Americas Collections Blog

Civil War Project: The Great Seal of the Republic Redux

(The Great Seal of the Republic, shown on the British Library digitised manuscripts website)

You may recall an earlier post about the Confederate Seal of the Republic, which was supplied to the Southern States by a British firm ("That symbol - the Great Seal of the infant Confederacy - sent to it by its nurse, England").  Well, we've now added it to the Library's digital items site: Digitised Manuscripts, which lets you explore the seal's case, provenance and zoom in on the seal itself.  More to follow.

[MJS]

 

St. Valentine’s Roses and Massacres

Map of Chicago showing areas in which the alleged gangsters and racketeers operate, National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, vol. IV.

With the feast of St Valentine upon us, with the thought that I am being fleeced by chocolatiers and flower sellers, my mind turns to events in Chicago in 1929. In what became known as the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, associates of the Chicago South Side Italian gang gunned down seven rivals members of the Moran Gang in the alley behind a garage on North Clark Street.

While these events are well established, some may be interested to explore the FBI file on the subject.  It contains over 100 pages of press articles, FBI memos and other material related to the Justice Department investigation.  Central to the massacre was an effort of Al Capone’s South Side Gang to gain control over the underworld in Chicago and the racketeering activities supplying black market alcohol during prohibition. An indication of the scale of racketeering in the prohibition era can be gleaned from the 1929 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Prohibition (A.S. 495), which claimed that in Illinois alone prohibition agents seized and destroyed over six million dollars of property in the crusade against illegal distilling and bootlegging. In addition to the financial ramifications of prohibition, another useful resource is the Report of the Wickersham Commission or National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (A.S.10/4), which documents criminal activity across the U.S.  The Commission’s five volumes offer an insight into the inextricable connections between crime and prohibition in the period, as well as providing an in-depth analysis of organized crime around the U.S. in enormous detail. 

Victims of the St Valentine’s Day Shooting, National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, vol. IV.

The human cost is addressed in a number of sections. One, intriguingly entitled “Reforming America With A Shotgun" (a pamphlet produced by the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment), offers a study of prohibition killings that estimates 286 officers and civilians lost their lives in the enforcement of prohibition laws. A further noteworthy element are the evidence statements of witnesses to the Commission, which provide a window into other aspects of the time such as the testimony of John B. Haggerty, president of the International Brotherhood of Bookbinders, who stated in 1920 that a journeyman bookbinder could expect to earn $25 or $26 for a six day week; by 1930 this had risen to $42 for a 44-hour week. An increase in earnings, he wanted to note, could not be attributed to prohibition.

[JJ]

Mapping 1812

Royal United Services Institute maps: Battle of New Orleans, 1815

The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) collection of maps at the British Library reveals the importance of mapping to the work of the Institute, which was founded in 1831 by the Duke of Wellington to encourage the study of naval and military science.  Yesterday, Phil and I visited Tom Harper, the curator of antiquarian mapping, to see what the collections might possessfor our War of 1812 digitization project.   He had kindly pulled from the shelves the very heavy two-volume catalogue to the collection, which is handwritten in leather-bound volumes purchased from the Army & Navy Stores by an Edwardian predecessor.  The collection is catalogued by region and by topic (e.g., Naval, Battlefield, and even Aviation).  We focussed on the United States of America and Canada, passing the numerous maps of the Punic Wars or the Second Carpathian Campaign (and noting details in the catalogue, such as 'to accompany Col. –––––'s lecture'.  Some references noted, we descended below the Northern Line and made our way to the secure 'cage' that houses these particular maps.

We weren't disappointed.  The Battle of New Orleans – tragically fought after news of the ending of the war by the Treaty of Ghent – was clearly an important event for military pedagogy: no fewer than three maps showing the movements of General Edward Pakenham's troops and the defenders under Major General Andrew Jackson are present.  (There was no mention of the forgotten ladders, but a relief drawing of the American defences was present.)  Phil was also pleased to see a number of other maps focussing on the Canadian/US border, with a marked emphasis on defensive forts.  We'll be gathering other materials, and hope to have some proper images on the blog soon.

[MJS]

Kodak: framing the last 120 years

'Kodak factory at Harrow, 1890s'. Photographer unknown. British Library Kodak Archive A.1787

The news that Kodak is formally filing for bankruptcy protection has been coming for some time but it still represents a significant moment in the history of photography. Ever since George Eastman marketed his company's first camera in 1888 Kodak has framed the personal, family, social and political histories not just of the Americas but of a significant portion of the world.

As such, I decided to dig around and see the mark Kodak has left on the British Library's collections. In short, it's a big one. Some of the earliest materials we hold relating to Kodak were published by the company itself, for example the Kodak Press publication, 'Picture Taking and Picture Making' (1898, Shelfmark: YA.1998.a.14770). This body of material is quite large and covers various subjects, from 'Motion Picture Laboratory Practice, and Characteristics of Eastman Motion Picture Films' (1936, Shelfmark: 778.1258 DSC) to the journal, 'Dental Radiography and Photography'.

Far larger is the body of material which owes a debt to Kodak equipment in its production, including a number of our photobooks, travelogues, newspapers, journals, and so on. Some early examples here include the Countess of Aberdeen's, 'Through Canada with a Kodak' (1893, Shelfmark: 10470.b.35) and Alfred Leader's, 'Through Jamaica with a Kodak' (1907, Shelfmark: 010470.e.5). Both also illustrate how quickly Kodak developed an intimate relationship with the international traveller and the travelogues many of them produced.

'Shrimp Fisher (September 1908)', entry for Eastman Plate Competition by L. Hillier. British Library Kodak Archive A.1997 

The Library's Kodak related collections do not end with published material, however. Two collections of particular note are, 'The Oral History of British Photography' and the 'Kodak Ltd. Archive'. Kodak receives multiple mentions in 'The Oral History of British Photography', often as a reminiscence but also because of the interviewing of people such as Robert Lassam (former curator of the Kodak Gallery). The Kodak Archive held here was donated in 2009 and is the corporate archive of Kodak's UK arm, providing access to photographs and documents which illustrate the development of photography in the UK as well as the company's history.

Kodak's global reach and legacy is borne out by how pervasive materials relating to or facilitated by the company are in the collections of the British Library and libraries across the world. This, therefore, is one of the many ways in which the significance of today can be impressed upon us.

[PJH]

War, Struggle and Equality: the Tuskegee Airmen

War bonds poster featuring an unnamed Tuskegee airman (displayed on Wikipedia's Tuskegee Airmen entry)

On January 10th the Institute for the Study of the Americas hosted a screening of the documentary, 'Double Victory', an account of the Tuskegee Airmen and their exploits in World War Two. These pilots of the 332nd Figther Group and 477th Bomber Group of the U. S. Army Air Corps were the first African American aviators of the U.S. Armed Forces but they faced a struggle against institutionalised racism in order to fly, fight and be treated as equals during and after the war.

'Double Victory' is a documentary account of this struggle, narrated by Cuba Gooding Jr. and produced to be viewed alongside the film 'Red Tails' (both productions are Lucas Film projects). The high point of the evening, however, was the attendence of two Tuskegee Airmen, Le Roy Gillead and Alexander Jefferson. Gillead and Jefferson's recollections added a great deal to the evening, with Jefferson talking about the struggle for African American men to be allowed to fly and his experiences as a German POW and Gillead highlighting the struggle for equality undertaken by officers who did not see front line service.

Both men also talked about their pride at being awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, along with roughly 300 other Tuskegee Airmen. During the award ceremony, President George W. Bush paid tribute to the airmen, saying, "The Tuskegee Airmen helped win a war, and you helped change our nation for the better. Yours is the story of the human spirit, and it ends like all great stories do – with wisdom and lessons and hope for tomorrow." A copy of the act bestowing the medals can be found here and Library holds a number of resources relating to the Tuskegee Airmen, their forces service and the relationship their actions had to the subsequent Civil Rights Movement.

The Library's collection of American newspapers contain a number of insights, with articles such as the Chicago Defender's, '332nd Flies Its 200th Mission Without a Loss' and many accounts of how the Freedman Field Mutiny and other incidents regarding racial equality were reported. There are also published service accounts, Alexander Jefferson's, 'Red Tail Captured, Red Tail Free' (shelfmark: YC.2005.a.5960) is a good example, and various journal articles on the exploits and legacy of the Tuskegee Airmen in Europe and the US.

[JJ and PJH]

A Hankering to Travel: Charles Dickens and North America

Portrait of Charles Dickens from J. Forster's 'The Life of Charles Dickens' (shelfmark: YA.1993.a.5369)

The British Library's Folio Gallery has a new exhibition up, 'A Hankering After Ghosts: Charles Dickens and the Supernatural'. The exhibition has been put on to mark the bicentenary of the birth of Dickens, who was born on the 7th February 1812, and is well worth a look. While I paid the exhibition a visit the other day it reminded me of some of Dickens' writings, which I had been meaning to read for some time, the notes on his travels to North America in 1842.

 'American Notes for General Circulation' is a travelogue resulting from Dickens' travels and experiences in America and Canada, the Library holds a copy at shelfmark, Cup.410.g.25. The account is well worth a read for the author's flair and as an interesting travelogue in its own right. What caught my attention was Dickens' devotion of the final thematic chapter to the topic of slavery in America. Dickens is strongly critical of the practice and goes to great lengths to illustrate the horrors of slavery through the reproduction of adverts regarding run away slaves.

Dickens is withering in his criticism of Republicans who maintain a system at odds with their stated values, denouncing these individuals as thinking they, 'will not tolerate a man above [them]: and of those below, none must approach too near' (p. 41). He also notes there to be a significant proportion of this group who would, 'glady involve America in a war, civil, or foreign, provided that it had for its sole end and object the assertion of their right to perpetuate slavery' (ibid). While the causes of the later civil war are complex such a statement does seem unnervingly prescient.

Even though the Library's 'A Hankering After Ghosts' led me to call up Dickens' 'American Notes' this chapter caught my attention for another reason, the Americas department's collaborative doctoral award on slavery in Canada. The award is currently open to applications and anyone who is interested can find more information on this previous post.

[PJH]

The National Archives' 'Today's Document Series'



Illustration of where Rosa Parks sat, December 1, 1955, National Archives

A few days late, but the document shared by the U.S. National Archives is such a striking image that bears sharing: the plan of the bus that Rosa Parks took on 1 December 1955. 

If you tumblr, then you can also follow the National Archives, too.

[MJS]

American Studies Resource Portal (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)

Our intern, Maro, writes:

Have you ever wondered about research on American Studies in Greece? Well, the Department of American Literature and Culture of the School of English at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh) has not only advanced but also facilitated the study and research of the field in question by launching the American Studies Resource Portal (ASRP) in the spring of 2010. This online database, an initiative developed by the Faculty members of the Department (with the sponsorship of the Information Resource Centre, Embassy of the U.S., Greece, and AUTh) – namely Dr. Zoe Detsi (Ass.Professor), Dr. Tatiani Rapatzikou (Ass. Professor) and Dr. Eleftheria Arapoglou (Adjunct Lecturer) –  makes an array of sources and research material relating to American Studies available to a wide community of scholars, academics, university students, educators, independent scholars, school teachers and pupils, as well as the general public. More specifically, the site lists all the academic departments in Greece that run courses in American Studies along with the detailed description of the courses offered – either undergraduate or graduate – in American literature, politics and culture. Moreover, the portal includes an informed list of M.A. theses and the full text of Ph.D dissertations completed and in progress in the field of American Studies nationwide. An important feature of this highly searchable user friendly directory of American Studies is that it provides information for all the forthcoming conferences and events relating to American Studies as well as the HELAAS (Hellenic Association for American Studies) activities and latest publications.  Finally, there are links to American Studies organizations, libraries, research centres in both Europe and the US, publications and a variety of online research resources which range from documentaries and interviews to podcasts and films.

Having been an MA student in the Department of American Literature and Culture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki for the past three years, I have found this portal extremely interesting and useful not only for the organized and carefully selected secondary material that it provided me with, but primarily because it connected me with Europe and the US, presenting me with options and opportunities on both a national and an international level. Within the framework of a collaborative project between the American Studies Resource Portal team and the Fulbright Foundation, Greece, I spent almost two months in the Fulbright headquarters in Athens researching the development of American Studies in Greece from 1948 to the present day, a research that is actually still in progress. With my internship in the Fulbright Foundation being part of a series of initiatives and projects that the ASRP team has launched, I am delighted to have been given this opportunity. What is more, I am now at the British Library as an Erasmus intern and it was the American Studies Resource Portal that allowed me to find out more about the Eccles Centre and the possibilities of an internship in the BL.

With the American Studies Resource Portal being the token of the ever-increasing national and international profile of the Department of American Literature and Culture, Aristotle University, I think that is a challenging task that came to fill in an academic vacuum with regard to the filed of American Studies in Greece, especially within the context of the growing reliance on electronic sources in a digitized international environment.

To find out more about the ASRP: http://my.enl.auth.gr/asrp

Also read the following interview: http://www.mosaiko.gr/features/our-american-studies-resource-portal/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tweet Tweet: John James Audubon's Birds of America

John James Audubon's Birds of America is undoubtedly a treasure but, it must be said, a bit unwieldy, especially in its double-elephantine folio.  Much handier is this new iPad version, which I spotted being announced on Twitter this morning.  It can be seen in its new habitat in two formats: the full, 'complete version', and the lesser-spotted 'highlights version'.  Both can be purcashed via eBook Treasures (along with other tomes, such as Blake's notebook).

More birds from the blog's backlist.

[MJS]

From Margate to Manhattan...

William Jerome, 'Down in the Subway', 1904, image from the songbook digitized at JScholarship.  BL copy at H.3987.f.(34.)

I just popped out of the Library to St Pancras next door (inadvertently messing up my punch clock), not for travel, but for artistic purpose: the collection of a small sculpture by Ann Carrington, who installed 13 'shell ladies' around Margate (not for the BL collections, I should add, although there are a fair few pieces of art distributed around the St Pancras site).  I am now safely clocked back in, the mini-shell lady is now safely at my desk, and, it turns, out, Carrington has a new work, 'Manhattan Mettle' in the W Hotel, New York, made out of 'metal punching, dollars, dimes, subway tokens, spanners, nails, pins...' and

I wonder if such an endeavour could be constructed from the subway tokens' replacement, the MetroCard?

[MJS]

Jackie O

Camelot still casts its spell, and the press has been full of reports of the recently released Jacqueline Kennedy recordings to tie in with Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F Kennedy, which is published today.  Much of the interest is to do with the gossip and occasional revelation contained in the text, but there is also, at least for many Americans (and many others), the continuing fascination with Jackie O.  As the New Yorker's Amy Davidson noted on the recordings and the current discussions,

Her comments here seem so striking because of the many paper-doll versions of her we’ve played with for so long. How many people have been the object of so much fetishization, of so many kinds—fashion, political, tabloid?

There are many items in the collections, of course, but here's one from the Sound Archive, recording the First Lady's more public utterances:

Biographical highlights of Jacqueline Kennedy - her speeches in the United States and abroad (Almanack, 1964).  disc 2 sides 30 cm 33 rpm.

[MJS]

Remembering 9/11 again (or What you won't be reading on your Kindle, part 3)

 

Image © Gaylord Schanilec

The 10th anniversary of 9/11 is being marked by a steady stream of newspaper features, documentaries on TV, and an ever growing number of books on the subject. In my blog on last year’s anniversary I mentioned Michael Katakis’s Troubled Land series of photographs. Michael’s response to 9/11 was to set out on a trip across America, taking the photos which now make up the aforementioned series.* 

A recent issue of The New York Times carried an article on another type of response. New Yorker Richard Goodman rode his bicycle from the Upper West Side down to Ground Zero nearly every day for three months. His experiences during those cycling trips through Manhattan now make up the book The Bicycle Diaries: one New Yorker’s Journey Through 9/11, which is published in a limited edition by Midnight Paper Sales, the press of poet, wood engraver and printer Gaylord Schanilec. The book is illustrated by Gaylord’s distinctive coloured wood engravings and represents the answer to the question he asked himself on the morning of the 9/11 attacks, ‘what can I do?’ Last autumn he accompanied Richard Goodman on a bike ride, re-visiting the same Manhattan streets of Goodman's earlier cycling expeditions down to the One World Trade Center construction site. The engravings in the book are based on the photographs that Gaylord took during that ride. Text and image combine to provide a view of past and present, referencing both the horrors of the original events, and the hope arising from restoration and renewal in the city.

The blending of word and image has always been an important aspect of Gaylord’s work, as has a strong sense of place, so The Bicycle Diaries seems a perfect project for Midnight Paper Sales. To some it might appear anachronistic in these digital days to produce a limited edition fine press book, using traditional letter press printing and laborious multi-colour wood engraving processes, but books can be so much more than just carriers of information. As e-books become increasingly popular, paradoxically, the number and variety of fine press and artists' books that are appearing also seem to be on the rise. Great, we can have the best of both worlds. I'm looking forward to the arrival of the BL’s copy of The Bicycle Diaries and to holding it in my hands. I have no doubt that, to quote from the NYTimes article,  ‘It has the weight of a small thing done with great care to honor a huge loss.’

 [C.H.]

 *We’ll be displaying a few of these photographs in the forthcoming Folio Gallery exhibition which opens on 10 October. The exhibition ties in with the publication of Michael’s new book Photographs and Words, which will appear under the British Library imprint later this month.

 

Negative feedback

We hope that visitors to the Library are happy.  However, this is not always the case, as one American traveller writes:-

Among the manuscripts, we observed... 41 volumes of decisions of the commissaries who settled the boundaries of properties after the great fire of London... We also noticed an original deed to some land to a monastery, dated Ravenna, Anno Dom. 572, written on the papyrus; and the original of Magna Carta. We had no time allowed to examine anything; our conductor pushed on without minding questions, or unable to answer them, but treating the company with double entendres and witticisms on various subjects of natural history, in a style of vulgarity and impudence which I should not have expected to have met in this place, and in this country - Louis Simond, 1810

A Research Guide to Secondary Sources on the American Fifties

Maro, our current ERASMUS intern has been busy over the last few weeks.  One of the first fruits is this bibliography of secondary materials on the USA in the 1950s. The Library holds most of these titles, but we will endeavour to fill the gaps over the next few months. 

Maro has broken the period into a number of themes, and has added a few introductory remarks about what she sees as the tenor of the age:

Download 1950s USA Bibliography [.pdf; 240kb]

See also our Guides and Bibliographies page.



Moby Dick on Horseback

Yesterday (1 August) was the 192nd anniversary of birth the author of fishy tales, Herman Melville.  Perhaps in unwitting honour, the BBC showed Major Dundee on Sunday afternoon.  One of Sam Peckinpah's revisionist westerns, with a fascination with the themes of male friendship, hatred and violence, it casts Charlton Heston as a Union Cavalry officer, forced to draft in Confederate prisoners in a campaign against an Apache raiding party.  Critics have neatly mapped the main characters onto those of Meville's Moby Dick, and the not-entirely satisfactory story tells the tale of the consequences of an obsessive idealistic captain on his 'crew' as they head into the watery part of the world, or, in the film's case, the deserts of Texas and New Mexico.

Read more in John L. Simons & Robert Merrill, Peckinpah's Tragic Westerns (2011).

[Matthew Shaw]

In Memory of the Patriots who Fell: Manassas and the Bull Run

On 21 July 1861, around 62,000 men faced each other near the key railway junction at Manassas, a vital point on the route to the Confederate capital of Richmond.  30,000 of them were Union troops under General Irwin McDowell, most of whom were 90-day volunteers; the 32,000 other were Confederates under the generalship of Pierre G.T. Beauregard.  Both sides thought the day would be decisive and swift.  It was neither.  The Union forces, under the gaze of sightseers from Washington, watching on a nearby hill, were mostly routed by the Confederate troops who then failed to capitalise on their success and press on to Washington.  A year later, between 28 August and 1 September, 48,000 Confederates faced 75,000 Union troops at the Second Battle of Manassas, forcing a Union retreat.  The war, of course, continued for another three and a half years. 

The National Park Service has published an online account, and today hosts an re-enactment of the battle (there are worries about the heat, much as in the disastrous 1961 re-enactment).  Visitors will not be able to visit the nearby Disney history theme park, as it was not built in 1994.  An earlier form of commemoration can be seen above (consecrated 11 June 1865).

For more about the preservation of the battlefield site, see Joan M. Zenzen, Battling for Manassas: the fifty-year preservation struggle at Manassas National Battle Field Park (Penn State University Press, 1998; online book).  On the memory of the Civil War more generally, see William A. Blair, Cities of the Dead: contesting the memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) and David W. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: race, memory and the American Civil War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004).  For an account of the battle, including the antics of the Times correspondent, William H. Russell, see Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire.

And for online materials, UEA's Containing Multitudes blog contains a well-curated list.

 [Matthew Shaw]



INDEPENDENCE/ JULY IV/ MDCCLXXVI

 
A new and correct map of the United States of North America: layd down from the latest observations and best authorities agreeable to the Peace of 1783... (Newhaven: publish'd according to act of Assembly, [1784])[Maps * 71490.(150)] 
Counterfeiting attracted some of the cruelest punishments in the past, in order to reflect the severity of undermining the coin of the realm.  But, in 1764, the prosecutor of one Abel Buell, a 22-year-old engraver and silversmith, who had been knocking out dodgy thirty-shilling notes in Connecticut, excercised a little mercy.  As punishment for his crime, 'the tip only of Buell's ear was cropped off: it was held on his tongue to keep it warm till it was put on his ear again, where it grew on. He was branded on the forehead as high as possible. This was usually done by a hot iron, in the form of a letter designating the crime' (John Warner Barber, Connecticut Historical Collections, 2nd ed., New Haven, 1836, pp.531-32, quoted in the catalogue for Christie's sale 2361).  Buell moved to New Haven in 1770, where he became the colony's leading copper-plate engraver, and in 1784 producted the first map of the new United States to be published in the United States and which was also the first map published in the new nation to depict the Stars and Stripes.  Eagle-eyed readers may not the absence of New York City and spot the placing of the prime meridian at Philadelphia, the seat of the new government. 

 

A copy was recently on sale, and is now on display in the Library of Congress (above).  The British Library's copy at shelfmark Maps * 71490.(150) is similarlyhand-coloured, and also shows the small scroll celebrating 'INDEPENDENCE/ JULYIV/ MDCCLXXVI'.  Happy Independence Day.

[MJS]
 

Aeluyd f'Ewythr Robert, or Uncle Robert's Hearth: Uncle Tom in Translation

Today marks the 200th anniversary of Harriet Beecher Stowe's birth, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin: or, Life Among the Lowly, undoubtedly the most influential novel in American, and perhaps even world, history.

The New York Times carried a pithy piece on Beecher Stowe as the 'unlikely fomenter of wars' by David S. Reynolds (Graduate Center of the City University of New York).  It comes recommended.  Rather than 'an old-fashioned, rather lachrymose affair that features the deaths of an obsequious enslaved black man and his blond, angelic child-friend, Little Eva' we should see Uncle Tom as vital fuel to the antislavery cause, and not just in the U.S.: 'In Russia it influenced the 1861 emancipation of the serfs and later inspired Vladimir Lenin, who recalled it as his favorite book in childhood. It was the first American novel to be translated and published in China, and it fueled antislavery causes in Cuba and Brazil.'  And it had profound influence on the Civil Rights movement.

As it happened, I stumbled across Uncle Tom while I was trying out an online resource.  A letter from Thomas Watts, assistant keeper in the British Museum in the nineteenth century, to a bookseller was published in the  Massachusetts newspaper, The Independent (and was followed up in the Boston Liberator).  The letter is reproduced in full in the excellent Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture(UVA).

Watts spotted the importance of Uncle Tom, which was translated into 'so many languages, and among them into so many obscure ones, languages into which it has been found so hard on many occasions for popularity to penetrate.  Even the master-pieces of Scott and Dickens have never been translated into Welsh, while the American novel has forced its way in various shapes into the language of the ancient Britons.'  He proposed to the head of the printed book department, Anthony Panizzi, that he collect as many editions and translations as possible, in order to be of service to students of language and philology.  The plan was put into action, as the Museum's holdings served as a model for the Boston Public Library, and no doubt elsewhere. 

Watts finished his letter: 'I regret that my account of these versions should be so much less extended than I had hoped to make it, but especially at this period of the year the duties of an officer of the British Museum render it almost impossible for him to make any use of whatever of the treasures committed to his keeping, which are, as a rule, as closed to him as they are open to the public.'

I wonder what he would have made of this wealth of online treasure?

[MJS}

Ring Any Bells? Paul Revere and printmaking

 
Paul Revere is, it seems, an echo of a memory of something that happened.  But as well as taking that pesky (from the British point of view) ride on the night of 18-19 April 1775, when he rode to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock in Lexington that the British were marching towards them from Boston, sparking a chain of events that would lead the naming of a bunch of restaurants, the great American patriot was also a silversmith and copperplate engraver.  He put these skills to good use in the service of the Revolution, engraving and printing currency for the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and in a series of striking prints.  Perhaps his most famous image can be seen above, a dramatic reconstruction of the Boston Massacre: read all about it on our online feature.

There are a number of other Revere prints in the collections.  They can be located by a search of [Paul Revere] in the English Short Title Catalogue, and then by limiting the results to the British Library.  There are a number of bibliographies, studies and biographies.  I can do no better than refer the interested reader in the listing produced by the American Antiquarian Society.

And there's more about the Old North Church and its lanterns here.

[MJS]

... and the Pacific (II)

Following on from last week's post on Obama's visit to Europe and possible contrasts with earlier claims to be the 'first Pacific president', here is the promised (brief) introductory bibliography on Samoa, in particular its place within the strategic and global interests of the late-nineteenth century and what might be termed the colonial gaze.  This, along with materials held in the UK National Archives, the Congressional Serial Set, and contemporary newspapers, would I'm sure be the basis for a very interesting final year or MA dissertation.

Manuscripts

Add. MS 41633, Log-book of HMS 'Diamond', on the Australian station, 22 Mar. 1882-16 Apr. 1884;

Add. MS 52309, ff. 11-12, Photographs of the ruler of, and a candidate for, the throne of Samoa (1888) [cf. Scott Papers, cf. Add. MS 52296]

Ashley B4313, ff. 21-24, Two Letters from Sidney Colvin to Edmund Gosse, the earlier on the death of R. L. Stevenson, the later on the possibility of moving his bones from Samoa now that it had become German; 18 Dec. 1894, 11 Nov. 1899. [ALC, vi, p. 11]

Printed Books

Edwards, Elizabeth, 'Time and Space on the Quarter Deck: Two Samoan Photographs by Captain W. Acland' in Raw History: photographs, anthropology and museums (Oxford, 2001), ch. 5;

Gilson, R. P., Samoa 1830 to 1900: the politics of a multi-cultural community (Melbourne, 1970);

Kennedy, Paul M., The Samoan Tangle: a study in Anglo-German-American relations 1878-1900 (Dublin, 1974);

Meleisea, Malama, Lagaga: a short history of Western Samoa (Apia, 1987);

Ryden, George Herbert, The Foreign Policy of the United States in Relation to Samoa (New Haven & London, 1933);

Watson, R. M., History of Samoa (Wellington, New Zealand, 1918);

Wilkes, Charles, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition... 1838-1842 (Philadelphia, 1845), vol. 5. (see also this post)

[MJS] 

President O'Bama and the Pacific (I)

I sometimes manage to drag myself out of bed to ride some laps of the Outer Circle of Regent's Park before work; indeed, I managed it yesterday.  However, an Icelandic ash cloud had other ideas, and the route was blocked.

The reason, of course, is that Winfield House, the U.S. ambassador's residence, is located behind a thick yew hedge.  Fears of flight disruptions from the ash cloud meant that President Obama and his entourage arrived a day early for the London leg of their European tour, and stayed the night there rather than crashing at Buckingham Palace.  The Metropolitan Police augmented the SO16 presence with a full roadblock; my fellow-rider was an American, so he repaid the cops' actually very polite and apologetic notice to turn around with a full-throated rendition of the Star Spangled Banner.

As you know, Obama had just arrived from Ireland, where he delighted the crowds with his search for the missing apostrophe.  Expert commentators (including the Eccles Centre's Director, Phil Davies, who is presently sat on stage in Westminster Hall, listening to the main speech of the day) have been asked their views on what this all means for the Special Relationship and the administration's views on Europe.  Several have noted that Obama begin his presidency as America's 'First Pacific President', and that this visit, as well as having electoral appeal with an Irish stop-over, is also about making sure the traditional North Atlantic alliance is given a comforting dose of mood music (as well as securing more European men and matériel in various military actions).

Meanwhile, I was doing a little bit of research into the 1892 Samoan celebration of the Fourth of July.  Islanders were also given the chance to sing the Star Spangled Banner over two days, as the islands moved from Antipodean time to 'American Time', gaining an extra day as a result of their manoeuvringson the international date line (it was recently announced that they will be shifting back to be more aligned with Australia and New Zealand on 28 December 2011).  The usual reason given for the 1892 change was the influence of American merchants; was this true, I wondered, and if so, did it make anything more than a symbolic difference?  A cable for telegrams was proposed in the 1870s, but it appears that this was never laid.

Some more research may turn up the answers, but in the meantime, it was a reminder of the importance of the Samoan question in the late nineteenth century, when the islands became a nexus for a strategic, diplomatic and commercial battle between Britain, Germany and the United States, all of which contributed to a series of civil wars on the islands.  As it happens, we have the papers of Sir Charles Stuart Scott, who attended the Berlin Convention; among them are a series of photographs (including the perforated waistcoat of the executed Maximilian I of Mexico), and two of the 'King of Samoa' and a 'claimant to the throne'.  But who were these two men?

More, and a bibliography, to follow.

Mulberry Row

 
Monticello, VA , photo M. Shaw

The Soane Museum Study Group arranges a series of talks on architectural topics.  Thursday night saw Danielle Willkens (the Bartlett, UCL) present a paper entitled 'A Case for Ruins and a Cause for Concern: the Digital Mulberry Row Project at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello', a survey of the buildings provided for the enslaved workers at Jefferson's Charlottesville residence, with some natty 3D fly-through reconstructions and some thoughts about what happens when these places, people and activities are commemorated, reconstructed; or, as has more often been the place, erased from history.  In particular, she wondered what visitors take away from reconstructions of such sites, and, if the decision to reconstruct is taken (e.g. if they look spick and span, perhaps it looks like things weren't so bad), what period of habitation should be rebuilt: Monticello went through at least three phases of slave housing, from an a relatively dense and populated village, with a nail factory, to a more limited collection of more aesthetically constructed buildings.  I liked the suggestion that the neglected ruins spoke particularly eloquently of the social status of enslaved black workers, when compared to the attentions lavished on the main house.

All this is now a live issue, as Mulberry Row is the recipient of a NEA grant, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation is now working on restoring and interpreting the Row, drawing on more than fifty years of archaelogical and historical work.  You can follow the process - and comment on it - via their blog.

All this reminds me of my recent visit to Lancaster, whose connections to the slave trade have only recently been brought to the surface and memorialised.  No reconstruction is perfect, and memorialisation brings with with it all kinds of cultural and aesthetic complexities, but there are also many dangers and potential hurts in forgetting as well.

[MJS]

'I remember the day when I first came here'

Everyone's geographical knowledge has improved over the last week.  I wondered a bit more about the man after whom the town just outside of Islamabad was named, so I snatched half an hour to look through Major James Abbott's Narrative of a Journey from Heraut to Khiva, Moscow and St Petersburgh (London, 1843).  (There are several later editions, and also some holdings of his manuscripts in the India Office Private Papers and Western Manuscripts.) 

It's an account of Abbott's part in the 'Great Game', Russia and Britain's long struggle over the northern approach to India.  In 1839, Abbott was sent on a mission to Khiva to help release captured Russians, who it was feared would be used an excuse for a Russian incursion in the territory.  Lacking an understanding of the khan's court, he failed in this mission, but was persuaded to travel to St Petersburgh as an intermediary between the Khivans and the Russians, something that far exceeded his brief.  After his kidnap and release by Kazakhs (he lost several fingers during the attack), he eventually reached St Petersburg, where the Russians rejected his terms.  He then returned to England, and published his Narrative, which is full of detail about the terrain and peoples he met during his epic journey, as well as thoughts on Russian aggression and defence of his actions (and a curious account of the Giraffe House at London Zoo, opposite the modern-day residence of the American Ambassador; what would an Iain Sinclair make of all this?).  He returned to India, where he pursued a successful career as an administrator, leading to the naming of the town after himself.

As well as an imperialist adventurer, Abbott was also a poet, author of perhaps the 'worst poem ever written'. Jeremy Bernstein has included it in his New York Review of Books blog post, That 'Sweet Abbottabad Air':

I remember the day when I first came here
And smelt the sweet Abbottabad air

The trees and ground covered with snow
Gave us indeed a brilliant show [...]

[MJS]

 

 

On the Road: British Association for American Studies, Preston, 2011

'The mental riches you may here acquire will abide with you always'

I'm in Preston for the annual British Association for American Studies conference.  We've heard about the politics of attacks on 'black homophobia', the current state of American Studies in India, Roosevelt's decision to run for a third term (reached in 1939, rather than 1940 as generally held), Truman's use of the rhetoric of the founding fathers, the use of Web 2.0 in teaching and mentoring students overseas, and - in the Eccles Centre lecture by Nigel Bowles - a bracing run through the recent banking crisis and the consequences and prospects for public policy.  And it's only the third session.

We also had a drinks reception this evening, which was a chance to hear about what people are working on in an informal setting, and what they want from a library to support their work (resources for student dissertations, visual materials, remote access, newspapers, newspapers, newspapers), as well as learning a little more about American Studies in China.

The reception, which was sponsored by Manchester University, next year's host, took place in Preston's Harris Library, a photo of which is above.  The inscription is wonderful.

Here's a short account of last year's conference.  And Phil, of course, has just been to BACS.

[MS]

Major Robert Anderson, Hero of Fort Sumter

 
[detail, Maps.71495.(54)]

Many people's sympathies were divided by secession in 1861.  Major Anderson, who had served as an artillery officer in the Black Hawk, Seminole and Mexican wars, was born in Jefferson County, Kentucky, and owned a few enslaved African Americans in his wife's state of Georgia.  Believing that secession was ultimately inevitable, he wrote that, 'In this controversy between the North and the South, my sympathies are entirely with the South.'  Nonetheless, his commitment to the Union and the constitution of the United States ensured he remained loyal to Washington, and he was placed in command of the three federal forts at Charleston, South Carolina.  When that state seceded on 20 December, he realised that only Fort Sumter, an island in Charleston Harbor, was defensible, and secretly moved there during the night of 26 December. 

There then began a long blockade by confederate forces, in which Anderson faced dwindling supplies and the worry that he might be responsible for starting a war.   Soon, the entire, but divided, nation, was watching the standoff.

On 11 April, his former student, the confederate brigadier general Pierre Beauragard demanded his surrender. Anderson refused, at at 4:30 a.m. on 12 April, bombardment of the fort began.  The barrage continued for 34 hours.  Along with 127 officers and men, and 43 civilians, Anderson defended the fort until he they were finally forced to surrender on 13 April, and the banner was lowered on April 14. 

His defence made him the Union's first war hero, celebrated in portraits such as the one above, taken from a contemporary map, which placed him alongside images of Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln.  After serving in Kentucky and Tennessee, he returned to Fort Sumter on 14 April 1865, where he once again raised the Union flag.

He died in Nice, in 1871.  His letters to his wife during the Mexican War are published in An Artillery Officer in the Mexican War, 1846-7. Letters of Robert Anderson ... (G. P. Putnam's Sons: New York & London, 1911) [9555.v.2]

 

Bang!

 

As if by clockwork, the first bunch of US Civil War maps arrive for the sesquicentennial (although we got a jump start yesterday, with an Eccles Centre conference on the war, featuring my rambling thoughts on the early oil industry during the war years, and the very brilliant Amanda Foreman talking about The World on Fire).  Lot's more to follow.  Meanwhile, here's Fort Sumter for you.

[MS]

Last week of Evolving English

 

 

Guerrila: the free newspaper of the streets [cup.653.a.20]

I popped into the Library on Sunday for a last proper look at the Evolving English exhibition (which closes at the end of the week).  As well as Beowulf, the King James Bible, and Viz, there are also a selection of US items.  I've mentioned the Milk and Honey Route before, but there's also a Strunk and White, and, strikingly, Guerilla: the free newspaper of the streets (there are others, if you want to make a game of it).  I was particularly pleased to see the latter, as it was one of the first things that I acquired for our collections when I moved to this post. Not so much a call for evolution, as revolution, there's a bit more about this radical publication on the learning team's site, 'Dreamers and Dissenters'.

You can also 'Map your Voice' on the website.  I think that they are still after American voices.

[MJS]

Borders: Canada, the U. S. and a very important line

 
One way to firm up a border: the opening of the British Columbia parliament, photographed by J. W. Jones (February 10^th, 1898). Shelfmark: HS85/10

Many people reading this blog will have an idea that borders matter in the Americas. However, while the importance of the Mexico-U.S. border or the disputes between Colombia and Venezuela may spring to mind, the important and sometimes testy history of the Canada-U.S. border may not be at the forefront of our historical awareness. After all, the most pressing concern today is often seen as being how to boost trade and mutual American-Canadian security at the border.

This was not always the case though. The history of the Canada-U.S. border is actually one of geopolitical struggle, reservations, trade wrangling, colonial politics, bail jumping and draft dodging. British Columbia’s early history is an example of how contested the U.S. and Canada’s border spaces were even in the late nineteenth century. The Klondike gold rush created conditions through which the province became increasingly Americanised, leading to Canadian fears that the territory would move beyond their control. As a result many state building exercises were conducted, such as the construction of the impressive Victoria parliament buildings (above), in order to affirm the cultural identity of the state and in turn strengthen the province’s Canadian status. This, of course, came after the initial wrangling through which the border was defined at the 1846 Oregon Treaty. Given the opening of the Victoria parliament happened over fifty years after the Oregon Treaty was formalised the border between British Columbia and Washington State illustrates the constant efforts nations feel is required to maintain and assert their own borders.

For anyone interested in the complex history of this significant border the Library’s collections provide all sorts of insights. Documents on the Oregon Treaty are prevalent, with items such as, Lewis Cass’s ‘Substance of a Speech… Delivered in a secret session of the Senate… on the ratification of the Oregon Treaty’ (1846, Shelfmark: 8177.d.18.) and our Early Canadian Microfiche materials at Mic.F.232, providing perspectives from both sides of the border. Similarly, publications such as, R. C. Harris (ed.) ‘Historical Atlas of Canada: Volume 1’ (Toronto, University of Toronto Press. Shelfmark: f87/0428 DSC) provide perspectives on the evolution of the border as a whole; considering not just the American-Canadian context but also wider colonial and Native American aspects.

[PJH]

Miles O'Reilly and Irish Americans in the Civil War

Something for St Patrick's Day (as well as the tasty Viennese [sic] biscuits that Jerry has kindly brought in):

 
It's the fancy Edward F. Mullen cover of Miles O'Reilly: His Book (New York: Carleton, 1864), composed by Charles Graham Halpin (styled Halpine after his move to New York), a journalist born in Co. Meath in 1829 to Anglican parents.  He studied medicine and law at Trinity College Dublin and emigrated to Boston 1851, whereupon he became an assistant editor of the Boston Post.  He moved to New York, where he worked for the Times and Herald, covering Walker's Nicaraguan Filibuster War of 1855-6. 

In 1861, he responded to Lincoln's call to arms, and enlisted in the New York Sixty-ninth Regiment of Irish volunteers, serving in Missouri and at Hilton Head.  In 1863, a series of anti-draft riots led to the first of his stories and poems of the exploits of Miles O'Reilly in the New York Herald as an attempt to drum up support for the military among the New York Irish. Fiercely egalitarian, O'Reilly rarely refuses the opportunity to tell his superiors how to win the war; the tales were a great success, and were widely reprinted.  And, as the American National Biography puts it: 'he helped change the image of the Irish in the North and gave the Irish themselves a sense that they had a future in the United States, that the country was worth fighting for'. 

Overwork and insomnia led to overdose of chloroform in 1868, not far from the Herald offices.  For a photo of him, visit the Pageant of America in the NYPL Digital Library.

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

[M.J.S.]

From Punched Cards to the Census

I've spent a little more time this morning than I hoped on working out how to update my timesheet with a Saturday duty in the reading room.  We've just moved over to an electronic clocking-on system, and so I've been wondering a little about the origins of these systems - and what the Library holds in its collections. 

There's quite a literature on the history of time-keeping: perhaps the best known starting point is E. P. Thompson's 'Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism', Past & Present(1967), which argues that clocks and watches helped to 'internalise' the work-discipline required by modern industrial soceities.  Nigel Glenny and Paul Thrift disagree, in 'Reworking E. P. Thompson's "Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism"', Time & Society (1996).  

For Americanists, the debate is moved interestingly by Mark M. Smith to the U.S. in Mastered by the Clock: time, slavery and freedom in the American South (1997), and is also considered by Cheryl A. Wells, Civil War Time: Temporality and Identity in America, 1861-1865(2005).  Historical overviews are provided by Gehard Dorhn van-Rossum, A History of the Hour: clocks and modern temporal orders (1996) and David Landes, Revolution in Time: clocks and the making of the modern world (2000).  A modest contribution to the history of the calendar should be published this year, too.  The social sciences are considered in Rene Adams, Timewatch: the social anaylsis of time (1995).  All can be tracked down on the catalogue.

Sadly, we don't seem to hold much original material on Willard Bundy, the originator of the puched-card timekeeping system.  He and his brother helped to found the company that went on to become part of I.B.M.   But the story is told in Lars Heide, Punched-card systems and the early information explosion, 1880-1945 (2009), which also emphasises the importance of early punched card systems to late-19th century U.S. censuses, bringing me to our new census exhibition, which opens soon in the front hall of the Library (an on which Ian, the curator, has done a great job).  There's a short preview on the 24 Hour Museum site, and a press release on Census and Society: Why Everyone Counts here.

[M.S.]

Brighton Rock & Entertainment

Before the 2011 film (and the 1947 film before that) was the book (and a radio dramatisation and a musical).  And before the book (published in London and Toronto) was the first edition: the 1938 New York publication of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, published, I'm told, slightly before the British edition.  It is held at shelfmark 012604.l.23.

I recently ordered it up to the Rare Books Reading Room, and was pleased to note that it's been conserved as part of the Adopt-A-Book programme - by the listeners of BBC Southern Counties in 2003.  Clearly marketed by Viking as a thriller, it brought to mind the notes on the early blurbs to Greene novels in America, making him out as something of a pulpy English Raymond Chandler, a writer of 'entertainments' rather than serious novelist.  (Sadly, our copy is not housed with the Salter dust jacket.)

[M.S.]

The U.S. Civil War on the Web: a guide [updated 2.8.11]

U.S. history titles on the Civil War probably outnumber any other historical subject (although WWII may give it a run for its money); the same is probably true for the web.  As part of our Civil War project, we plan to curate some of it - selecting the best or the first ports of call. 

1. Discovering the Civil War

Site: http://archives.gov/exhibits/civil-war/

Description: Linked to the National Archives exhibition (from 30 April 2011), but also serving as a guide to their resources, with an excellent guide to existing National Archive-related materials, such as Kevin J. Foster's 'The Diplomats Who Sank a Fleet:
The Confederacy's Undelivered European Fleet and the Union Consular Service' (Prologue, Fall, 2001).  The site and exhibition also sees things in global terms.

Includes digitised collection items, guides and multimedia materials.

Follow them on Twitter.

Audience: General public, schools, librarians, undergraduates

Date visited: 2011-02-01

2. Southern Cultures: the sesquicentennial: how should we remember the Civil War?

Site: http://www.southerncultures.org/content/read/read_by_subject/civil_war/

Description: featured content from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, including older articles and new essays focussing on the Civil War in collective (Southern) memory.  Links to selected articles from the journal Southern Cultures via Project Muse.

Audience: undergraduate and research.

Date visited: 2011-03-08

3. Places in History (Library of Congress)

Site: http://www.loc.gov/rr/geogmap/placesinhistory/archive/2011/20110301_descriptiveintro.html

Description: Beginning March 4, 2011 until April 20, 2015, the Geography and Map Division will post selected maps from its digitized collections relating to political and economic issues leading up to the Civil War as well as military maps ranging from maps of minor skirmishes to major battles during the week of the 150th anniversary of those conflicts. Each map is accompanied by text discussing the selected maps, as well as citations and references. The site will be updated weekly during the four year anniversary of the Civil War and a keyword searchable weekly archive accompanies the site.

See also: Library of Congress Civil War Maps.

Audience: General public, schools, librarians, undergraduates

Date visited: 2011-03-08

4. Civil War Resources: Teaching the Sesquicentennial

Site: http://blog.historians.org/resources/1289/civil-war-resources-teaching-the-sesquicentennial

Description: A collection of useful teaching resources links from the American Historical Association. Includes links to lesson plans.

See also: http://blog.historians.org/resources/785/civil-war-resources

Audience: teachers, students, general public, academics

Date visited: 2011-02-22

5. Union or Secession: Virginians Decide (Library of Virginia) 

Site: http://www.virginiamemory.com/online_classroom/union_or_secession/

Description: Drawn primarily from the collections of the Library of Virginia, Union or Secession: Virginians Decide presents private letters, public debates, and other records that allow Virginians who experienced the crisis between the autumn of 1860 and the summer of 1861 to explain their thoughts, fears, and decisions in their own words. Union or Secession also contains the life stories of forty Virginians who experienced slavery, the sectional tensions of the 1850s, the secession crisis, and the split of their state into two.

Audience: teachers, schools, general public, researchers

Date visited: 2011-03-30

6. Life and Limb.  The Toll of the American Civil War (U.S. National Library of Medicine)

Site: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/LifeandLimb/

Description: The perspectives of surgeons, physicians, and nurses are richly documented in the history of Civil War medicine, which highlights the heroism and brutality of battlefield operations and the challenges of caring for the wounded during wartime. Yet the experiences of injured soldiers during the conflict and in the years afterwards are less well-known. Life and Limb: The Toll of the Civil War focuses on disabled veterans and their role as symbols of the fractured nation.

Audience: teachers, schools, general public

Date visited: 2011-03-30

Reviews, etc:

McPherson, James M., 'What Drove the Terrible War' (A. Foreman, A World on Fire; G. Gallagher, The Union War, A. Goodheart, 1861; D. Goldfield, America Aflame; G. Rable, God's Almost Chosen Peoples), review article in New York Review of Books, 14 July 2011. [accessed 2 Aug 2011]  Review contained additional footnotes to the printed article.

[M.J.S.]

Commemorating the Civil War: "The War We Want to Forget"?

I was chatting with a colleague at Queen Mary, who mentioned the British reluctance to remember the commotion caused in the UK by the American Civil War (perhaps unsurprisingly, given our support for the Confederate, slave-owning South), so I was interested to read this article in the Art Newspaper, which Carole forwarded to me. 

While museums and galleries were keen to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birthday in 2009, there has been much more of a disinclination to engage with the complex legacy of the Civil War (and perhaps a paucity of paintings). 

"Compared with the Revolution­ary War with its clear-cut enemy—the British —," notes Eleanor Jones Harvey, the chief curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum,"there is no glut of heroic canvases for the Civil War. “There was no market,” said Harvey, “for Ameri­cans fighting Amer­icans” ad­ding: “How do you commemorate something that we haven’t in a sense really gotten over?"

There are some exceptions - the Smithsonian, whose show Jones Harvey curated, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, for example.  And we'll be having a special website here at the BL.

[M.J.S.]

What's Next: Patterns and Practices in History in Print and Online, Part 1 (AHA)

The H-Histbibl listserv reminded me that several sessions from the American Historical Association were filmed, and are up on YouTube.  The following is the first of several clips from session 191, which I attended, and is full of interesting things about how the academy is and isn't embracing digital developments.  Worth a watch. [M.J.S.]

 

Civil War Project, Charlottesville and Stonewall Jackson's Birthday

 I spent some of this morning in a meeting, getting approval for a digital project that will digitise some of our collections in time for the 150th anniversary of the U.S. Civil War (followed by an interesting discovery related to this in the music collections.  More anon). 

It's also Stonewall Jackson's birthday.  We'll also, of course, be following the Union side of things; but the British did start off supporting the South.  Here's a brief recording, made in Charlottesville, in front of a commemorative statue - a stunning example of early c20th memorial work by Charles Keck, even if you don't have much truck with the general himself.  [n.b., for 'brass', read 'bronze'; it's also the second in a series of recordings.]

 

[M.J.S.]

Seeing Double: Impressions of America (1899)

Phil wrote some months back about stereoscopic photography, and I was struck by a current reprint of some U.S. Civil War '3D' photographs that I came across during the AHA, so I thought I would start to have a look at some of the photographically illustrated Americana in the collections.  First up is Porter's Impressions of America (1899), an account of a British scientist's journey from New York to Colorado Springs via Niagara, Yellowstone Park, San Francisco, Yosemite and Utah. There's a copy online, thanks to the University of California Library (and a .pdf available via the British Library's online catalogue).

You will, however, need a pair of stereoscopic glasses to get a full effect.  There are a pair in the back of the British Library copy at shelfmark K.T.C.103.b.3 (which is also signed by Porter); these are sadly lacking in the copy at at 10412.d.11.

 

Readers will find an account of the stereoscopic effect, a considerable amount of detail on the flora, fauna and geography Porter encountered along his way: in Manitou Grand Cavern, CO, for example, his guide plays the stalactites with a 'sort of drumstick', playing 'soft, bell-like notes, sometimes almost nasal... Thus we heard "Rousseau's Dream," and other airs, ending with "God Save the Queen"' - or, perhaps, 'God Save America'.  The effect knocks the show caves in Cheddar into touch.  Porter concludes with some speculations on the periodicity of the Gulf Stream, the American and Canadian Falls, Mirages, Photographic Methods and Geysers.  The final page includes a table of temperatures 'made with due care, on the summit of Pike's Peak, during the morning of September 7, 1897, by the author on five men' in the sleeping room at 8:15.  The author hoped that the observations 'may interest physiologists'. 

 

[M.S.]

Happy Thanksgiving

 

I was a little early at St Paul's this morning, where the annual Thanksgiving Service for the American community in London takes place, so I said hello to Richard Belt's Victorian replica of Francis Bird's 1712 sculpture of Queen Anne while we drank our coffee (it was a very cold morning). 

At the base are four marble figures depicting the notional dominions of France, Britannia, Ireland and, shown here, America, with her foot resting on a severed male head and what an eighteenth-century guidebook called an 'alligator creeeping'*.  In 1813, the Gentleman's Magazine speculated that the head was supposed to be that of Oliver Cromwell.  Happy Thanksgiving.

 

[M.S.]

Yes We Can!... But...

 

Team Americas are likely to be glued to More4 this evening, as President Obama makes his first appearance on the Daily Show as POTUS.   We are also waiting for reports on the Million Man March - March for Sanity/to Keep Fear Alive on Saturday.  We can't decide whether this is all a good thing of Swiftian brilliance, or some sort of post-Baudrillard ridiculousness, and are slightly troubled as to how historians of the future will get hold of the online and television materials that document/create this phenomenon.  Something else to worry about/keep fear alive, I suppose.

 

[M.S.]

Remembering 9/11

 
Photograph by Michael Katakis.

Mike Barnett and Bud Evans, Ranchers, Merriman, Nebraska, Tuesday, September 18 4:10 p.m. 'It may be New York but we're all Americans.' Bud Evans

We’ve reached that dreadful anniversary again. The past week has seen numerous documentaries on TV focused on every conceivable aspect of those terrible events of 11 September 2001 - and can it really be nine years since we first watched our TV screens in disbelief as we saw footage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers?

Almost a year ago I blogged about the American Civil War and the huge number of books that have been published on the subject, but I also focused on the fact that there are photographs of the aftermath of some of the battles. The debate around 9/11 has also generated a huge number of publications, not to mention the millions of internet pages (just Google it) but it’s the video footage, both professional and amateur, that we remember most, that we can replay over and over again in our heads. And the thousands of photographs that were taken to record every moment, as if the documenting would somehow make sense of it all (it didn’t).

I’ve also blogged about our acquisition of the archives of the photographer and writer Michael Katakis and his wife, the anthropologist Kris Hardin. Michael’s response to 9/11 was to set off on September 14 on a trip across America.

His photographs in the ‘Troubled Land’ series show people from all walks of life – and from the many different nationalities that make up the United States. Each photo identifies the subject, their occupation and the time and place, and most have a short quote from the subject. The photos offer a ‘snapshot’ of America at a unique moment in time, and, not surprisingly, the responses are very different - from the women in the Muslim Americans for Civil Rights and Legal Defense Office in Illinois (‘We are under siege domestically.’) to the owner of a radio station in Nebraska (‘I put up that flag yesterday with a star hand drill. With every blow I was hitting Bin Laden between the eyes.’).

And to quote Michael:

‘I wanted to know if the country could be as reflective as it was reactive. Would we be able to discuss why this had happened or explore if our actions in other parts of the world over the years had somehow contributed to such misery here at home. After 12 days I had more questions than answers.’

 
Photograph by Michael Katakis

Lorraine Woody, Ranger, Little Big Horn Battlefield Hardin, Montana, Sunday, September 16 4:37 p.m. 'I'm very sad. I'm a native New Yorker. When I heard I wanted to go home. I just wanted to go home.' 

[C.H.]

 

 

No-one wears white after Labor Day... a post-summer treat

Summer's gone; day's spent with the grass and sun.  But we don't mind, at least not when we can offer up some summery sea-shells such as these:

It's one of the many delicate copperplate, hand-coloured engravings contained in Thomas Say's American Conchology (New Harmony, Indiana, 1830-[1838]) [1256.f.21].  This particular specimin is Fulgur Pyruloides, and 'inhabits our soutern coast'; he reported that he 'never found it so far north as New-Jersey'.

Say's pioneering work is devoted to the cataloguing of American shells, a work he pursued in partnership with his wife, Lucy, and who produced many of the drawings in this volume.

They had married in secret during a scientific expedition to New Harmony, the utopian community founded by Robert Owen.

 
Here, the Says continued their studies, wrote, drew and coloured their work, and oversaw the output of the community's School Press.

As the great bibliographer, Streeter commented, 'A work as extraordinary for having been produced in the wilderness as for its elegance and the importance of its contribution to natural history'. 

Say, who died in 1834, is honoured in the naming, among other creatures, of the Caribbean mud crab, Dyspanopeus sayi.  Lucy moved back east, where she 'longed for the freedom I used to enjoy when I lived on the Banks of the Wabash'  She was elected as the first female member of the  Academy of Natural Sciences Philadelphia in 1841; she died in 1885.

[M.S.]

The Right to Dry

(photograph of frontier clothesline by Travelling Dancers, Jamestown Frontier Village, ND) 

[M.S. writes] In one of those rather sad statistics that emerges in the news from time to time, usually lamenting the decline in the number of pubs or Parisian bars, the BBC reports that the number of launderettes in the U.K. has fallen to just 3,000.  The image of the launderette has always been one of the acmes of U.S. pop culture, as the adman Sir John Hegarty noted while recalling the successful marriage of Nick Kamen's boxer shorts, jeans, washing machines and Marvin Gaye:

"We wanted an egalitarian environment, somewhere you would find almost anyone, and the launderette had that. In our minds we were clear - it was New York in the 1950s, it's 4pm on a Saturday afternoon when he walks in. In reality we sourced the washing machines on London's Harrow Road."

There's another image, of course: that of the white picket fence with laundry blowing in the wind, somewhere on the American frontier.  Long-gone now, one would have thought, given the popularity of electric dryers.   But no: across the land, people are fighting for the right to hang out their washing in the face of fastidious clothes line bans and class-based aesthetics, arguing that the environmental cost of machine dryers is hard to justify (as well as it smelling fresher).

I'm sure there's a dissertation of some sort to be found here, should you be on the lookout for one.  It's got it all: suburban and urban aesthetics, class divisions, nostalgia, civil disobedience, gender relations, politics, economics.  There's already a Wikipedia page about it, some articles in the press, and even a film, Drying for Freedom.  Oh, and Florida, Colorado, Utah, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont have also passed bills forbidding the banning of clotheslines.  Sadly, it hasn't yet come to pass in this curator's block of flats, but perhaps I'll follow in Rob and Laurie Cook's footsteps, and put more than just my smalls on the line.

"His Excellence in the Art of Swimming"

The Londonist alerts us to the news that the journalist Matthew Parris came to an embarrassing, but thankfully not tragic, end to his attempt to swim the Thames at Rotherhithe (we quite like the tunnel there).  As the Londonist reports:

But the normally level-headed correspondent mixed up his tide tables and, slipping into the water before high-tide, ended up three-quarters of a mile upriver.

The Port Authority of London was apparently not impressed.

Nonetheless, we like his pluck, and call to mind an earlier visitor to London's fondness for watery expeditions.  When Benjamin Franklin found himself in London as a young man, he took to swimming (at least according to his rather puffed-up pages of his Autobiography) like a fish to water:

At Watts's printing-house I contracted an acquaintance with an ingenious young man, one Wygate, who, having wealthy relations, had been better educated than most printers; was a tolerable Latinist, spoke French, and lov'd reading. I taught him and a friend of his to swim at twice going into the river, and they soon became good swimmers. They introduc'd me to some gentlemen from the country, who went to Chelsea by water to see the College and Don Saltero's curiosities. In our return, at the request of the company, whose curiosity Wygate had excited, I stripped and leaped into the river, and swam from near Chelsea to Blackfryar's, performing on the way many feats of activity, both upon and under water, that surpris'd and pleas'd those to whom they were novelties.

Before returning to Philadelphia, a gentleman apparently heard of Franklin's aquatic abilities and asked him to remain in London to teach his sons how to swim. Ben, however, had to return (no doubt to invent something), and the Franklin School of Swimming remained unopened, and alas, unable to assist future natatory journalists.

[M.S.]

Postscript: the cause of Parris's trouble was a muddle between GMT and BST in the tide tables; as ever, Franklin was here first, and came to London with recommendations for a more sensible daylight saving plan (and continued to promote his plan in Paris in 1784).

War Logs Again

[J.J writes]

Last month, when our Chief Executive announced plans to digitize swathes of the British Library’s Newspaper collection in collaboration with Brightsolid she used the well known saying that 'newspapers are the first draft of history.' 

As news broke this week of the leak of 92,201 internal US military records relating to the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2009, the journalists at the Guardian, the New York Times and the German magazine Der Spiegel who received these logs found themselves working on this 'first draft' on an epic scale; a modern-day echo of the 1971 leak of the Vietnam 'Pentagon Papers' to the New York Times.

As someone who regularly deals with government documentation, albeit generally somewhat older in origin, it appears that at the very least a portion of this documentation would have been made available in the fullness of time, particularly when one considers the recent overhaul to the US Government’s document classification system (see my blog post 17 February 2010). 

A quick look at the Digital National Security Archive database will uncover a range of US foreign policy decisions.  One document, dating from September 1952 entitled 'Guatemalan Communist Personnel to be disposed of during Military Operations of Calligeris', grabbed my attention. It lists 58 names, all of which have been redacted and are classified as 'Category I - persons to be disposed of through Executive action.' Executive action is of course a CIA euphuism for assassination.

Today, the editorial pages of our papers will offer us a first draft of history based on material that in usual circumstances be classified of at least seventy years.  The question is, can anything be learned from this first draft?  While they are novel in the extent to which they pull back the curtain of secrecy, their contents surely do not differ from what we sadly know to be true about war.

[M.S. adds]

The nature of the leak is also novel but increasingly familiar: WikiLeaks has become a feature of our age.  But it is also one that senses the need for partnership with 'old media'.  As David Michon comments on the Monocolumn ('Young upstart WikiLeaks turns to the old guard'), 'wanting to make a splash, and surely spread its workload, this new media platform turned to the powerhouses of print, with reputations built over decades of accurate reporting – plus a habit of digesting major reports for public consumption.'

Mark Twain's Autobiography

[M.S. writes] Last week, Carole and I were pleased to be invited to a reading and discussion at the English Speaking Union, thanks to the U.S. Embassy.  The event marked Granta magazine's publication of a long excerpt from Samuel Clemens' reminiscences, which are due to be published in full this autumn after a century-long embargo.

[10604.i.18, plate XXI]

Bonnie Greer and Robert McCrum gave a U.S. (and Southern) and U.K. perspective, the audience provided some Southern context, and Kerry Shale channelled Huck and Clemens perfectly.  John Freeman(modestly introduced himself as 'just a guy', but also a guy who currently edits Granta) graciously kept the discussion moving along.  We also learnt that 'Mark Twain' echoes the call of safety made as ships reached the second fathom.  The only problem was that the power of Clemen's writing (which sounded powerfully modern, perhaps one reason for the emargo, as if Twain's literary ability could not be recognised in his own time because of his popularfame) summoned up such mouthwatering images of food and home-style cooking, our stomachs were rumbling.

We look forward to the full publication of the autobiography, and swear to revisit Twain's oeuvre.  Meanwhile, here's a rather grainy picture:

 
  

Entente Cordiale: Joseph Hodges Choate

President Sarkozy is passing through St Pancras International today, in order to celebrate his predecessor Charles de Gaulle's historic war broadcast. 

But here's a picture and verse to celebrate another form of Entente Cordiale (perhaps recent events in the Gulf of Mexico are a reminder that the 'special relationship' is subject to downs as well as ups): 

It's from The Struwwekpeter Alphabet(illustrated by F. Carruthers Gould and versified by Harold Begbie [12315.k.15).  The humour doesn't travel down the ages well (it dates from 1900), although the images perhaps do:

In 1899, President McKinley appointed Choates as ambassador to the UK. In the words of the American National Biography he

was instrumental in working out the remaining differences between the two states and cementing Anglo-American friendship in the years before World War I. During his years at the Court of St. James's, Choate arranged for the United States and Great Britain to settle the Alaska-Canada boundary dispute by arbitration; won Britain's consent to abrogate the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, allowing the United States to proceed with the Panama Canal unilaterally; and secured Britain's implied assent to the Open Door policy in China.

More about this in Bradford Perkins, The Great Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1895-1914 (1968).

[M.S.]
 

Politics and Bookstore diversions

We have a General Election today in the UK, and this means that there are certain rules about what can be discussed on blogs by public servants.  But, I think I'm safe to say that in order to get into political zone, I watched a couple of episodes of West Wing, that great liberal fantasy, last night while bashing out a few stationary miles on the cycle trainer.

During the second episode ('In Excelsis Deo', series 1), President Bartlett visited a bookstore to pick up a few presents for Christmas.  Needless to say, his staff were not much amused by this scholarly expedition.

Would it be possible to recreate this scene at the BL?

1. BARTLET: Oooh! 'The Fables of Phaedrus,' 1886, first edition, red leather label, gilt lettering, engraved frontice. Phaedrus, you know, who was a slave, but later granted his freedom by Augustus, wrote his animal fables in iambic verse.

Not sure what is meant by first edition here, but there was a grammar school edition of Phaedrus published by Longman in New York and London, 1887 ([shelfmark 11306.aaa.33])

2. JOSH:A book which if I was stuck with it on a desert island, I still wouldn't read it, 'The Adventures of James Capen Adams, Mountaineer and Grizzly Bear Hunter of California.' I believe I would eat this book before I read it.

Conservation may have something to say about that. Published in San Francisco in 1860 at at 10882.bb.4. (Adams named one of his bears Ben Franklin, something Josh could surely have, ahem, joshed about).

3. BARTLET:All right. You know Zoey is starting Georgetown in two weeks, I was thinking about getting this for her. 'The Nature of Things. A Viviscalic Poem Translated from the Latin of Titus Lucrecius Carus.' Leo looks to Charlie with a disbelieving look.

Trickier.  It looks like Viviscalic is a transcription error, so that leads us to possibly this edition: 

Watson, John Selby. Lucretius on the nature of things : a philosophical poem in six books / (London : Henry G. Bohn, 1851.) [X3/2479]

Later, Josh presents Donna with a gift: 3. DONNA: Skis would have killed you? I assume Heimlich Beckengruber on The Art and Artistry of Alpine Skiing is as fictitious as Bartlett himself. A survey of 'In the Thick of It', may, of course, have come up with some different results. Anyway, go vote. [M.S.]

Little Red Book

Charlottesville, VA, can boast one of the lowest ratios of restaurants per head in the USA; the same must surely be true of the number of bookstores.  Despite Virgin Atlantic lowering the baggage weight limit, several titles made their way back across the Atlantic after a recent trip.  The haul included this slim volume, Joesphine Cleary Winsatt, Recollections (1926), which I picked up at Blue Whale Books and have added to the collections:

OCLC lists twelve copies, none of which are in the UK (or even Europe).  It is a memoir of Wimsatt's 'career as a war wanderer' during the Civil War (25), written up during her time in China (it was printed by North China Star Press, Tientsin).  As a young girl of five, she 'thoroughly enjoyed' the adventures caused by her flight from Washington, D.C. (her family were Confederate sympathisers - they had a pet Mexican monkey that they named 'Abe'), but concluded that 'as I look back at those far off times I think that the War of the Rebellion, like all other wars, was unnecessary, selfish, and cruel' (11).  The volume captures some of the Southern views of the 'Yankees', and offers historians all sorts of glimpses of the past: details of the nursing of the wounded,  a vignette of a breakfast with General Lee, an account of the diphtheria outbreak in Charlottesville, and stories of entertainments ('Starvation Parties') near the University of Virginia 'which was not in operation during the war, as all the students who were old enough to carry arms had become soldiers.' 

Wimsatt also took part in a play, representing one of the Southern States (she was Maryland),but 'as I reached the Goddess [of Liberty], Abe Lincoln, acted by Bob Maupin, one of the large boys, stepped forward and threw a chain over my shoulders, to indicate I was captured by the Union.  I buried my face in my hands and burst into tears, a bit of acting that was not in the program, but which was highly applauded by the audience'. (24)  She concludes her memoir: 'Although I am an old woman now, I am still at heart, I think, a Little Rebel.'

[M.S.]

Thomas Jefferson's Birthday [updated]

If you follow the Gregorian Calendar then today marks the 267th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's birthday (13 April 1743).  The Library is fortunate enough to hold a contemporary copy of his Notes on the State of Virginia, which Jefferson inscribed to Col. Smith (most likely John Adam's inept son-in-law), and I was perhaps even more fortunate to have a visit to Montalto, overlooking Jefferson's beloved Monticello just before Easter.  Not only does the visitor witness a panorama of the Blue Mountains in the distance, but also enjoys a bird's-eye view of the house and gardens, planted not only with Jefferson's favourite vegetable, peas, but also more exotic produce like wormwood.  The vines now also produce grapes for wine, something that Jefferson aspired to, but never achieved.  Here's a photo:

And the plants:

Elsewhere on the web, the NYPL has tweeted a link to its digitized Jeffersonian material. And Jefferson's papers are being put online at UVA's Rotunda project.  The manuscript of Notes on the State of Virginia is online at the Massachusetts Historical Society's brilliant website.

[M.S.]

American Studies in Norwich

As Carole mentioned in her latest post, Team Americas are on the road.  The 55th British Association for American Studies conference is underway at the University of East Anglia, and we have just returned to the dorms after a reception and talk at the Civic Centre at The Forum.  It offered a chance to chat with some other delegates, admire the Lord Mayor of Norwich's chain (and listen to her tales of being a war baby), and a remarkable lecture by Professor Wai-Chee Dimock (Yale) entitled 'Who's Irish? Henry James, Colm Toibin, James Joyce, Gish Jen'.  The Forum was rather open plan, so the professor gamely spoke on as Pizza Express eaters were treated to an exploration of how identities are made, and often as not made through language.  Here's a photo:

 

The Forum also has some very impressive projection equipment.  This was used to show off a some images produced as part of UEA's School of American Studies outreach project - a collection of schoolchildren's responses to and thoughts on the USA.  We also received a copy of their work in a book in the conference pack.  Another photo:

 

I am now trying to find something for supper.  More papers tomorrow...

[M.S.]

Team America on the road

April is conference season for Team America. Phil is on his way to Cambridge for the British Association for Canadian Studies annual conference; Matthew and I will be heading to Norwich and the University of East Anglia on Thursday for the British Association of American Studies conference, and on Friday, Aquiles will be off to Bristol for the Society for Latin American Studies conference. For some reason, the Society for Caribbean Studies has its conference in July – but that’s just as well or we probably wouldn’t be able to fit it in. So, it’s a busy time, but apart from enjoying seeing old friends (and making new ones), the conferences are a great opportunity for us to do what we all love doing – telling people about our collections and pointing them in the direction of material that they might not have thought about. The range of papers on offer also provide us with a good pointer on trends in research, always invaluable when we have to anticipate what materials people might want, both now and in the future. Matthew and I are also looking forward to celebrating the official opening of the Thomas Paine Study Centre at UEA. And as usual, our Eccles Centre for American Studies will be sponsoring a lecture at both BACS and BAAS. Tomorrow, Dr Danielle Fuller will be delivering “Citizen Reader: Canadian literature, mass reading events and the promise of belonging” at BACS, and on Saturday 10th at BAAS, Professor David Reynolds will speak on “America, Empire of Liberty: the challenges of ‘popular’ history.”

[C.H.]