This week ASHP/CML staff discussed Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War as part of our semi-regular staff reading series. Generally, reviews were mixed in our crowd, many of us feeling that too often Faust, in equalizing the mourning on both sides of the conflict, seemed decidedly apolitical about the causes for which they fought. (For those who have read the book, Eric Foner’s review is required reading.) While there were some parts of the books that really worked, such as the description of setting up national cemeteries in the war’s wake, there were other parts that did not, like Faust’s reliance on usual suspects Walt Whitman and Ambrose Bierce to talk about how the effect of the war’s destruction could be see in literature.

We all were frustrated that the book’s many images were used merely as illustrations, without context or comment on any. The simplistic and unexamined use of images among historians is exactly the problem that ASHP’s PUSH project hopes to rectify. In This Republic of Suffering, at the very least it seemed like a missed opportunity, and, given what we know about the importance of photography in the Civil War, at times it seemed a like a major oversight. I was reminded of this thread of conversation while looking through the images in the Library of Congress’s Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Portraits, recently announced in the Internet Scout Report. There I came across the portrait below, entitled [Unidentified girl in mourning dress holding framed photograph of her father as a cavalryman with sword and Hardee hat].

What a rich source to accompany Faust’s chapter “Realizing,” which looks at middle-class mourning customs and the “work” performed by civilians to come to terms with individual losses and the scope of death and misery caused by the war. For me the photograph is interesting because it is so similar to soldiers’ portraits, like the one she holds of the man who is presumably her father. The effect of the portrait’s similarity is heightened when one comes across it in a series of Civil War soldiers’ portraits, as I did on the Library of Congress’s website. One wonders who commissioned the photograph, who took it, who looked at it, and what each person thought of as they gazed upon the scene of grief and mourning. Was it part of a larger fad for taking pictures of wives and children in mourning, holding their loved ones’ portraits? Was this an image that one displayed on a mantle or held close to one’s heart? At what point did it become separated from the family whose grief it memorializes?

Good thing we are tackling Civil War photography as one of our subjects in the upcoming series Still Hazy After All These Years! For those of you in the New York area, mark your calendars now for February 3, April 5, and November 3. At the final date, we’ll be talking about photography with Anthony Lee, Mary Niall Mitchell, Martha A. Sandweiss and Deborah Willis.

From Leah:

I’m really impressed by the University of Wisconsin-Milwuakee’s “The March on Milwaukee Civil Rights History Project.” The project brings together primary sources from across the university’s collections related to the black freedom struggle in Milwaukee. It’s particularly strong on issues related to open housing and the desegregation of schools, especially the one-day boycotts known as “Freedom Days” that occurred in many northern cities in the mid-1960s. Unlike many university-based digital archives project, this site contains plenty of context and supporting materials–maps, a glossary of important terms and people, a timeline–to help a non-specialist understand the scope and contents of the collection. They’ve also done an impressive job digitizing and publishing archival film (!!) and audio materials, in addition to photographs, court cases, ephemera and other documents.

From Ellen:

The New-York Historical Society has digitized 14 manuscript collections relating to slavery and abolition and put them online. They include many gems, including the records of the African Free School and account books, ships’ logs, and bills of sale from individuals and companies involved in the slave trade. Alas, these digital collections are not particularly user-friendly. The documents are presented almost entirely in facsimile (ie, images of the original documents rather than more easily readable type) and while you can search among and within the documents, it is vital to have a strong sense of what you are looking for–the site does virtually nothing to contextualize them. Still, it’s never a bad thing to have greater access to such rare and important archival materials.

And finally . . . did you know that ASHP is now on Twitter? Follow us at ashp_cml

On Tuesday we welcomed a new group of teachers to our Teaching American History professional development seminars. For the first time, we started the series with a day addressing the question “What Is Social History”, rather than focusing on a particular content topic. In one of our introductory activities we looked at how social history has changed the narrative of U.S. history. As an example, we looked at the historiography of slavery as reflected in textbooks.

We set up the activity with Herb Gutman’s framing of the historiography of slavery: first, historians looked at what slavery did for the slaves; then they looked at what slavery did to the slaves, and finally, social historians asked, “What did slaves do for themselves?”  The differences between the following textbook excerpts are illuminating:

As for Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears, there is some reason to believe that he suffered less than any other class in the South from its ‘peculiar institution.’ The majority of slaves were adequately fed, well-cared for, and apparently happy. Competent observers reported that they performed less labor than the hired man of the Northern states. Their physical wants were better supplied than those of thousands of Northern laborers, English operatives, and Irish peasants . . . Although brought to America by force, the incurably optimistic Negro soon became attached to the country, and devoted to his ‘white folks.’ Slave insurrections were planned—usually by the free Negroes—but invariably betrayed by some faithful black; and trained obedience kept most slaves faithful throughout the Civil War. . . If we overlook the original sin of the slave trade, there was much to be said for slavery as a transitional status between barbarism and civilization.

[Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 537-539.]

At best, the slave family was unstable and uncertain.  Slaves could not own property because they could not make agreements or contracts.  Likewise, they could not legally marry.  A slave man and woman were “married” by their owner’s consent.  At any time, however, the owner could sell the man or the woman, and that would be the end of that marriage and that family.  If children were born, the owner could sell the children, thereby breaking up the family.  This was one of the most cruel features of slavery…

Today, a hundred years and more after the end of slavery, we can only imagine what it meant to be a slave.  Constantly watched, and subject to complete control by the master, a slave was never allowed to forget that he was a slave.  As the songs of the slaves indicate, there was a deep undercurrent of sadness and despair.  “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” and “Let My People Go” are examples.  “Everybody Talkin’ about Heaven Ain’t Goin’ There” implies a rebuke to their masters.

[John W. Caughey, John Hope Franklin, and Ernest R. May, Land of the Free: A History of the United States (New York: Benziger Brothers, Inc., 1966), 305-306.]

On plantations and small farms, slave women and men employed a variety of methods to slow the pace of work, subvert the owners’ authority, and create a sense of identity and community distinct from whites. A small number of slaves chose open rebellion over everyday resistance. Although none of these uprisings succeeded in toppling the institution of slavery, or even doing significant damage to it, each sent a shock wave of fear through the white South. Along with a small but growing movement opposed to slavery in the North, southern blacks’ embrace of religion, resistance, and rebellion made clear that the institution of slavery could be maintained only by physical force and a strong political will.

[American Social History Project, Who Built America: Working People and the Nation’s History, Third Edition, Volume 1: To 1877 (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008), 304.]

As we read and discussed each textbook passage, teachers shared their thoughts about why social history matters, especially for their students. We all agreed that social history is where our public school students can see themselves. But we hardly could have phrased the importance of social history better than Milwaukee high school student and activist John Lawrence did in 1968, when speaking to journalists about why students were protesting their textbooks.  Lawrence noted that he hadn’t grown up with textbooks that showed the experiences and contributions of African Americans or other marginalized groups, and consequently had spent his youth wishing he were white.  Now, he said, he didn’t want the same fate for his younger brother:

I want him to learn about how his race of people and the other races of people…have functioned, how they will function, or how they must function in order to form a more complete society.

In 1968, Milwaukee schools had adopted “The Negro in American Life: A Guide to Supplement the Study of U.S. History.”  As the title suggests, the supplement covered black history absent in the main narrative of the district’s standard textbook. Lawrence noted that for “right now, it will have to do, but in five years, I want my little brother to have something better, and I don’t want it to be called a supplement.”  Lawrence went on to say that it’s not enough that students hear about Crispus Attucks dying in the Boston Massacre:

So what?  [It’s fine that he died] for a great and noble cause, but what did he contribute?  …What did he help the nation as a whole gain? He died, one man fighting for freedom…but we want to know about the rest of the men. I’m not saying black, I’m not specifying black.  I’m saying the rest of the men, period.

Unfortunately, I can’t embed the video of Lawrence speaking to the press, but I highly recommend watching it at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Library’s website (Lawrence begins speaking at 1:56 mark).

Jack Minnis, A Chronology of Violence and Intimidation in Mississippi Since 1961, (Mississippi, circa 1963), 4, from the University of Southern Mississippi McCain Library and Archives.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that Tea Party activists are organizing “surveillance squads” to “photograph and videotape suspected irregularities, and in some cases to follow buses that take voters to the polls.”  What a terrifying return to an earlier era of voter suppression.

The photograph at left was published in a report chronicling the intimidation and violence towards African-American voting activists in 1963. As the original photo caption notes, police documented voters as they entered courthouses so that the “evidence” could later be used to identify them to employers and landlords for possible firing and eviction. The report was most likely published and distributed by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, though it was based on research that was originally compiled and entered into the United States Congressional Record in 1963.

I guess we should not be surprised that the same people who think the 1964 Civil Rights Act is unconstitutional would also ignore the principle and the letter of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Yes, there is a distinction between the vigilante nature of the Tea Partier squads, compared to the role of government officials in voter suppression as captured in this photograph. But there were plenty of self-appointed  squads, citizens’ councils, and klans who suppressed voters back then, too.

What we have is one of those perfect “teachable moments” to make connections between today and the past. I hope that teachers might find a way to draw upon events surrounding the 2010 elections, including the “Don’t Vote” advertisement targeted to Hispanic voters in Nevada, to talk about the history of voter suppression in the U.S. and the efforts of activists to document and counter voter intimidation.  It is also an opportunity to put the Voting Rights Act in the context of people’s lives today, rather than simply teaching the Act as the culmination of the black freedom struggle and the last point on a timeline of the civil rights era.  As today’s news suggests, civil rights, including the right to vote, is hardly a settled issue.

The above photograph will be included in HERB, our forthcoming database of history education resources.  In the meantime, if you are a teacher and would like a classroom-ready version in order to teach about voter suppression past and present, please let me know and I’m happy to send you a PDF.

In honor of the comic strip Doonesbury’s 40th anniversary (the first strip was published in the Yale Daily News on October 26, 1970), Slate has a series of articles celebrating “Doonesbury at 40,” including an interview with creator Garry Trudeau and a list of the strip’s 200 greatest moments. (You can check out Doonesbury’s entire run online for free for the next two weeks, via gocomics.com. It is, sadly, not keyword searchable.)

While I follow the strip only sporadically now, I have a very large soft spot for Doonesbury. When I was about 11 or so, I discovered my older brother’s soft-cover compilations and devoured them. Watergate and the end of the Vietnam war, which had existed on the fringes of my childhood consciousness, came into focus for me, along with Trudeau’s playful take on feminism and the counterculture. (My brother, or perhaps one of his friends, had starred all of the strips that dealt with Mark Slackmeyer’s fights with his father over the length of his hair, an argument I had heard plenty of times between my brother and my father. This is hilarious in retrospect, since my brother has been, as a teenager and ever since, the polar opposite of a countercultural figure. My vigilant father thought that any male head with hair longer than a crewcut was suspect.)

In recent  years, Trudeau’s coverage of the war in Iraq has been particularly fine, depicting the humanity of ordinary soldiers with nuance and humor, and all without sacrificing its political edge. Doonesbury has also followed its soldier characters home from the battlefront, too, with long-playing stories of how they attempt to recover their physical and mental health. Sounds more bleak than funny? It’s not. That’s Trudeau’s gift, which has in many ways only improved with age. This blog post, which excerpts a longer Washington Post profile of Trudeau, offers great insight into why his work has remained timely and incisive for forty years.

Links from Aaron:

This week Queens remembers Nathaniel Woodhull, a Revolutionary War era POW who was fatally wounded at what is now the corner of 196th St. and Jamaica Ave. But in a changing attitude towards memorial, borough historian Jack Eichenbaum suggests that the remembrance be part of an “Iphone Application” or tour of Revolutionary War sites in Queens.  Meanwhile, ReadWriteWeb asks the hard questions about technology’s impact for historians and archaeologists working in the field.  Buffalo, NY remembers Vietnam war resisters, border crossers, and the role that the city played in the anti-draft movement by recounting the story of two 19 year olds who burned their papers and took sanctuary in the Unitarian Universalist Church.

But if I had to recommend one thing above all this week, it would be this story of teen crime, the NYPD and a penguin that didn’t pay for its subway ride.

From Ellen:

A heartfelt plea from Mike O’Malley about academic conferences in the history profession; amen, brother!

From Leah N:

This week on the Tenement Museum blog, a reader asked about how immigrants sent money home to relatives in Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. I learned a lot from the answer, but I was delighted to read about the Tenement Museum’s use of records from the Emigrant Savings Bank.  The Emigrant Savings Bank–which still exists today!–was founded in 1850 by Irish immigrants living in the Five Points. We use a table of records from the bank in our seminars about Irish immigrants; the bank records, along with marriage records from the Church of the Transfiguration and artifacts recovered from the Five Points neighborhood, are important sources for understanding people who seldom left behind records in their own words.  I am so excited that HERB, our forthcoming database of history education resources, will soon be live so that teachers and students will be able to access the documents I’ve just described.  In the meantime, read below or check out the Five Points Database, from which this data was recovered:

This sample of account records from Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank sketches an outline of the lives of a number of immigrants living in New York City's Five Points neighborhood in the mid-nineteenth century. The bank also recorded the account number, the person's city of origin, the ship's point of origin and arrival date in America, the name of the parents and whether or not they were still living, the names and whereabouts of siblings, and children's names.

Right on schedule, as commemorations of the 15oth anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War lurch into gear, comes news from Virginia of an elementary school textbook containing the whopper “Thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two black battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson.” Author Joy Masoff’s evidence for this claim? “Internet research, which turned up work by members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.”

Many historians can (and no doubt will in the coming days) set the record straight on this one. Probably the best equipped to do so is Bruce Levine, who will be appearing on our February 3, 2011 panel on Civil War scholarship. Levine’s book Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves during the Civil War thoroughly details how Confederate political and military leaders went from rejecting the idea of arming slaves to slowly accepting its necessity, and finally attempting to enact it a mere two weeks before the Confederacy’s final failed military stand at Appotmattox.

The idea that slaves fought for the Confederacy is put forth by those who want to convince us that the Confederacy was not fighting to defend the practice of slavery. It is, in the 21st century, obviously a minority position, but a tenacious one. Here’s hoping that the attention generated by the sesquicentennial will put it down once and for all. Although that may be far too optimistic; the Washington Post‘s editors seem to want to avoid the historical discussion entirely. The question they pose to readers in a discussion group linked to the article is “Should research for textbooks be conducted online?” Sigh.

In a completely unrelated search on Google Books this morning, I came across the 1900 children’s book America’s Story for America’s Children by Mara L. Pratt.  Since Columbus Day was Monday, I was curious about how Ms. Pratt framed the “discovery” of the Americas.  My worst suspicions were confirmed when I came across this passage:

…When Columbus began to talk about a round earth the people laughed at him…”The earth is flat, and we should sail off the edge!” the people would say. “Then, too, there are dragons and sea-serpents out in the strange seas. They would eat us alive.”

After a long time Columbus found a good old monk who listened to him. This monk was a wise man, and he believed what Columbus said. The monk went to Isabella, Queen of Spain, and said: “Here is a man who can bring great riches to Spain. Let me bring him to you, and let him tell his story.”

So Queen Isabella called Columbus to the palace, and he spread out his maps and told his story… The King and Queen…believed that Columbus was right, and they promised to give him ships.

“It can do no great harm,” they said, “even if he is mistaken.”

Mara L. Pratt, America's Story for America's Children, Volume 1: The Beginner's Book, (Boston, New York, and Chicago: D.C. Heath & Co., 1900).

Have un-truer words every been spoken–in fiction or reality?  We now know that the arrival of Europeans wrought fantastic destruction upon the native people who lived in the Americas, first by disease, later by deliberate fighting. The scale of the destruction is difficult, and troubling, to wrap one’s mind around.  Even estimating the pre-Columbian population, and hence the total number of deaths that occurred in the wake of Columbus and other European explorers, has proven difficult–and politically charged.

As Charles C. Mann outlines in a 2002 Atlantic Monthly article “1491”, anthropologists and historical demographers long underestimated the pre-Columbian population.  In 1910, one scholar estimated the entire population of North America in 1491 to be only 1.15 million!  Using archaeological evidence, historical sources (including estimates by Spanish conquistadores in 1520s), and mathematical models based on the rate of death from epidemiological disease, that number has dramatically increased since the 1960s.  Most scholars have assumed a death rate of at least 95 percent.  Mid-range estimates of Mexico’s pre-Columbian population alone are now between 5–10 million, with some estimates higher than 25 million.  (For the whole of the Western Hemisphere, mid-range estimates are now about 40 million.)

The debate between “high-counters” and “low-counters,” Mann observes, became one more frontier of the culture wars; low counts of pre-Columbian population mean fewer deaths and (to some people’s mind) therefore a less grievous crime perpetrated against Native Americans. Further, it is convenient for the descendants of Europeans to assume that the continents were sparsely populated:

“Non-Indian ‘experts’ always want to minimize the size of aboriginal populations,” says Lenore Stiffarm, a Native American-education specialist at the University of Saskatchewan. The smaller the numbers of Indians, she believes, the easier it is to regard the continent as having been up for grabs. “It’s perfectly acceptable to move into unoccupied land,” Stiffarm says. “And land with only a few ‘savages’ is the next best thing.” (Mann, “1491,” Atlantic Monthly, March 2002)

I think most readers today would find Mara L. Pratt’s children’s books laughable and–given her later descriptions of the people Columbus encountered in the Caribbean–offensive, although I still wonder what young people today learn in story books and textbooks about the encounter between Native Americans and Europeans or about the diverse civilizations that existed before Europeans’ arrival.

I highly recommend reading Mann’s article and his book, also called 1491, which provides even more detail about how scholars today formulate estimates of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas.  But I also think it’s important to keep in mind this observation by an historian of smallpox, Elizabeth Fenn:

To Elizabeth Fenn…the squabble over numbers obscures a central fact. Whether one million or 10 million or 100 million died, she believes, the pall of sorrow that engulfed the hemisphere was immeasurable. Languages, prayers, hopes, habits, and dreams—entire ways of life hissed away like steam. The Spanish and the Portuguese lacked the germ theory of disease and could not explain what was happening (let alone stop it). Nor can we explain it; the ruin was too long ago and too all-encompassing. In the long run, Fenn says, the consequential finding is not that many people died but that many people once lived. The Americas were filled with a stunningly diverse assortment of peoples who had knocked about the continents for millennia. “You have to wonder,” Fenn says. “What were all those people up to in all that time?” (Mann, 2002)

We continue with our weekly round-up of interesting social history news and projects around the web.

Links from Leah

I’ve been a big fan of the British Museum’s A History of the World in 100 Objects podcast series since its inception, but all of the objects so far were created too early to have much to tell us about the social history of the United States. That’s all changing now that the series is addressing objects and themes from the 1600s–1800s. Last Friday’s object was an Akan drum, the oldest African-American object in the British Museum’s collection, created by the Akan people of West Africa and transported to Virginia sometime around 1735. The podcast briefly traces the forced migration of Africans to the New World, as well as the complicated relationships that brought the drum first to the British colonies and then to the British Museum. The highlight of the podcast for me was hearing the recreation of music featuring this style of drum; the music was originally transcribed from African slaves in Jamaica by the man who collected the drum.

Iconic Photos: This lively blog gives the back story to many famous photos and makes the case for why other photographs are important even though you might not know them. The photographs are not just of U.S. history–they span world events and popular culture. Each blog post includes a fun social media feature, where readers can vote Yay or Nay on whether the photograph is “iconic enough.” A good starting point is the post of Oliver Sipple, the gay veteran who saved President Gerald Ford’s life in 1975 by intercepting a would-be assassin; in the ensuing press coverage he was outed, which tragically led to the destruction of Sipple’s personal life and his eventual suicide.

Links from Ellen

This New York Times Metro article about St. Peter’s catholic church, on Barclay Street in lower Manhattan, provides a nice social history angle on the controversy over the proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero. It details the strikingly similar history of anti-Catholic opposition to the building of the church in 1785 (it’s the oldest Catholic church in New York State) and how Father Kevin Madigan has used those parallels in letters and sermons to his parishioners.

This week we also discovered docsteach.org, a terrific new resource from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). It provides tools for teachers to construct and share classroom activities using digitized NARA documents and, crucially, organizes those tools in ways that reflect current thinking about historical thinking and analysis skills. The activities you create are meant to be completed online, and students can email their work to the instructor. A major  drawback may be the documents themselves–many are nifty but more likely to illuminate events rather than the  larger historical understandings teachers will want their students to gain. Also, there does not seem to be a way to modify or edit the documents, which we know is absolutely critical for many teachers, particularly those whose students have various literacy challenges. But all in all, a very worthy new addition to the burgeoning universe of history education tools.

Links from Ellen:

For Chronicle of Higher Education subscribers, “The Afterlife of an Archive,” a lovely article by Deborah Kaplan on the papers and other materials amassed by her late husband Roy Rosenzweig in the course of his three extremely productive decades as a professional historian. Roy was, of course, a close and cherished colleague of ours, and Deborah’s essay is both tribute to Roy and a thoughtful reflection on the material traces of a scholarly life.

Be sure to check out our colleague Mike O’Malley’s new blog, The Aporetic. I was especially taken with his post “Colored Me,” a fascinating, document-studded piece of Virginia history that covers family history, the eugenics movement, and civil servants run amok.

On a far grimmer note, via MSNBC and Talking Points Memo, Professor Susan Reverby of Wellesley College has uncovered previously hidden evidence that from 1946 to 1948 the U.S. government intentionally infected prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis in order to research potential chemical preventative measures against the disease. Reminiscent of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which ran for decades rather than years, this federal public health initiative was equally egregious, since doctors refused to treat the Tuskegee subjects once penicillin became available but never deliberately infected anyone.

Links from Aaron:

A bold re-envisioning of the future of the New York subways also explores how the past has helped define the MTA system that we all use and experience today. Meanwhile, New York City’s past was the topic of a discussion at the Graduate Center last night where historians, developers and activists got together for a panel on Coney Island’s heritage and how it can be used in the its imminent redevelopment. Ephemeral New York re-discovered the Yiddish Hall of Fame (previous blog about it on Now and Then). A conference in honor of Roscoe C. Brown is being held at the Graduate Center this afternoon about the challenges and rewards of teaching disadvantaged students. ASHP is also proud to announce that Mission US has gone live, and you can read more on the main website.

My Pick of the week: Say what you want about Johnny Knoxville’s career but you would be remiss in not taking a look at the Knoxville hosted documentary Detroit Lives. Yes it’s made by a boot company, but its a rather powerful look at how ordinary people of all walks of life are trying to “remake” a city on their own terms that some have called an “apocalyptic wasteland” or worse. It’s a little over the top at times, but I think its just a powerful glimpse of a city where tomorrow’s social history is being made today.