto the world” in hope of seeing where we stand in respect to the present it frames. So when the journalist George Flack in Henry James’s novel The Reverberator calls the newspaper “the great institution of our time” he means both that it is “the history of the age” and that it puts its readers in relation to the age so that anyone who does not keep up with the news, like the French aristocrats in the novel, also becomes unassimilable to the times the “Times” describes. The nineteenth century, in other words, learns from newspapers to read for relevance and to participate in their fantasy of perpetual currency: everything that really matters continues to speak from the perspective of the moment and stays relevant to the degree that it keeps pace with the progress of the moment. For Americans, writes Tocqueville, “the idea of the new is coupled with … the idea of the better.” To read for relevance in the nineteenth century, then—to read for relevance now—is to see things from a point of view that is more than simply presentist as we have come to know the term (a usage that itself derives from the nineteenth century) but powerfully suggests that the things we read are always the parts through which the whole of our recent culture radiantly shines through. One need only do a quick MLA title search to see how much the imperative for the “enduring relevance” of our own work (“The Enduring Relevance of Huck Finn,” “The Relevance of Thomas Jefferson for the Twentieth Century”) defines the very project of reading through the temporal logic that the age of news creates—bringing perspective to the world we are in, while bringing with it a feeling of historical synthesis that views the purpose of the past as a function of its immanent connection to us. 

The newspaper, writes one editor, should make an effort to show “a true perspective of the world’s real developing history,” which is also why, by the mid-nineteenth century, newspapers began the practice of organizing daily events for readers within a visual hierarchy of information that suggested some things are more significant than others. As the news event became of paramount value and timeliness became the measure of its worth, the newspapers introduced a design regime that controlled the reader’s experience of the material it provided by sorting it for relevance. Headlines, new to journalism, announced the latest items and made them increasingly visible on the page (Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone note that several papers in 1837 still had no headlines, but by 1847 almost all did). The division of news content into columns and digests grouped items together and prioritized some items over others within a field of information that changed each day. All items were now established with relation to the whole of the page and their respective force was due to the visual impact of headlines and subject heads in decks and banks (up to 15 banks by 1862) that often diminished in size and heaviness from the top to bottom bank (fig. 3). While newspapers often continued the tradition of placing the latest news on page two (with less timely matter on the outside pages in case ink smudged in delivery), the “extra” editions of newspapers began the practice of making the front page the symbol and expression of the news itself, so that, by the end of the century, most newspapers would look like the “extra” had looked (fig. 4). Telegraph dispatches and wire services now surpassed the mail in the timely transmission of the news and were given prominent place on the page, and the “inverted pyramid” of the news lead began to standardize the packaging of facts in descending order of importance. As Henry Justin Smith, an early editor of The Chicago Daily News writes, journalists and editors are “all artists now … They color some things so that the hasty reader can tell they are more important than others. Maybe they don’t distort facts; they do not distort so much as rearrange. They suggest perspectives … “

For Tocqueville, the problem with the news was the irresistibility of the perspective it suggested. It is not just that Americans with no time to think adopt the “ready-made opinions” of the newspaper, so that the press communicates the only picture of the world that readers will take the time to know. As a society of equals, he says, Americans “see things from the same angle” and become “naturally inclined toward analogous ideas.” “They are,” Tocqueville writes, “like travelers scattered throughout a vast forest in which all trails lead to the same spot … if they all recognize this central point and head toward it, they will imperceptibly come together without intending to.” When the individual finds himself among a democratic people who are equal and more or less alike, the newspaper becomes an instantiation of public opinion where what applies to one applies to all. In Bowles’s words, newspapers express “the whole human mind” that Americans are willing to embrace since their unwillingness to believe in difference means that they accept the view of the majority because they already believe it’s their own. 

The newspaper, then, comes to represent what Tocqueville calls in Democracy in America the “association” of individuals with their age. What aligns individuals with their age—indeed what makes for the full expression of individualism in its age—is the belief that the news inspires when, as Tocqueville says, “it sweeps us up in its train” every morning: that time is dynamic and superseding and that what counts most in the shaping of public belief happened last. Relevance to the moment is the epistemological vision of democracy in an age of news where, as Tocqueville writes, the individual “must constantly rely on ideas that he has not had the leisure to delve into, so what helps him most is far more the timeliness of an idea than its rigorous accuracy” or truth. So while the press in America may be, as one editor writes, the “circulating life blood of the whole human mind,” this Hegelian figure of total synthesis between the individual, his society, and the news they share is, for Tocqueville, an altogether unwelcome sign of the times. It accounts for the skepticism we hear when he insists, for example, that “there is no advantage to any man in struggling against the spirit of his age.” A democracy of individuals reading the newspaper finally feels, says Tocqueville, like “millions of men marching at the same time towards the same point on the horizon,” which might make us think again about the medium that at least one critic calls “the horizon of men’s thoughts and sympathies.”

In his memoir, Souvenirs, Tocqueville describes the 1848 revolutions in France as a series of diminished events: the crowd, “irresistibly set in motion” and “carried away by the tide of public opinion,” had “a lot of noise but no enthusiasm.” There was “something new happening or news arriving every moment,” he says, but the agitation of the mob felt monotonous to Tocqueville because its actions, as empty repetitions of earlier revolutions of 1789 or 1830, left the mentality of society untouched. The events of 1848 represented, as Sheldon Wolin puts it, “the incessant change but homogenous sameness” of a restless modern society, in which the “frantic dash to keep pace by rejecting the past” effected little political change. “Great revolutions,” says Tocqueville famously, “will become rare,” speaking to the final conservatism of an egalitarian culture. Given Tocqueville’s sense of how the political spectacles of 1848 always “[led] to the same spot,” it is perhaps no surprise when he tells us that the revolutionaries “fed their minds on no literature but the newspapers.” 

The American Martin Johnson Heade painted Roman Newsboys in the late summer or fall of 1848 during the Italian unification movement, Il Risorgimento, after republican revolutionaries had forced Pope Pius IX into exile (fig. 5). He painted it again in the summer of 1849 (fig. 6). In the first picture, two newsboys extend copies of the antipapal broadsheet, Il Don Pirlone, to an approaching figure whose shadow appears on the left. The boy in bright sunlight wears a dunce cap with “Pius IX” stitched on it, while the other boy wears a Greek cap as a symbol of the revolutionary cause. The surface of the wall is covered with graffiti about the liberation movement and the church, including a stick figure of a cardinal to the left. A poster celebrating the reformer Gioberti hangs above a poster for Roman freedom, while old perfunctory notices—or “avvisi”—peal away and fade. This is a picture of the daily news, and Heade reflects its timeliness in its topical references, but also in the idea of imminence we get from the figure who is just now emerging in his hat and from the newsboys who gesture towards him but appear frozen, as Theodore Stebbins suggests, as if by a high speed lens for us to see in the moment. We get the sense that if we were to advance the frame, the boy to the right in shadows might, in an instant, fall off his perch. Everything speaks to the sense of movement and relevance that the revolution itself inspired.

Martin Johnson Heade returned to America from a visit to Rome, where excited by the progress of the events, he chose to paint a political picture that was relevant to its times. But in 1849, the French had defeated the Roman Republic and restored the pope to power. The revolution was old news and Heade’s picture was out of date. So Heade repainted it, but now the boys hand out a newspaper with “Roma” in the title, since Il Don Pirlone had died with the republic. The revolutionary posters are nearly gone and the graffiti is wiped clean. The picture is almost the same, but there is less urgency this time and the closer newsboy has swung his leg around to the front of the post to sit more stably. He wears a regular street cap instead of a Greek cap. In the first version, the window looks into a void, but, much larger now, it is also brighter, flat and emphatically barred in a way that defies the illusion of deep space. As we look forward into a painting that seems to have lost its faith in picturing the news, our “window on the world” is blocked. The shadow from the first version has now grown longer, as if it were later in the day; the way it hangs over the newsboy is reminiscent of a gallows. A bishop’s hat encroaches from the lower right, and while there is still an imminent hat to the left, here it is old hat. The bench behind the post is gone with the extra stack of newspapers, which is to say that there are no “extras” in the version of the picture that admits its untimeliness and irrelevance and speaks more to repetition, variation and return. For Tocqueville, the mind in the age of individualism is “constantly active, but it exerts itself in endlessly varying the consequences of known principles … rather than in looking for new principles. It dances agilely in place.” We might say that Tocqueville discovers about the age what Heade discovers when he returns to his painting: that there is nothing new, only the news.

Heade never tried to be timely again. He goes from painting a pair of newsboys to painting pairs of hummingbirds, flowers, and haystacks in marshes that often resemble the newsboys formally, but have no explicit context that we can tell (fig. 7). It was not simply that he turned from the news to subjects that lack topicality and reference, but that he repeated these subjects compulsively for decades. Heade painted, for example, more than 120 versions of a northeastern salt marsh, but why move on? If one newspaper writes in 1849 that “all things seem to be hastening towards some great result,” then these are pictures that do not encourage us to look ahead, but at the sensible presence of objects that swell in the moment that we see them. “The world,” writes the paper, may be moving “towards some point at railway speed,” but in the marsh scenes our points of view are multiple and dispersed across exceedingly horizontal canvases—sometimes twice as wide as they are high. Our eyes wander the scene because there is no system of perspective in which the haystacks or streams recede to a central point on the horizon and because, unlike Hegel in front of a newspaper, it is never too clear where we stand. Without a central focus to organize their elements, these are not the sort of pictures that we “digest” easily. Heade loses perspective in the age of news and learns, in his patient commitment to the marsh, that to be untimely may actually widen our horizon and that every moment and every place he happens to be is at least relevant to him.

Further reading

Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (New York, 2010) and Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (London, 2006) both address the relevance of book reading within a contemporary digital culture; Alan Liu offers a more comprehensive history of the idea of information and explores possible futures for the humanities in The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago, 2004). Kirk Citron’s TED lecture, sponsored by the non-profit group Technology, Entertainment, Design, is available here: http://www.ted.com/talks/kirk_citron_and_now_the_real_news.html. Elegies for the vanishing newspaper include Charles M. Madigan, ed., The Collapse of the Great American Newspaper (Lanham, Md., 2007) and Philip Meyer, The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age (Columbia, Mo., 2009). Hazel Dicken-Garcia’s Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America (Madison,Wis., 1989) provides a helpful survey of press criticism in the period. John Nerone’s article “Newspapers and the Public Sphere” in A History of the Book in America: The Industrial Book, 1840-1880, ed. Scott E. Casper, et al. (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2007) traces the modern institution of the news after the penny press, while Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone in The Form of News: A History (New York, 2001) and Menaheim Blondheim in News Over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897 (Cambridge, Mass., 1994) chart how the news began to restructure and visually organize information. Susan Buck-Morss’s Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh, Pa., 2009) presents a fascinating look at the significance of Hegel’s philosophy for the age of news. Sheldon S. Wolin’s Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton, N.J., 2001) is helpful to read alongside both Democracy in America and Souvenirs. Laura Rigal’s essay in Common-Place 9.1 has a terrific account of democratic politics in Bingham’s painting. Theodore Stebbins’s The Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade (New Haven, Conn., 2000) provides the best context for a reading of Heade’s two pictures of the newsboys.

This article originally appeared in issue 10.4 (July, 2010).

Elisa Tamarkin is associate professor of English at University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (2008).

As I eagerly sorted through what seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of boxes of stereographs at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), I came to a stop at the view of Broadway on a Rainy Day from about 1859. Stereographs were an early form of three-dimensional photography that used a pair of two-dimensional images, side by side, to be viewed in a special stereo viewer (fig. 1). The rectangular orange card with its dual images featured a long perspective along glistening streets and crowded sidewalks, filled with umbrella-covered pedestrians and horse-drawn vehicles, all caught in mid-motion, except for a small carriage in the immediate foreground. This view of Broadway and New York itself was a very different image of the city than its photographic predecessors that had either offered blurred figures or streets devoid of activity, in order to make up for their long exposures. With little text on the front other than copyright, I turned over the card and read: Anthony’s Instantaneous Views, Broadway on a Rainy Day, no. 5095, Published by E. & H. T. Anthony & Co., American and Foreign Stereoscopic Emporium, 501 Broadway New York (fig. 2). 

I was starting a new project, “New York as Cultural Capital,” a study of how New York City and several of its key manufacturing trades were critical to the cultural development of a new Victorian domestic culture, materialized in parlor suites of furniture, displays of stereographs and chromolithographs, and plaster figures. Middle-class Americans eagerly sought these household objects that signified culture and refinement by their associations with artistic taste and worldly knowledge. First, I decided to tackle AAS’s stereograph collection, more specifically, the stereos of E. & H. T. Anthony & Co., one of the largest American producers. The firm was located on several sites on Broadway, from which they sent forth thousands of images of domestic and foreign scenes. Cultural production and direction increasingly came from urban places in the nineteenth century, and New York was at the center of that reorientation of American culture. That new metropolitan culture became the national culture through the efforts of an important group of cultural entrepreneurs that included Edward Anthony, Currier & Ives, John Rogers, and the Harper Brothers—the subjects of my project. 

The AAS has 50,000 to 60,000 stereograph cards, well over 300 boxes, mostly views of American landscapes and city views; they are organized by place rather than producer. I had decided to start with the New York City views. While leafing through the boxes with many interesting views of Central Park or Astor Place, I had come upon this one that seemed familiar, iconic as it turned out, given that it had been included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s online Timeline of Art History’s sampling of nineteenth-century photography. It appeared in Anthony’s very first set of city views, although this one was renumbered 5095 in a later series. Indeed, Anthony’s early stereographic catalogues and his advertisements featured testimonials of this view and similar views of Broadway: Broadway was a familiar scene for Anthony and others, the bustling commercial venue of the nation’s growing metropolis. There seemed to be a story centered on this fascinating image.

Anthony’s Broadway on a Rainy Day became a significant statement for the firm and for the stereoscope itself, partly because Broadway symbolized a thriving, bustling commercial metropolis.

Like many other photographic entrepreneurs during the exciting years after the introduction of the daguerreotype, Edward Anthony made his start by making and selling the unique (they could not be reproduced) silvered and shimmering images on a plate, invented by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in 1839. But Anthony’s great success came less by selling photographs in the fashion of Mathew Brady, whose products and production studio made him known as Brady of Broadway, but rather by his mastery of the photographic supply business on that very same street. Anthony was born in New York City in 1818 and after graduating from Columbia College in civil engineering, worked on the Croton Aqueduct, the engineering marvel that supplied the city with water and facilitated its enormous growth into the Empire City—along with the Erie Canal. He took lessons with the painter and inventor Samuel Morse, who had been in Paris when Daguerre made his first demonstrations, and was one of the first Americans to experiment with what he called “one of the most beautiful discoveries of the age.” One of his former Columbia professors, James Renwick, asked for his assistance in photographing some of the land in the northeastern boundary dispute between Great Britain and the United States. Anthony took along his new apparatus, and his plates proved invaluable in the eventual settlement that was known as the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842. Soon after, Anthony made photography his profession and opened a studio in Washington to secure portraits of all the members of Congress along with other notables for a venture called the National Daguerreian Miniature Gallery. Anthony, like many of his peers, easily moved between the work of artist and artisan, inventor and entrepreneur at a time when professions and fields of expertise remained in flux.

After the great influx of aspirants into the trade, the daguerreotype profession consolidated in the later part of the 1840s. Many former artisans or artists went back to their previous professions, while others secured fame and fortune for their artistic representations and advertising prowess, including Brady as well as Southworth and Hawes of Boston. Anthony looked in a different direction: he sold his interest in the daguerreotype gallery and started selling photographic supplies and engravings in 1847, at 205 Broadway, the same building as Brady’s studio. Soon he was manufacturing materials as well, and formed a partnership with his older brother Henry that became the leading photographic supply house in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. Every photographer needed these supplies, and business expanded rapidly. Jobbers, the precursors of wholesalers, arose in a host of different industries as the marketing system in the United States matured. Anthony built his supply depot at 308 Broadway, followed by a succession of ever-more elaborate Broadway buildings as the business moved continually uptown to more stylish quarters, like the rest of Manhattan’s businesses and residents.

Stereographs had first been popularized in Europe, with the stereo daguerreotype being the first photographic process to take advantage of the binocular effect that offered a three-dimensional vision when held in a special viewer. Scientific interest in the process soon gave way to great enthusiasm for its possibilities as a consumer product. The Langenheim Brothers of Philadelphia pioneered commercial stereographic views that were made from negatives and then printed on glass. This negative process allowed for multiple reproductions and solved the problem posed by the daguerreotype’s unique image. These early efforts were soon succeeded by the advent of the collodion or wet plate process, where a piece of glass was coated with a layer of iodized collodion, dipped in a light-sensitive silver solution in a darkroom, and then used to make an exposure before the chemicals dried. The Langheims didn’t just work on the technical side, they also recognized the need to produce popular images that consumers wanted. They secured local financial backers to embark upon a project called “American Views,” the beginning of the stereograph’s primary use as a landscape medium, creating countless stereoscopic series that brought images of domestic and international landscapes into the middle-class parlor for family viewing. From the series “New York & Vicinity” comes their “View from Peter Cooper’s Institute Towards Astor Place,” from around 1856, a stereograph glass positive in the New York Public Library. However, their experiments with albumenized paper stereographs, using paper coated with egg white and salt and then sensitized for printing a negative in sunlight, produced much cheaper and more popular commodities. 

Other photographic entrepreneurs recognized the potential of stereographs as popular entertainment. The Boston team of Southworth & Hawes designed the grand parlor or gallery stereoscope (fig. 3) “a complete Picture Gallery in itself” with its three-dimensional views—”A view of the street seems the street itself”—that could be seen in their Tremont Street studios in 1853. But this expensive apparatus was not designed for ordinary homes. By 1858, when Edward Anthony first entered into the stereo “craze” with a box of a dozen views of the Fulton Street Prayer meetings, other Broadway merchants such as the publishers D. Appleton Company had already recognized the potential market as shown in the view of their Stereoscopic Emporium with its crowded shelves and displays of Stereoscopic Views everywhere. An article in the American Journal of Photography that same year highlighted some of the major attractions of the boom, reporting “stereoscopes are at last coming into vogue with us … this maybe somewhat owing to price since they can be bought for $1.50 a dozen.” They went on to say that it would be strange “if many parlors were without them,” for what would better suit a guest waiting for the lady of the house to appear, or “What better interlude during an evening party than to fill up a pause with a glance at a fine stereoscopic view?”

Edward Anthony’s success as a stereographic entrepreneur was built upon a series of innovative commercial and technical practices. He started by importing European stereographs but soon built his business around the popularity of domestic views, and his fortunate location in New York City contributed to his success. Anthony manufactured albumen photographic paper for prints from imported German paper of the highest quality. He improved the sensitivity of the collodion negative emulsion and the shutter technology of the camera so that his views were about 1/40 of a second compared to most others of 30 seconds or longer. His cameras were small, simple and lightweight affairs with tiny negatives. Fortuitously for the stereo’s popularization, expensive and cumbersome stand-alone viewers, pieces of household furniture, were replaced or at least supplemented by the light and simple Holmes-Bates stereoscope, invented by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. in 1859 and refined by Boston merchant Joseph Bates (fig. 4). The physician and author wrote several influential essays in the Atlantic that contributed mightily to the popularization of the stereograph. His stereo viewer with its small board, two lenses, and a projecting arm to place the stereograph, which could be held up to the user’s eyes, became the viewer of choice for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Also, Anthony ventured into mass production, employing over fifty women and also male workers in the process—some selected the prints while others trimmed, mounted, and finished the pictures. The views were printed on albumen paper using the glass collodion negatives in a separate building with plenty of light. An albumen paper factory of women workers opened at 65 Broadway to meet the mounting demand. Although little was mechanized, the processing used an assembly line system that allowed the Anthony employees to produce two to three thousand cards a day, or over a million a year! “Each single process in the manufacture of elaborate products of skill oftentimes seems, and is, very simple,” Holmes noted in an 1860 Atlantic essay, after a visit to the Anthony establishment.

Anthony’s final innovation was not his alone or even purely associated with the stereoscope—the parlorization of the commodity that made the stereograph one of the essential parts of the domestic scene. This process was well under way by the time of the 1858 American Journal of Photography article, but was certainly advanced by Anthony when he opened his own stereoscopic emporium in May of 1860 at 501 Broadway, one of the grand commercial palaces that lined mid-century Broadway (figs. 5-7). Anthony’s Frank Leslies ad of 1859 had already recommended that “No visitor should leave New York without some of them [Anthony stereos] to astonish friends at home.” But the opening of the “American & Foreign Stereoscopic Emporium and Depot of Photographic Materials,” as the prominent lettering on the building’s façade boasted, was marked by an extensive advertising campaign and the issuing of their first catalog of stereoviews. The establishment offered a selection of parlor items as well: photography albums, cabinet and card pictures and chromos alongside stereoscopic views. When the English writer and photographer John Werge visited New York in April of 1860, he remarked: “What a wonderful place New York is for photographic galleries.” Werge exclaimed how everything in the metropolis was mammoth, such as the “saloons,” the stores, and the galleries.

And the most mammoth, of all is the ‘store’ of Messrs. E. & H.T. Anthony, on Broadway. This establishment is one of the many palaces of commerce on that splendid thoroughfare. The building is of iron, tall and graceful, of the Corinthian order, with Corinthian pilasters, pillars, and capitals. It is five storeys high, with a frontage of about thirty feet, and a depth of two hundred feet, running right through the ‘block’ from Broadway to the next street on the west side of it. This is the largest store of the kind in New York.

Werge went on to say that the city was renowned on two continents for its vast stock of photographic supplies, and its two proprietors for their commercial and technical enterprise. 

Anthony’s Broadway on a Rainy Day became a significant statement for the firm and for the stereoscope itself, partly because the Anthony business was located on the great avenue as a pioneer “palace of commerce,” but also because Broadway symbolized for Americans and those abroad alike the image of a thriving bustling commercial metropolis. In addition, the “instantaneous” stereograph represented itself (or at least Anthony made that claim) as an article of modernity. Urban views became a staple of the stereo catalog, replacing the daguerreotype’s portraits. By concentrating “on the encyclopedic, ‘objective’ documentary potential of the stereoscope and its view,” American Studies scholar Laura Schiavo has argued, “the vogue in stereoscopic views turned to landscapes, city views, and other subjects far more suited to the delineation of national, political, and cultural identity.” Daguerreotypists had early on tried out their cameras on the still streets before their windows as Anthony himself recalled: “I amused myself by taking pictures out of the back windows.” But in 1860 Holmes invoked the difference in discussing this very view of Broadway: “It is the Oriental story of the petrified city made real to our eyes … But what a wonder it is, this snatch at the central life of a mighty city as it rushed by in all its multitudinous complexity of movement!” Still, if we observe a series of Anthony’s Broadway views (fig. 9), we can start to see the formulaic qualities that marked all of his city views, as photographic historian Peter Hales has noted. When Anthony held his camera out a second floor balcony, the goal was to obtain the greatest dimension of depth down the street by minimizing foreground areas that might have blurred motion. The shutter was released when the maximum amount of activity would be registered with its arrested movement, as had caught Holmes and others’ imagination, and he framed the arrested movement with a triangular wedge of sky balanced against the triangular angle of the street. 

New York was the subject of many Anthony stereographs and was also the center of Anthony’s national system of production and distribution. The firm contracted with a network of brokers to secure photographs for their inventory of American Scenes and distributed their views over the new rail system across the continent. Broadway on a Rainy Day was part of a series of 175 instantaneous views that included other views of the New York Harbor and other street scenes such as the series on the visit of the Japanese Embassy to New York in June of 1860 (http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?G91F182_030F). By 1873, their trade list included over 11,000 items. Hales insightfully argues that Anthony’s stereographs take an innovative approach to the representation of the city as process, while also utilizing conservative characteristics in their visual depiction and business practices to maximize their adoption in the American home.

After looking at my boxes of Anthony and other stereographs at AAS along with advertisements and periodical articles, I could better understand how these objects became part of a common imagery that took its place in the home, where they could also serve as a focus in the parlor for visiting and other social activities. Shared visual libraries or the creation of a family museum was the goal for stereographs, some commentators claimed. The city in these views was represented as a culture-cohering force, a universal democratic world of art and amusement. As an 1860 advertisement for the American and Foreign Stereoscopic Emporium that appeared in many newspapers put it: The stereoscope was the “most Instructive, interesting, entertaining, amusing and exciting of modern inventions.” No home would be complete without it, “and it must and will penetrate everywhere,” and, to extend the theme of cultural advancement, to “EVERY GENTLEMEN OF WEALTH AND REFINEMENT.” The means of creating a proper parlor became available to all those willing and able to purchase the necessary mass consumer goods. See, for example, the Lipscomb Stereo (fig. 10) of a couple playing chess in their parlor with their prints, doilies draped over the rocking chair, and the woman holding a book in one hand, with the stereo viewer on the table behind, all attesting to their mastery of the tools of refined living. Objects were culture in tangible form, historian Katherine Grier writes, and the parlor, with its formulaic vocabulary of furniture, carpets, decorative lighting objects, center tables, pianos, and stereoviews, was the “theater of culture” in the Victorian age. Anthony’s Broadway on a Rainy Day, as I had come to realize, was no mere illustration but helped to create that new culture. 

Further reading:

For stereographs, see Edward Earle, ed., Point of View: The Stereograph in America: A Cultural History (Rochester, N.Y., 1979), and Laura Schiavo, “A Collection of Endless Extent and Beauty: Stereographs, Vision, Taste and the American Middle Class, 1850-1880” (PhD diss., George Washington University, 2002). Other works include Robert Silverman, “The Stereoscope and Photographic Depiction in the 19^th Century,” Technology and Culture 34 (October 1993): 729-756; Laura Schiavo, “From Phantom Image to Perfect Vision: Physiological Optics, Commercial Photography, and the Popularization of the Stereoscope,”New Media, 1740-1915, eds. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 113-137. For thinking about the parlor and domestic scene, see Shirley Wajda, “A Room with a Viewer: The Parlor Stereoscope, Comic Stereographs, and the Psychic Role of Play in Victorian America,” Hard at Play: Leisure in America, 1840-1900 (Rochester, N.Y., 1992), 112-38.

William C. Darrah has written several pioneering works including Stereo Views: A History of Stereographs in America and their Collection (Gettsyburg, Pa., 1964) and World of Stereographs (Gettysburg, Pa., 1977). Peter Hales’ Silver Cities: Photographing American Urbanization, 1839-1939 (rev. ed., Albuquerque, N.M., 2005), focuses on urban photography and discusses the importance of Anthony’s Broadway series. Peter Wing, Stereoscopes: The First Hundred Years (Nashua, N.H., 1996) is the standard guide to stereoviewers.

On Anthony, William Marder has written a comprehensive monograph Anthony: The man, the company, the cameras (Plantation, Fla., 1982). Reese Jenkins discusses Anthony’s manufacturing and marketing practices in Images and Enterprise: Technology and the American Photographic Industry, 1839-1925 (Baltimore, 1975). John Werge’s visit to Anthony and other New York photographic establishments is found in his Evolution of Photography (London, 1890). Anthony published several catalogs starting with their daguerreotypes and then their stereoviews. The AAS has a comprehensive run of Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin (1870-1902). Oliver Wendell Holmes published several important articles on stereographs starting with “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph” in the Atlantic in June of 1859.

Finally, there are the stereographs. The AAS has a marvelous collection organized by state and the remainder by topic athttp://www.americanantiquarian.org/stereographs.htm Other significant collections include the New York Public Library: see the NYPL Digital Gallery’s Robert Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views, with over 72,000 stereographs, at http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?col_id=361

The George Eastman House has over 500 Anthony stereographs online at http://www.geh.org/fm/st05/htmlsrc/anthony_idx00001.html And then there’s lots on eBay.

This article originally appeared in issue 10.4 (July, 2010).

David Jaffee passed away in 2017. He previously taught American Material Culture and was Head of New Media Research at the Bard Graduate Center. He wrote extensively about early American artisans and art. His book A New Nation of Goods: Material Culture in Early America was published in 2010 by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

The curious history of the Pine Tree Shilling

According to the 1652 act of the General Court that authorized the creation of the Massachusetts mint, the coins were supposed to be square.

“for forme flatt & square on the sides & Stamped on the one side with N E & on the other side with xii^d. vi^d & iii^daccording to the value of each peece together with a privie marke which Shalbe appoynted every three monethes by the governor & knowne only to him & the sworne officers of the mint.”

In other words, Massachusetts would issue square coins, without pictorial design or embellishment, nothing but the letters N E (for New England) on one side and their value in Roman numerals on the other. Each coin would bear a secret mark, changed every few months at the governor’s discretion, to assure the public that the money was trustworthy.

But even as the committee appointed to implement this legislation was just forming, John Hull, the newly named mintmaster, began to undermine the concept of square coins and sketched designs for circular coins in the margins of the committee’s minutes. Before the first coins were minted, the General Court changed its orders and declared that Hull and his assistants “shall Coyne all the mony that they mints in A Round forme till the Gennerrall Corte shall otherwise declare their minds.” Even for Puritans given to iconoclasm, who would never think to put a graven image on their coins, square pegs simply could not fill the round holes that legitimate money occupied in their pockets and imaginations.

Why did the General Court contemplate this deviation from circular custom, and why did the mint committee reject it? An answer lies in the depths of European tradition concerning money and its representation of sovereignty and economic power. In the modern era, money has become nationalized. Each nation-state is expected to have its own exclusive currency. But before the middle of the nineteenth century, the basic division of the world’s moneys lay not along national lines but between what we might call “big money” and “little money.”

Big money was commodity money, money in which the claims about value and quality stamped on a coin’s surface were consistent with its value as a material substance, a sterling silver shilling or a gold florin. Big money was coined by monarchs and states, traded by international traders for expensive commodities in large volumes, and regulated carefully for consistency and stability.

Little money was fiduciary money, money made of an inexpensive and plentiful substance that bore little relation to the value stamped on it. It came in small denominations and was often issued by local authorities, corporations, or associations rather than by states or monarchs. Little money was not well integrated with big-money currencies, often fluctuating wildly in value from place to place or else circulating across narrowly confined geographical areas.

Cowrie shells performed this little-money function in Africa, India, China, and Southeast Asia, the areas linked by the Indian Ocean. Cowries, measured out in bags and bushels, were useful for trade in many different goods over an enormous geographical area, but it was difficult to correlate the fluctuating value of cowries with that of the high-grade gold and silver coins issued by the Mughal of India. In Europe, plentiful cheap metals were more commonly employed for similar purposes. In early seventeenth-century London, more than three thousand different businesses and organizations issued farthing coins of copper, tin, or lead, which circulated within only a few city blocks. Cowrie shells and farthings were prime examples of little money.

Square coins have always been rare, but before the Massachusetts General Court’s flirtation with the idea, square coins seem to have been associated with little money. The 1497 statute of Ferdinand and Isabella, specifying the weight, quality, and design of Spanish silver reales, ordered the coinage of various denominations, including the half-, quarter-, and eighth- real pieces. The whole, half, and quarter coins were to be round, but the smallest coin to be issued, the eighth real, would be square: “e que los ochavos sean quadrados.” Similarly, a description of early English monetary practices in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577) claimed that “King Edward I did first coine the penie and smallest peeces of siluer roundwise, which before were square.”

Before 1652, Massachusetts had been a little-money economy. The gold and silver coins that some of the early migrants brought from England quickly flowed back across the Atlantic in payment for imported goods. In the absence of a circulating medium, colonists turned to substitutes like wampum and musket balls to conduct their local exchanges. But these forms of fiduciary money did not meet all the needs of the people of Boston, especially the merchants who began to enter the Atlantic trading economy in the 1640s. The General Court’s decision in 1652 to begin coining high-quality silver shillings expressed a desire among the colony’s leaders to move from a little-money to a big-money economy. The initial call for a square coinage may reflect a latent uneasiness about making such a bold move. Perhaps the square design was meant to disguise the fact that Boston was attempting to enter the world of big money by presenting their coins in what was traditionally a small money form. But Hull and his fellow merchants knew better—they were making big money, and big money, commodity money, was supposed to be round.

Entering the world of big money meant encountering the challenges of empire. Bostonians would inevitably face consequences for meddling in the affairs of the great imperial powers competing for dominion over the Atlantic world—Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, England, even Sweden and the native American nations and confederacies that surrounded them. All these constituted threats to the autonomy to which Bostonians believed they were entitled by their founding charter and on which their newfound livelihood depended. Accepting the challenge of empire meant playing the complicated game of maintaining their autonomy in the face of external threats by means of negotiation, alliances, the payment of tribute, the development of mutually beneficial trading relationships, trickery, and if need be, by means of violence and war.

Boston’s move to enter the world of empire grew out of the city’s own modest imperial designs. Boston’s founders and commercial leaders were committed to gaining control over as much of the New England region as possible. To accomplish such a goal, this small, weak, and resource-poor commonwealth had to extend its authority over territory beyond its borders, martial its own meager resources to exploit the material wealth of alien regions, and influence the political economies of other places enough to suit their own needs.

These twin forces of imperial competition and transatlantic commerce presented the greatest challenges to Bostonians’ aspirations in the seventeenth century. Their desire, as a Puritan colony, for autonomy and brotherly interdependence would be severely tested by the incessant reach of empires and by the corrosive power of trade to measure all values in cash. But survival in the Atlantic world required coming to terms with the forces of empire and commerce, and for that reason, Boston had to resolve its money problems and the restricted commercial and political power that its small money signified.

Boston’s ability to dominate the New England region was initially constrained by the severe geographical limitations of its charter. The charter granted Massachusetts only a narrow band of coastline, between the Charles and Merrimac Rivers and a few additional miles on either side. These limits meant that upon settlement, Bostonians found that they had little access to the fur trade because the Charles and Merrimac could be navigated only a short distance into the interior. In addition, the key to the fur trade was wampum, the strung beads made from whelk or clam shells that the Dutch at New Amsterdam had transformed from an item of ritual diplomacy among Indians into a monetary system throughout the region. But the clams needed for wampum production and the Indians with the skill to make it lived only along the coast of Long Island Sound, well beyond the reach of Massachusetts.

To remedy this problem, Bostonians made their first attempt at imperial expansion, a simultaneous effort to hive off new colonies in Connecticut and to assert their dominance over the Pequot and Narragansett Indians who controlled wampum production. Intrusive colonization and blundering diplomacy quickly gave way to aggressive warfare. By 1637, Massachusetts had driven out the Dutch, destroyed the Pequots, and made tributaries of the Narragansetts, Niantics, and Mohegans. Over the course of the next forty years, Boston collected thousands of pounds sterling worth of wampum, enough to subsidize a substantial part of the cost of New England colonization.

In a remarkably short time span, between 1633 and 1637, Bostonians recognized the potential value of wampum and exploited that potential to achieve dominance over extraterritorial lands, to gain access to furs, and to organize political relations among Indians and colonists of the coastal northeast. Yet in subsequent years, in almost as short a period, the value of wampum collapsed. After a decade and more of inflation and devaluation, in 1661 the Massachusetts General Court demonetized wampum, ordering that no one could be forced to accept payment in wampum against their will.

By contrast, the cowrie shell money produced in the Maldive Islands of the Indian Ocean, which became the small money of the West African slave trade, remained relatively stable and reliable for centuries. Wampum seemed to have all the advantageous qualities of cowrie shells—decorative and ceremonial uses, lightweight, durable, uncounterfeitable, and available in large yet still limited supplies. What’s more, European merchants did not have to transport wampum across thousands of miles of ocean or desert to reach the markets where it was most in demand, and they had far greater control over its production and acquisition than the Dutch and English East India Companies had over cowries. So why did wampum fail?

The answer lies in understanding the difficult challenge of integrating local economies and small moneys into international trade and tributary networks. When sixteenth-century Portuguese traders arrived in coastal West Africa, they discovered that cowrie shells, despite their very low denominational value, were already part of an integrated and complex economy that spread across North Africa to the Indian Ocean and beyond. Once the Portuguese found their own source of shells, it was simple to extend that economy a bit further, to use shells to buy slaves for the sugar-producing islands off the African coast that they had recently acquired.

The Dutch and English traders who entered Long Island Sound in the 1620s believed they had found something like cowrie shells, but they were wrong. At the time they first encountered it, wampum was not money—it was a useful item in a native gift economy that was more like diplomacy than commerce. But by mistaking wampum for money, the Dutch monetized it, giving it a value as a currency and expanding the geography of its usage to new places. Still, wampum’s value as a currency was limited primarily to the American Northeast, in particular the regions adjoining the member tribes of the Iroquois League. Its exchange value depended on its value to those groups, the chief suppliers of furs to New England traders.

As Bostonians soon discovered, wampum’s utility as money vanished when it could no longer be relied on to produce furs for export to European markets. By the mid 1640s the fur-bearing animals that could be reached by New England’s rivers were disappearing. At the same time, New England’s expansion into Connecticut and across Long Island Sound in the 1630s, gave New Englanders easier access to wampum. The end result was the collapse of wampum’s value as more and more of this indigenous currency chased fewer and fewer pelts. In the late 1640s, Boston’s merchants dumped as much of their wampum as possible on the Dutch merchants of New Netherlands, who had once taught them its value and from whom they had struggled to wrest it only a decade before.

By the 1640s, as Bostonians began to trade in the West Indies, foreign currency began to wash up in New England, much of it clipped or counterfeit and all of it confusing in terms of value. With wampum’s value in rapid decline, Boston seized this opportunity to coin its own money. The timing of this decision hinged on developments at the opposite pole of the Western hemisphere. Most of the Spanish coins that drifted into Boston were made of silver mined in Potosi, the enormous silver mountain high in the Andes. Pieces of eight minted at Potosi were among the most common coins in early Boston, but at the end of the 1640s, word began to spread through the Atlantic of a scandal. The master of the mint had been issuing debased coinage for over a decade, skimming the difference for his personal profit. The resulting widespread distrust in the Spanish money supply motivated Bostonians to make their own coins.

For a colony to coin its own money was to usurp a privilege that monarchs jealously guarded. Of course, in 1652, there was no king in England, and Boston’s mintmaster, John Hull, followed the model of Cromwell’s commonwealth in casting the coinage. Like the Commonwealth shilling, the Massachusetts coins bore no human image, no images at all. But these first coins were so crude and so easily clipped that they were rapidly replaced by a more elaborate design, though still without a human image. These were the so-called Pine Tree Shillings. On the reverse was the date, 1652, the value in Roman numerals, and as a superscription on the two sides of the coin, the words “Masathusets in New England.” John Hull was ordered to produce coins of the same quality alloy as English sterling but only three-quarters the weight of their English equivalents. That is, a Massachusetts shilling was lighter and smaller than an English one, though valued at the same rate within New England. The lighter weight was to insure that Massachusetts currency would stay in Massachusetts, as foreign merchants would be less willing than local ones to accept underweight shillings.

During the years of Oliver Cromwell’s rule, the Massachusetts shillings went unchallenged, but after the Restoration of the monarch in 1660, King Charles II demanded a reckoning of the colony’s conduct. Massachusetts’s interests were represented by Sir Thomas Temple, who had lived and traded in Boston during the 1650s. Charles II questioned Temple closely about the Massachusetts currency, claiming that it was an invasion of his royal prerogative. Temple attempted to explain that the colony was ignorant of the law and had meant no harm in coining money strictly for their own use, and as he explained, he brought out a Massachusetts coin and presented it to the king.

“Charles inquired what tree that was? Sir Thomas informed him it was the royal oak; adding, that the Massachusetts people, not daring to put his majesty’s name on their coin, during the late troubles, had impressed upon it the emblem of the oak which preserved his majesty’s life. This account of the matter put the king into good humor and disposed him to hear what Sir Thomas had to say in their favor, calling them a parcel of honest dogs.”

In this dexterous act of verbal tribute, Temple insisted that Massachusetts had usurped nothing—that, in its coinage, the colony had been honoring the king in a hidden and invisible way. For the moment, the bluff succeeded.

Within a few years, pressure would be renewed when the crown sent a royal commission to investigate the laws of Massachusetts. In May 1665, the commission demanded that the law establishing “a mint house, &c, be repealed, for Coyning is a Royal prerogative.” In response, the General Court neither complied nor sent a representative to London to defend their case. Instead, they offered Charles more tribute: “It is ordered, that ye two very large masts now on board Capt Peirce his ship . . . be presented to his majty . . . as a testimony of loyalty and affection from ye country, & that all charge thereof be paid out of the country treasury . . . ” Meanwhile, they went right on minting their coins.

A decade later, facing another royal commission, Boston’s leadership decided to bluff once more. John Hull, now the colony’s treasurer as well as the mintmaster, consigned aboard his own ship The Blessing a handsome tribute consisting of eighteen hundred and sixty codfish, ten barrels of cranberries and three barrels of samp (high-grade cornmeal mush). Although it seems unlikely that the king accepted these commodities as adequate tribute, from Boston’s point of view, these gestures “worked”—John Hull continued to make Pine Tree Shillings. Only when the colony’s charter was vacated in the 1680s under pressure from James II did the mint stop producing coins.

By the time of its demise, the Pine Tree Shilling had done its appointed task. Massachusetts was now a big-money economy, the port of Boston was the second busiest shipping entrepot in the British empire, and its mercantile community had solidly established ties of credit around the Atlantic world. The notes these relationships produced would become the basis for various experiments in paper money in decades to come. Despite its lack of natural resources, or perhaps because of this very absence, Boston managed to become a thriving port city, an integral part of the Atlantic economy, and the powerful hub of New England, by finding and making money of the appropriate size.

Further Reading:

For a more extensive discussion of the Pine Tree Shilling and its role in Boston’s commercial and diplomatic affairs of the later seventeenth century, see Mark Peterson, “Boston Pays Tribute: Autonomy and Empire in the Atlantic World, 1630-1714,” in Allan Macinnes and Arthur Williamson, eds., Shaping the Stuart World, 1603-1714: The Atlantic Connection (Leiden and Boston, 2006). My discussion of fiduciary and commodity, or “big” and “little,” money relies heavily on Eric Helleiner, The Making of National Money: Territorial Currencies in Historical Perspective (Ithaca, 2003). On pre-modern British money, see John Craig, The Mint: A History of the London Mint from A.D. 287 to 1948 (Cambridge, 1953). On cowrie shells and their distribution in West Africa, see Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1986). Excellent discussions of wampum in early New England and its relationship to the Atlantic economy can be found in Lynn Ceci, “Native Wampum as a Peripheral Resource in the Seventeenth-Century World System,” in Laurence M. Hauptmann and James D. Wherry, eds., The Pequots in Southern New England (Norman, Okla., 1990); and in David Murray, Indian Giving: Economies of Power in Indian-White Exchanges (Amherst, Mass., 2000). Detailed information on the early currencies of Massachusetts can be found in Louis Jordan, John Hull, The Mint, and the Economics of Massachusetts Coinage (Hanover, N.H., 2002); and Sylvester Sage Crosby, The Early Coins of America, and the Laws Governing their Issue (Boston, 1875).

This article originally appeared in issue 6.3 (April, 2006).

Mark Peterson teaches in the history department at the University of Iowa. He is the author of The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (Stanford, 1997) and is at work on a book on Boston in the Atlantic World.

How westerners portrayed the West in the age of John Muir

In the late 1880s the far western states were attracting new residents from across the United States and around the world. This was especially true of the largest western state, California, which had joined the union in 1850: by 1880 its population surpassed 860,000 and would grow in the next decade to over 1.2 million—less than Virginia’s but more than Maryland’s, two states that had been absorbing immigrants since the seventeenth century. With several rail lines now completed, many immigrants, as T. S. Van Dyke wrote in Picturesque California, came in “Pullman cars instead of ‘prairie schooners’” and “built fine houses instead of log cabins.” Yet for most Americans, the Far West was still largely unknown. The great exceptions were the region’s prime natural wonders, Yosemite Valley, the giant sequoias, Yellowstone National Park, and the Grand Canyon. Some would have seen oil paintings, stereographs, or photographs of these famous sites, and many more would have seen wood-engraved illustrations in inexpensive periodicals with national circulations.

In 1888, the San Francisco-based publisher James Dewing (ca. 1846-1902) launched a project to provide the most comprehensive visual coverage of the Far West yet available: Picturesque California and the Region West of the Rocky Mountains, from Alaska to Mexico. Edited by John Muir, who wrote much of its text, it was the first major illustrated work on the West produced primarily by westerners. Sold by subscription, the work first appeared serially in thirty parts, with more than eight hundred images produced by an array of printing technologies.

A brief overview of what came before will help us understand Picturesque California’s contribution to the imagery of the West and its place in the history of graphics more generally. In the 1830s and 1840s several works published in Europe depicted the topography and indigenous peoples along the upper Missouri River. Few Americans saw these expensive works and their magnificent large plates—either aquatints or lithographs with hand coloring. They were designed for a wealthy European audience. Following the close of the Mexican War in 1848, when the United States acquired California and other western territory and the Gold Rush was in full swing, the U.S. government sponsored expeditions to explore the newly annexed territories and identify the best railroad routes. These expeditions yielded many volumes containing small lithographs and engravings of the landscape, the inhabitants, the geology, and the flora and fauna of these regions. Such reports were distributed primarily to government officials but sometimes reached a wider public. Interest in the West burgeoned after the Civil War and especially after the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869. Popular, inexpensive periodicals, such as Harper’s Weekly, mainly based in New York, sent artists west to make sketches for wood-engraved illustrations, and Currier & Ives and other firms produced inexpensive lithographic views of western scenery and towns.

From 1872 to 1874, New York’s D. Appleton and Company published a work illustrating the scenery and cities of the entire country that was clearly a model for Dewing: Picturesque America, edited by the eminent poet William Cullen Bryant. Other similarities besides the title were the large format, the variety of media—both wood and steel engravings—and the serial publication (forty-eight parts at fifty cents each). But the earlier work covered only a few areas of the West—the San Francisco region and northern California, the Columbia River Valley, Yellowstone National Park, the Colorado Rockies, and the Grand Canyon—and the writers and artists were travelers from the East. Picturesque California’s treatment of the region would be much more comprehensive, and it was published by a San Francisco firm, with text and many images produced by westerners.

James Dewing, originally from Connecticut, had joined his brother in San Francisco after serving in the Union Army. By 1871 he was a partner in Francis Dewing and Company’s publishing firm. After Francis’s death in 1883, James Dewing operated a bookstore and publishing office and with other family members manufactured and sold pianos, organs, and school furniture. In January 1887 the J. Dewing Company was incorporated with a capital stock of $250,000, presumably from investors interested in Picturesque California’s publication. By 1888 the firm had established a New York office, no doubt to help promote the book.

Little is known about Picturesque California’s early genesis. But clearly, Dewing was well enough connected to engage John Muir (1838-1914) as editor and principal writer. Muir was not yet the household name he is today or even the nation’s premier conservationist (he would found the Sierra Club in 1892). Still, he was well known for his expertise on the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Yosemite Valley, which President Lincoln had made a state park in 1864. An early review of Picturesque California described him as “the man of all others who has most lived with and expressed nature in California.” His articles expounding his theories on Yosemite’s formation and describing the glaciers he had found in the Sierras had appeared in the San Francisco periodical the Overland Monthly from 1872 and in Harper’s and Scribner’s, the nation’s leading illustrated monthly magazines, from 1875 through the 1880s. Dewing’s invitation to edit Picturesque California came at an opportune time for Muir. As a father and principal breadwinner, exploring the Sierras and California’s other natural wonders had become impractical for him. He accepted the commission and reworked some of his earlier articles in preparing his contributions.

Picturesque California was eventually issued in many different formats, at different prices, a marketing tactic popular with publishers of elegant illustrated works. The initial issue was in thirty 16 x 12-inch parts, at one dollar each, distributed monthly. At least part of the printing was done in New York. The December 1888 Overland Monthly described the parts as “laid within grey cloth book-covers, tied with ribbon” and stamped in red with a vignette of the old Carmel Mission and mountains and a pine and palm in the background. The review explained that in more expensive editions many of the illustrations were printed on India paper (a thin, fine-quality paper) and in the most expensive, on satin. The array of boxes and bindings offered is suggested by the entries on Picturesque California in John Muir: A Reading Bibliography. An alternative, longer title was sometimes used: Picturesque California: The Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Slope. California, Oregon, Nevada, Washington, Alaska, Montana, Idaho, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Etc. Eventually, in 1894, less expensive, shorter versions were issued on poorer quality paper, without the plates. The short title, Picturesque California, is in keeping with the work’s focus: of thirty-one separate articles, twenty-one pertain to regions of California, whereas the other areas are covered in one article each, with Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada each receiving only four or five pages (and Idaho none at all).

The title page’s assertion that the work is “Illustrated with Etchings, Photogravures, Wood Engravings, Etc. By Eminent American Artists” is entirely justified. Picturesque California’s illustrations aestheticized the West using all the most popular processes of the moment—following the fashions of the East. In some processes, like etching, the artist created the image on the printing surface, while others, like photogravure and photoengraving used photography to prepare the printing surface. (The technology for printing photographs via the half-tone process was just being developed and was used sparingly in the book.) The etchings, photogravures, and photoetchings constitute the 120 “plates” on heavier paper that are interspersed between every four pages of text. The text paper is coated and lighter weight. At least thirty-seven different artists from across the country contributed to the work, all skilled and some quite well known. Many of the plates featured works of California painters, especially Thomas Hill (1829-1905), who had long painted Yosemite and other scenic regions; William Keith (1838-1911), a friend of his fellow Scotsman John Muir; Julian Rix (1850-1903); and Charles Dormon Robinson (1847-1933).

The original etchings, numbering only fifteen among the 120 plates, are some of the most appealing of the book’s illustrations. To prepare an intaglio etching, the artist uses etching needles and other tools to scratch through the ground covering the metal plate and then uses acid to bite the lines he or she has created. The incisions hold the ink and with the pressure of the printing press the ink is absorbed by the paper. The late 1870s and 1880s saw a revival of interest in the centuries-old process in the United States and publishers began including etchings in their most elaborate illustrated books (fig. 1). (The four photoetchings among the book’s plates have less of the artist’s touch.)

The majority of the plates, 101, are photogravures, a process that was first used in the 1880s to produce high-quality monochrome reproductions of paintings and photographs. It used photography to make intaglio printing plates. The prospectus for Picturesque California claimed that “by means of a new process of photo-gravure . . . the painter’s work is reproduced as in a mirror,” “losing nothing” of the artist’s “individuality” or “style.” Although admired by some at the time, most of the photogravures reproduced landscape paintings characterized by soft textures and little detail, and, without full color, the results are often rather muddy and dull. Photogravure more successfully reproduces photographs or works with distinct details (figs. 2 and 3).

Even more of the illustrations—the seven hundred printed along with the text—were produced either by wood engraving or the newer photoengraving, which could reproduce the artist’s lines through photographic means. Because both utilized a relief printing surface, they could be printed at the same time as letterpress type and were less expensive to produce than plates printed on an intaglio press. Most of the text illustrations are photoengravings; the few wood engravings may be identified by an engraver’s name in addition to the artist’s. Some of the text illustrations faithfully reproduce delicate ink drawings (fig. 4), and many are examples of the still-popular composite approach, with highly irregular shapes and overlapping or interlocking images (fig. 5).

Further novelty was introduced by printing some of the plates and text illustrations in other colors besides the usual black or brown; some were printed entirely in either red, green, blue-gray, or reddish-brown. Picturesque California was initially published before the color half-tone process came to be used, so the publishers chose this unusual means of introducing color.

The writers for Picturesque California were primarily prominent Californians who wrote about areas they knew well. Next to Muir the best known was the colorful Joaquin Miller (1837-1913), whose long poem Song of the Sierras (1871) and subsequent travelogue My Life among the Modocs (1873) purportedly chronicled his California adventures. Others had already written about California: Charles Howard Shinn (1852-1924) had published Mining Camps: A Study in American Frontier Government (1885); George Hamlin Fitch (1852-1915) was the literary critic of the San Francisco Chronicle; T. S. Van Dyke (1840-1923) published Millionaires of a Day (1890), a critique of California real estate speculators; and the widely published naturalist Ernest Ingersoll (1852-1946) had covered Colorado and New Mexico in his The Crest of the Continent (1883).

The primary theme of Picturesque California is a dual one: that these western regions contain both countless natural wonders—surpassing those of the East—and impressive works of civilization. Further, these features make the region a worthy alternative to foreign travel. Indeed, for some of the contributors the natural wonders of the West promised visitors a nearly religious experience. As Muir wrote of the Sierras, “Visions of ineffable beauty and harmony, health and exhilaration of body and soul, and grand foundation lessons in Nature’s eternal love, are the sure reward of every earnest looker in this glorious wilderness.” The illustrations provide images of more peaks, mountain ranges, and waterfalls than had been included in any one publication previously—places both celebrated and unfamiliar. On the other hand, there is little attention to the barren desert regions of the West, which, after all, did not conform to the variety, irregularity, and contrast of the picturesque aesthetic.

The parallel emphasis on advancing civilization, including growing cities, tourist facilities, railroads, and agricultural expansion contains the implicit message that the region’s natural beauty can coexist with population growth and economic development. The writers expect that further amenities will make life in the West comparable to life in the East. In addition, they explain, southern California offers an idyllic environment unique in the United States—a sunny climate year round, with semi-tropical plants, fruits, olives, and vineyards—features that prompted the by-now-familiar comparison to Italy. For example, George Hamlin Fitch claimed of Santa Cruz, “Italy has no place on which the sun rests fairer, where the roses bloom more luxuriously, where the air is so warm and caressing.”

The superlatives throughout the text suggest the authors had two central purposes: on the one hand, to bolster the growing sense of regional pride among westerners and, on the other, to combat persistent notions of a lawless, uncivilized frontier among easterners. Of the brand-new state of Washington, Muir comments that although it is little known to easterners except as “wild west,” its citizens from diverse European backgrounds have put aside “sectarianism” to work there in harmony. John P. Irish implicitly chides those who might denigrate the West by pointing out a wheat field in the irrigated Sacramento Valley nearly twice the size of Rhode Island and worth more than sixteen million dollars, the same amount the federal government paid Mexico in 1848 for California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and parts of Colorado and New Mexico.

With Muir as editor, it is no surprise that mountains—both forbidding and accessible—receive more attention than any other feature of the region. Unlike earlier explorers such as Clarence King who used metaphors of battle to describe his ascents, Muir emphasized the “enduring blessing” and harmonious feelings of such excursions (despite the dangers he frequently encountered). And because many of the great western mountains were accessible, such experiences were not limited to the hardiest climbers. Muir pointed out that the southern Sierras have less ice and snow than the passes of Switzerland, and with the railroad to Sacramento, “everybody with money may go to Mount Shasta, the weak as well as the strong” (figs. 6 and 7).

Images of rock formations, especially Yosemite’s Half Dome and Sentinel, and waterfalls in many regions abound. The West’s vegetation, so different from the East’s, is depicted—from giant redwoods, sugar pines, and Douglas spruce forests to wildflower meadows with “larkspurs eight feet high and lilies with thirty flowers on a single stalk.” But the messages can be contradictory. While Muir stresses the need to protect some of the ancient forests, he is also impressed that the mills of Puget Sound and California “are said to be the largest and most effective lumber-makers in the world.” Attractive images of logging operations contrast with John P. Irish’s charge that using the trees of the Sacramento Valley for lumber is like breaking up Greek statuary “into stones to wall a well or build a sewer.” Similarly, images portray a wealth of animal life in the region, from hummingbirds to bears, and writers emphasize the excellent opportunities for hunting and fishing. For example, Miller praises the tributary waters of the Sacramento as the most favored spot in the world “for rod and gun,” with an abundance of grizzly bears and the world’s largest mountain elk (fig. 8). On the other hand, Muir notes that “tourist sportsmen” and ranchers are driving away the game.

In images the Indians who have lived for centuries in the West are depicted as picturesque elements in the landscape, but the text is more negative. While illustrations show them in traditional food-gathering activities, such as hunting for eggs of gulls and other seabirds (fig. 9), the writers more often view them as annoying intruders. Muir finds the Mono Indians “mostly ugly, or altogether hideous” but is kinder to the Indians of the McCloud River, who have “better features” and are “ambitious in their way.” Whereas Muir hopes for assimilation, Ingersoll is offended by those who disregard “Indian rights or feelings.” Similarly, while the illustrations of San Francisco’s Chinatown feature its picturesque qualities (fig. 10), Miller harshly describes the Chinese as “ugly” and “asleep for thousands of years.”

By 1888, the agricultural potential of the far West was of more interest than its potential for quick mining wealth. The writers praise several different river valleys as the most fertile in the West, and images of orchards and vineyards abound (fig. 11). For example, Jeanne C. Carr boasts that the irrigated fields of “Orange, Santa Ana and Tustin counties contain a greater wealth of products than any other equal portion of the country.”

Picturesque California also depicts the West’s progress in establishing cities and towns with attractive homes and top-quality educational, religious, and scientific institutions. Text and image depict San Francisco’s magnificent bay, which could hold “all the navies of the world,” its cable cars, the new Golden Gate Park, and the “castles” of Nob Hill (fig. 12). Miller calls San Francisco “the New York of the broader and better side of this continent.” Among many other featured cities are Berkeley, with the University of California; Oakland, with “the most perfect ferry service in the world;” Santa Barbara, with “one of the most beautiful sites anywhere;” Denver, the most important city between Chicago and San Francisco; Vancouver, which has grown from a forest clearing in 1885 to a full-fledged seaport of twenty thousand; and Los Angeles, with sixty-five thousand inhabitants occupying about thirty square miles, served by fifteen railroad lines. Revealing the region’s cultural attainments are the new Lick Observatory, with “the greatest telescope in the world,” and the soon-to-be-completed “Cambridge of the west,” Leland Stanford Jr. University in Palo Alto.

A secondary but important theme derives from nostalgia for the region’s Spanish and Mexican past. This is clear, for example, in the admiration for Monterey, with its tile roofs and adobe walls, and nearby Carmel Mission. Fitch suggests a visit there, where “the dreamy Spanish life . . . takes no account of time or progress,” is “equivalent to going abroad without crossing the ocean” (fig. 13). Interest in identifying places associated with Helen Hunt Jackson’s best-selling 1884 novel about southern California, Ramona, also suggests the strength of romantic notions of California’s past, an interest that will fuel the tourist industry in the region.

This brief overview of the 478 pages and over eight hundred illustrations can only give a taste of Picturesque California’s riches. Soon after publication began, in February of 1890, a report to the Literary World (Boston) judged it the most important current “literary enterprise” in San Francisco. Several western newspapers ranked it high nationally.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle it was “one of the finest illustrated works ever produced in this country” and would “give to Eastern readers for the first time a satisfactory idea of the wonderful grandeur, beauty and variety of California scenery” (fig. 14). Some of California’s politicians and academics endorsed it, as did librarians from as far away as Minneapolis and Brooklyn. The San Bernardino Board of Trade thought the fact that it was “free from direct advertising or ‘booming’” would enable it to gain the attention of the “best people throughout the Union,” the type California needed. Similarly the San Jose Mercury expected it would “draw hither many permanent dwellers, which no other form of temptation could reach.”

Such endorsements, which were quoted in the 1894 edition, must have pleased Dewing, but they were evidently not enough to make the work a financial success. By the spring of 1891 Dewing and Company, at least the San Francisco office, had declared bankruptcy. Although the expense of employing so many artists and such elaborate and varied printing processes to depict the West’s variety and magnificence proved greater than the financial return, the publication no doubt played a part in enhancing the self-confidence of westerners and the respect afforded the region in the rest of the country.

Finally, in terms of its graphics, Picturesque California could and would have been produced only at the particular time it was: when artists still played a major role in landscape images in books; when etching was the new artistic craze; when printing of photogravures was a new (and short-lived) technology; when wood engraving was being gradually replaced by photoengraving; and when, although the allure of color was strong, the technology for four-color printing had yet to be worked out. Picturesque California was a most flamboyant example of the last major publications illustrating scenery and cities before photography and mechanization displaced artists and craftspeople.

Further Reading:

John Muir, A Reading Bibliography, compiled by William F. Kimes and Maymie B. Kimes (Palo Alto, Calif., 1977), contains details of many different issues and editions of Picturesque California. Two overviews of images of the West are: Ron Tyler, Prints of the West (Golden, Colo., 1994) and William H. Goetzmann and William N. Goetzmann, The West of the Imagination (New York, 1986). On Picturesque America, see Sue Rainey, Creating Picturesque America: Monument to the Natural and Cultural Landscape (Nashville, 1994). An excellent history of California in the latter half of the nineteenth century is Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915 (New York, 1973). On Muir, see Linnie Marsh Wolfe, Son of the Wilderness: The Life of John Muir (New York, 1945), Frederick Turner, Rediscovering America: John Muir in His Time and Ours (New York, 1985), and Sally M. Miller, ed., John Muir in Historical Perspective (New York, 1999). Many of the quotations praising Picturesque California appearing in the text were printed on the back of the part covers of the 1894 edition; the San Francisco Public Library owns a set of this edition. The Sierra Club’s Website includes Muir’s contributions to Picturesque California and the prospectus for the original publication, which was printed inside the front cover.

This article originally appeared in issue 7.3 (April, 2007).

Sue Rainey is editor of Imprint: Journal of the American Historical Print Collectors Society and writes about artists who contributed illustrations to books and magazines in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

The car came to a stop near a warehouse on the rail line, the sun slowly diving for the horizon. My guide and I entered, making our way to the back freight elevator, passing cases of pinot, chasselas, and fendant as forklifts pirouetted in the cavernous space. The elevator creaked and whined as we made our way down. It lurched to a stop and we were let out on a lower level that smelled vaguely of moist wood and chalk.

Passing through a long hallway, we finally arrived at our destination. After a jangle of keys, and a creaking hinge, we were inside a room replete with artifacts. Spears, masks, and instruments from the four corners of the earth lined the walls. This area had become a makeshift storage area for a local museum while it was remodeled. My host searched for a moment, methodically reading inventory numbers. Et voilà! He took a tubular container wrapped in plastic down from the shelf and handed it to me.

I looked around eagerly for a flat surface. On a wooden crate nearby I gingerly placed the treasure down and removed its protective layer. Even in the dim light, the colors were magnificent. Quelle merveille! My eyes fell upon an ornate headdress of vibrant yellow, iridescent blue, deep red, and lacquered black plumage (fig. 1).

My mind was a whirl. I held in my hands a ceremonial object of singular beauty, from one of the most fearsome head-hunting tribes of Brazil. It had been brought back along with a number of other artifacts, including a trophy head (or so the story goes), from South America in 1853 by Swiss explorer Henri de Büren. I imagined what it must have been like for him to see this object for the first time, in the rainforest 160 years ago.

Viewing this rare artifact was a great highlight in a journey that has consumed my life for the last six years, a journey that has taken many twists and turns and now feels at a crossroads. At the beginning, everything was fresh and uncomplicated. But that was a long while ago.