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Communications History, Part 2

This Monday, over Twitter, I received an unexpected bit of feedback to last week’s post on Communications History from the Henry Ford Museum‘s Suzanne Fischer:

@retius Just read your comm history call to arms--I'm a little confused why you don't situate your work/interests/methods w/i hist of tech.

In writing the post, doing some pre-writing for a field statement I’m working on for school. I wanted to try to express in words why I choose to privilege communications, and to define what I meant when I said I was doing so. While I had hoped the post would be read and that feedback would be offered, it was a pleasant surprise to have it come days later over Twitter. I had several initial reactions to Dr. Fischer’s feedback:

  • First, I was a bit embarrassed that I had so underplayed the importance of the  history of technology to my thinking on the topic. A very large number of the books on my bookshelves fall under the history of tech rubric. The exhibit that I recently helped curate, on postal systems technology, is very much informed by a history of technology viewpoint– I was interviewing engineers and even had machine schematics hanging over my desk. And I would very much also argue the story that it tells is part of communications history. I think I had thought that the connections between the kind of communications history I’m advocating and the field of history of technology were more implicitly obvious than they actually are, upon re-reading the post.
  • I also felt that, in my experience, historians of technology tend to privilege the science community, business concerns, and legal issues that shape technological development– sometimes to the expense of users. I recalled going to several telecommunications-related panels at a SHOT conference where I heard a lot about Bell Labs, packet switching, and the like, but almost nothing on customers or users.
  • Finally, I just felt there was an ineffable difference between the two. Certainly communications technology deserve to be part of the literature of a history of technology, but to me there just seemed some hard-to-identify difference, something special about communications that made it somehow a little unique, a special case within technology. This was the hardest reaction to express and impossible to defend, but it was also the deepest-felt.

As is often the case on Twitter, the question quickly sparked a lively and very helpful conversation. Dr. Fischer and myself were quickly joined by Shiela Brennan of RRCHNM and Trevor Owens of NDIIPP.

I had expressed concern that people might not consider things like early nineteenth century mail systems “technology” per se, and that much of postal history is written by postal historians (something I regretted while researching for the above-mentioned exhibit.) But I was actually told that there had been several postal presentations at the most recent SHOT conference— something I was encouraged and excited to hear.

It was also pointed out to me that there is much more of a literature on users than I had been aware of within the history of technology community, and I was recommended several very interesting books on the topic that I look forward to reading. And yet that feeling that there was an ineffable difference persisted– while historians of technology may indeed deal with users, surely there must be a significant qualitative difference between, say, users of electric razors or polio vaccines, and participants in the republic of letters? Of course, it was then pointed out to me that the written word itself is a technology, and must be thought of as such, and not falsely naturalized.

As the conversation wound down, I was still not satisfied that communications history should be seen as necessarily a subset of the history of technology– there was that can’t-put-my-finger-on-it feeling still there. But I did have a lot of new ideas to explore about the intersection of the two, lots to read, and lots to mull over. (When Twitter is collegial and helpful it’s truly an amazing thing.)

Ultimately, I ended up simply asserting that, to my mind, it was an issue of tent size, so to speak.  The history of communications is a very large topic, even if it fits within the auspices of the history of technology. While it is imperative that communications history draws from history of technology, and while there is certainly a place for communications media within the history of technology, it is a large enough and important enough topic to warrant discussion as a discrete thing. Similarly, the advent of gender studies didn’t obviate the need for women’s studies. Every square is a rectangle, but not every rectangle is a square.

And yet, even that answer didn’t fully satisfy me. I still felt there was some fundamental difference. I still suspected that ultimately, it wasn’t like women’s studies. It was intersectional. Historians who study African-American women can’t be satisfied to draw just from women’s history, or from black history. They have to draw from both, because their subjects lived within both experiences. African-American women aren’t off-limits to historians who focus on women’s history or black history– they just have to be mindful of that intersectionality and not be reductionist.

I’ve been trying to figure out why I felt that way, trying to justify this suspicion, ever since. And after a few day’s thought, I think I’ve figured it out.

The issue, as I’m coming to see it, is that there are a whole host of comunicative cultural practices that are difficult to shoehorn into the category of “technology” that are nonetheless very much a part of communications history as I’m conceiving it. (It is also important to remember that the point of these posts is not to prescriptively assert subdisciplines as discrete items, but for me as a PhD student to better articulate the scope and shape of my own specialization. Communications history as I conceive it is essentially all that matters, ’cause I’m trying to hone my own conception, here.)

To give some examples of such phenomena from works that engage with what I think of as having a place in the historiography of communications history:

  • Parades, toasts, and parties. David Waldstreicher’s In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes discusses the use of parades, toasts, and parties as communicative acts that helped to reinforce national unity and identity in the early republic. Of course, the utility of doing so is deeply contingent upon use of these events to shape discourse within the emerging news media, which was growing precipitously at this time, but while communications technologies were used to broadcast the events and reinforce their import, I would feel uncomfortable describing a toast or a parade as a “technology.” They are social practices with deeply communicative intent.
  • Blackface and racial melodrama. Beyond the “technology” of using burnt cork as make-up, blackface is not a technology. It’s a mode of cultural expression– a deeply problematic and revealing one, and one that WT Lhamon Jr. argues ably in his Raising Cain has proven quite good at bridging genre, media, and time. Likewise, Linda Williams’s Playing the Race Card demonstrates that racial melodrama– an understanding of racial relations and identity deeply entrenched in the narrative conventions of melodrama– is a “wonderful, ‘jumping’ fish,” one that has bridged media and been a dominant narrative in American entertainment since Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This is a coupling of a dramatic/narrative mode with a set of cultural constructions– not a technology. While both blackface and racial melodrama play through media, they are not in and of themselves technology or media.
  • Stand-up comedy. In Revel with a Cause, Stephen Kercher provides a challenging, fascinating history of liberal satire during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. While the book is almost encyclopedic in its scope, two figures who definitely stand out are (unsurprisingly) Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce. Both men’s careers must be framed in terms of communications technology– Bruce’s career was largely built on records, at a time when censorship of “blue” recordings had only recently decreased, and he dealt with the media ecosystem of his time– from the news media and contemporary politics to jazz. Sahl, even moreso, was a product of mass media, in that he was a direct and vocal critic of it. He read the paper as part of his routine, and gave commentary. Stand up itself was forever changed by the advent of electric amplification. But a man joking and telling stories on a stage? Decidedly low-tech stuff. But due to cultural impact, these comedians are important to understanding the media environment of their times.

…I’m sure there are debates, quibbles, and questions one could bring up with these examples and others. But ultimately, I think they demonstrate the reason for my discomfort with seeing communications history as simply a subset of the history of technology. To me, communications history is– or should be– history at the intersection of cultural and media studies on one side, and the history of technology on another. 

Of course, this is still a dramatic simplification. The history of communications also intersects with aspects of legal history, social history, economic history, and countless other subdisciplines. Every breed of historian borrows liberally from others. But I see the intersection of communicative cultural acts and the technology that mediates communication as key.

We’re also all the products of our experiences, and I’ll be the first to admit that this conviction may be the result of my education– my concentration on drama and cinema in college, my intense interest in media studies and cultural theory while getting my MA in American Studies, and finally, coming to George Mason, with the prevalence of technology in its History department.

That said, I think what I’m identifying here is a fertile little niche for historical scholarship. And my dissertation, still in the early stages of research, definitely fits within it. At the core of what I’ve been saying in these two blog posts is something I think is pretty uncontroversial– Communications is a very important aspect of the modern world. And I would like to see even more scholarship on it.

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Why I Do Communications History

“Markets are conversations.“

When the writers of the Cluetrain Manifesto wrote this over a decade ago, they were looking for something revolutionary. They were trying to express the impact of the astounding new power of electronic media on communications– the internet, we are told all the time, is the biggest thing since the printing press!

And a lot of people who drank the Cluetrain Kool-Aid have been somewhat discouraged by what they’ve seen in the last ten years. Where’s the big change? Online communications has allowed for the kinds of conversational brand advocacy that Cluetrain advocates, but in general, corporate communications and marketing are just business as usual. Certainly, a purist would argue that most companies haven’t taken the lessons of cluetrain to heart, they haven’t gotten into the real, human conversations, and haven’t reaped the benefits as a result. And that’s not an invalid assessment.

But a couple weeks ago, another reason dawned on me as I was reading on the subway. Something painfully obvious. Markets are communications in the information age, yes. But that was just as true in the nineteenth century as it is today. And likewise, communications in the nineteenth century was undergoing a set of dramatic transformations, much like today. The internet changes everything, to be sure. But that itself is business as usual.

The internet has revolutionized communications. But looking at the history of the United States, from 1788 to present, with an eye to communications technology, one witnesses a nation that is more often in the midst of a communications revolution than it is not. American History has in many ways been singularly defined by a long series of communications revolutions.

From the First Amendment and the Postal Road System to the telegraph to the birth of the Railway Mail Service to the rise of the mass media and the advent of the telephone to the television age to the internet, the United States has been a nation that has been constantly being reshaped by revolutionary shifts in communications. The way that people communicate has been shifting rapidly and radically for most of our nation’s history.

What makes communications history such an exciting lens into history is its ability to bring together the two most important historiographic trends of the last thirty years— the quantitative, materialist approach of the new social history, and the cultural theory and more literary analysis that constitutes the cultural turn. Communications technologies shape and drive markets. These networks are an essential engine of the economy. Simultaneously, it is within the content of communications media that we have our only window into the discursive forces that shape culture. It is for this reason that I think communications history is critically under-explored.

Certainly, ever since Marshall McLuhan became a public intellectual rock star, there has been an ever-growing community of people in media studies, and that [inter]discipline has influenced a good number of historians. There is a lot more work that should be done, however– and communications history needs to be allowed a more central role in our historiography. It’s time to let communications history have center stage.

There are many well-researched histories of particular media– there are books on the telephone, the telegraph, motion pictures, et cetera. These usually focus on the technological, business, and/or legislative-governmental aspects of the medium’s history. And there are books that analyze cultural phenomena within media (usually broadcast media), from issues of class in early silent films to performances of race on the internet. There are far fewer books that integrate both the medium and the message, unfortunately.

Historians have drawn extensively on letters throughout modern historiography. But rare is the author who positions those letters within both the cultural practice of letter writing as it changes over time and the postal networks that allow for such communication. Too often, the letter as an object itself is overlooked.

I think there is still a large body of potential work that foregrounds the history of communications and uses it as an inroads to other avenues of historical investigation.

There are at least three recent books that I have encountered that do an excellent job of foregrounding communications in the way I am discussing. I’m sure there are others, and would welcome suggestions, but these are three that have caught my attention for their broad scope and deep insight.

Paul Starr’s 2005 The Creation of the Media is impressive in its scope, taking a comparative approach to media and contrasting the development of the American media over the last 300 years with the parallel developments in France and Britain, arguing for the uniqueness of the US media environment. It’s an impressive read, and an amazing introductory text on the subject. While it’s still almost entirely on the media and very little on their messages, it is admirable for creating.

More recently, Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought is a work of synthetic history, bringing together much of the most important work in the historiography of the Age of Jackson. One of the primary arguments of the book– and one of its most fascinating– is a re-framing of the Market Revolution as a Communications Revolution, foregrounding the import of the rapid dissemination of information as the key change that allowed for the transformation of the American economy.

Unfortunately, by concluding in 1848, (a date which one guesses he chose for the death of his book’s hero, John Quincy Adams) he downplays the import of the postal rate reductions of 1845 and 1851. As David Henkin has demonstrated, the import of these rate reforms cannot be overstated, as they allowed for a major cultural shift toward a more egalitarian world of letters in the US. Despite this, the book is admirable for its foregrounding of the broader impact of communications, and makes what I feel is a convincing case on that point.

Finally, Henkin’s 2007 The Postal Age— while much more narrow in its scope than the above two books– does an amazing job of integrating information about the legislation, policy, and technologies that shape the postal system of the mid-nineteenth century with discussion of the system’s public, and how they used the post. While I would have loved to see even more analysis of everyday letter writers’ rhetoric and discourse, that would have fallen a bit out of the book’s scope, and even still, Henkin proves– as he did in City Reading— that he is a master at the difficult task of discussing the complex praxes of common literacy.

What attracts a historian to a particular topic, methodology, or theoretical approach is always highly subjective, and I’m not trying to pretend that this isn’t the case for me as well. My primary objective in writing this post has been to try to better put into words why I think that communications history is a worthwhile and interesting lens into American History, an inroad that has yet to be well-explored.

Of course, it would be wonderful to see the field bloom, to see “Communications Historian” listings in the AHA job listings, or to see curatorial positions open up in a new National Communications Museum (something some other nations have, from what I’ve been told.) I think communications history is just starting to prove itself as a worthy specialty for historians to explore. As I said, it does bring together threads from both social history and the cultural turn, and for those who are banking on digital humanities being the next big thing in the field, I think it could play quite nicely with DH, as well.

Even if none of that happens, however, it’s what I want to study and research. It fits quite nicely with my personal interests, and I’m confident that there’s many careers’ over worth of research left to be done.

 

ETA: There is now a second part to this blog post, which can be found here.

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The Early Comic Strip Archive, Part Two: Why a Database?

In my last post about building a digital comic strip archive, I tried to sketch out why I thought early comic strips would make a good subject for an Omeka-based archive. (I could have gone on for ages, but I’m trying to keep this brief– also the reason for breaking it up into installments…) This post is dedicated to looking at why a digital archive using Omeka would be an optimal format to explore the topic.

The best online projects are the ones that don’t try to mimic the functionality of any other medium– if your website could just as easily have been a book, you’re not adding much value by putting it online. I think an online database collecting early comic strips would be the optimal medium for such a project.

The primary advantage of an online database would be the ability to use multiple categories or tags as organizational tools. A single strip could be included in multiple categories. To take one example, a single strip from Harry Hershfield’s Abie the Agent, a strip about a European Jewish immigrant, a car salesman who was also vehemently and vocally opposed American involvement in what he described as “that Europel war.” One strip from this comic could be categorized according to the various newspapers that included it (it was notably more popular in urban costal cities, and not distributed to many middle-American small town newspapers), under King Features Syndicate, which distributed the strip, under the strip’s title, the cartoonist’s name, under “automobiles,” “Jewish characters,” “WWI”… the list goes on.

The ability to sort by a variety of means brings together the collection as a dynamic thing, a research tool in and of itself.

Omeka has two primary functions: collections management and exhibition. So far I’ve just been discussing the former. Now a few thoughts on the latter:

Once the collection has a substantial number of item/strips within it, I think it would be a great thing to have thematic essay/exhibits. An essay on the debate over neutrality during the Great War, accompanied by strips that reflect the debate. Another on issues of race and ethnicity in early comics. Another on the formal evolution of the medium, the gradual conventionalizing of things like word balloons, thought balloons, elements of visual storytelling, etc.

What makes these comics an invaluable tool for historical research is the multitude of voices, perspectives, and themes that they encompass. An online collection could highlight a variety of issues within this multitude, allowing visitors to follow their interests, rather than making some hierarchical linear narrative.

Comics history is an under-researched topic. Aside from the ghettoization of the medium itself, it’s commonly being assigned to the dustbin of kiddie fare and ephemera, what little attention the topic does receive is divided into several niche markets of interest. There’s the Nostalgists, the people who want to look at the history of comics fondly and rather uncritically. Then there’s the Cultural Historians, who want to look at the medium simply as a lens to broader social and cultural trends within society. Finally, you have the Artistic Formalists, who– inspired by the seminal works of Will Eisner, Scott McCloud, or Matt Madden, want to look at comics as an artistic medium, and to look at older comics as a window into the evolution of a symbolic system, an artistic code, a mechanism for storytelling.

All three approaches have merit.

All three approaches, however, also have pitfalls, blind spots, and difficulties. This fracturing of the already-small number of those interested in looking at this topic is a perpetual frustration to those of us who want to look at something approaching the bigger picture.

I think that an Early Comic Strip Archive could attract attention and use from all three groups, and that moreover, because the database format is well suited to multiple approaches, it could serve the additional function of bringing these three tribes closer together. Beyond this audience of enthusiasts, as I mentioned earlier, I think that an archive like this could be an invaluable resource to educators trying to make history more interesting to resistant or reluctant students. Comics have humor, visual appeal, and an ever-present iconoclasm that can make history more appealing to the same student who get bored with slogging through dry textbooks and memorizing dates and names.

Next: Potential Pitfalls and Possible Partners

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The Early Comic Strip Archive: Part One

I’ve been trying to come up with a project that would be well-suited to Omeka. I want to learn to use it, want to give myself practice with it, play with the insides, see what I can do with it. I think I’ve come up with a decent idea.

I’m thinking about creating a digital archive of early newspaper comic strips.

Why Comic Strips?

A personal anecdote, before you dismiss the concept as purely self-indulgent: comics were what made me interested in history in the first place. I was a very visual kid. I loved drawing. And my hometown library had a decent collection of comics. But not too many of my favorites. After reading all the Garfield and Peanuts books in their collection, I started branching out. The library had a lot of “The year’s best editorial cartoons” collections. I started picking them up for the art. I kept reading them for the history. It was a unique window into times and topics I didn’t know too much about. The editorial cartoons led me to Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury and Walt Kelly’s Pogo. To this day, my view of the political history of the twentieth century is shaped, in part, by political cartoons.

Comics are a fascinating cultural artifact. They can give a lot of insight into a time. And they’re a good inroad into history for students who may otherwise be resistant. They add a visual element, humor, and a window into how ideas and events were being received within popular culture. They don’t give a single view– reading a comics page from, say, 1911 can give you a great insight into the debates of the time.

Because of my lifelong interest in comics, I decided to do a seminar paper a few years back on the ethnic and racial images in early Hearst newspapers’ comics pages. I found a surprising heterogeneity of topics, portrayals, and ideas. In the years leading into the US’s involvement in WWI, I found that while Hearst demanded his editors toe a party line of German sympathy and non-intervention, the comics page of the New York Journal was actually the site of a rather lively debate. Some strips came down firmly for intervention, and mocked neutrality. Others were firmly opposed to American involvement in a European war, strongly advocating isolationism. While Hearst is famous for supporting his cartoonists, he apparently also felt they were unimportant enough to be allowed a greater degree of freedom than many of his prose journalists.

Whether you trace ethnic images, political debates, class sympathies– the early comics page was one of the most multivocal sites in the newspaper business. And they drew readers. People sometimes picked their newspaper based on the inclusion of their favorite comic, just as others might choose to read a paper because it sympathized with their political beliefs.

And best of all, these early strips, from 1895-1932, are in the public domain.

Part Two: Why a Database?

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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.

_______________________

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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Jamestown 1907: the Annotated Bibliography

One of the really nice things about blogging is that you can edit your posts at any time.  This is just a start to what I’m sure will be a much longer list.

Primary Sources:

American Federation of Labor. American Federation of Labor Industrial and Social Economic Exhibit at the Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition. Washington, D.C.: American Federation of Labor, 1907.

An account of the AFL’s exhibit at the Fair.  An induction into Progressive-Era labor consciousness, the exhibit highlighted the quality products manufactured in unionized factories, even going to the lengths of having a "Model Union Store" stocked with union-made goods.

Glimpses of the Jamestown Exposition and Picturesque Virginia. Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1907.

A commemorative photo book of the Expo, its buildings, and exhibits.  Great source for photo reference.  The wording of the captions can be interesting as well, giving a good sense of the messages or lessons conveyed in individual exhibits.  The Philippines exhibit is quite interesting, talking about their uniquely high "potential to civilization."

Jamestown Ter-centennial Exposition Corporation. The Official Blue Book of the Jamestown Ter-centennial Exposition. 1907.

This book is the mother load. It’s actually a bit intimidating, as it’s probably a source of information overload.  It clocks in at 800 or so pages, and gives an official daily account of the goings-on at the Expo.  It lists full texts of most important speeches made there, accounts for what day was what– almost every day was in honor of some group, from Georgia Day to Negro Day to Women’s Day… It’s definitely the organ of the organizing committee, so it will not be the best source for dissenting voices, but it is quite exhaustive in its coverage of the Expo’s goings-on.  If you want to know what day Mark Twain or Booker T Washington came to the fair, what they saw and what they said, this is your book.

Jamestown Ter-centennial Exposition Corporation. Official Catalogue of the Jamestown Ter-centennial Exposition. 1907.

This volume makes for incredibly dull reading, but may be of some use.  It is a catalog of all groups exhibiting at the Exposition, from states to temperance groups to pen manufacturers.  It could probably yield some form of quantitative data as to the nature and character of the event.

Jamestown Ter-centennial Exposition Corporation. Official Guide of the Jamestown Ter-centennial Exposition. 1907.

This is the official guidebook to the exhibition.  Main attractions are outlined, descriptions of buildings, events, and exhibitions.

Laird & Lee’s Guide to Historic Virginia and the Jamestown Centennial. Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1907.

This is a rather thick but pocket-sized unofficial guide to the Exposition, much like the official guide except in format, and on a greater emphasis on the greater Norfolk area.

Library of Congress Photo Lot 2832.

This is a collection of fifty or more stereographic photos from the Exposition– great pictures of the buildings, some of the more celebrated visitors, exhibits, etc.  If you’re curious, a small selection of them have been scanned, and can be found here.

Library of Congress Photo Lot 7026.

This photo lot is a collection of postcards and photos from the Expo, many of the photos appearing to be, upon inspection, the images that were used for the creation of the postcards.  Again, a few of these have been scanned, and can be found here.

McCall, Samuel Walker. The American Constitution, a Speech Delivered by Hon. Samuel W. McCall of Massachusetts, at Jamestown, on September 17, 1907, on the Occasion of the One Hundred and Twentieth Anniversary of the Adoption of the National Constitution by the Convention of 1787. Boston: 1907.

I grabbed this because it was a highly patriotic theme, a patriotic speech at such an imperialist event seemed natural and interesting.  To be honest, I’ve only had the time to give it a quick scan-through.  But he focuses much time on the original intent of the framers of the Constitution– much as the protest pamphlet dedicates several pages to arguing the founding fathers were anti-imperialist.  Also interesting in that he does a little high-wire dance about federalism, as a Yankee in the South, at this event that seems to bear the thumb-prints of the Civil War all over it.

See! See! See! Guide to Jamestown Exposition, Historic Virginia, and Washington D.C. Washington, D.C.: B. S. Adams, 1907.

Yet another unofficial guide to the Exposition.  This one is interesting in that it is the version most obviously targeting people from outside the Virginia area– Eastern Virginia and D.C. attractions are given about as much page-space as the Expo itself.

Veloz-Goiticoa, N. Effect of the Jamestown Exposition on the Foreign Commerce of the United States and Incidental Remarks on the Subject. Washington, D.C.: W. F. Roberts Company, 1907.

A speech made the January before the Expo, on its intended economic effects, made before the National Convention for the Extension of the Foreign Commerce of the United States.  Essentially, the gist of it is, "we hope this will make a lot of money and encourage foreign trade."  As with McCall’s speech, I’ve only really given this a cursory look-through, but I was fascinated by the speaker’s conviction that this Expo will have a dramatic and positive effect on Latin American trade…  Are special invitations made to Latin American leaders to an Exposition celebrating America’s growing imperialism and military might less than a decade after the Spanish-American war really the best incentive to trade with those nations?

Wright, Carroll D, et al. International Justice Vs. The Splendors of War: Protest Against the Diversion of the Jamestown Exposition to the Service of Militarism. 1907.

This document, which I mentioned in an earlier post, is a protest against the growing militaristic character of the Expo, cosigned by (among others) Jane Addams, Edward Everett Hale, and Cardinal Gibbons.

Secondary Sources:

Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. "Meta Warrick’s 1907 ‘Negro Tableaux’ and (Re)Presenting African American Historical Memory." The Journal of American History Vol. 89, Issue 4. (2003), 1368-1400.

A look at the "Negro Tableaux" in the Negro Hall of the Exposition, and the politics of the Tuskegee Institute folks who coordinated the Negro Hall.  Uses a lot of resources that will be unavailable to me, as they’re in Alabama.

Gleach, Frederic W. "Pocahontas at the Fair: Crafting Identities at the 1907 Jamestown Exposition." Ethnohistory 50:3 (2003) 419-445.

An excellent analysis of the various constructions of Native American identity that competed at the Expo, looking to the agency of the Indians who participated in constructing alternative visions of themselves and their people.

Werry, Margaret. "’The Greatest Show on Earth’: Political Spectacle, Spectacular Politics, and the American Pacific." Theatre Journal 57 (2005) 355-382.

An article on militarism in turn-of-the-century expositions, looking at them as spectacles of empire.  While it mentions the Jamestown Exposition only a couple times, it’s a good article for contextualizing the event.

Winton, Ruth M. "Negro Participation in Southern Expositions, 1881-1915." The Journal of Negro Education Vol. 16, No 1. (1947) 34-43.

A more general overview of black participation and representation in the golden age of Expositions.

Items I haven’t had the pleasure of looking at that look promising:

  • The LC has at least three or four maps of the grounds of the event.
  • I’ve found COUNTLESS articles in newspapers from the time, but have yet to sort through them.
  • I’ve also found several more  pamphlets that were printed for other exhibits at the Expo that I haven’t yet looked at, and there are a few photo lots I haven’t pulled as of yet.
  • Representing the Nation: A Reader, eds. David Boswell and Jessica Evans.  London: Routledge, 1999.
  • David Blight’s work on the memory of the Civil War.
  • Manliness and Civilization, by Gail Bederman.  I don’t have my copy, but I wanna look over the chapter on TR again.
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Jamestown, 1907

I’m really a "follow the research" kind of guy, so it’s hard for me to present a proto-thesis or "research questions" at the moment… I’m still digging.  Nevertheless, I’d like to talk about what I’ve discovered so far in my most recent little research obsession…

While I was in the LoC print and photo reading room looking for something else, I came across something fascinating: a collection of stereographic cards from the Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exhibition.  Digging further, I found there were several lots of photos from the exhibition as well, including a whole collection of printer’s proofs of commemorative postcards to be sold at the event. 

Quickly I became fascinated with the event, as it seemed to be a site of confluence for many "big issues" of its time.  There was an incredibly complex and conflicted view of race being exhibited, for example.  There was the issue of the Civil War– 1907 is still firmly within the period where the discourse of reunification and reconciliation after that conflict was still being actively worked at and played out.  Teddy Roosevelt spoke there, and his very existence always brings up various questions of gender, empire, war, and peace… (The last two are best illustrated by the fact that 1907 was 9 years after the Spanish American War, and two years after Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize.)  And there was this overarching militarism and nationalism– so different from the World’s Fair quality of the World’s Columbian Exhibition 14 years earlier.  Where the Columbian Exhibition had a "Midway," the Jamestown Exhibition had a "War Path."

Then I came across a wonderful pamphlet housed in the Rare Books room– International Justice vs. the Splendors of War: In Protest Against the Diversion of the Jamestown Exposition to the Service of Militarism.  This was a 12-page pamphlet, published five months before the Exhibition’s opening, was written by a splinter group of the Exhibition’s Advisory Committee, protesting the increasing militarization of the event by the Committee.  Among the undersigned were an amazing collection of Progressive Era progressives– Jane Addams, Carroll D Wright, president of Clark College and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Edward Everett Hale, and Cardinal Gibbons.

The group was mortified that the budget of the Exhibition had gone from the initially-allocated $200,000 to $1,500,000, largely due to spending on military spectacles.  (This extra money was procured from congress only after piggybacking it onto a House Sundry Civil Bill, as the Speaker of the House and several key Representatives were highly opposed to the increased spending.)  They further proposed reallocating some of the money dedicated to military spectacle to the building of a "Hall of International Justice," which would celebrate the values of the upcoming Second International Peace Conference at the Hague.

A shorter version of the pamphlet appeared in the January 10th issue of the progressive journal The Independent, along with an article celebrating TR’s winning the Nobel Prize and hoping he would continue to promote International Justice at the Hague, and an article by Charlotte Perkins Gilman advocating paying housewives.

I want to write a paper looking at the Jamestown Exhibition, using it as a window into its era. I’m still sifting through all the sources available to me– I’ve located over 40 primary sources at the LoC, including photos, maps, brochures, and all matter of related materials– but I’m very interested in using this pamphlet, as well as the other, celebratory materials dealing with the battle reenactments, military parades, ship christenings, etc. to look at this event as a celebration of the nascent spirit of US Imperialism at the time– sort of an Americanized Empire Day.  I’m curious to find accounts of the Exhibition in newspapers of the time, to see if it was understood in that way at the time.  I’d also like to dig up the congressional record for 1905-1906, and see what can be understood about the jockeying for increasing funds.  I’d also love to find the actual speech that TR delivered at the Exhibition, on "Georgia Day," and see what kind of world he’s creating with that address.

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