Tag: “Doing” History

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History on Shuffle

Jenny Reeder, a member of my cohort here at GMU, was studying for her quals last semester, and she showed me her 3×5 cards.

I’d never really used them before, personally, for anything other than public speaking classes in high school. They don’t really gibe with my rather organic, piecemeal approach to studying or to note taking. It always struck me as an extra activity that would distract me from the actual work at hand. But that’s just me– YMMV, different strokes for different folks, something about drummers, etc.

Now, just because I don’t use them doesn’t mean I’m not fascinated to see them. And Jenny’s were amazing. She had multiple sets in different orders– one stack by author, another in chronological order, and another that was organized alphabetically by theme.

It’s that last stack that really got to me– it was a fascinating way to look at History, where causality, chronology, biography, and historiography all fall by the wayside. Where Reconstruction is nearer to Reformation than it is to the Civil War. Flipping though those cards, I realized, was historical gymnastics. You had to shift modes, books, eras, and patterns with each flip of a card. Explain the House of Burgesses. Okay. Flip the card. Explain HUAC! The sudden shifts and turns didn’t just make practicing for quals more challenging, they made it more engaging and fun.

* * *

If you have an iPod, you’ve had those moments where you suspect that the “shuffle” feature isn’t as random as it’s supposed to be– why else would it play three songs in a row from the 1980s that all feature former Beatles? But, as this NPR report and this episode of WGBH’s Open Source make pretty clear, it’s not that the iPod isn’t random– it’s that our minds are quite bad at perceiving randomness. We naturally and instinctively look for order, for patterns, and our mind gloms onto them instantly, even if what we’re really looking at is completely random…

Even in the face of chaos, our brains look for order, looking for connections, perceiving causality. And that process is a lot of what we as historians do– we look to the chaos of the past, and try to make order of it. Sometimes we do it by imposing our own frameworks onto the events of the past, but we at least like to think that what we are actually doing is illuminating connections that may have been obscured, perceiving the organic order where it may look like chaos or disorder.

So how do we harness this propensity to see order, and make it work for us?

* * *

It seems to me that randomness has traditionally been a bit of an anathema to historians. The sheer vastness of history itself requires the imposition of order, and that’s the historian’s task. “Doing history” is making order out of disorder. Why would we embrace the chaos?

But digital tools allow us to work with things differently. This started to be apparent with the New Social History, with historians working with punch-card computers to crunch number sets so vast that they had been useless before. Computers are great for making large data sets manageable.

They’re also quite good as pseudorandom number generators, which in turn means that they are quite good at creating fairly random juxtapositions. We can see this with the iPod’s shuffle feature, or even the link on Wikipedia that takes you to a random page. We now find ourselves in a age of shuffle, where wild juxtaposition is the norm.

Even simple little applications like the Random Activity Generator can be powerful tools for promoting creative thinking. Incorporating the principle of randomness into tools for digital humanists would, I think, help promote better scholarship. Shuffling– creating random juxtapositions– forces the mind to make connections between otherwise unconnected items. And finding new connections between historical events– isn’t that at the heart of a historian’s work?

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Herbert Hoover and the Corporatist State

One of those questions that Americanist grad students in History get asked a lot is, “What was new about the New Deal?”

At first it struck me as a pretty obvious question– of course EVERYTHING was new about the New Deal. That’s definitely the story I heard growing up… But when you look at it, things get murky– Hoover wasn’t the laissez faire capitalist he’s often made out to be. In fact, he was a proponent of an interventionist federal government. FDR outspent every president before him on social welfare, but Hoover outspent every president before HIM.

So looking to resolve the question, and looking into it a bit, I’ve come up with– well, at least a theory. Hoover was a corporatist and an associationalist. He was for intervention, but not for the type of big state programs that the New Deal ushered in. And when he needed big state programs, he didn’t like to leave their management in the hands of the state alone.

In his essay “Three Facets of Hooverian Associationalism” Ellis Hawley argues that Hoover, in his time as Secretary of Commerce and President, created a new approach to federal regulation with regard to “problematic” industries, one that he sees as an outgrowth of progressive associationalism. While earlier progressive associationalism had approached the regulation of industry by the bringing together of interest groups that had a stake in the industry, from management, labor, and consumers, Hoover’s regulatory approach to troubled industries was essentially corporatist—characterized by the rationalization of troubled industries by new governmental agencies that were headed by individuals within the industry. Hawley further argues that the definition of “problem” industries included not only industries in decline, but nascent industries whose primary “difficulty” was a failure to efficiently meet their full potential.  F. Robert van der Linden’s Airlines and Air Mail and Douglas Craig’s Fireside Politics, two books that draw on Hawley’s work, both bring this particular dynamic into much closer focus, looking at the new industries of commercial aviation and radio, respectively.

Robert van der Linden draws very directly on Hawley’s work, framing his book in its introduction as an expansion of “Three Facets.” (viii) Where Hawley’s article focused primarily on the role Hoover played in regulating commercial aviation as Secretary of Commerce, van der Linden expands upon this work, looking at the arguably far greater role played by Hoover’s Postmaster General in regulating and rationalizing the industry after the Watres Act. While the Watres Act was essentially an expansion of Federal authority—giving Brown almost unchecked authority over the young airline industry, which was still dependent upon government subsidy in the form of Air Mail contracts—the way he went about implementing this authority is an excellent illustration of Hoover’s corporatist approach to regulation of industry.

In the conference of airline operators held May 19, 1930—the notorious “spoils conference”—Brown used the powers given him by the Watres Act to bring together the heads of the top companies to discuss, and resolve by means of cooperation, how to best rationalize the airline industry. This meeting, while it stunk of collusion to many contemporaries, embodied Hooverian corporatism. The nascent industry was a “problem” industry because it was failing to reach its potential—commercial airliners were failing to gain the desired numbers of air travelers, routes weren’t standardized, and there was a level of competition which, in the estimation of Brown and the heads of the top carriers, was unhealthy for the young industry. Brown brought together industry leaders to force consensus on these and other issues. The goal, more than simply the negotiation of Air Mail payment rates, was fairly explicitly to reshape the industry itself to something more in keeping with Taylorist notions of rational industrial management. The result was vertical integration of the industry, fusing several of the largest players to create a tighter oligopoly, and the exclusion of small upstart players to benefit “competition” among the remaining three behemoths.

The back-door collusion of this meeting eventually led to scandal when Hugo Black began his investigation and Roosevelt’s Postmaster General James Farley revoked the Air Mail contracts and assigned the military the task of flying the mail. However, military aviation quickly proved unable to safely and efficiently perform the task, and Air Mail contracts were re-awarded to the big three airlines. Moreover, the consolidations that Brown had overseen remained, and the three airlines created out of this conference remained as the core of the industry for half a century.

While Hawley and van der Linden see Hooverian corporatist regulation of “problem” industries as springing directly from the earlier principle of progressive associationalism, Douglas Craig interprets it as resulting from a failure of associationalism. Craig argues that the radio conferences of the 1920s reflect a more pure associationist approach, bringing together various interest groups to help steer the direction of the industry with direct Federal intervention being held back to a minimum, primarily in the maintaining of the Radio Act of 1912. Taking a stricter definition of associationalism, he argues that it is only when this sort of interest-group consensus building failed under the weight of the rapidly growing industry that Hooverian corporatist regulation came into play with the Radio Act of 1927 and the creation of the Federal Radio Commission.

Under the Radio Act of 1912, regulation of radio fell under the Department of Commerce, and thus—through most of the 1920s—under Hoover. When Hoover announced in 1926 that radio would be subject only to voluntary self-regulation until congress passed new legislation better defining the government’s rights and responsibilities in regulating radio, it could be argued that after his loss in court to the Intercity Radio Company, he decided that the young radio industry had officially reached the point of being a “problem” industry, and thus required a shift in tactics, away from traditional associationalism and toward corporatism.

The FRC was a clear example of corporatist regulation. The commissioners often were men who had worked within the industry, and often went on to executive positions within the networks after leaving the FRC. Moreover, the FRC favored commercial networks over the noncommercial independent operators, often placing a greater burden of proof upon them with regard to their commitment to public interest. While the commissioners were more overtly given the right to do so in legislation than Brown had been with the airlines, the FRC was also similar in that it helped to directly shape the industry, apportioning and taking away licenses of operators. While some of this reshaping was done in response to political pressures asserted by outspoken politicians, as with the rewarding of licenses to Southern operators to the detriment of operators in the North and East, it was always done in a spirit of cooperation with the major networks, who were also given a disproportionate number of clear channels.

As with the airline industry, the Hoover-era act that created this corporatist alignment of Federal and oligopolies’ interests was replaced by a New Deal piece of legislation that had little net effect. In the case of the radio industry, it was the creation of the FCC in 1934. Craig argues that the new, larger commission had only minor, almost negligible differences from the FRC when it came to issues of radio broadcast.

Both books further our understanding of Hawley’s initial argument. Hoover was an associationalist, but when a new industry became “problematic,” either by growing too slowly like commercial airliners, or too quickly, as in the case of radio, he felt that a greater deal of state intervention and regulation was necessary. Rather than the direct state intervention preferred by New Dealers, Hoover’s solution was to create regulating bodies that would represent the interests of both the state and the most successful companies in the industry. The result in both cases was the creation of an oligopoly—a collection of the “big three” companies that would submit to government regulation, and in exchange, were given the lion’s share of the industry and an opportunity to participate in their own regulation.

The authors don’t necessarily agree, however, on the net effect of this pattern. Robert van der Linden seems to be a fairly enthusiastic advocate of Hooverian corporatism, refusing to see collusion in Brown’s “spoils conferences,” and indeed avoiding the words “spoils” or “scandal.” He makes a point of mentioning Black’s membership in the KKK, but avoids the topic of Ford and Lindberg’s Nazi sympathies. Despite his enthusiasm for Hoover’s policies, however, one doesn’t get the impression that he lets it effect the quality of his scholarship, even if it colors his treatment of the subject. Craig, on the other hand, seems to mourn radio’s lost potential, especially the possibility that American radio could have adopted the Australian/Canadian model of public and commercial radio—something that the US didn’t achieve until the Johnson administration.

However, both authors seem to agree on the lasting impact made by Hooverian corporatist regulation. Both books end in the Roosevelt era, with that administration making little impact on the overall structure of the industries as they were engineered under Hoover. The big three networks and two of the big three airlines are still dominant. The FCC is still around. And as much as some people evoke the lasting impact of FDR’s interventionist state, we can see shadows of Hoover’s corporatist model in the way the Federal Government regulates many industries today.

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What I’m up to lately…

I’m working on a lot of different things right now.

I gave up on the rubber sheeting project, basically because I’m realizing I have the basic understanding, and that it’s probably not going to be helpful for my final project. I’ve decided on doing the autobiographical mapping idea, mostly because it doesn’t involve a) too too much extra research, so I can put my time into the actual map-making, and b) it also doesn’t involve technology that is beyond the scope of this class– which I’m afraid most of my Boston Common ideas did. I also like the idea of being a bit introspective, making myself– and how to represent myself– the "problem" of the class. I was a lit and creative writing person in college, and to be honest, I miss some of the introspection and self-investigation that was required there… it’s just so easy to get swept up in the tides of history, and to lose site of yourself in that.

I toyed with the idea of doing more of a family history thing, but to be honest, it’s just not feasible. I have one surviving grandparent, no great aunts or uncles, no uncles, aunts, or cousins. My family is cut off and small, and there’s just been a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty uncovered whenever I try to learn too much about my family’s past. It’s a shame, too– if I’d done a family history project and it looked good, I bet my parents would have loved that as a Christmas present, if it was put in a nice frame.

Anyway, I’m excited to say I’ve  found a way to make my Sketchup map relevant to that final project– When I was at the LC, I was able to get a copy of the Sanborn Map for the block I grew up on. It’s been fascinating to look at those maps.

First off, I found that Tipp City, my home town, has hardly changed at all in the last eighty years or so. The 1926 map of my neighborhood is basically identical to the neighborhood I grew up in. There was a small grocer built since then, a block away, and there was a tiny creamery company that’s been converted into a two-and-a-half-car garage. But other than that, it’s the same. The same houses, the levee in my back yard had been built by then (it was built in the aftermath of the Great Dayton Flood of 1913, a pretty devastating flood that resulted in one of the largest and most innovative flood control efforts of its time.) My parent’s old house is there, as is my grandmother’s, next door. The houses of my childhood friends… Even the tomato canning plant on the next block, and the adjoining sewage pump house– which lets me know that by 1926, whomever lived in that house had to put up with the strange, sickly-sweet smell of tomatoes and sewage that my family dealt with every summer.

Everything’s pretty much as it would be in the 1980s.

Although there were some surprises– a block or so from my house, there was the old flour mill and the old buggy whip company. When I was growing up, the mill was abandoned, and later turned into a performing-arts center by the man who took it upon himself to attempt to turn our struggling little town into a town that tourists go to for crafts and antiques– it worked, by the way, and the place looks better than it ever did when I was growing up. The old buggy whip factory was a workshop for a family friend who restored antiques. I was surprised to learn that the mill was still a functioning flour mill as late as 1926, while the buggy whip factory had been converted into an auto dealership.

One thing that perplexed me was that certain sections of the town have been blacked out on the main map, including my neighborhood. The map’s key is of little help in figuring out why this is. The best guess I have is that these are the industrial areas of the town, and may for this reason be uninsurable.

Which leads me to another issue– when I went to look at some of the other years, I discovered that my block, which is actually one of the second set of lots laid out after the town was founded in 1840, was actually left off of the maps all together. Moreover, the house I grew up in, if memory serves, was built in 1907, but was absent from the 1916 map, not appearing until 1926. Could this be a function of my house being on the "bad side of town"?

Speaking of "bad sides of town," something in the above-linked wikipedia article caught my eye, and I want to now go back to the LC and look into it:

The early city was a popular stopping-off point for the boatmen [from the Miami-Erie Canal, which it was built along]. The
original downtown included a large number of bars and a red light
district.

Now, the fact that the town was a stop on the canal is pretty widely known. And the number of bars makes sense, given the architecture of a lot of the buildings downtown. But I never heard of Tipp City having a red light district, and that sort of fascinates me.

I want to look and see what I can find, see what I can tell from Sanborn maps and maybe some newspapers. I love the idea of the quiet, Mayberry-type town I grew up in as some sort of den of sin. It does make sense given one piece of local history that always stuck with me from childhood. Where the Eagles building now stands, there was a great wooden building– thinking back, it looked a bit like a giant saloon– on the corner of First and Main, a block or so from my house. First and Main was maybe 100, 200 feet from the Canal Lock. Anyway, a book on Tipp City history had a picture of the building, and a brief description. Aparently, it was burnt down in the early 1900s after a fight between the two brothers that owned it.

I’d love to learn a bit more about that, and look for the old Red Light district.

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What We Talk About When We Talk About History, Part II: Atheoretical History?

I know that the mere mention of the word "theory" makes some people’s eyes roll and their ears flap shut, but history needs theory.

I read Black’s Maps and History last year, and I have to say I rather liked it. But reading it again after reading The Landscape of History and James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State in the last few weeks, the lack of any underlying theoretical structure in Black’s book really stuck out like a sore thumb.

It’s probably not helping that last week I was required to read another book, David Stradling’s Smokestacks and Progressives, that had essentially the same problem. That book sensitized me to how annoyed I can get when there’s a lack of theoretical underpinning to a work of history, even one on an interesting topic.

So yeah, Stradling and Black fall into the same trap– they give very authoritative and in-depth accounts of activity over time, without any theory unifying their books. In one case, it’s the history of smoke abatement movements in the Progressive Era and into the Depression, and in the other, it’s the evolution of historical atlases. Both are fascinating topics. Both books seem quite well-researched. But neither author really puts much effort into demonstrating commonalities over time– whether they be commonalities in causes of change, effects, methods, forces that repeatedly influence the historical narrative, commonalities over time…

And that’s what I’m talking about when I say theory.

History needs theory. Not necessarily big-T Theory, you don’t need to include Foucault or Derrida or Althusser or something to write history… although I often get a kick out of it when historians do. But you need something to unite the events you describe. Otherwise, you have books like these two, interesting at times and even informative, but not fully doing the "work" of History, if you ask me. As Gaddis points out, building on Scott, Historians necessarily must simplify for the sake of legibility.

What this means is that we don’t compile a list of causes and effects– writing History is more than creating a timeline, although even that action is of course still a simplified cartography of the historical landscape for the sake of legibility. But historians, writers of Good History, go a step further– they seek unities, they create theories that express links, similarities, continuities, and even ruptures. Without this, history becomes a confusing mess of discontinuity and unrelated events.

I’m arguing that theory is necessary to the work of History, but but as I said before it need not be the kind of totalizing, absolute Theory that supersedes fact and lobs confusing jargon at the reader.

Gaddis seems to think that Hayden White is one such writer of Theory. While Gaddis acknowledges the utility of the concept of narratization and emplotment in Metahistory, he seems to feel that it falls under the weight of its own jargon. All this is stated in a couple throw-away sentences, and the footnote indicates another book rather than Metahistory… This was one of the few things in the book that really rubbed me the wrong way.

I’m digressing, here, and anyway, White himself has acknowledged in an interview with Ewa Domanska (published in her wonderful collection of interviews, Encounters: Philosophy of History after Postmodernism) that few people read the book in its entirety, and that it is "long and repetitive," and he seems fine with both. The reason I brought this up, though, is that in  the same interview, White argues that his theories in that book are not techniques to be applied, but a sort of contingent, contextually-based structure set up to explain what was going on in a particular set of texts. He seems almost put off at the concept of younger authors trying to continue with his theories laid out in that book in other works. "It is not meant to be applied. It is analytical. It does not tell you how to do something."

White also repeatedly praises Roland Barthes as a diverse and inventive thinker in that interview. The next interviewee, Hans Kellner, seems to put his finger on what it is about Barthes that might be so appealing to White:

From Mythologies to the last essay, he was always changing… in each work… you get this enormous structural framework poised in order to do a quite small job… Then Barthes goes on to his next work and says in effect: "Oh, I’m all done with that. I am never going to use that system again."

So even among these people who are associated with arch-structuralism are nevertheless proposing the primacy in Historical work of theories over Theory.

You don’t need to get married to a single theory and apply it to every event– you don’t have to be a Marx or even a Derrida. You don’t even need your theory to be applicable in any other historical context. But you need theory to really make sense of history.

I liked, on a certain level, both Smokestacks and Maps and History. I’ll keep both for reference. I wouldn’t even be surprised if I ended up incorporating either of them in a bibliography or reading list one day. But the experience of reading both left me unsettled, full of questions.

I never got a clear sense of why Stradling thought that smoke abatement movements over those fifty years ultimately failed, only learning more about the periodic and seemingly unrelated interruptions, upsets, and setbacks that the movement suffered over that time. Likewise, I don’t have a clear answer to the "so what" question as far as Black’s treatment of historical atlases. I don’t have a clear concept of why he feels these atlases are important enough to merit the in-depth treatment he gives their changes over time.

I can propose answers on my own– both authors give their readers enough information to form theories of their own– but the lack of a theoretical base to their books leaves me unclear on how to read certain passages, and generally unsatisfied.

Theory, as well as making the reading more interesting, also gives a reader a map to reading the book, an easy "in" to understanding the authors biases and assumptions, and deepens the feeling of coherence in history.

And after all, coherence and symmetry are things that humankind seems hard-wired to seek out.

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What We Talk About When We Talk About History: (Hopefully) Part One in a Series…

I’m not an Historian.

At least, not yet.

I’ll tell people this proudly, because I think it means I’m not coming at this project with any artificially "naturalized" concepts– I like to think I don’t have as many assumptions about what history is or how one goes about it. This is because academically, I’m not from an historical background. And I honestly just don’t completely grok what people talk about when they talk about history. Since coming to George Mason, though, I’ve been trying to work through what it means.

But sometimes someone will say something that makes me realize that I have fairly definite beliefs, or at least suspicions, about what I think History is– or should be. These moments are wonderful, because sometimes my beliefs come crashing down, and other times they’re reaffirmed, but these moments are always times when I realize that I’m starting to become an historian– to become someone who cares deeply and holds strong opinions about the nature and methods of Historical work.

A couple of the students in my Historiography course last semester kept bringing up the idea of history as a science. This seemed, to me at the time, to be patently ridiculous. Science means reproducible results, controlled experimentation, objectivity (a term I’m so loath to use that I almost always write it bracketed or under erasure or in scare quotes)… History is simply not like that, I felt.

History is interpretive, it’s subjective. It’s narratizing. The way that it’s done in the academy today, History is something deeply intertextual– it takes place in the footnotes, dialogically.  When you look to the origins of historical writing, it doesn’t come out of the sciences, it comes out of the tradition of bards, chronicles,  and heraldry. It’s a poetic tradition.

Moreover, there’s the problem of sources. Sciences are, I thought, the product of direct observation. Most of History’s sources are just textual traces, documentary remnants from unreliable narrators. When we write history, we do so placing trust in those sources. We may have standards of critical skepticism, we may demand plausibility and require that sources support one anothers’ assertions, but we essentially are interpreting texts, and when we talk about History in terms of "reality," we’re really placing a lot of trust in our sources or our own critical faculties.

I’m starting to open up to the idea that there are strong similarities between History and certain scientific disciplines. One reason for that is a conversation with a friend from my old alma mater– who is, incidentally, also a Mason grad. In a conversation over the summer, talking about History over Thai food in DuPont, he presented a quite strong argument for History as a Science. I wasn’t converted, but it was the first time someone made the argument so convincingly to me. I’ll talk more about that conversation in a later post.

But the argument made by John Lewis Gaddis in The Landscape of History is what I want to talk about here. Gaddis’s book is one of the most incredibly clever books I’ve read in a long time. And I mean "clever" in both the complimentary and pejorative sense of the term.

Gaddis argues that History is much closer in its approaches to Physics or Evolutionary Biology than to the Social Sciences– History, like those "hard sciences," is deductive, multicausal, complex. It’s a strong argument.

But like Gaddis’s entire book, it’s also deeply metaphorical. The whole book is awash in strange metaphors– my favorite being the image of the SS Jaques Derrida bearing down on the British coastline. And this is part of the insight of the book– that scientific insight is often deeply metaphorical. It’s thought experiments, insights gained from suddenly recalling the image of the snake that eats its own tail.

So I would say that Gaddis influenced my oppinion insofar as he has helped convince me that History is like many sciences. I’m just not completely convinced that it falls into the category of science, that it IS Science.

Of course, I’m biased. I don’t want History to be a Science. I’m not interested in being a scientist. I came to History because I wanted a way to do the kind of textual interpretation and theory that I came to love in college… and make it Mean Something. Because I sort of stopped believing, after a certain point, that Joyce changed the world. But I can’t believe that William Randolf Hearst didn’t.

I love the idea of History as the Art of the Footnote. As a practice of navigating between texts, sailing through a sea of traces and scraps of the past. I know that Historians can’t throw out the concept of Historical Truth, but I don’t want to stop asking why. Many people seem to feel that microhistory represents the postmodernization of historical practices, but I don’t know if that project goes far enough. I want to see Derridian history– history that attacks the authority to make Historical Truth Statements. I know that this sort of project would quickly become tiresome and difficult and of questionable utility, as Derrida’s work itself did, but I think that it would only strengthen History as a discipline. I think Historians need to make the postmodern turn, if only to turn away from it.

And, as a final note, I do want to add that if there is one criticism I would have of Gaddis’s book, it would be that– I think he sets the social sciences up as a bit of a straw man, creating an unfair comparison between more contemporary Historical Theory and a fairly Modernist, mid-twentieth century view of what the social sciences "do." From some of the sociologists I’ve met, I get the feeling that they’re further along in making the postmodern turn than a lot of Historians. (Of course, the handful of Economists I’ve talked to have seemed to fit fairly well within his characterization of that discipline.)

I have a lot more to say, and I know that this is somewhat muddled. But I’m trying to tease out an argument, a way of explaining what I think, or at least suspect, when it comes to the theory of History, the philosophy of history, whatever you want to call it.

So… More thoughts on this later.

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…making history “cool?”

History isn’t cool.

I was reading through sepoy’s Polyglot Manifesto (part 2) and came across the following:

…what if I reimagined the text anew. What if I scanned, annotated, tagged all five manuscripts and the translation into a comprehensible data-structure
and presented the text so that the reader could peel, as it were, the
layers of various recensions; read the translation against the
manuscripts; follow the thread or theme in and out of various chapters?
And coolest of all: What if my reader could annotate and tag and link
my medieval persian text to another medieval persian text and another
still? What if the texts spoke to one another and threads connect the
reader, the text and the historian?
(emphasis mine…)

sepoy’s using two or three meanings to the term "cool," here, although I think they’re almost inextricably linked in today’s web 2.0 world. The most obvious, there’s the sense of the word "cool" as "hip." In another sense, the word can be used to less specifically mean "novel." And then, of course, because it’s impossible to leave the guy behind completely, there’s the Marshall McLuhan sense of the word– as in "hot" and "cool" media:

There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that
extends one single sense in "high definition." High definition is the state
of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, "high definition."
A cartoon is "low definition," simply because very little visual information
is provided. the ear is given a meager amount of information. Telephone
is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a
meager amount of information. And speech is a
cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has
to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave
so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore,
low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion
by the audience.  Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has
very different effects on the user from a cool
medium like the telephone.

(From Understanding Media)

I have to briefly digress, and say that the internet, especially in its more recent form as web 2.0, actually completely breaks down McLuhan’s division of hot and cool. Is a hot medium? Well, the computer is actually rather "high-definition," so yes– there’s a very precise relay of information. There’s very little "static." Is it a cool medium? Absolutely– despite the high level of definition, it is more participatory than any electronically-mediated medium McLuhan could have imagined in his lifetime– he passed on in 1980. However, the level of "definition" is illusory, because there is no beginning or end to "the internet," and no singular reading. It’s high-definition from single web page to single web page, "well filled with information," but the "edges" bleed. Hypermedia is almost like frostbite. The internet is so cool it feels hot.

sepoy, and others like him in the Digital Humanities, see the future of our discipline shifting toward a "cooling" of History. Historians like hot media. They like books. They like being able to craft their argument, control the ways their work is interpreted and used. And this is an understandable impulse.

But the argument for the Digital Humanities makes sense to me. By using new media’s ability to increase participation, Historians can raise awareness of History– not as an event or single narrative, or a set of facts in temporal order, but as a process of understanding, as a whole set of methodologies and techniques of interpretation and evaluation, as a form of textual analysis.

There’s a widely circulated quotation from Diane Feinstein during the hearings about the Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian back in 1995, "…is it really the role to interpret history, rather than just simply to put forward historical facts…? …I was a history major. In the days when I studied the text… was essentially a recitation of fact, leaving the reader to draw their own analysis…"*

This is the popular view of History, among a large portion of the population– even, obviously, among the well-educated and powerful in this country.

Interactivity and new media give us a chance to help rectify this situation, to show that "doing history" is always, and inherently, a process of making choices, of highlighting and omission, of reconstructing the past in relevant ways, and ultimately, is a manner of understanding not the past, but the present.

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* This quote can be found in multiple articles, it was a bit of a flashpoint. I found it in an article by James Gardner from The Public Historian (Vol. 26, No. 4) however, the citation for the quote in this article is mis-attributed, so I cannot vouch for the accuracy.

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…looking at “The Quilting Frolic.”

John Lewis Krimmel's "The Quilting Party"

"The Quilting Frolic" is a work of art that is used frequently as a window into the material culture of the middle class of the Early Republic.  It was painted in 1813 by John Lewis Krimmel, a German-born American genre painter best known for his paintings of middle-class families in Pennsylvania.  Because of his interest in depicting the quotidian pleasures of middle class life in that time, his paintings of interiors are richly detailed, and illustrate well the booming consumer culture of the post-Revolutionary period.  As Krill and Eversman explain:

Pictures provide intriguing glimpses into the material life of Americans of a more modest means than the federal elite… [This painting] depicted the interior of a Pennsylvania German home, a scene fairly bursting with consumer goods: silhouettes and paintings hang above the fireplace while the cupboards are filled with ceramics.  Although sparse, the furniture includes a Windsor chair and a tall-case clock (a favorite status symbol of the Pennsylvania Germans.)

Even picking a single item in the picture can, with a little research, yield a great deal of historical information about the time.  Let’s look at the china cabinet.

The China Cabinet

I haven’t, in the last few days’ digging-around, been able to find much information about china cabinets per se.  They, and other kitchen furniture like the Hoosier cabinet and the pie safe, don’t seem to get quite as much attention in histories of material culture as do, say, chests, desks, or beds.  They do tend to be somewhat less ornate, as they were intended for the kitchen, which was not a place for guests, so this may be the reason.  Alternatively, one might argue that these objects are culturally gendered items, furniture that is associated with women’s work, and this might bring down their cultural capital. 

Whatever the case, a few things can be said about the china cabinet.  From its rectilinear lines and simplicity of design, it can be identified as belonging to the federal style of furniture– also known as early classical revival, Louis XVI, Adam, Sheraton, and Hepplewhite.  This style avoided the curved lines and ornate designs of the earlier Chippendale and rococo styles, or the the empire style of furniture that came after it.  It lacks, however, some of the characteristic ornament of that style: it has no gilt, no intricate carvings, no paintings or wood inlays.  I initially thought that perhaps this meant that it’s a cheaper piece of furniture.  However, when I started thinking about its sliding glass doors, I reconsidered. 

If you’ve ever taken a stroll around Beacon Hill in Boston, you likely noticed the purple window panes.  These panes were originally created by accident– the glass maker in England added too much magnesium to the glass, which resulted in the purple tint.  Most of Beacon Hill was developed in the period between 1800 and 1830 by a group of Boston Brahmins that included the celebrated architect, statesman, and real-estate speculator Charles Bulfinch, and the purple panes date back to the Bulfinch Era.  Or at least the originals do.  It has been a long-standing statute in Boston that if you have one of the famed purple panes on your house, and it breaks for any reason, you’re required to replace it with purple glass.

…At any rate, the point of this little digression into Boston History is that in 1813, flat glass panes were an expensive import item.  They were fragile– more fragile structurally than other glasswares, like bottles, and costs were driven up by the risk of damage while making their transatlantic journey.  Panes of glass were also smaller– the glass at the front of this china cabinet is much larger than any single pane on Beacon Hill.  Such large panes of glass would have gone for a pretty penny indeed.  For this reason, I would guess that this china cabinet must be at least a middle-price-point item, if not a relatively expensive one.  It could well be one of the most expensive items in the painting.

The other reason the glass front of the cabinet is interesting is that it reveals the piece of furniture’s dual purpose: the cabinet was not just a storage device, but it was also intended for displaying the china.

The china.  Here’s where the sources I was able to track down get a little more helpful.  Apparently, the early republic was a time of great change for porcelain, both in America and internationally.  In the colonial era, most ceramics were imported to America by the British, the Dutch, and from China by the British and the Dutch.  American-made tableware had been produced throughout the colonial era as well– in fact, the first soft-pour porcelain (proper porcelain, of the type that had previously only been produced in China) to be produced in America was made in 1770, only twenty years after the British first figured the process out.

The British considered the American colonies as something of a dumping ground for old and unpopular designs.  However, by 1800, tariffs on British ceramics had become prohibitively high on the continent, and  the US had become the primary target of British china exports.  Porcelain exports from China shifted dramatically in this period as well.  In the seventeenth century, European export from China was dominated by the Dutch East India company, but this near-monopoly was lost at the end of the 1600s with civil war in China.  In the next century, the British would come to dominate the shipping of goods from China.  This period of dominance came to an end soon after the American Revolution, when the US became the main supplier of Chinese goods to Europe, aided by their status as a halfway-point.  (In fact, one of the oldest museums in the country, the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, was founded in 1799 by the elite import/export men of that city– which was at that time one of the largest trading hubs in America.  It has an amazing collection of East Asian art from that time period.)

Styles in china patterns shifted quickly and radically in the early republic, enough so that we can glean a little bit about the pieces in the painting that one might not expect.  Look again at the porcelain in the china cabinet and on the table.

Teaware on the table...

The dinnerware and the teaware patterns don’t seem to match.  This would be in keeping with Miller et al.‘s assertion that it was likely more common for families to have mismatched tea- and dinner- wares, as they were manufactured by different processes and marketed differently.  Moreover, when one compares the patterns, as best they can be discerned from the painting, to a chart of popular china patterns from 1750-1840, something surprising emerges.

China Shards, 1750-1840

The china in the cabinet most resemble the the feather-edged bisque, which was popular between 1760 and 1790.  The tableware in the painting would probably be seen at the time as quite old-fashioned, and was most likely actually fairly old. The teaware, seen most clearly on the table, looks more like a combination of the blue shell edge pearlware and the brown-line creamware– having the lined and rounded edges of the latter and the white and blue coloration of the former.  The teaware was likely newer, and more stylish.

It seems logical that the teaware might be newer than the tableware: teaware was used in entertaining guests (as we see here in the painting,) and as such can be seen as occupying a nominal position between domestic and public, where the plateware was much more firmly part of the domestic sphere.  However, as Diana diZerega Wall has noted, the domestic sphere was a rapidly morphing beast itself at this time, and this affected china and table service. 

As the economy shifted away from households and more men began to work outside the house, dinner took on a whole new cultural meaning in America.  The meal hadn’t been thought of as particularly important in the days when most production was done within the house– the family saw each other all day long, and dinner was merely the largest meal that happened around midday.  As men began working outside the house, dinner was held after the end of the work-day, and took on a whole new set of rituals.  It became a symbol of the values embodied in the new "cult of domesticity."  Around this time, plateware fashions shifted to the more and more ornate, embodied in the complex patterns of chinoiserie.

…This is all getting quite long-winded, but I think I’ve definitely proved that with sufficient deep digging, (which this blog entry is not pretending to represent) there is a lot you can dig out of this painting.  Honestly, you could probably put together an edited volume, thematically linked by items in this book– it would probably be more interesting reading than one might initially think.

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Works Consulted:

"John Lewis Krimmel – An Artist in Federal America" by Milo M. Naeve

"Changing Cunsumption Paterns: English Ceramics and the American Market from 1770 to 1840" by George Miller et al. and "Family Dinners and Social Teas: Ceramics and Domestic Rituals" by Diana diZerega Wall, both from Everyday Life in the Early Republic, edited by Catherine E. Hutchins

Early American Decorative Arts, 1620-1860: A Handbook for Interpreters by Rosemary Troy Krill and Pauline K. Eversmann

In Praise of America : American Decorative Arts, Sixteen Fifty to Eighteen Thirty by Wendy A. Cooper

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…On Suzanne Lebsock’s The Free Women of Petersburg…

You know how when you’re watching a movie that takes place in, say, King Arthur’s time, and you can’t stop noticing those little things that give away that the film was made in a certain time period?  Not even necessarily anachronisms, just little markers of the time that the film was produced– the colors used in the set design, a hair style, a certain type of make-up…  Why does Lancelot have a perm?  Why is Guenevere wearing blue eye shadow?  Why is the castle court in almost the same color scheme as my grandmother’s kitchen?

That’s the rough equivalent of the feeling I got reading Lebsock’s The Free Women of Petersburg.  Don’t get me wrong– it’s a fascinating book, dealing with an interesting topic, and honestly a pretty entertaining read for a book that’s based largely on quantitative analysis of probate law.  But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was looking at two times at once.  Just like Lancelot’s Christopher Atkins hairdo won’t let you forget that you’re looking at Medieval Britain through the lens of the 1970s, Lebsock’s antebellum South is constantly filtered through rhetoric that reveals her own placement in history at the time the book was written. 

Free Women of Petersburg is a product of an author at a particular moment in time– specifically, she is coming from the world of academic feminism in the early 1980s.  It was a heady time, to be sure– momentous, even.  But it colors the text in ways that seem strange to someone like me, who grew up in the age of third-wave feminists and post-queers.  The main conclusion that Lebsock draws– that women’s social conditions in the antebellum South improved in some ways despite the lack of overt feminism– is something that I wouldn’t have thought to bat an eye at.  Of course social conditions change, with or without overt activism– both for the better and for the worse.  Social conditions are inherently fluid, and any study over time will reveal shifts, advances, backsliding… it’s just the nature of the beast.  Overt activist approaches can have amazing power to affect change, but they are not a precondition to change, nor are they always successful– they can have negative or positive results.  Backlash is just as much a part of social protest movements as positive change. 

But to Lebsock and others in her time and milieu (academic feminists of the time) this was a surprising result– so surprising it bears repeating multiple times throughout the book.  When you’re still near the high-water mark of second-wave feminism, and haven’t yet encountered the lion’s share of the backlash against the advances of the Civil Rights Movement through the 80s and 90s, social activism doubtless seems the necessary tool to affect social change.  It was a different world, and the lenses they looked at things through were different.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the reading of gender relations in the book.  Lebsock often seems to assume that the natural state of affairs between genders is one of barely-concealed competition and animosity.  Men are sometime vilified unfairly, and women are sometimes just as unfairly valorized. 

In one chapter, we hear the story of the widow Eliza Ruffin, who, while legally independent, was horrible at running her affairs, resulting in her repeatedly and frequently having to turn to her brother for loans.  Lebsock, in taking account of the situation, looks at the brother’s role in this relationship and sees him as part of the problem, for reinforcing her "diffidence."  In the same chapter, Lebsock describes the somewhat better situation of Mary Strange, another widow, who when made the administrator of her late husband’s estate,  found it a "most lucrative task."  While she quotes Strange’s collecting over $200 in 1811, as her legally-sanctioned administrator’s 5% of collections made for the estate, she fails to comment on the fact that 5% of the collections that year would have only constituted around $157… either Strange was skimming off the top or she was mismanaging funds– either dishonest or incompetent, two traits ascribed to a goodly number of men in the book, but seldom any women. 

Likewise, in a section on women’s organizations, she looks at the rise in active engagement in what had previously been "women’s" causes by men, and sees more an attack on women’s autonomy and public voice than, say, a growing concern on the part of men, who may have actually been prodded to the task by their wives, or at least made conscious of the cause by the women around them.  Cooperative and general-cultural hypotheses are pushed aside for ones that support a vision of open gender conflict, of men as active agents who sought to suppress women’s rights and their autonomy.  And I won’t even get into her spiel about antebellum slaveholding women as crypto-abolitionists…

It’s forgivable, of course– the book is a product of the time in which it was produced.  In an age of consciousness-raising and "political lesbianism," Lebsock was hardly an extreme voice.  Nevertheless, it’s an interesting window into two time periods at once.

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All in all I liked the book, despite this criticism.  But it got me thinking about the nature of the old "New Social History," and about its limits.

Lebsock is taking hundreds upon hundreds of documents, here, and weaving them into an analysis of the time.  She paints a surprisingly vivid picture of Petersburg’s women, of their lives and their struggles.  She is able to find historical trends in the town, of certain types of freedoms being increased over time, or certain kinds of wills becoming more or less common.  But it got me thinking– something that I’ve never really thought about reading other social historians, for some stupid reason– can any of these trends be trusted to be true anywhere other than Petersburg?  Does the book really tell us that much about the antebellum South?  The sample size is very small.  And of course the sample is very geographically isolated. 

The real problem here, is not that Petersburg may or may not be historically "typical" of any particular time or place, but simply the depth of research.  Would anyone want to put the years of research into another small Southern town, with an eye to similar historical questions, when they knew they ran the risk of coming to the conclusion that, yes, Petersburg was pretty typical, and that there is little that can be said about their town that Lebsock hasn’t already said about Petersburg?  Moreover, would anyone bother to support a grant to fund research where that was the possible outcome?

I guess that what I’m wondering here isn’t whether or not if this book presents any definitive answers about the time and the area, other than the specifics of Petersburg; but whether this type of research can possibly have the effect of inhibiting similar research, becoming one of the only works on the topic, and thus de facto authoritative.

I’m starting to wonder if the "New Social History" might not be the History field’s equivalent to "New Criticism"– insightful and in-depth, but sometimes slightly myopic.

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…On what started out seeming like a simple assignment…

(N.B.– There’s a scrapbook that accompanies this post.  Check it out, as it’ll make things a bit clearer…)

I have to say that this first assignment for the Doctoral Research Seminar was more complicated than it had initially seemed.  We were each assigned three pages of the 1880 manuscript census for Fredericksburg, Virginia, and directed to the 1886 Sanborn fire insurance map for the city.  One of the goals was to see if there was any data we could add to the map that we had gleaned from the census.  I was assigned pages 57-60, the last three pages of the census.  I think that this was part of the problem.

After downloading the census pages from Ancestry.com, I began by transcribing them. This, already, proved more difficult than I had expected. I’m much more used to working with printed materials– I’m quite comfortable dealing with the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of antiquarian printers than I am with the complexities of old handwriting.  For that matter, I’m not even that good at interpreting a lot of modern handwriting.  It took me half an hour of staring at this:

I have no idea what this says... it's illegible

…before giving up and using the wonderful tool that is the Internet to find a helping hand… It turns out, it says "George Street."  I still don’t quite see it.  (And let me quickly give a thank-you to Audrey for helping a fellow out in his time of need.)

After transcription, I turned to my map.  And that’s when the real confusion began.  The town of Fredericksburg had yet to number houses, so the census-taker was unable to record house numbers.  This made figuring out anything other than the streets the houses were located on tricky.  I turned to the 1889 City directory, but I was only able to locate a couple people from my sample group– all of whom seemed to have moved in the intervening nine years.  All others, seemingly, had left the area. 

Trying not to be discouraged, I went to the record of property taxes for 1800 which even listed some tenant’s names, hoping it would prove more fruitful.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t make any positive matches– there were some common surnames that I found in the records that also appeared in my sample group, but without first names, I couldn’t say with any certainty if these were the people I was looking for or not.  I was running out of ideas. 

I went to classmates’ blogs, hoping to find something– a hint about method, perhaps, or something indicating how one might go about plotting a single locus on the map, assuming that I could then retrace the census-taker’s footsteps, and figure out the locations of the other houses by logical deduction.  Unfortunately, this was only dispiriting, as I discovered that Tamara had already figured out the location of the people in her sample group, and that her people seemed to live along Hanover Street– the same street on which 82% of my sample group lived!  And Jennifer mentioned in her blog that she had people on Hanover Street in her group, too!

Somewhat discouraged, I returned to looking at the Sanborn maps.  Looking at the maps, I noticed something that I hadn’t previously noticed.  The Sanborn maps included both a smaller, general map of the town of Fredericksburg and a set of more detailed maps that accounted for each building– houses, commercial buildings, and public structures.  Comparing the two, I realized that there was a large portion– the majority, even– of Hanover Street that was not accounted for by the larger, more detailed map.  The map of the area shows Hanover Street as a long road, leading out into the country. The more detailed map, however, showed just three blocks of the street.  Moreover, my three pages of the census show 19 households on Hanover Street– not to mention the houses on Hanover accounted for in my classmates’ blogs– whereas on the Sanborn map, there are only 11!

Some demolition may have happened in the intervening six years between the census and the map’s being made, and some buildings may well have been adapted to commercial purposes that had previously been homes.  However, it seems less likely that there was such a radical shift in the town, and more likely that there are simply certain structures and households on that stretch of Hanover beyond the three blocks downtown that for some reason were omitted from the Sanborn maps.  Given that the Sanborn Map and Publishing Company was making these maps for fire insurance purposes, perhaps this section of town was omitted because it was on the outskirts of town, where land use was likely less dense, and fire would spread less easily.

I had initially assumed that the section depicted in the detailed maps was the section reflected in my portion of the census, primarily because there was a single household in the section on Main Street, on the easterly side of town.  However, after looking more closely at the census data, I have begun to suspect the obvious– that my section of the census was in fact in that unaccounted-for area of Hanover Street, on the western fringes of town.  The three households on George Street could easily be on the area of the street, also unrepresented in the detailed maps, near where it joins with Hanover.  If this is the case, the house on Main Street may have simply been a case of "cleaning up"– the census-taker backtracking to an abode at which he had previously not found anyone home.

There are several reasons for this inference.  The sample includes two men whose occupation is listed as "farmer"– people I would expect to be on the geographic  periphery of the town. 

Another reason is the socioeconomic profile of my sample.  The group is largely of the lower class.  Many of the men working outside the house have fairly low-income jobs–there are many listed simply as "laborers," as well draymen, sailors, and a "preacher" who I assume since he is living with a carpenter is probably itinerant. Of the 109 people listed in this section of the census, only nine are servants employed in the house.  As the South at this point is still fairly early into industrialization, I would assume that a large portion of the town’s wealth would congregate in the center of the town or city, as it tends to in preindustrial societies.

Likewise, the group is fairly racially mixed.  Of the 23 households in my sample, about one in three are listed as black or mulatto.  While the black houses are exclusively so, they don’t seem to be in any way "clustered"– they are scattered throughout the group.  If one imagines the census taker walking down the street, knocking on each door he comes across, one must imagine that every third house he comes across is a black household.  I don’t know much about patterns of settlement in the South at this period, but I would assume that such a pattern of mixed settlement might be indicative of a poorer neighborhood.  This is more speculative, but I also thought it relevant that the western side of town is the location of the "colored cemetery."  This is purely speculative, but one can imagine in the context of the 19th century South, living "out on Hanover, past the colored cemetery" might not be the type of thing that drives up property values.

Interestingly, as one gets to the last page of the census, the situations of the individuals seem to get worse and worse.  On the last page, you have William Hunt, a single man who repairs watches, and shares his house with two boys– five and three years old– who do not share his name.  This is followed by John Lewis, a drayman who lives with his wife and his two adopted sons.  Then there’s several houses full of unmarried working class men– a cart-driver who lives with two laborers, a household of three sailors, and the previously-mentioned carpenter who shares his home with an itinerant preacher. (The preacher does not show up in either the 1889 town directory or the 1885 business directory, making me even more sure that he was probably a traveling evangelist.)

There are also, however, several rather prominent people represented in this sample.  These are wealthier men who probably have larger houses on the outskirts of town, not out of necessity, but for the space– "country homes" outside town, if you will, almost proto-suburbanites.  To be more precise, there are four such men. 

There’s the lawyer Samuel Brooke, who lives with his wife, his three children, and two domestic servants.  Brooke doesn’t show up in either of the later city directories, and it seems likely that his legal career took him on to a larger town.  Likewise, you have Irish immigrant David Fleming.  Given the location of his daughters’ births, it can be inferred that Fleming had moved to the town some time between 1875 and 1877, probably for his job as the Superintendent of the Citizen’s Gas Company.  Fleming had two in-house servants by 1880, and by 1885, was a prominent member of the Home Building Association, the Opera House Syndicate, and an officer in at least three Masonic organizations.  Then there’s John Berrey, a retired hardware merchant– and the only retired person in the sample.  Berrey lives with his five children, all unmarried, who range in age between 28 and 44.  Of the three sons, the 28-year-old is listed as "at home," as young children and dependent women tend to be, and the older two sons have very nice middle-class jobs, as a clerk and a commercial trader.

The final person of wealth in my sample group is the one that really makes me suspect that I’ve successfully located the correct section of Hanover Street, and that’s Charles Richardson, proprietor of the Windsor Manor Pickle Company. While one wouldn’t expect a factory owner to live next door to his factory, one would expect that he would want to be relatively nearby, in the days before the automobile. Looking again at the map of the Fredericksburg area, notice the location of the pickle factory, at the bottom of the map. The western section of Hanover Street would present the most convenient commute, avoiding the traffic of Main Street and the commercial districts to the East.

Ultimately, of course, all this is speculation and inference.  I did a quick search in a couple databases, but I couldn’t find any articles about 19th century census-taking patterns, so the entire assumption that these houses are in any particular order may be false.  (It’s a tough search– try it!  There’s all sorts of false correlations and strange hits that have nothing to do with what you’re looking for…)  I certainly wouldn’t bet any money on any of this.  But I have a fairly good feeling about it, and I’ve definitely learned a bit about process, and how one might go about such work.  If I was going to go further with this, (which would be silly since it’s just an exercise) I would probably start looking at the court records and the police blotters next, looking for some sort of clue that could help me confirm or disprove my suspicions.  I would also likely go to later Sanborn maps, and other maps of Fredericksburg, to see if they offered any clues as to what was over on the outskirts of town, on Hanover Street.

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