Recent Acquisitions

So here are some recent book acquisitions (yes, I know I'm trying to divest myself of stuff and am very careful about what books I acquire because of it). I saw this on another blog, and thought it was a pretty fun idea. Ok, I'm a geek. I get it! Enjoy :)

1. Seeman, Erik R. (2010) Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492-1800. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. This *just* came in the mail today (thank you, Amazon Gift Certificates!). I'm very excited to read it, and the little bit I've skimmed indicates it is really quite readable. Chapters include deathways in the Old World, first contact in the Americas, the Chesapeake, New France, New England, African-American deathways, and the Seven Years' War. It's distantly related to The Book, too; I'll have to be careful not to get all tangential.
2. Zinn, Howard (2003) A People's History of the United States, 1492-Present. Perennial Classics, New York. I've wanted to read this since I first heard about it, oh, five years ago or so? (Yes, I've been living under a rock). I got it about two weeks ago, and have been reading it. Good stuff; I'm very much enjoying the different view of history, and have actually already incorporated some of it into my work. I only wish there were more complete citations for information and other leads I could chase down. I understand editors often cut those things out for general audience books, but I'm *really* missing them.
3. Drooker, Penelope Ballard and John P. Hart (2010) Soldiers, Cities, and Landscapes: Papers in Honor of Charles L. Fisher. New York State Museum Bulletin 513, New York State Education Department, Albany, New York. This one is available free online as a .pdf courtesy New York State (click on the title to get there). A quick peek suggests there are a lot of good papers in here, including early military stuff and two chapters on delft tiles in the state. Flipping through, I saw a very neat wolf-head effigy European smoking pipe, which I need to read more about, and I'm very interested in reading the chapter on the Tenant-To-Owner Agrarian Myth (agricultural ladder) in the Adirondacks.

Edit 1/20/11: I should clarify which fields these are from! #1: history, with some archaeology; #2: history; #3: archaeology, mostly historical. I almost applied for PhD studies in history, but I'm pretty hard-wired as an archaeologist.

Social Annihilation

America was a very interesting place in the very late eighteenth/early nineteenth century; interesting, at least, from the distance of two hundred years.

Fresh out of the Revolutionary War, riding early waves of the Industrial Revolution and snowballing scientific discovery, Americans sorted out what it meant to be American. We left our small towns, and pushed west; we mined coal and built canals to carry it to increasingly industrialized cities, our manufacturing no longer dependent on water power. We built railroads, and new towns sprung up along them like a string of pearls. Free of the Church of England, we sought our own meaning in utopian communities and home-grown religious traditions.

It all sounds very progressive and romantic. But there was, of course, a price. When a person's world was limited to a couple of days ride by horse or buggy on shitty roads, and they knew or were related to pretty much everyone they encountered, they (and everyone else) knew exactly what their place in the community was. As people began to travel further, move to industrial centers, or set out to make their fortunes, communities became very fluid. Members of families who had lived in one place for generations would move away; people who had no family ties to an area would move in, or just stay a spell before moving on. The social order was in flux, and there were so many strangers...

It became necessary to wear your social rank and status on your sleeve; to visually advertise to the strangers around you, where you placed in the social pecking order. There was an entire ballet of right clothing, right mannerisms, right pursuits, right language that, it was assumed, only true members of the elite could pull off. But because none of these things are inherent within a person, social rank and status became contested -- people of lower social rank and status emulated the social ballet of the elite, and when too many of them got close to being good at it, the bar was moved. This even played out in cemeteries:

... the working poor tried to assure themselves a place in funerary society by securing burials in cemeteries or churchyards that were equivalent to those of the bourgeoisie, or within bourgeois cemeteries in inferior graves and spaces. The alternatives - to be sold and/or stolen, dissected, and/or displayed in a museum, or to be dumped anonymously in a mass grave in a potter's field - represented social annihilation. The dissected body was nothing but a collection of body parts and waste, a thing; potter's field was a dumping ground, a place of exclusion…. For working men and women, burial in the cemetery or churchyard symbolized inclusion in the social order. (Sappol 2002: 35-36)

It was important to be important enough that your body was not exhumed by the Resurrection Men and sold to medical schools for dissection or dumped in an anonymous paupers' grave. Funerary display was one way that families could assert their place in society; that they could show, by virtue of having All The Right Trappings, that they belonged. I think the idea of social annihilation is an interesting one in the context of material status display and negotiation.


Significant sources for the above include:

Baker, Faye Joanne
1977 Toward Memory and Mourning: A Study of Changing Attitudes Toward Death Between 1750 and 1850 as Revealed by Gravestones of the New Hampshire Merrimack River Valley, Mourning Pictures, and Representative Writings. M.Phil Disseration, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

Halttunen, Karen
1982 Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870. Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut.

Hoffman, Frederick L.
1919 Pauper Burials and the Interment of the Dead in Large Cities. An address read at the National Conference of Social Work, Atlantic City, N. J., June 4, 1919. Prudential Press, Newark, New Jersey.

Sappol, Michael
2002 A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomies and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey.

Shively, Charles
1988 A History of the Conception of Death in America, 1650-1860. Garland Publishing, Inc., New York. PhD dissertation, Harvard University.

Mark Twain and the Totenhauser

A few days ago I posted about Totenhauser (aka hospitals for the dead, aka waiting mortuaries). In the comments, Ink recalled a Mark Twain story involving a guard at one of these establishments. I don't want to spoil the story, which I thought quite a good one, called "A Thumb-Print and What Came Of It," part of Twain's Life on the Mississippi (pp. 232-247 of the linked edition)... but I will share Twain's description of the Totenhaus:

Toward the end of last year I spent a few months in Munich, Bavaria... One day, during a ramble about the city, I visited one of the two establishments where the Government keeps and watches corpses until the doctors decide that they are permanently dead, and not in a trance state. It was a grisly place, that spacious room. There were thirty-six corpses of adults in sight, stretched on their backs on slightly slanted boards, in three long rows -- all of them with wax-white, rigid faces, and all of them wrapped in white shrouds. Along the sides of the room were deep alcoves, like bay windows; and in each of these lay several marble-visaged babes, utterly hidden and buried under banks of fresh flowers, all but their faces and crossed hands. Around a finger of each of these fifty still forms, both great and small, was a ring; and from the ring a wire led to the ceiling, and thence to a bell in a watch-room yonder, where, day and night, a watchman sits always alert and ready to spring to the aid of any of that pallid company who, waking out of death, shall make a movement -- for any, even the slightest, movement will twitch the wire and ring that fearful bell. I imagined myself a death-sentinel drowsing there alone, far in the dragging watches of some wailing, gusty night, and having in a twinkling all my body stricken to quivering jelly by the sudden clamor of that awful summons! (pp. 233)

Ignoring for a moment Twain's literary turns, comparing watches dragging, the night wailing, and his body "in a twinkling" (all evidences of paranormal activity) stricken to quivering jelly (invoking decomposition)... how many Americans had this as their first introduction to the Totenhaus? How many wondered what Twain was smoking, or pooh-pooh'd those wacky Germans? Now I'm curious if Totenhauser were ever described in Godey's Ladies' Book. (Oh hush, I love me a good tangent...)

Edit: Apparently I've not been using the correct plural for -haus, which should be -hauser not -hausen which is the verb -to dwell, -to reside, -to live. Shame on me for forgetting my high school German! Though the verb form is sort of interesting, particularly in this context.

The Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization in New York State working to establish a science and technology center and museum at Wardenclyffe, the last extant lab used by Nikola Tesla. The land is currently for sale.

In 1901, Tesla purchased 200 acres on Long Island's north shore from James Warden. These 200 acres were part of an 1,800 acre potato farm along what is today Route 25A in Shoreham, NY. The site became known as Wardenclyffe, after the former owner. Here, Tesla established what would become his only remaining laboratory building.

Tesla is a pretty compelling figure. It would be a shame for his last remaining lab to disappear. In addition to his many scientific achievements, Tesla has made quite an impression in popular culture. Perhaps it was his eccentric personality, his grand vision of where science was going (which many thought was outlandish, but some of which has or will soon come to pass), his path-crossing with Edison, his FBI file... whatever the reason, he's one of those people that need only be referred to by a single name. Seriously, hands up if you knew a) Tesla wasn't his first name and b) if you knew Nikola was, and c) how to spell Nikola without looking it up. I got 2/3, so there.

Some popular culture incarnations of Tesla:

David Bowie as Nikola Tesla in the 2006 film, The Prestige. With Hugh Jackman. Bowie as Tesla = pretty amazing. The rest of the film was pretty good, too.

The first film Superman cartoon short, released in 1941, has Superman fighting a Mad Scientist who, with his death ray (which Tesla was working on) is set on destroying those who laughed at him. AC current makes a cameo appearance when the Mad Scientist turns up the juice! According to Wiki, the scientist is referred to as Tesla. I didn't catch the reference when I watched it, and it's not in the transcription, either. But, it sure does appear to be a caricature of Tesla, 2 years before he died, even.

He appears in a popular cartoon by Kate Beaton, who is rocking the world with her history cartoons. She can draw, she's articulate, and damn funny, too.

I'm sure there is something in all of this about preservation, public history, history of science, what's important, mass media, the relevance of history, why place is important, etc., but I am not articulating it particularly well. Still, there it is.

Saving The Modern Era

A short post today; I have much to do, and not much time to do it in (Quick! Everything EVERYTHING into the end-of-semester boat! Double-time!)... but I thought this was cool. It is also a cautionary tale about digital media, throwing things away, and making fun of geeks who love technology.

From Old Dirt-New Thoughts, a description (with photos!) of saving the digital archive of the Lunar Orbiter missions in the late 1960s.