In a course on local history I teach at a large public high school in Massachusetts, I take my students out of the classroom to a place where the past never fails to ignite their curiosity–the cemetery. We found our way there, at first, almost by accident.

Years ago, in “Primary Research through the History of Beverly,” an elective for 10-12th graders, we were studying a method of archaeological dating called seriation. The students seemed confused by my explanation of the method, as it applies to pottery types, so we decided to conduct above-ground seriation using the gravestones in a nearby colonial Puritan cemetery. Five energetic volunteers accompanied me after school on our first visit. When these students related their findings to the class the next day, soon everyone wanted to “tiptoe through the tombstones.” At our local cemetery, students began to notice that although the death heads etched on the stones were somewhat similar, there seemed to be subtle stylistic differences. The students wondered, How could you determine if the gravestones were carved by different carvers? Students also began to visit other cemeteries in surrounding towns and reported their findings to the class. In addition to stylistic similarities and differences, students were reporting earlier or later dates of introduction for the gravestone cherub style. I brought a few disposable cameras and a crude seriation chart and asked them to record their findings.

Each time I taught the course, the students became more and more interested in the various historical and cultural aspects of the colonial cemetery; soon, they began writing their term papers on various aspects of this topic. After four years, “Tiptoeing through the Tombstones” evolved into a totally separate–and extremely popular–course unit, a product not of any great vision of mine, but solely from the interests and curiosity of my students. We spend approximately two weeks on this unit. Students are first given a written assignment with an online study guide [chapter 4, “Remember Me As You Pass By,” of James Deetz’s In Small Things Forgotten (Garden City, N.Y., 1977)]. We then begin four on-site cemetery investigations. For two of the field trips we visit local Beverly colonial cemeteries: Conant Street Cemetery (approximately one hundred stones) and Abbot Street Cemetery (approximately two hundred stones). These field trips take place before school begins and last for an hour and fifteen minutes. Students provide their own transportation. We encourage parents, friends, and interested community members to join in the fun. We also visit two other cemetery sites beyond the confines of Beverly, one in North Andover and one in Harvard Square. We pick a weekend for these site visits and divide the class into two teams. One team visits North Andover on a Saturday afternoon and the other team visits Harvard Square on a Sunday afternoon. On Monday the teams share their data and digital pictures. “Tiptoeing through the Tombstones” provides students the opportunity to research and analyze the evolution of Puritan New England gravestone symbols (e.g., death heads, cherubs, and urn and willows), inscriptions, borders, and finials, styles popular in New England from approximately1620-1820. For each cemetery they visit, students are asked to make individual seriation charts. In effect, the cemetery becomes a history laboratory where students can chart and graph gravestone styles and inscriptions according to the specific increments in time in which they first appear, reach the height of popularity, and finally fade out. By comparing seriation charts from a variety of colonial Puritan cemeteries, the students begin to see that changes in style may be connected to a broader cultural context. This observation raises some interesting questions for critical thinking.

1. Are these gravestone symbols really representing the Puritan beliefs in life, death, and the afterlife?
2. Would changes in these styles reflect changes in these religion beliefs?
3. Are changes in style more likely to first occur in the larger cities that serve as the religious organizational centers or the hinterlands that would have less contact with urban cultural influences?
4. Would the same style gravestone be somewhat uniform or reflect in some way the individual expression of the carver?
5. How can the name of a carver be specifically identified?
6. Were the wealthy Puritans more likely to have a more elaborate and different style from the working class?
7. What would the gravestone of a slave, or free African American, look like?
8. Can a broken or damaged stone that no longer displays a visible date be accurately dated by the seriation dating method?

Our class unit on Puritan gravestone studies culminates with a research project; on occasion the students have presented their findings to the community at the Beverly Public Library. One of my most important course objectives is to help students become their own historians. Occasionally the results of our research run counter to the prevailing assumptions of scholarly historians. I tell my students that as long as their research data can support their conclusions they should feel confident in their conclusions. When two minds think alike one of them isn’t thinking. There is no universal agreement among scholars regarding the relationship between the symbols on Puritan gravestones and ideology. James Deetz, Allan Ludwig, and Peter Benes all link gravestone style to a larger cultural context but David D. Hall challenges this interpretation by suggesting that we are reading too much into the meanings of mere designs and decoration. Over the years, through direct observation and seriation charts, our students have generally agreed with the interpretation of Deetz, Ludwig, and Benes. From our observations of four cemeteries and approximately seventy stones, all of the early Puritan gravestones are facing east, many with two smaller stones (called “footstones”) in front. These stones seem to represent a bed in which the deceased can more easily rise when God appears from the east on the Judgment Day to save the chosen ones from eternal damnation. Through our seriation charts we have also determined that the stylistic evolution from death head to cherub reflects the exact time period in which the Great Awakening (1735-1750) brought about a change in Puritan attitudes toward life, death, and the afterlife. The change in inscription from “Here Lies ____” to “In memory of ____,” during this time period also suggests a connection between gravestone iconography and the larger cultural and religious context. And the later (1780-1820) more secular design of the urn and willow, with its classical Greek symbols could be interpreted as representative of an emerging spirit of democracy and republic–a civic religion! Our seriation charts have revealed some interesting data concerning the question of whether a change in the popularity of a style would more likely occur in larger urban centers as compared to outlying areas, particularly coastal areas. The conventional wisdom would conclude that the change would most likely occur in the urban area because of its greater cosmopolitanism, but my students’ research suggests the reverse. This may be explained by the likelihood that the urban area religious leaders may see a change in gravestone iconography as a challenge or threat and would do their best to retard this symbol change. Our seriation data from the cemetery in Harvard Square, a bastion of Puritan religious and intellectual power, seems to demonstrate this point. The death head style remains popular in Harvard Square much later than elsewhere. In fact, the stylistic evolution seems to go almost directly from death head to urn and willow. Jessica Herzog, a sophomore in the “Primary Research through the History of Beverly” class, became very interested in the artistry of gravestone carving. She pointed out slight variations in death head and cherub smiles, noses, and wings. She asked me if she could write her term paper on the stylistic differences in colonial gravestone carvers. I agreed to the research topic but asked her how she could determine if there were indeed different carvers or one carver using variations of subtle stylistic changes. The only historical research in this field, at least to our knowledge, was Harriette Forbes’s Early New England Gravestonesand the Men Who Made Them (Boston, 1927).

To a discerning eye there seem to be slight differences in style particularly around the wings, mouth, nose, and eyes of death heads and cherubs. The challenge is to prove that different stone carvers created these variations in style. This proves difficult because an individual stone carver would rarely sign his name on the stone. Forbes began her work by identifying what she considered stylistic variations in gravestone design in Essex County, Massachusetts. She first wrote the name and death dates of gravestones that she felt represented a particular carver’s style. She set out to prove that these stones were products of different carvers. She also was determined to identify the carvers by name. This name identification would be invaluable in determining through record linkage if the stone carvers were: 1) itinerant or particular to a specific town, 2) full- or part-time carvers, 3) native born or bringing skills from England. Forbes took her list of names, death dates, and style variations to what is now the Massachusetts State Archives. Her research objective was to link probate records with the respective names. She then checked to see if the deceased had filed a will (testate). Colonial era wills contain detailed inventory lists of the deceased’s possessions and figures estimating the total value of the estate. Occasionally the will’s executor included the receipt from the stone carver as part of the paid bills. Forbes used the information from the wills to compare the type of stone with the relative wealth of the deceased and the name of the carver from the receipt. From this, Forbes was able to identify individual carvers and conclude that there was little difference between the styles of the wealthy and working classes. In this regard, cultural Puritan cemeteries were quite democratic. Ambitiously, my sophomore Jessica Herzog set out to replicate the same research strategy that Forbes had attempted almost seventy-five years ago. Jessica spent endless hours in Essex County cemeteries and at the Massachusetts State Archives linking probate records with the names of individual carvers. Ultimately, her research confirmed Forbes’s key findings, and serves as a model for the kind of sophisticated work students in the class have done. In the same spirit, “Tiptoeing through the Tombstones” has spawned an ongoing project, in which we are collecting data concerning the gravestones of colonial slaves or free blacks in Essex County. We hope to accumulate a large enough sample to make a valid conclusion. This year six students are collecting pictures and probate records of local African Americans of the colonial era, for cross-referencing with gravestone inscriptions.

Investigating gravestones has also given my students the chance to see how historical mysteries are solved today. In 1998, my class was presented with a real life critical thinking question concerning damaged gravestones. A Beverly resident brought a broken slate stone to the high school and asked if we could approximate the date. The top part of the gravestone that included the lunette, name, and death date was missing. The only visible features were the border and finial. (Many gravestones have been broken by careless gravestone rubbers pushing too hard on the fragile slate.)

We began a seriation database of all the stones that included finials and borders, in both colonial cemeteries in Beverly. From this data we were able to approximate the date of the broken stone. This database should prove helpful in approximating the dates of other broken stones. My students were extremely proud to have devised this unique dating method. As more broken stones are being brought to our attention many students are developing an interest in the field of preservation. One of my former students, Mindy Keating, now a senior at Bridgewater State College, has spent hundreds of hours over the years helping to preserve fragile gravestones and presenting her work before interested community groups.

“Tiptoeing through the Tombstones” has truly made history come alive for my students. Most importantly, interest in gravestones has “bubbled up” from the students, not “trickled down” from the adult community. Students not only become their own historians; they also pass on a historical and civic legacy that will aid future interpretations of the local cultural landscape.

This article originally appeared in issue 2.2 (January, 2002).

Dean Eastman has been teaching history at Beverly High School in Beverly, Massachusetts, since 1970 and has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Massachusetts Christa McAuliffe Fellowship (1989), the Disney American Teacher Award (1991), and Harvard University’s Derek Bok Prize for Public Service (2000).

There is something delightfully vague about the term “old curiosity shop.” It may mean so much and so little.

–New York Times, February 5, 1899

The powerful first chapter of Charles Dickens’s 1841 novel The Old Curiosity Shop presents three kinds of curiosity. The first curiosity is the city itself. Traversed at night by an aging narrator, London and its representative characters are laid out in all their gaslight ghastliness: the beggar, the exquisite, the potential suicide on the bridge, the late reveler at Covent Garden. The second curiosity is the behavior of Nell’s grandfather. What kind of guardian would leave a child alone at night? The last, and certainly least, curiosity is the shop itself: “There were suits of mail, standing like ghosts in armour here and there; fantastic carvings brought from monkish cloisters; rusty weapons of various kinds; distorted figures in china, and wood, and iron, and ivory; tapestry and strange furniture that might have been designed in dreams.” Then the description ends. In what must be Dickens’s most misnamed novel, the shop hardly figures. Its gothic curios serve as a mere backdrop to the peculiar psychology of Nell’s gambling grandfather and her own frail beauty: indeed, the whole stock of the shop is sold off by the vicious Quilp by the end of chapter 13.

However inapt the title may be as a shorthand to the novel’s plot it was evocative enough to supply the name to nearly every bric-a-brac and second-hand furniture shop in New York City for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Seventeen such “Old Curiosity Shops” existed in Manhattan and six in Brooklyn in 1880 according to Trow’s business directories. From what little is known about the shops, all shared some of the characteristics that Dickens had managed to fix fictionally by 1840: they were disorganized, overstuffed, eclectic, and fading. Indeed Dickens’s descriptive legacy seems to have hung over such premises much as it did with the Five Points after Dickens recounted his visit to New York’s notorious slum in his 1842 American Notes.

Though Old Curiosity Shops continued to multiply throughout the nineteenth century they were, I believe, a recessive cultural form. New sites appeared to satisfy the public’s appetite for the curious; the museum and library placed fine curios in a clearer interpretative light, while popular museums, such as Barnum’s, illuminated their attractions in an ever flashier manner. Yet what happened on the retail side? The weak conjunction in this essay’s title poses a question about whether our modern notion of an antique finds its origin in these stores or whether it is part of a different organization of the “curious.”

Emporia of Curios

Like the Five Points, curiosity shops shared in the general problem of the unknowable, uncategorizable, and therefore “indescribable.” The Old Curiosity Shop on Broadway near Bleeker, as reported in the October 24, 1878, New York Times, contained vast quantities of material: umbrella stands (one made from an elephant’s foot), walking canes, clocks, pen and ink stands, fire screens, old firearms, some particular objects of patriotic affection (including a Washington snuff box), and “ridiculous old chinaware . . . all dubbed Japanese.” Many of these emporia might strike us today simply as junk stores, and indeed there were places called that, as early as the 1880s, over on Avenue A. However, the curiosity shop seemed to aim at a higher class of object that was then handled by the French term “bric-a-brac.” This import, according to the Times, meant “anything quaint and ugly.” Moreover, curiosity shops, unlike their junk cousins, were located on main thoroughfares. By the 1880s there was a particular cluster of stores on Broadway between Eighth and Fourteenth Streets indicating that the trade in old furniture and chinaware has been rooted in one strip where it remains today–surely a New York rarity.

Certainly, there were gradations of curios between the shops. Over in Brooklyn Heights, William Harvey Strobridge kept an extensive collection of classical antiquities, especially coins and Egyptian scarabs, as well as some fine Americana. A friend of the great antiquarian Henry Stevens and an advisor to the celebrated bibliophile James Lenox in his book and manuscript purchases, Strobridge seems to have possessed a polymathic knowledge of the coins and classical pottery that he sold to collectors. The retail side of his trade however, conducted out the front of his house, presented much more of a Dickensian jumble with seal rings, English china, snuff boxes, and walking sticks.

Strobridge knew more about the classical period than the typical shop proprietor; the true curiosity shop owner appeared to be unconcerned about general classification, piling in the new with the old. Marley’s, on Broadway, had always included a mix of the two and when, in 1887, it moved uptown and upmarket to Seventeenth Street and Broadway under the new ownership of Sypher & Co. it compounded the confusion by becoming a specialist in reproductions of old furniture and paintings. Curiosities, of course, need not be ancient or, for that matter, authentic.

In an obvious departure from Dickens these stores always included quanta of Americana. In Flushing, New York, John Halleran’s shop was full of Revolutionary caps and swords, buckles and epaulettes, a copy of the “Village of Flushing Trustee Reports” from the eighteenth century, and old editions of Brooklyn and New York City directories. His specialty, however, was in collecting documents relating to the disposition of Indian lands on Long Island. All of these were strewn about the floor according to a visiting journalist. Historical curiosities need neither to be beautiful in themselves or in their presentation. Henry James may have said, “[T]he ancient can never be vulgar,” but a general appreciation for the past and especially a sense of patriotism does not have to wear an aesthetic face. There was nothing especially beautiful about the patriotic in these shops no matter how valuable they were in terms of national or local mythology. And, like a saint’s relic, the patriotic or historic material did not even have to retain its original form. At Sypher’s furniture store one could buy a new Andrew Jackson chair made from the hickory on his estate.

“No museum ever equaled the interior,” marveled the New York Times in an 1894 report on the Old Curiosity Shop on Broadway and Bleeker. “It is piled high from floor to ceiling with a nondescript condition of everything in all stages of unrepair. There is literally only a passageway through the center of the shop. It branches off where the stairs lead to the floor above and then goes on further into some mysterious rear apartments.” Mysterious, indeed. But the greatest curiosity in these shops, at least to the eyes of the press, was not the oddities of inventory but rather the character of the male proprietor. John Nicklin, for example, who ran New York’s most visible Old Curiosity Shop on Park Row, was known for his collection of old clocks, jewelry, and musical instruments, but he was also celebrated for his ragged hands deformed from employment in an iron works. John Halleran’s interest in Native American material was clearly odd, but as further generous proof that he possessed the eccentric confidence of an autodidact, reporters commented that, along with his less-curious collection of illustrations of and letters by Washington and Jefferson, he savored artifacts from the Franklin Pierce presidency!

From Curios to Antiques

Overall then it seems that the New York curiosity shop kept faith with the Dickensian model. None of the stores presented much awareness of period or style, or much concern over authenticity, that would be prerequisites to our modern interest in the art object. In other words, none of these shops dealt in antiques.

Although the term “antique” begins to appear in the 1870s, it was seldom used in the nineteenth century and then usually as an adjective connected to furniture and not as a general category of old, rare, and aesthetically pleasing material. The earliest instance of the word’s use that I have been able to find in the New York press was in promotional material disseminated by the important Levitt Brothers’ auction house, which maintained large rooms in Clinton Hall on Astor Place in the old Opera House building. In 1874 it offered an exhibition of “antiques,” namely Etruscan and Roman pottery, along with some Renaissance Italian majolica, that it advertised as “of interest to the scholar and antiquarian.” Not, one should note, to the homeowner.

Levitt’s auction material could only have been intended for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other new museums in formation or for the very wealthiest of collectors. But Levitt’s use of the term “antiques” was an anomaly: the word “antiquities” was more often used to differentiate the rarest classical item from the general run of the recently “old.” A modern notion of “antique,” I would argue, finds its place outside of the museum within the overall sense of taste established in the domestic interior. It was not an object distinguished by an aristocratic patina or, for that matter, a republican gloss; nor was it defined by extreme rarity or links to known historical figures. After 1900, places to purchase these aesthetic objects–that is, the familiar antiques shop–rapidly filled New York business directories. Though still sometimes designated “curiosity shops,” their selectivity of objects and their display strategies differentiated them from their Dickensian namesakes that continued to exist in less fashionable locations.

How do we then account for the transition from curios to antiques? Why was the change in nomenclature and character so rapid? Cultural historians have noted important long-term changes in popular historical consciousness. The “past” was indeed unappreciated in America until the very end of the nineteenth century, at least in terms of its material preservation. In this view, Americans’ obliviousness ended with an outbreak of nostalgia at the turn of the century, fanned by general concern over the heedless pace of industrial society. However, who or what exactly carried out these changes remains obscure; moreover, these changes covered decades, not years. So, we are left asking whether the rise of the antique had anything to do with Americans’ looking towards the past for guidance at a time of rapid transition, or was it the result of something more grounded in the material world–for example, the short run changes in retail display or the fashions of home decoration?

Taking the latter course, let’s consider three possible culprits.

Agents of Antiques

The first possible agent to clarify the new distinctions between curios and antiques may have been the male collector. To the kind of antiquaries that had been operating since the early modern period the Gilded Age added a host of new-wealth hobbyists. As the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted on May 6, 1888, it was de rigueur for financiers to make it known they were an enthusiast of some arcana. Henry Clews collected Sevres and Worcester pottery; Jay Gould, orchids; and Austin Corbin, Japanese swords. The journalist judged this to be “an elegant divertissement and an intelligent way of getting rid of superfluous income,” but did not consider it of cultural importance. He dismissed the amateur collector with the standard, unanswerable refrain: “great collectors are born, not made.” What is not so certain is whether the great collectors necessarily predate the standard levels of interest among the acquiring bourgeois, whether they are in the vanguard of popular taste. Pioneering collectors of American furniture and ceramics such as Irving W. Lyon and Alice Morse Earle only got going at the turn of the century and organized collaboration between collectors even later, with the formation of the exclusive Walpole Society in 1910. It is also noticeable that women were by 1900 (and contrary to Wallace Nutting’s notable remark that “Men, because they seek prettiness less than solidity, are better collectors than women”) very solid in their collecting interests: Abby Rockefeller, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and Electra Webb were outpacing their family members in the preservation of Americana.

A second character appears in the 1870s to adjust, as it were, the relations of the producer to the consumer. Clarence Cook, a student of A. J. Downing and Calvert Vaux, published an Eastlake-influenced series of essays on home decoration that he later collected together as The House Beautiful (1878). Together with H. Hudson Holly at Harper’s, Cook led the movement to bring an arts-and-crafts sensibility into American taste. But however one may wish to place this advocacy of vernacular simplicity within a linear development of the modern concept of “antique,” it is not clear whether their advocacy of lighter lines and clearer organization in domestic furnishings made much difference to the late Victorian clutter of the parlor. A journalist in the Times (January 2, 1879) suggested that such expert advice only further clouded the issue. He argued that neither the Eastlake, Queen Anne, or Renaissance modes had done much to clarify the standard of taste: “These three great troubles,” (anticipating the voice of today’s “Living Section”), “have revolutionized household art. Indeed household art has revolutionized the household. What with painting and patching, glueing and mortising, our homes are wholly given over to the demon of unrest.”

What was the nature of this unrest? It was not, I suspect, a new appreciation for hand craftsmanship or the patina of the ancient piece brought on by the rush of factory made goods. Factory-made “colonial revival” furniture appeared in the mid-1880s without any corresponding rush to collect the original, and “authentic” pieces were still recarved into more modern forms. The real unrest issued surely from women’s growing notions of domestic taste and control over the shape of the household. A parody from “Dark Mahogany” contained this imaginary conversation between two women in a Brooklyn curiosity shop: “My Tom has no elevated tastes, not even in high backed chairs. But must the principles of art be sacrificed to a husband’s selfishness? No man shall call me wife who cannot climb o’nights into an Elizabethan bedstead. Think what glorious memories of a golden age of literateer, as well as furnitoor, the objects of virtoo revive.”

In the path towards the modern version of the antique these two tracks, the antiquarian collector and the aesthetic tastemaker, may not have been continuous, let alone in parallel. Elizabeth Stillinger, in the only scholarly account of the early U.S. antique’s trade, imagines an innovative male collector loving his Revolutionary forebears’ chair while at the same time holding a copy of Ruskin or Eastlake in his hand. Yet there is little evidence that such a composite character ever existed.

It is perhaps to women holding their copies of Ruskin that one should look for the new placement of curios. From the Civil War onwards old curiosity shops, short-lived charitable endeavors, appeared as a regular feature of church and voluntary association fairs. Despite their name these did not originate as ways to sell objects unearthed in the parishioners’ basements, like today’s bring-and-buy stands, but rather as little tableau of interesting curios, mixing the patriotic and the exotic. The origin of the charitable curiosity shop appears to lie in the fairs organized during the Civil War by women’s relief agencies and the national voluntary United States Sanitary Commission. The 1864 Brooklyn Sanitary Fair featured a whole New England kitchen, complete with a fireplace, roasting spit, and ancient kettles, all worked by upwards of thirty ladies en costume who also engaged in quilting bees, donations, wedding preparations, and other old customs. The only thing on sale was the food; objects such as a Revolutionary-era teapot and pewter set belonging to a signer of the Declaration of Independence were “relics,” a spiritual form of placing detail.

The tradition of “relic rooms” and small-scale reenactments was revived during the nation’s centennial year. Although the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition glorified the promise of an industrial and commercial future, some material from America’s past, including another New England kitchen, was on display. Moreover a range of local celebrations in 1876 paid even more attention to antiquities in part because local antiquarians were especially keen on collecting history at the county level. The centennial festivities at Salem, Massachusetts, included the first exhibition on record where old furniture was arranged by century and a progression of style noted. It even drew the attention of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, which judged the event to be “by far the most complete and interesting exhibition of antique furniture, we venture to say, ever held in this country.” By the time of the Washington Centennial Exhibition in 1889 at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, American materials–ceramics, furniture, and metalware–relating to the first president were organized by period and displayed with aesthetic clarity. In short, a shift from the curio to the antique emerged in the practice of the fairs and charity “curiosity shops”: national sentiment remained important but old objects were gradually loosened from their relic status and resituated in a new strategy of display.

The advent of the modern antique store was announced by the New York Times on February 5, 1899, with the straightforward title “How to Start an Old Curiosity Shop.” Though the article began with the usual aphorisms about the great collectors being born and not made, it immediately reversed itself with the claim that modern women’s knowledge of the cycles of fashion was even more essential than capital or connoisseurship in starting an antiques business. Knowing, for example, whether Lowestoft china is “all the rage” allowed one to judge the market clearly. Thus the business of antiques was primarily about style, and thus better suited to educated middle-class women than to male collectors with large amounts of discretionary cash. A fine discrimination had to be on display; one should foreground only a few choice pieces in the shop window to suggest to browsers that a selective mind was at work within. Of course, finding the ware to sell at auctions required a certain amount of pluck and publicity–but traveling abroad also had commercial advantages: ” Here and there in Europe you find a peasant with an old cupboard” (although this observation came with the warning that nowadays even peasants were aware of cash value). The final piece of advice, however, was incontestable: a location for the shop had to be obtained near “the haunts of men and women of culture and money.”

Here then was a thoroughly modern antique store in which the objects were arranged in cabinets or placed on tables according to style, period, and maker. Beyond their classification and physical placement, the objects were housed in an environment informed by the “taste” of an individual proprietor that, in turn, was aligned with collective fashion. A “relic” room perhaps, but one shorn of sentiment and arranged with an eye to exchange value. Gone were the piles of undifferentiated clutter, the narrow passageways, and the mysterious back room. If Little Nell had avoided her apotheosis she might have lived long enough to have made something out of her grandfather’s inventory.

Further Reading:

As with all particular areas of New York’s trade and commerce, other than printing, banking, and shipping, the antiques trade needs a historian. This small essay has used newspapers and business directories yet the next best point of departure would be to search the archives of R. G. Dun and Company in the Baker Library, Harvard. The only general treatment of the business remains Elizabeth Stillinger’s The Antiquers: Early Collectors of American Antiques (New York, 1980), which understandably privileges the pioneer collectors of Americana. Russell Lynes’s stalwart The Tastemakers: The Shaping of American Popular Taste (New York, 1980) remains a good resource. The transformation of the environment for the retail object is covered wonderfully in William Leach’s unmatched Land of Desire; Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1984). The passage of the charitable woman into the world of commercial arts and decoration is an exciting area of scholarly activity. Among the best treatments are Michele H. Bogart’s  Artists, Advertising and the Borders of Art (Chicago, 1995); Diana Korzenik, Drawn to Art: A Nineteenth-Century American Dream (Hanover & London, 1985); and Laura R. Prieto, At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America (Cambridge, 2001). Two essays are especially useful: Amelia Peck’s introduction to Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition catalog Candace Wheeler: The Art and Enterprise of American Design, 1875-1900 (New Haven, 2001) and Peter McNeil’s “Designing Women, Gender, Sexuality and the Interior Decorator, c. 1890-1940,” in Art History 17 (34) (1994): 631-57, which explores the Vogue 1921 quotation, “Someone once said that a woman is either happily married or an Interior Decorator.” The works of Ruskin, it turns out, were seen more in the hands of women in design than in those of male collectors. See Lisa Koenigsberg, “Arbiter of taste: Mrs L. C. Tutill and a tradition of American Women Writers on Architecture, 1848-1913,” Women’s Studies 14 (1988): 339-66. The next stage in what was then called “antiqeering” awaited the motor car. Clues to that development may be found in Virginia Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (New York, 1991).

This article originally appeared in issue 4.2 (January, 2004).

Peter G. Buckley teaches history at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. He is currently at work on a history of education at The Cooper Union, 1859-1984.

A historian’s life at sea

The signal has three parts: one four-second blast followed by two one-second blips. It is that forlorn warning, a ship’s foghorn, and when I was on a sailing vessel in the middle of the Atlantic this past summer, we sounded it throughout the sixty hours of fog we endured between Sable Island and Halifax. The fog hit us just as my watch began a 23:00 to 3:00 stint, and it finally burnt off (“it seems only just,” our mate said, wearily) when we again stood watch on the morning we sailed into Halifax. Depending on the thickness of the fog and what the radar showed, we had to use the foghorn every four minutes, or every two minutes, or every minute. (Having been two weeks at sea, we were so tired that we easily slept through the din.) I asked our mate how close another ship would have to be to hear our signal. I couldn’t help but notice that he didn’t make eye contact or give much of an answer. Pretty close, I deduced, so I learned that fog could be fatal—still. I went to sea thinking I would learn about the social worlds of seafaring. My more valuable lesson was that nature matters, a lot, and that the way it mattered in the past is a part of history as elusive as it is important.

Why did I go to sea? I had been writing a book on Benjamin Franklin and science and had been researching Franklin’s maritime interests. Franklin produced some pioneering charts of the Gulf Stream—indeed, he and a cousin did the very first chart of that current. I had given many lectures and seminar presentations on Franklin and the Gulf Stream, and people kept asking me, “Have you seen the Gulf Stream?” How much better to say “yes,” I thought, and even better to say I’d seen it the way Franklin did, on a sailing ship. Sailing is a unique way to experience the past; were we able to resurrect Franklin and transport him to a modern sailing vessel, he would recognize much of its technology, terminology, and social order.

So I begged a place on a 140-foot brigantine, SSV Corwith Cramer, one of two multimasted sailing vessels that belong to the Sea Education Association (SEA) of Woods Hole, Massachusetts. I spent three weeks on the Cramer during May and June of 2004, cruising from St. George’s, Bermuda, to Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, and then to Woods Hole, where I disembarked and returned to my day job as a history professor. I returned to sea again for two weeks in June of 2005 (the other half of my household threatened to put a widower’s walk at the top of the house) and sailed from Woods Hole to Halifax, with that big foggy patch at the end.

SEA promises to give college students a sense of the maritime past. Its students begin their journey on shore, with courses in maritime history and literature, alongside nautical science and oceanography. Students then go to sea to haul lines while singing shanties, preferably on four hours sleep at three in the morning, thus experiencing life at sea as it would have been in the age of sail. The students even learn celestial navigation, a technique that is no longer the standard on either commercial craft or holiday sailboats.

I earned my meals and berth by lecturing on maritime studies and doing my best to impersonate a deck hand. I told the students about the history of hydrography, an ancestor of ocenography; they showed me the ropes. Never had I worked so hard in the “classroom.” I knew I’d entered new pedagogical territory when one of the students, hearing that I was determined to tough out the seasickness without the drugs, yelled at me across the Cramer’s main salon, “Dude! Don’t be a hero!” Well, quite.

Being a professional historian, I’d always hooted at historical reenactors. I had lived in the South for almost fifteen years and had learned to dodge gray-clad weekend-Confederates when they clanked toward me, convinced I would appreciate their subtly distressed uniform buttons. Yet there I was, in the middle of the North Atlantic, counting “one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three . . .” under my breath as I plied the foghorn in the wee hours, desperately hoping the supertankers could hear us, a borrowed digital watch and a layer of fleece the only reminders of my twenty-first-century self.

But what version of the past was this? Was I really getting a taste of what life would have been like for someone like Franklin during his many months at sea? I decided to poll my fellow sailors—both the students, who sail for a six-week semester, and the crew, who’ve logged many hours at sea. Here are the results. (Note: this study followed none of the established protocols for valid social science research. Questions were leading; subjects, manipulated. Generalizations are blithely made.)

The Cramers (a ship’s sailors are known by its name) were a remarkably studious lot, given that 87.5 percent of them had read some Herman Melville, though only 40.6 percent had read any Patrick O’Brian—the modern master of maritime fiction. About 72 percent of them knew and sang shanties. Not that they were tedious pedants about historic accuracy. When I asked them whether they preferred Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean or Russell Crowe’s Captain Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander, Mr. Depp beat out Mr. Crowe, 68 percent to 32 percent.

I also discovered that no less than 28 percent of the Cramers were tattooed; over 50 percent (men and women) could knit, crochet, or sew—skills that would have been highly valued among tars (as sailors were known in Franklin’s day), with their limited stocks of clothing. Only 3 percent were vegetarian though 34 percent used tobacco. They were absurdly sentimental: 50 percent had acquired, on the voyage, a keepsake for a loved one. When I asked what they missed most while at sea, 77 percent said a person, 19 percent said a substance (I avoided follow-up questions), and only one person (the engineer) said he missed some aspect of modern technology or popular culture. The Cramers, it seemed, had become living stereotypes of Jack Tar, that complicated fellow, alternately hopeless and cheerful, able to repair or rig anything, swearing a blue streak yet longing for his sweetheart (and perhaps tattooed with her name), smoking tobacco, and eating anything, ravenously.

The longer they’d been at sea, the more stereotypical the seafarers were. Only 17 percent of the students were tattooed, but 36 percent of the crew and officers were. Twenty-nine percent of officers and crew confessed that they swore more at sea than on land, as opposed to 5.5 percent of the student sailors; 79 percent of the former said they ate much more butter at sea, as opposed to 55 percent of the students. And then the real distinction: 29 percent of crew and officers had never, ever experienced sea sickness, while only 11 percent of students could make this claim. Certain people, not including me, were born sailors.

Whatever conclusions I might draw from my poll, it was becoming clear to me that life aboard the Corwith Cramer made for a pretty selective reconstruction of the past. The work routine and hierarchy on the Cramer were a far cry from those on naval vessels in Franklin’s era. At best, it resembled regimens in the merchant marine—a structured routine but without the gold braid and flogging. There was never any grog, the diluted rum that became a sailor’s staple in the eighteenth century. Shanties were sung but only that tiny, tiny percentage of shanties I began to call “hypoallergenic” because they offended no one. Traditional sailing technology dominated (sails and lines, bow-watch, steering with compass or by stars) except when we used radar, radio, and engine to avoid danger or maintain optimal position. Of course, a more authentic semester-at-sea adventure might have given students and, especially, their parents pause. SEA is quite right not to put college students through too many historically accurate ordeals. But the lapses in authenticity began to nag at me.

Not that I wanted to see rations cut or the grate rigged for flogging. But the emphasis, as with tall-ship enthusiasts everywhere, was on the age of sail’s cheerful and demotic aspects, the “Squeeze of the Hand” chapter of Moby Dick and the jolly, hearty bits of Patrick O’Brian, not the terrible maritime worlds of Barry Unsworth’s tale of an Atlantic slave ship Sacred Hunger, or Marcus Rediker’s social history of eighteenth-century sea-farers Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, or Philip Curtin’s The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Sing all the hypoallergenic shanties you like—your sense of the maritime past will be, for good or ill, approximate.

Eventually, I left the quarterdeck to all the bluff, salty types and, minding my inner nerd, drifted toward the Cramer‘s lab. Each SEA student must do a science project on either physical or biological oceanography. This meant an original contribution to science—indeed, SEA is now wondering what to do with the decades of data that its students have harvested under very difficult conditions.

We historians of science love to point out that science is not a universal practice, identical in every time and place. Boy, are we right. Science at sea makes you respect the tricky, shifty, and unwelcoming nature of what you’re trying to study. At sea, microscopy will invariably need to be done when you’re at your queasiest; net tows to collect biota will be scheduled for the coldest and darkest hours of the morning. Not cold and dark enough for you? Add rain and biting wind. Standing beside the lab, trying to do the hourly report on general conditions, the Beaufort Scale’s abstract, poetic sea states (State 5: “Moderate waves . . . many white horses are formed”; State 7: “Sea heaps up and white foam from breaking waves begins to be blown in streaks”) suddenly seem like fine gradations of misery. I’d read those Patrick O’Brian novels and assumed that naval Captain Jack Aubrey was their hero, but I now have new appreciation for naturalist Dr. Stephen Maturin, who never quite got his sea legs yet could steadily dissect rotting specimens, below deck, in a gale.

As I lectured on early modern hydrography, an interesting thing happened: students and crew alike saw resemblances between hydrography then and physical oceanography now. This surprised the historian of science in me, who had long assumed that hydrography and oceanography had about as much in common as medieval alchemy and modern chemistry. I kept countering, pointing to the profound differences between old and new ocean science, until I realized that “then” and “now” had one big, common context: the ocean. Most of the time, historical reenactors have to reconstruct the past’s physical environment, by wearing its clothing, eating its food, using its chamber pots. But maybe its natural environment does not need to be reconstructed. Fog is fog, right?

I’m not so sure.

The physical nature of the past has two sides, one human and one material. People have history; so does nature. Science has changed a lot over time. There’s no sense assuming that hydrography was just like oceanography—or that because it wasn’t like oceanography it wasn’t a real form of knowledge. People in the past thought about nature in ways that, to us, often appear quite strange and alien. We should not judge them for this nor should we minimize the changes in perception. Likewise, we should recognize that the natural world itself actually changes over time—witness our own climate or the dramatic decline in fish and whale populations. All of this makes it unclear whether descriptions or even data from the eighteenth century can tell us much about nature’s history. When it was collected, that material passed through minds that we historians still do not entirely understand. This fact makes it difficult to imagine that we will ever be able to make their data match our needs.

I decided that I wanted to see how far the gap between “then” and “now” or “them” and “us” might be and that, dear reader, is how I became a historical reenactor. Maybe reenactment of eighteenth-century science was going off the deep end. But cruising the Atlantic with a bunch of Johnny Depp fans was itself crazy, so why not go overboard? I did so by exploring two aspects of marine science that had interested Benjamin Franklin: charts of the ocean and variations in water temperature.

Charts of the open ocean were new in the eighteenth century. Over Franklin’s lifetime, determining the features of the deep sea was, like determining longitude, a considerable and mostly unsolved problem. Charts included the sea, but they had emphasized land—what navigators were trying not to run into. Even by the end of the eighteenth century, after John Harrison’s chronometer began to make determination of longitude easier, hydrographic surveys of the ocean were rare. It would be well into the nineteenth century before bathymetric maps, charts of currents, and large-scale surveys of sea-surface temperatures would be used to chart the open sea with any real detail. Previous efforts, such as astronomer Edmond Halley’s early eighteenth-century chart of magnetic variation over the Atlantic, were the exceptions that proved the rule.

Another significant exception came in 1768 when Franklin and his cousin, Timothy Folger, created the first chart of the Gulf Stream. The two cousins did so to answer a question the commissioners of customs in America had posed to Great Britain’s arbiter of questions of commerce and communication, the Board of Trade: why did the postal packets traveling from Falmouth to New York take longer than those sailing from London to Boston, when the distance traveled appeared roughly equal? Franklin, one of the postmasters for the continental colonies, learned of the question and passed it to Folger, a Nantucket sea captain. Folger told him that the Gulf Stream, well known to Nantucket whalers (who harpooned prey along its edges), explained everything. Flowing hard to the east, the current slowed any ship (including packets trying to make New York from Falmouth) in its path.

Franklin asked Folger to mark the dimensions of the Gulf Stream on a chart and then sent the manuscript to the Post Office to be engraved. The Post Office called on their contract stationer, Mount and Page (a grand, old maritime publisher), to provide a printed version, which the firm did by putting Folger’s sketch on an existing chart of the whole Atlantic Ocean taken from its Atlas Maritimus Novus (1702). There, almost drowned by the sea around it, the current surges up from Florida. Above it are Folger’s sailing instructions. Franklin would reproduce this chart twice more, once with a French firm, Le Rouge, during his diplomatic mission in Paris and once again in the second volume of the American Philosophical Society Transactions (1786), in “A Letter . . . Containing Sundry Maritime Observations.”

Franklin didn’t stop there. He also published, alongside this final Gulf Stream chart, data on sea-surface temperature readings he had collected on his final three Atlantic voyages in 1775, 1776, and 1785. These readings indicated Franklin’s conviction, not only that the Gulf Stream was warmer than the water around it, but that the temperature difference might help navigators determine where they were in the North Atlantic.

Then, Franklin went below the surface. On the very last of these three voyages, he and his grandnephew Jonathan Williams Jr. experimented with devices to collect samples of sea water in order to measure subsurface water temperatures. One of these was an ordinary wine bottle, emptied, recorked, and lowered on a line. Water pressure would eventually push the cork in, and the bottle would fill; as it filled, the water would wedge the cork back into place, creating a sample of water from the depth at which the cork had popped in.

Their other water sampler was trickier. Franklin and Williams built it according to a prototype that Captain Henry Ellis had tested off the coast of West Africa in 1751. The Reverend Stephen Hales, a noted Newtonian experimenter, designed that instrument with brilliant simplicity: it was a wooden bucket fitted at top and bottom with unidirectional valves. Ellis rigged up the gauge according to Hales’s design. When it was weighted and lowered, water velocity pushed the valves open, filling the bucket; when the bucket was pulled up, the valves closed. Ellis had described this sea gauge in the 1753 Philosophical Transactions of Britain’s Royal Society. (The article directly followed one of Franklin’s classic essays on electricity, perhaps leading the great doctor to squirrel away its contents for use thirty years later when he and his grandnephew rigged a keg with the requisite valves.) The 1751 device leaked, but it confirmed what Hales had discovered: water well below the sea’s surface is considerably colder and gets colder the lower you go. Hales’s device had indicated what later oceanographers would call thermohaline circulation, the movement of cold water from equator to poles, deep in the ocean.

As my SEA students noticed, Franklin’s hydrographic interests (charts, temperature variation), rather amazingly, remain essential to present-day oceanography and nautical science. Many features of the ocean (tidal patterns, magnetic variation, depths of water) now appear on charts—seafaring is now much safer because of these printed guides. And temperature readings still indicate the presence of the Gulf Stream. Present-day images of the Gulf Stream, generated by satellites and infrared cameras, thus show the North Atlantic in bands of color, the warmest water a reddish orange and the cooler waters green or blue. The bird’s-eye view seems to capture, if only for a moment, every inch of the sea. Wouldn’t Franklin be pleased?

Perhaps not. By and large, technology has shifted the burden away from the sailor, who now needs much less knowledge of the sea. The global positioning system (GPS), especially, assumes that you can’t be trusted to figure out where you are. Instead, GPS satellites give you your coordinates and place them on the map: you are here. But are you? Built-in inaccuracy (justified on grounds of national security) makes parts of the GPS less accurate than its immediate predecessor, the Loran radio network. The Loran system allowed a ship to calculate position relative to radio signals from set points on the ocean. (Looking for a book topic? Please write on the Loran system.) Loran signals are still used for some commercial traffic, and the system is still discussed as a possible emergency back-up system for GPS. It’s an excellent example of how succeeding forms of technology don’t necessarily get successively better.

Nor are the new GPS-derived electronic maps of the oceans very thorough. A satellite map shows only an ocean’s surface, not its depths, which contain dynamics of interest to oceanographers and sailors. And even the thousands of available data points don’t account for every inch of the sea’s surface; they’re strung together to make a pattern—assuming, for example, that the water between a spot that’s seventy-four degrees Fahrenheit and one that’s seventy-six degrees must be no more than seventy-five degrees and representing it as such. The satellites capture a lot of stuff but not everything, and they may not always be improvements on what people once knew about the sea.

What did they know? Sailors and hydrographers had experience, memory, and imagination, and our technologies only roughly approximate those forms of knowledge. Long before satellites and infrared cameras, the whalers whom Timothy Folger consulted had experienced the Gulf Stream and, remembering the experience, described it to him. Folger then imagined the Gulf Stream as a visible current running for hundreds of miles in the ocean; no one saw the full sweep of it before satellite technology, but that didn’t prevent him from imagining what it might look like when seen from above. Meanwhile, Franklin imagined a connection between temperature variation and the visible current and then tested this hypothesis with his thermometrical readings.

That these were brilliant acts of imagination is even more apparent when Franklin’s data is mapped. He didn’t map it himself but Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software has made it easy for me to do so. For the most extensive run of data, from 1785, I averaged each day’s temperature readings, plotted them on a map (Franklin correlated his temperature readings to his ship’s position), and expressed them in colors, running from green (coolest) through yellow and orange (warmest). I then mapped the data over the 1768 Gulf Stream chart. The result shows a family resemblance between Franklin’s hydrography and modern day oceanography: we see the Gulf Stream as a fluid in motion (Folger’s running band of water) and as a set of temperature readings (Franklin’s data). Remarkably, Folger’s current and Franklin’s warmest points of water are, roughly, in the same place—allowing for annual and seasonal variations, it’s a surprising match and anticipates all those satellite images with whole spans of water differentiated by color. The biggest historical difference is the amount of data. Franklin had thirty-four data points, and the average satellite map has, well, more than you want to think about.

The avalanche of data comes at a cost: physical oceanographers have lots of numbers but rarely see what generates them—the sea itself. Just as on the Franklin-Folger chart, maps (paper or electronic) are flat representations of what the human eye can most readily see. Sailors used to have to construct all this in their minds, and they could only do so after considerable experience at sea. They learned to judge conditions (wind, waves, color of sea, presence of anything in the water) as indications of what they couldn’t see—fog-bound coastline, impending squalls, currents, dangerously shallow water. If you now sail with charts, radar, radio, and GPS, you get the information already formed into patterns. It is generally safer, though many sailors now worry whether, if all the technology failed, anyone on board would know what to do. When you’re fogbound, you fret about such things. If your or another ship’s radar gave out, would a foghorn be warning enough?

That’s why I decided to retest Franklin’s methods of data gathering, the wine bottle and the sea gauge. Maybe those techniques still had something to recommend them.

“Throwing old stuff overboard,” one of my maritime studies colleagues called it, even though I was using replicas—I’d be barred from museums everywhere if I ever tried to use the actual old stuff. (In many ways, my scheme followed the logic of the SEA program, in which students learn celestial navigation and use buckets to gather water samples.) Before I went on my 2004 SEA cruise, I had a carpenter cut valves in the bottoms of two wooden planters and stick the two planters mouth-to-mouth to make a keg. I caulked the keg’s seams with paraffin and twine then packed it in my checked luggage to Bermuda, where the customs officials looked at it, and me, very carefully. The night before the Cramer sailed, I begged several empty wine bottles and their corks from the head waiter in a local restaurant. And we were off.

Of course, the sea gauge refused to work on the sunny June afternoon when we first tested it. The wine bottle performed beautifully, to the gratifying amazement of the students. But the water sampler leaked water from its bottom valve. This failure was, at least, historically authentic—Franklin’s sea gauge had leaked, too! Everyone on board gave me advice; I took the engineer’s, and we rigged a tension line across the bottom flap, so it wouldn’t open all the way. We sent it down again at 2:25 the next morning, and its sample’s temperature reading, from a depth of 243 meters, compared pretty well with the reading that the ship’s fancy equipment gave: 5.0 degrees centigrade for the bottle; 6.41 degrees for the ship’s equipment.

So I went back the next year with a collaborator, SEA maritime studies instructor Matt McKenzie, and a specially coopered keg. In honor of the Reverend Stephen Hales, I named this sea gauge the Rev II (the Rev I having given its all the year before). It seemed better than a pair of jury-rigged garden planters, but it too needed to be caulked. Matt and I eschewed paraffin as anachronistic and decided to use tar, so very seamanlike. Spreading a tarp over the Cramer‘s lovely teak deck, starboard at midship, we set to with brushes and got some students involved, in much the manner that Tom Sawyer got his fence whitewashed.

Meanwhile, on the port side, the official science people were using a standard oceanographic device, a carousel of Niskin bottles. Each bottle can be set to close depending on pressure data, so that each can capture water at a specific depth. The water samples can then be analyzed, especially for CTD (conductivity, temperature, density), and for mineral content. But the bottles didn’t work. Down the carousel went and up it came, bottles stubbornly undeployed. This happened three times in a row, at which point Matt and I strolled across the deck to offer them the use of our water sampler.

It still leaked, tar notwithstanding. Even worse, the depth of our final deployment, nineteen hundred meters, smashed the Rev II’s thermometer. But our reenactment made for a wonderful set piece on the history of technology. That both the archaic and modern instruments had failed made clear to the students just how contingent instruments are in general. It was a good day for history, if not for science.

Our historical instruments also gave a tangible, indeed tactile, demonstration of how data is not just a numerical value, much as modern science might lead us to believe. Depth, for instance, represents an actual section of the sea, a wet, salty point on the planet, some of whose qualities could, maybe, be explained in terms of temperature. If one purpose of a cruise on the Corwith Cramer is to experience the sea in a way no longer available to weekend sailors, then it was clear that old instruments could sometimes serve that purpose at least as well as, if differently.

Last summer, the Cramer‘s route took us over the Gully, a deep undersea canyon in Canadian waters. It is a protected area—equivalent to a national park—because of its unusual fauna, including the rare bottlenose whale. We were primed to make the most of the visit: two experts on the Gully, a geologist and a cetologist (whale expert), had sailed with us and gave background lectures on the canyon and its inhabitants. Within the protected waters, we could not run our engine, dump anything, or use our depth indicator (its “ping” annoys marine mammals and can disorient them). At last, we were as close to eighteenth-century sailing conditions as we could be. Our reward? Three bottlenose whales approached, rose, and sported around the Cramer. The humans scrambled for cameras and a good position along the rail or in the rigging.

Though it should have, it had never occurred to me that sailing ships afforded a better view of the sea (and its inhabitants) because they were as quiet as those residents. I began to wonder about the interaction between ships and sea creatures. I asked our onboard cetologist about our bottlenose visitors, “What do they think we are?” Did they think the ship was a thing and recognize us as fellow creatures? Or did they think the red-hulled ship was a creature, albeit with antic, camera-carrying parasites? Her reply pitied my ignorance—something to do with my sorry, anthropomorphic reliance on such terms as they, we, and think. Wrong question for a biologist.

But maybe it’s the right question for a historian. They, we, and think are meaningful terms for those of us interested in past nature and past science. I’ll use the terms with care, understanding the barriers between then and now, but I’ll use them. If that’s going overboard, I’m happy to take the plunge.

The author thanks Patrick Florance of the Harvard Map Collection for his help with GIS; Paul Joyce and Matt McKenzie of SEA for their comments on this essay; the SEA’s staff and crew for their patience with a historical reenactment, which is not a normal part of the SEA program; and David Armitage for his forbearance with a seagoing spouse and for many pieces of advice about life and science in the eighteenth century.

This article originally appeared in issue 6.2 (January, 2006).

Joyce E. Chaplin is professor of history at Harvard University and author, most recently, of the forthcoming The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (New York, 2006).

National History Day and American educational reform

‘Tis the season for National History Day. As with Christmas, National History Day (NHD or simply History Day) refers more to a span of weeks than to a particular calendar date; much as when one speaks of “the playoffs” in sports, NHD names a series of events. As you read this piece, over half a million secondary school students in thousands of schools across the country are writing essays, editing documentaries, performing skits, launching Websites, and mounting table-top exhibitions. Students will gather for regional competitions, typically held in late March. Winners will advance to the state level later this spring. And a lucky few will get the chance to go to the national contest in mid-June. While many of their peers will be enduring long lectures or rote skill-and-drill instruction of the kind engendered by standardized tests, these kids will actually be doing history. And what better way to learn than to do? In some cases, they will be doing while enduring those lectures and taking those tests, testifying to their commitment to what my colleague Andy Meyers, a longtime fixture of the NHD scene, has dubbed “varsity academics.”

National History Day was the brainchild of Case Western University professor David Van Tassel (1928-2000), a pioneer in the field of public history. An intellectual historian also known in the academy for his work in the field of aging, he became interested in history as practiced outside the academy. And this interest, in turn, led to a desire to bring the knowledge and talents of local amateur historians to larger audiences. To achieve this, Van Tassel developed a series of projects, among them an encyclopedia of Cleveland. But Van Tassel was not satisfied with simply unearthing little recognized historical talent. He believed the nation had a responsibility to foster historical interest and that it should begin doing so in the public school system. Rather than simply try to reshape existing curricula, Van Tassel enlisted some colleagues, recruited some teachers, and started National History Day in 1974. The program was modeled on already wildly popular state and national science fairs and by 1980 had achieved national recognition. Today the NHD program is based at the University of Maryland at College Park, with a staff of six that works with regional coordinators and volunteer judges around the country. Currently the national office is funded by nongovernment sponsors such as the History Channel, but the program is actively seeking federal funding.

Each year, National History Day events are organized around a central theme. In 2007, it was “Triumph and Tragedy”; this year, “Conflict and Compromise.” These themes are elastic enough to accommodate any number of topics, yet they encourage students to conceptualize their projects through an interpretive lens. The national organization publishes a rulebook as well as a glossy manual that describes the program, offers sample topics, and provides lesson plans and research documents for grades six through ten. But much of the charm of the event lies in its local character.

At my school, the annual History Day process begins in early fall when we distribute the assignment and support materials to all tenth-grade students who are taking the required U.S. history survey (any student can enter in any specialty, but we build the program into the standard tenth-grade curriculum). Students may work alone or in teams and can choose any number of media options. In all cases, particular emphasis is given to the use of primary sources. For example, students designing table-top exhibitions are limited to five hundred of their own words, though they may quote documents as fully as they like (advised, however, that a wall of type is not particularly inviting—storytelling in this particular medium is best done with photographs, maps, or other kinds of visual sources). All projects must include annotated bibliographies. And particular emphasis is placed not simply on offering a thesis but on explicitly framing a question of which the thesis is in effect the answer (in some of these and other parameters, we depart from the official national rules). Final drafts of the projects are due in December; in early January, faculty members gather and collaboratively assess the projects, using official contest worksheets to provide feedback.

In February, we set up a gallery in our school cafeteria—rows of video monitors, laptops for Websites or Power Point presentations, banquet tables for exhibitions, etc.—which parents can view during what we call the “History Fair,” an event that coincides with an information session on the next year’s electives. This festive event becomes a kind of community celebration, with students serving as interlocutors for the adults as they view displays on the Salem witch trials, the Seneca Falls declaration, the Massachusetts 54th regiment, as well as more contemporary topics (some of us limit projects to those covering the period prior to 1860). It is also an occasion for the relevant faculty to review all the projects on display and select those entrants we believe are most likely to fare well in the regional competition.

The Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) has been hosting a regional History Day competition since 1990, supported with funding from the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History and the F.A.O. Schwartz Foundation, among others. The museum hosts a series of workshops for students and teachers over the course of the fall, a recruiting tool particularly directed toward under-resourced schools. According to coordinator Joanna Steinberg, about three hundred students from forty city public, private, and parochial schools participated at MCNY last year. “What I like most about National History Day is what it does for a sense of community,” she says, emphasizing the sense of family involvement the event fosters.

The event itself has the feel of a track meet. Contestants convene at different sites around the museum, appearing before judges (typically faculty at local colleges and universities) who query them on the origins and implications of their projects. Other entrants wait in the wings—an Abraham Lincoln rehearsing his justification for the suspension of habeas corpus here, a nervous student fretting over a yellow—journalism exhibition there-or chat anxiously about common friends at different schools. At the end of the day the participants gather for the awards ceremony, where the profusion of categories, levels, and special citations serves to distribute the glory widely. But first- and second-place winners in each major category also get the chance to move on to the next level.

Participation in National History Day at the state level varies widely. With the addition of Montana last year, all fifty states (and Guam as well) now compete. In New York, which has a program with a $150,000 budget, participation is growing rapidly: last year there were 25 percent more participants and a 60 percent jump in the number of schools involved, according to state coordinator Tobi Voigt. “Everybody is talking about testing, testing, testing,” she says, lamenting the overall state of history education nationally. “I’m really excited to get students involved in an academic program that favors interpretation over repetition.” New York’s competition takes place in historically rich Cooperstown. Last year for the first time, Voigt says, all the hotels were sold out. Throngs gathered at the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Fenimore Art Museum, and other sites around town before convening at a local high school for the awards ceremony. The surge in participation has raised the overall level of play. In years past, my school, something of a regional power, could routinely expect to send a handful of kids to the national level. Last year, we didn’t send any.

The annual competition culminates each June in College Park, where last year there were about 2400 registrants, according to Noah Shaw, technology and public affairs assistant for National History Day. In addition to a vigorous program of presentations and evaluations, the annual gathering honors outstanding educators. The event also features appearances by eminences like Ken Burns and Richard Dreyfuss, both of whom attended the 2007 event. Prizes include cash awards as well as partial scholarships to a number of universities; a full scholarship to Case Western in honor of Van Tassel is also awarded.

By this point in the program, National History Day has drifted far from its local roots. High travel costs as well as the substantial financial investment in many of the finalists’ projects give the national competition a seemingly inescapable element of class and racial bias, though it should be said that the national organization makes considerable efforts to combat the structural inequities of the U.S. education system by using state coordinators to recruit under-resourced schools, defraying the travel expenses of participants in need, and looking beyond the bells and whistles that sometimes adorn projects. Despite these efforts, however, the very degree to which the apt term “varsity academics” captures the spirit of History Day also suggests a sense of competition, even exclusion. And the spirit of competition, however laudable in some respects, does raise questions about the utility, even possibility, of establishing objective parameters for historical excellence.

Yet to dismiss History Day as a mere educational gimmick would be a mistake. As with any decent varsity athletic program, an imperative of participation coexists alongside one of competition. At its best, History Day is genuinely inclusive. In October, I attended a reception at MCNY for last year’s winners and listened to a student panel of remarkable diversity describe the role the program had played in their lives. One student spoke of the sheer thrill of going to a museum for the regional event, her excitement finally conquering the powerful anxiety that accompanied her all day. Another described conversations about history that strayed far beyond the task at hand as she and her collaborators worked on their project after school (in this regard, she was reminiscent of a student of mine, whose exhibit on the presidential election of 1876 became a vehicle for what he jocularly termed “male bonding” during the elaborate construction of the exhibit). A third spoke of meeting up with his teacher on weekends, his scholastic experience spilling beyond the confines of his school and workweek. That teacher, who had addressed the audience earlier in the event, described her own excitement as she told her department chair she was going to attend an organizational meeting for History Day, departing hastily before there could be any effort to stop her.

Other students related research discoveries—and the discovery that research itself could be gratifying. In 2007, one student at my school won first place in individual documentary for his film on the Negro Baseball leagues (the triumph was integration; the tragedy was the collapse of an entrepreneurial African American sporting culture and the eventual disappearance of African Americans themselves as players and fans of the game). He began his research for the film, not surprisingly, at the New York Public Library. Before long, however, he gravitated toward the Schomburg Library in Harlem, a journey to another world that led him to a treasure trove of images, music, and words. Like many students, he had a fair amount of technical savvy. Being able to tap such skills, or to leverage alternative learning styles, is one of the great strengths of the program.

Cathy Gorn, a former student of David Van Tassel and current director of National History Day, emphasizes the degree to which the program fosters good pedagogical practice. As she explained in a 1998 piece in The History Teacher, “NHD is not a secondary school version of Trivial Pursuit. It is not a ‘bee’ type of competition in which students memorize information that they regurgitate in response to questions. Rather, it requires that they thoroughly and deliberately examine the world of the past through direct contact with original materials including documents, photographs, films, historical buildings, newspapers, and oral history interviews with those who experienced history firsthand. In the process, students study—not memorize—a topic in depth.” One of the more impressive dimensions of the process is the judging; both students and judges often acquit themselves with great insight and sensitivity, with a spirit of exchange that resembles a good orals examination or dissertation defense.

Yet for precisely these reasons—the demand for substantial personal assessment and the fostering of critical skills that can’t necessarily be quantified—National History Day is unlikely to displace standard history curricula or the skill-and-drill mentality that has only intensified in the age of No Child Left Behind. Still, those of us who participate in NHD know: this works. And despite the manifold obstacles that get thrown in their way, thousands of teachers in schools around the country manage to find a way to squeeze it in. And if, for whatever reason, things don’t work out now, well, I’ll say what I always say at the end of the baseball or football season: there’s always next year.

For more information on National History Day, see the organization’s Website.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.2 (January, 2008).

Jim Cullen teaches history at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, where he serves on the board of trustees. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (2003) and Imperfect Presidents: Tales of Misadventure and Triumphs, recently published by Palgrave Macmillan, among other books.

Baltimore | Boston | Charleston | Chicago | Havana

| Lima | Los Angeles | Mexico City | New Amsterdam | New Orleans
Paramaribo | Philadelphia | Potosi | Quebec City | Salt Lake City
Saint Louis | Santa Fe | San Francisco | Washington, D.C.

In 1795, fourteen years after Catalonian and Spanish Franciscans founded Mission San Gabriel, Toypurina, a sorceress who had remained outside the mission system, led the Gabrieleños (as the Spanish came to call the Indian peoples in and near the mission) against the Spanish soldiers and priests. At the inquest after her capture, Toypurina stated that she commanded a chief to attack, “for I hate the padres and all of you, for living here on my native soil . . . for trespassing on the land of my forefathers and despoiling our tribal domains.”  The inquest said that Nicolas José, the neophyte within the mission who convinced Toypurina of the necessity of killing the interlopers, desired the extinction of the padres and Corporal Verdugo because they disallowed him his “heathen dances and abuses.”  During the night of October 25, 1785, a band of Indians from six local villages entered the compound, but failed in their mission because Toypurina’s special powers failed to kill the padres as planned.  Corporal Verdugo of the command discovered the plot; Governor Pedro Fages dispatched in irons the Indian headmen and Nicolas José to the presidio at San Diego and released the others with twenty lashes; and Toypurina suffered banishment to Mission San Carlos in the north.

Events like these shook the missionaries’ faith in the Indians’ ability to fulfill their grand aspiration of communal society based on faith in the One True God. There were usually two soldiers stationed at the mission for protection, but they didn’t make matters easier for the padres. Some soldiers virtuously married Indian women, but the father president of the missions, Junípero Serra, remonstrated to the first governor, Felipe de Neve, in 1780:  “We have positive proof that their (the San Gabriel mission Indian) alcalde, Nicolás, was supplying women to as many soldiers as asked for them.” These soldiers carried venereal diseases. The spread of the disease throughout the Indian population produced the physical and spiritual degeneration of the mission neophytes. The situation of “so many sick Indians,” as Padre Zalvidea of San Gabriel put it to the governor in 1832, was no less than utterly tragic. Prefect Mariano Payeras, described the situation in 1819:

The Missions of San Gabriel, San Juan Capistrano, and San Luis Rey have built chapels in their hospitals, in order to administer the sacraments there to the sick more conveniently. I say hospitals, because, as the Fathers observed that the majority of the Indians were dying exceedingly fast from dysentery and the ‘gálico,’ they took energetic steps to arrest the rapid spread of such a pernicious malady by erecting in many of them (missions) said hospitals in proportion to their knowledge and means, and also by procuring such alleviation as was available. In spite of all this, we see with sorrow that the fruit does not correspond to our hopes.

The Spanish priests, moreover, had not figured any way to deal with all the fleas.

It wasn’t just that the soldiers corrupted the priests’ earnest efforts, but the reluctance of the natives to give up their life ways–the fact that they were not blank slates upon which to inscribe the Word of God–doomed the missions. Along the few rivers running through the great basin that would become Los Angeles lived the Tongva, the Shoshonean-speaking, native people. Their largest rancherías–most provided home to fifty to one hundred people–grouped along what the Spanish first called el Río de los Temblores (the River of the Earthquakes), while numerous others lived scattered from the mountains to the sea. To eat they gathered acorns and grasshoppers and snared small animals with superb dexterity. They moved, from the valleys to foothills as the weather suggested, and as they departed they torched their round huts, which inevitably became infested with fleas. They fought a lot too, with each other and with their neighbors, the Chumash, who lived north of Topa-nga, and the Ajachmen to the south. What little we know of these peoples’ lives has come in the form of the artifacts that bulldozers have uncovered in the great metropolis’s implacable building of freeways, houses, and offices.

Almost impossible to exhume is what was most important to them–the Tongva spirit world. One spirit predominated, known as both Chinigchinich and Qua-o-ar, but many smaller spirits, unique to the place, animated the material world and were associated with the weather, animals, plants, and locales. The peoples’ shamans could journey into that spirit world to heal afflictions of the body and soul, but so too could everyday people when they powdered and drank the root of the wicked and transcendent jimson weed.

While intrepid Spanish explorers (Juan Cabrillo in 1542 and Sebastián Vizcaíno in 1602-03) had audaciously claimed all of Alta California for the Crown, it was not until 1771 that storms that had brewed in far away places would descend on the people of such villages as Yang-na, Cahueg-na, and Asucsag-na. From the College of San Fernando near Mexico City would come priests carrying the Word of that awesome and jealous God first to the natives way to the south, then to the Kumeyaay in 1769 (San Diego), and two years later to the Tongva at the river to which the friars would give the same name as the mission the friars would establish there,San Gabriel. Padre Junípero Serra, the first and most famous of the father presidents of the California missions, brought the Word from Catalan-speaking Mallorca, an island off the coast of Spain. He envisioned that from these people whom he called salvages could be created a most perfect society. Once rid of their devilish heathenism, and compelled–by the whip, if necessary–to confine sex to Christian marriage and labor to European-style farming, the newly Christianized natives would unite as one body in the church: imagine God as the head, the church as the torso, and the newly illuminated believers as the legs and arms, and then how all would be joined via the sacred ritual of Holy Communion.

Father Jose Maria Zalvidea, the outstanding priest at San Gabriel, built San Gabriel into what was called from that time on “the Pride of the Missions.” Father Zalvidea was so earnest a fisherman of souls that he learned the Gabrieleño language and crossed mountains to visit their villages.  In a brief diary of 1806 he related one such trip to “the village of Talihuilimit where I baptized 3 old women, the1st of sixty years (and) who had lost the use of one of her legs.” Father Zalvidea had compassion for her and believed in the equality of souls: “To her I gave the name María Magdalena.” The complexity of this priest, though, emerges in the recollection of an Indian, Julio César, who “served him as a chorister.” He told how he “was a very good man, but was . . . very ill . . . He struggled constantly with the devil, whom he accused of threatening him.  In order to overcome the devil he constantly flogged himself, wore hair-cloth, drove nails into his feet, and, in short, tormented himself in the cruelest manner.” Such physical penance, understood in part as sharing the Savior’s pain upon the cross, was not uncommon amongst the devout. Padre Serra chastised himself with a whip, too.

While Franciscan priests struggled to Christianize the native people at the San Gabriel mission, a competing idea of civil society–that people could unite through bonds of property, law, and citizenship–came to southern California in the baggage of the first two governors, Felipe de Neve (1775-82) and the former military comandante Pedro Fages (1782-91). These forceful men feuded incessantly with Padre Serra and then the later Franciscan leaders. In part their conflicts derived over who should control the newfound bounty of Alta California and in part over these great ideas of what should organize society and what the future of New Spain (Mexico and the former provinces in the present-day United States) should look like: religious communities or secular, civil towns. To further his conception Neve ordered the founding of two pueblos, one at San Jose in 1777 and the other in 1781 along the Río Porciúncula, where the old village of Yanga-na had been, nuestra Señora de los Angeles. The Mission Road (paved today and tenanted with mostly Asian shopettes) connected the pueblo named for the Queen of the Angels with the mission named for the archangel who bore the good news to Mary that she would bear the Son of God. The rancor would increase between those associated with the vision of a civil and secular Los Angeles and those who would see its future in terms of spiritual utopia.

Indeed, it was as if proponents of these two great ideas–of the spiritual and secular societies–had found a barren place where their visions could be played out and the aboriginals’ nondescript existence could be replaced with something sublime. On the side of civil society Governor Neve issued a reglamento in 1779 directing the founding of pueblos (towns). In it he codified the proper ordering of a town regarding house lots, pasturage, a proper plaza, and how “the settlers shall nominate by and from themselves the public officials that shall have been arranged for.” It was with these ideas in mind that Pedro Fages suggested that the area along the Río Porciúncula “offers a hospitable place for some Spanish families to join together as neighbors.” Eleven families who had journeyed from the interior of Mexico marched from the Mission San Gabriel on September 4, 1781, to the site the governor had selected. There are divergent stories of the ceremony which Neve conducted, but we do know that the mission fathers blessed the new pobladores and that they were a mix of mestizos, mulattos, and Indians, though one claimed to be Spanish. With pasturage, cows, and seed they were to be independent economically and politically. Indeed each patriarch described himself in the town records as “queda avezindado en el Pueblo.”  Avecindarse means “to join as neighbors,” and this is the word that helps us understand the fundamental social relation in the new pueblo de los Angeles. And there the settlers proceeded to do with the Indians as the rest of Spanish America so famously did–they worked them, corrupted them, and married with them.

In 1784, the Rosas brothers of el pueblo de los Angeles, Carlos and Máximo who were of Indian and mulatto descent, both married gentile Indian women (who had to be baptized for the occasion.) The two women of Yanga-na and Jajambit rancheras were both probably familiar with pueblo life. In 1796 another Rosas married a neophyte from San Gabriel, as had a number of other pobladores. Those few soldiers from Santa Barbara and San Juan Capistrano who married Indian women, as Spanish policy encouraged, mostly moved to Los Angeles before the turn of the century. After forty years of missionization, a very few Indians were selected to leave, marry other “nuevos cristianos,” and join the pueblo.

On and on went the diatribes of the friars about “the residents [who] are a group of laggards . . . in those pueblos without priests.” Imagine the righteous indignation when Dona Eulalia Callis, the wife of the archenemy of the missions, Governor Pedro Fages, furiously and publicly sued her husband for divorce, charging in 1785 “that I found my husband physically on top of one his servants, a Yuma Indian girl,” an event known to have been common for the governor, pobladores, and soldiers. As Padre Zalvidea fumed from San Gabriel about Los Angeles in 1816, “That [pursuit] to which everyone dedicates himself is to go about on horseback, put in grapevines, hiring a few gentiles for this purpose, teach them to get drunk, and then take jars of aguardiente [“firewater” or brandy] to Christian Indians.”

We see emerging in Los Angeles what happened to so many Indians who did not die or whom Europeanization did not sweep into the dustbin of history. They became Mexican culture. Their children would be essentially Hispano-Americano, neither Indian nor Iberian in culture but a hybrid, a mestizo. This was the great idea that, out of the wreckage of Spanish imperialism to which the Catholic Church had attached itself, came from the variously sanctified and base mixings of the Americas: the stunning idea that people were not one thing or the other, nor even some cross between two civilizations, but some new mestizaje, some new way of being altogether. This mixture has been one of the great tensions–sometimes creative, sometimes confusing–in Los Angeles and the other great Latin American cities of the New World.

This now-great metropolitan center of Los Angeles has its genesis in the religious and the civil, the sacred and the profane, but its growth and troubles and strengths have been about the issues associated with mixing. In this place where God and Church once dictated authority in the mission and Holy Communion bound neophyte and Christian together, where neighbors (vecinos) had voluntarily entered into a civil arrangement in the cause of settling the place for the Crown and for production of subsistence, there has been at once conflict and accommodation, and separation and mixing. Thus it was that along one river did the vision of a society united by the One True God in the Mission San Gabriel contend with the town only a few leagues distant along another river, one motivated by the vision of an enlightened civil society. Some readers might want to know that, while the two rivers flow separately to the sea, the two places quickly and unalterably mixed into a world famous city, the very one that arguably portends our urban future.

Further Reading:  Because Los Angeles history has always been so fractious–a historiography that reflects the controversies over its founding within the Spanish Empire–the secondary sources are stunningly varied in their points of view, choices of documents, and agendas. Pro-church scholars have blamed Fages and the soldiers for the failure of the missions and the iniquity at the pueblos. Others, often for genealogical purposes, have celebrated the first “pioneers.” More recently, scholars have emphasized the victimization of the Indians by the soldiers, settlers, and the church. I will somewhat ungraciously suggest my own book, Thrown among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991), for a more balanced view of the Mission San Gabriel and the founding and evolution of Los Angeles, and enthusiastically recommend the wonderful collection of documents that Rose Marie Beebe and Robert Sankewicz have edited, Lands of Promise and Despair: Chronicles of Early California, 1535-1846 (Berkeley, 2001). Each has a strong bibliography.  

This article originally appeared in issue 3.4 (July, 2003).

Douglas Monroy is professor of history at The Colorado College and the author of Thrown among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley, 1990), and Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression (Berkeley, 1999), both from the University of California Press. He is presently finishing a book called In the Footsteps of Father Serra: Essays on California, Mexico, and America.

My question was whether slavery really disappeared from national politics between the abolition of the slave trade in 1808 and the Missouri Crisis beginning in 1819.  The common wisdom was that the partisan and international fury surrounding Jefferson’s Embargo on foreign trade and the War of 1812 took slavery off the table in national politics.  I thought this national newspaper in particular would be a good place to inquire as to the truth of that historiographical consensus.

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

Matthew Mason is an assistant professor of history at Brigham Young University. He is the author of Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (UNC Press, 2008).

That is the question

In 1961, when I entered junior high school in the New York City Public Schools, I was introduced to the “Do Now” activity–an individual, pencil-and-paper exercise (the sort of thing that might otherwise be done at home) at the beginning of each math class–which continued as long as I took mathematics courses. The intent was to ensure that students understood the previous lesson, correct any student misunderstandings, and remedy any deficiencies. It would also help students who had been absent and (hopefully) serve as a motivation for the class.

Today, the “Do Now” has become almost universal across the secondary school curriculum. Walk into a United States history class and you are likely to witness the class period beginning with the teacher calling students’ attention to the daily “Do Now” inscribed on the blackboard. Usually, this entails a brief reading assignment followed by several questions introducing the day’s lesson. Many teachers believe this opening activity starts the lesson off in an orderly, efficient, and productive manner, improving classroom management in the process. 

Unfortunately, the “Do Now” has been corrupted: it has been drastically altered from an effective review technique for the drill required in mathematics instruction to an introductory device that is usually, at best, an ineffective waste of instructional time. Well-meaning educators are often unwittingly sabotaging their lessons before they have a chance to get them off of the ground. Even teacher educators, supervisors, teachers’ unions, and professional organizations often embrace the “Do Now” as the gold standard for inclusion in a lesson plan.

A typical “Do Now” assigned to a heterogeneously grouped United States history class might be the following:

Answer the following questions based on the political cartoon that appears below and your knowledge of United States history.

1. Describe in detail what you see in the political cartoon.
2. Why is the turtle in the cartoon named “Ograbme?”
3. How does the political cartoon reflect the way the cartoonist feels about Thomas Jefferson’s trade policy?

The questions incorporated in this activity elicit conclusions about the cartoonist’s message. Note that the first question merely asks students to pull information from the cartoon, while the second and third questions require higher levels of thought. These three questions could ultimately lead to further questions such as:

“How does the cartoonist feel that the Jefferson embargo is affecting New England and the United States?” 

“What specific evidence in the cartoon leads you to an understanding of the opinion of the cartoonist?”

“Why do you think the Jefferson embargo became so controversial?”

“What constitutional alternatives might you use if you were a dissatisfied citizen wishing to oppose the Jefferson embargo?”

The richness of the lesson points to the problem that the history educator faces when employing a non-mathematical “Do Now” commencement activity. Because the elements of good questioning are already evident in the above referenced “Do Now,” one might wonder why these questions necessitate an opening activity at all. Most teachers assign homework in advance of the lesson. Some of these questions (question number one in particular) would be better addressed in a homework assignment, thus saving classroom time for more productive and more interactive discussion.

There are also psychological problems created with the incorporation of “Do Now” exercises. The completion of the above assignment, particularly in a heterogeneous situation, may extend far beyond the five minutes of a mathematics drill activity and could vary from five minutes for stronger students to fifteen minutes for the weakest. Weaker students may have difficulty identifying finer details in the cartoon and may become frustrated with the remaining two questions. The unintended message if the teacher then “cuts” the activity off before students have completed the task may well be that the work is really not that important (particularly if it is not being collected and graded). This, in turn, might encourage students to begin arriving late for class (when, in their view, the “real work” begins). Or it might compel them to “stretch” the activity to as great a length of time as possible or to simply (either covertly or blatantly) avoid the “Do Now” exercise entirely.

A stronger instructional opening would focus student attention upon the instructor rather than desk activity. Effective commencement activities might include a discussion of an upcoming homework assignment, a reminder about a future examination, the progress of an assigned project, or perhaps the discussion of a significant news development related to the course of study. The message given to all students is that the teacher has started the serious instruction from the opening bell (i.e., he or she is speaking) and the class must be engaged. The advantage that this practice also creates is that through a discussion clarifying class work or dealing with a contemporary situation, a dialogue is easily created where students are encouraged to participate. The discussion that begins with this opening segment will often carry over to the remainder of the period, as students have now already been engaged in conversing with the teacher (and each other) prior to the start of the formal lesson.

Students in today’s technological age require stimulation. It is, therefore, essential to follow this initial discussion with some motivation prior to the beginning of the informational portion of the lesson. A “Do Now” activity subtracts from the time needed to properly stimulate a class and adds the drawback of “dulling” the instruction by encompassing a drill that, by its very nature, is perceived as “drudge work,” done in isolation at the student’s desk.

The natural discussion that would be generated from the snapping turtle depicted in the cartoon would be sufficient to stimulate most classes through immediate discussion. With proper instructional guidance and effective questioning techniques, it offers the opportunity to get students to speak to each other. (How often do we complain that our students don’t want to participate?) The “Do Now” described earlier usually leads to a very dull reading of individual answers rather than engaging dialogue.

This is not to say, however, that there should be a complete removal of any hands-on activity during the lesson. If any new material, such as a primary document, were to be introduced as a portion of the lesson, it certainly would be desirable to give students time to read, examine, and digest the information, especially with one or two thought-provoking questions to consider. If such questions could be developed within the framework of the lesson, the teacher would be more likely to succeed. With the students now more engaged by the subject matter, they will also be more inclined to take seriously a short task over very limited time (which the teacher will now have more power to control).

The elimination of a formal, daily “Do Now” activity, in sum, opens the lesson to far greater potential for effective motivation and classroom management. It will additionally allow for a more effective placement of hands-on instruction at an appropriate point in the lesson time frame.

It is ultimately the teacher who must break out of the box and incorporate a varied yet structured approach to accomplish effective teaching in United States history. By liberating students from the tyranny of the “Do Now,” the history educator will thereby be free to create well-structured, rich lessons containing depth and meaning.

This article originally appeared in issue 7.1 (October, 2006).

Stephen A. Shultz is the coordinator of social studies with the Rocky Point Public Schools in New York. He has authored teacher manuals in both United States and global history and has contributed to several textbooks and sourcebooks.

With Mightier Than the Sword, Reynolds has written the biography of a book, and 2012 might be the perfect time to read it. As the wired world celebrates Twitter revolutions and the cultural power of the 140-character microblog, we citizens of Facebook nation have come to suspect that books will soon be a thing of the past. At a time when the concept of an author’s words sandwiched between two covers seems a little quaint, we might finally be ready to rediscover what a really powerful book can do. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is that sort of book, and if Reynolds’s study of it convinces readers of anything, it will be that they have somehow underrated the cultural importance of a novel that many already believe launched America’s bloodiest war. First printed in serialized form in issues of The National Era in 1851 and 1852, UTC was quickly published as a bestselling anti-slavery novel. It has been in print ever since—outlasting slavery, its author, and any number of supposedly earth-shattering novels that are now long forgotten.

More important than its life in print, though, is how from its first appearance the novel thoroughly permeated the culture that created it. Within months of its publication it was already being adapted to the stage, and its dramatic productions, as Reynolds points out, would for many decades reach far more Americans than Stowe’s novel could. Almost instantly, its compelling characters became the subjects of everything from figurines to children’s games. Tom Mania spanned the Atlantic, surging into Britain, the Continent, and even Tsarist Russia, and the story brought a huge number of international readers to sympathetic tears. It did not, however, have the same effect on white Southerners. Rather, its most immediate result was increasing the already heightened sense of sectional divisiveness that defined the last antebellum decade in the wake of the Compromise of 1850 and its strengthened Fugitive Slave Law. As more and more Northerners began to regard the actuality of American slavery through the lens of Stowe’s fiction, slaveholders and their supporters dug in their heels and clamored in protest. As the war of words heated up, it would bring new and bloody violence to Western territories and the floors of Congress, and help make the Civil War irrepressible. Stowe’s novel had attempted to fight with weapons of the heart and had not called for a war to liberate Uncle Tom and his fellow slaves. Her book helped bring on the Civil War only through a complex chain of powerful responses and reactions that the author herself could hardly have predicted, and which would continue to ripple through the postwar years right up to the present day.

By tabulating complex influences and diverse responses—from Tom shows and white supremacist narratives, to Hollywood films and televised miniseries—[Reynolds] offers readers a richly informative and entertaining work of scholarship, a generation-spanning account of American race relations, and a testament to the power of a book to change history.

This is the story Reynolds wants to tell, and he is not interested in offering merely a new literary interpretation or a sense of historical context. These are small fry; the big fish he is angling for is indicated in his rather grandiose title. He is seeking an understanding of how Stowe’s pen came to be mightier than the sword—or at least came to be the sort of pen that makes swords necessary. As he traces the cultural developments preceding, surrounding, and emanating from one of the most historically significant novels ever written, he is also explaining how literature achieves cultural power. By tabulating complex influences and diverse responses—from Tom shows and white supremacist narratives, to Hollywood films and televised miniseries—he offers readers a richly informative and entertaining work of scholarship, a generation-spanning account of American race relations, and a testament to the power of a book to change history. His book should be of special interest to scholars working in American studies and nineteenth-century literature, but its sparkling and sprawling narrative should also appeal to general readers.

Reynolds’s historical descriptions and close readings are engrossing in their own right, but they also support a thesis that helps organize and connect the book’s first and second halves. The first three chapters—on antebellum religion, popular culture, and antislavery rhetoric—address Stowe’s influences and how UTC managed to weave together many important strands of antebellum culture into a uniquely powerful novel. The second half tries to demonstrate the book’s monumental impact in three chapters that explore a wide array of adaptations, refutations, and passing references that extend into the twentieth century and beyond.

Although it may not become fully clear until nearly the book’s midpoint, Reynolds believes that the two sides of this story are indelibly connected: he argues that Stowe’s original synthesis of innumerable cultural forces led to the novel’s broad and longstanding influence. The first few chapters describe a dizzying variety of occasionally contradictory elements that Reynolds finds shaping the novel’s construction. Yet just as readers are ready to assume this cacophony of contradictory impulses have snuck in while Reynolds wasn’t looking, he gathers the squawking brood under his authorial wing. “[T]here is no single source,” Reynolds insists. “All kinds of cultural phenomena—visionary fiction, biblical narratives, pro- and anti-Catholicism, gender issues, temperance, moral reform, minstrelsy—contributed to the novel” (87-88). This range of influences, according to Reynolds, helps explain Uncle Tom‘s later significance. Although many have sought the single “key” to Uncle Tom‘s construction, Reynolds believes that “to isolate individual sources strips the novel of suggestiveness and diminishes what may be called its distributive power: its capacity for generating varied responses in different contexts” (188).

Reynolds’s resistance to root causes or uniform effects means, in practical terms, that he can range widely in both sections of the book. Influences proliferate, effects expand to include distant times and lands, and the reader gets to enjoy a decidedly lively literary history. Reynolds’s determination to emphasize the novel’s capacious dimensions also allows him to take a fuller measure of the cultural complexity that produced it. In the first of the influence chapters, for example, Reynolds focuses on religion but wisely avoids trying to wrangle the complicated spiritual shifts of the antebellum period into a pat set of categories. Thus he portrays strains of religious thought and feeling that are more varied, convoluted, and dynamic than the reader might expect. The dominant Christianity of Stowe’s time and place, Reynolds tells us, was in the midst of a profound transition away from traditional Calvinism and into new engagements with broader social activism and humanitarian passions. Because no family in America seems to have been more embroiled in this religious ferment than the Beechers, it is no surprise that the spiritual voice of UTC captures the tone, if not the content, of a surprising combination of half-abandoned orthodoxies. Reynolds shows how the disciples of a new “religion of love” dug the Puritan tradition out of its grounding in Calvinism and redirected its reformist energies toward fresh social causes. While the pragmatic social reform of the sort pursued by Harriet’s father, Lyman Beecher, is still hard at work in her novel, it competes with the passionate appeal represented by her brother, Henry, and the era’s sentimental preference for the heart rather than the head. In this unruly chapter, a range of reinterpreted dogmas and unexpected interests dishevels the image of the author of UTCas a straight-laced Christian crusader. Stowe’s staunch scriptural faith is complicated by flirtations with spiritualism and trance writing. The novel’s sense of ecstatic vision turns out to be Roman Catholic, but it arrives yoked to the distrust of religious authority that energized the anti-Catholicism of nativists and know-nothings. If this seems contradictory, so be it; as Walt Whitman, another of Reynolds’s antebellum subjects, once proclaimed, we are large, and contain multitudes.

Reynolds’s refusal to apply modern categories to the messiness of nineteenth-century culture can sometimes yield what seem like excuses for prejudice and oppression, and some readers may be bothered by his tendency to judge works according to the moral standards of their times rather than our own. But that same resistance to contemporary standards also allows him to share some rich connections that otherwise might be difficult to recognize. In a chapter on popular culture, for instance, he refuses to describe the novel’s representation of women as either subversive or conservative, but that refusal is no mere shrug. Rather, Reynolds argues that Stowe was intentionally staking out a “middle ground” between available positions on women’s roles, while arguing that she did so in Uncle Tom in order to deliver “daring ideas and images in conventional wrapping” to a mainstream audience (45). But Reynolds also points out that Stowe derived this strategy from a whole range of nineteenth-century popular literatures that profited by presenting subversive material under the mantle of respectable conventions. Reynolds catalogs titillating antebellum accounts of vice that appeared in print as crusades to reform drunkenness, crime, and Catholicism; these, he suggests, served as models for Stowe’s muted but still sensational descriptions of slavery and the treatment of women in UTC.

After the first half of his study, Reynolds moves from an effort to identify Stowe’s precedents to a celebration of the novel as an unprecedented phenomenon. The chapters on “Igniting the War,” “Tom Everywhere,” and “Tom in Modern Times” offer deep analyses of some of the more obvious and important responses to Stowe—the move toward war being chief among them. Yet there are more surprising outcomes here as well, as Reynolds traces the novel’s role as a reference point and argument partner for a vast array of cultural productions. Already in the first chapter on the novel’s results, UTCseems to have inspired the modern play, the interracial working class, Leaves of Grass, “Benito Cereno,” and (I’m fairly sure) vaudeville. While most readers would assume that the novel inspired anti-slavery agitators and Southern apologists alike in the antebellum period, later responses to the novel in the penultimate chapter figure largely in the “mammoth contests over versions of American history” that David W. Blight has found at the heart of postbellum nationalism. Later still, the book becomes a pivot point in the emergence of the American century and the Jim Crow era, and a catalyst for a slew of major national and international events including the Russian Revolution. True, when Reynolds asks the rhetorical question, “Did Uncle Tom’s Cabin save Lenin’s life?” readers will likely respond with a fairly unanimous “no” (225). Nevertheless, even such relatively unconvincing claims are suggested by fascinating evidence. Lenin’s Eliza-like escape across breaking ice to Finland was clearly too sumptuous not to include, and Reynolds’s reading of this dramatic flight may be somewhat tongue in cheek. Furthermore, the author more often than not is able to make a surprising connection stick. Reynolds copiously documents communist revolutionaries’ attachments to UTC, and finds similarly striking ties to the early leaders of the Niagara Movement and the NAACP.

By the time readers reach the era in which the “Uncle Tom” epithet has become more familiar than Stowe’s character, they may be wondering whether they are still dealing in any substantial way with an antebellum novel’s influence. Is Uncle Tom merely marching in a grand cultural parade or is he leading the band? And is it still Stowe’s Uncle Tom, or someone who only happens to share his name? That question about the degree of literary influence may be only mildly disconcerting when the book arrives at Birth of a Nation in 1915, but it becomes more urgent when Tom still seems to be hovering over the martyrdom of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. How much, the reader may wonder, does this really have to do with Stowe’s book? Reynolds wonders about this, too, but the fact that the same question has been asked almost without ceasing since 1851 reinforces his point about UTC‘s importance. Ever since its first serialized publication, the novel has encouraged serious reflection on literature’s historical effects, a scholarly activity that, as Reynolds’s enriching explorations demonstrate once again, is worth pursuing even if the quest turns out to be endless.

This article originally appeared in issue 12.4.5 (September, 2012).

Samuel Graber is an assistant professor of Humanities and Literature in Christ College, the interdisciplinary honors college of Valparaiso University. His articles have appeared in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and American Nineteenth Century History. He is currently revising a book about transatlantic influences on the representation and remembrance of the American Civil War.

On a chilly evening in early December 1795, seven members of New York City’s Friendly Club convened at William Dunlap’s lodging for their weekly meeting. Dunlap opened the proceedings with a reading from Helen Maria Williams’s recent publication, Letters from France, and for nearly five hours, the attendees discussed literary works and debated current issues. Satisfied that the meeting had generated a stimulating conversation, Elihu Hubbard Smith recorded in his diary that “[t]his evening has been better spent, than usual.”

In Men of Letters in the Early Republic, Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan examines why Smith, along with many other young men residing in the Northeast, attached great importance to intellectual labor and exchange. These aspiring literati, Kaplan observes, perceived that belletristic endeavors were necessary for maintaining a healthy and harmonious society. Their vision of a national community bound by practices of sociability, sensibility, and learning constituted a radical critique to the notion that formal political participation defined citizenship, and this vision offered a welcome alternative to the intense personal and ideological partisanship of post-Revolutionary America.

In her investigation of how “men of letters” articulated a civic role for themselves and whether there was “a place and a use in the new United States for these men and their different kind of citizenship” (12), the author focuses on three sets of individuals and their affiliated literary networks: Elihu Hubbard Smith and the Friendly Club in New York; Joseph Dennie of Walpole, New Hampshire, and later Philadelphia; and the trio of William Smith Shaw, Arthur Maynard Walter, and Joseph Stephens Buckminster, who formed the core of the Boston-based Anthology Society and founded the Boston Athenaeum. Kaplan notes that these groups exhibited several shared traits, most notably adherence to social elitism, masculine identity, and transatlantic modes of polite culture. Even so, she goes on to show that they each formulated different models for social and political improvement.

For Smith, a physician and prolific author of prose and poetry, the accumulation and dissemination of all types of knowledge in a convivial setting was the means by which individuals effected change and “created harmony and pursued justice” (7). The aptly named Friendly Club provided a space where Smith could collaborate with others on projects of self- and social reform. Here he could converse with colleagues of various vocations—the novelist Charles Brockden Brown, the jurist James Kent, and the dramatist William Dunlap—about the progress of the local manumission society to which they belonged, discuss Brown’s latest novel or Dunlap’s latest play, or go over innumerable other topics. Friendly Club meetings, however, were only one of many literary venues available to Smith. As Kaplan surmises, “Rather than a self-sustaining circle, the Friendly Club was a node in a network of linked and interdependent groups” (43). Smith’s involvement with the Medical Repository and his frequent conversation and correspondence with women literati further demonstrate that the network contained overlapping realms of oral, manuscript, and print communications.

Like Smith, Joseph Dennie, a reluctant lawyer, created an active literary network, producing three periodicals with varied success—the Tablet in Boston, the Farmer’s Weekly Museum in Walpole, and the Port Folio in Philadelphia—and participating in Philadelphia’s Tuesday Club. Kaplan attributes the longevity and popularity of Dennie’s Walpole paper to his ability to create a geographically extensive network of “all those who read, wrote for, found subscriptions for, extracted, or even quoted the Museum” (122). To solidify his readers as a distinct community, Dennie employed an editorial style based on intimacy and humor. Although he lambasted overt partisanship, his writings nonetheless imparted Federalist sympathies. Moreover, unlike Smith, Dennie favored “ephemeral wit” over “empirical information” as a means of exposing truth (9).

For Bostonians Joseph Stephens Buckminster, a Unitarian minister, Arthur Maynard Walter, a lawyer, and William Smith Shaw, the clerk of the District Court of Massachusetts, belles lettres provided a refuge from the mundane and at times maddening world of “commerce and politics” (11). In contrast to Smith and Dennie, these men did not pursue a national framework for their reforming efforts, developing in its stead “a more parochial vision of cultural community” (189). Relying on an impressive literary network that spanned Boston and Cambridge, the Anthology Society revived the Monthly Anthology, a local periodical, and formed the Athenaeum, a private reading room that served Boston’s mercantile elite.

Kaplan concludes that although Smith, Dennie, and the Anthologists established “lasting forums and institutions,” such as the Medical Repository, the Port Folio, and the Boston Athenaeum, they nonetheless failed in their quest to transform notions of American citizenship (231). Even if their literary endeavors did not reconstitute civil society throughout the fledgling United States, the evidence presented in Men of Letters suggests that these belletrists did shape emergent cultures in local and regional spaces. As Trish Loughran has recently claimed in The Republic in Print (New York, 2007), transportation and communication deficiencies precluded the possibility of a viable national public in print. Kaplan’s examination similarly forces us to move beyond a national framework and to foreground the local and regional networks at work in the post-Revolutionary era.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.3 (April, 2009).

Robb K. Haberman is a Ph.D. candidate in early American history at the University of Connecticut. His dissertation is entitled, “Periodical Publics: Magazines and Literary Networks in Post-Revolutionary America.”

Once marginalized in a male-dominated profession, insights from the study of women’s history are coming to reshape the entire discipline, even in such seemingly unlikely specialties as foreign policy and political history. Similarly, attention to race has spread beyond the study of African American social history. Historians increasingly recognize the influence of gender and race on virtually all aspects of American life, both among women and among men.

In Reforming Men and Women, historian Bruce Dorsey now draws together ideas from a wide range of recent studies in gender and racial history. He builds on the insights of such scholars as Gail Bederman, David Roediger, and Anthony Rotundo (who provide flattering blurbs on the dust jacket), and applies their ideas in an intricate reinterpretation of antebellum reform. Dorsey proposes to create “a holistic history of gender and reform by documenting and exploring the life experiences of both men and women reformers, and the contested meanings of manhood and womanhood among urban Americans, both black and white, working class and middle class, in the antebellum North. More than simply bridging the gap between two phases of the historical literature on reform, [Dorsey] offer[s] a different perspective on this history of topics–antislavery, temperance, poor relief, and nativism–that have produced a trail of historical interpretations.” In so doing, he contributes to a larger “intellectual quest to engender all of American history”(4).

The city of Philadelphia (with its early working-class suburbs) is the setting for most of the events discussed in this book, but Dorsey places greater emphasis on the national context. He begins by examining women’s activism within the public sphere of the early republic. Differing from earlier work by Linda Kerber, he suggests that early reformers did not present themselves as republican mothers whose public speech was an extension of their maternal duties. Instead, free African American women, unmarried Quaker women, and others found alternative strategies in defending their right to speak on public issues–including appropriating “a set of widely accepted masculine symbols, masculine language, and in some cases a masculine persona” (30). Like men, they defined their benevolent activity in opposition to selfish luxury, and presented themselves as fully capable of independence and civic virtue.

In his chapter on poor relief in the early nineteenth century, Dorsey examines a growing Northern contempt for the poor. “In the eyes of the middle class, a poor person had changed from a neighbor into a stranger,” partly because the classes were indeed more spatially separated (60). Male-led societies soon embraced the idea that the poor were to blame for their poverty, and sought to put them to work in a “house of industry” that was little more than a sweatshop. Women reformers were more hesitant to blame the poor. The divergent responses of male and female reformers, Dorsey suggests, may have reinforced a middle-class male perception that compassion was a sign of feminine weakness. But as reformers of both genders accepted a view that poverty was the result of sin, women retained an important niche in benevolent work based on what was believed to be their special “influence” over the souls of others.

Just as poverty was believed to be the fault of improvident males (while exploited female workers faded into invisibility), so did drunkenness come to be seen as a problem mainly of young men–a crisis of young manhood vaguely associated with the pursuit of self-interest in Jacksonian America. Drink was not seen as a problem limited to any class. In denouncing drunkenness, “white middle-class men were engaged in a battle over gender identity that was not exclusively an attempt at class domination against working-class men. It also involved, significantly, a conflict within the middle class over rival forms of masculinity”(107). Working-class white and African American reformers also used temperance to explore the meanings of manhood–respectively seeing sobriety as a marker of whiteness and of freedom from the slavery of drink.

Dorsey’s chapter on antislavery examines the centrality of masculinity in the African colonization movement. Colonizationists portrayed African American men as having been emasculated by slavery and white prejudice, and thus in need of emigration to Africa in order to regain their manly independence. White fears of black men’s social and sexual engagement with white women contributed to denunciations of abolitionism and to the notorious burning of the abolitionist Pennsylvania Hall in 1838. Blacks also drew on the language of manhood in their debates over emigration. White abolitionist women linked the plight of women to the plight of the slaves, and thus attacked both forms of oppression together.

In conflicts over Irish immigration, a tangle of ideas about white manhood shaped the discourse of natives and newcomers alike. Native white men doubted the manly independence of the supposedly priest-ridden Irish. Native women launched what the author calls “the first political newspaper in the republic operated exclusively by women,” in order to slander the Irish and promote Anglo-American women’s patriotism (213). The editors defended their entrance into the public sphere by asserting that Irish Catholic immigration threatened values dear to women, particularly the religious instruction of children in the public schools. Irish immigrants also developed a complicated, gendered discourse about their place in the United States. They divided among themselves over the manliness of drinking; their effort to claim the rights of white Americans contributed to their growing racism, even in the face of Irish nationalists’ call for racial unity.

Dorsey’s argument is far too complex to adequately summarize in a brief review. Each page introduces new insights–most of them not wholly original to Dorsey, but woven by him into a coherent whole. As the author moves methodically from topic to topic, examining the thoughts and actions of people in various social categories, historians will be impressed by the breadth of his research in primary and secondary sources. Readers outside the profession may be discouraged by the plodding prose, but those who persist will see a solid synthesis, and application, of insights from recent gender and racial history.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.4 (July, 2003).

Peter C. Baldwin is assistant professor of history at the University of Connecticut, and author of Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford, 1850-1930 (Columbus, 1999). He is currently researching the social history of night in American cities.