A few weeks ago the New York Times featured an article on American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle, a new initiative by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to commission original plays that address the big themes of U.S. history. Reading it turned my thoughts immediately toward Cornerstone Theater Company. OSF’s Artistic Director is Bill Rauch, who as a fresh-faced college graduate in 1986 helped to found Cornerstone. As a young arts administrator who eventually ended up a public historian, I was enthralled with Cornerstone.  The dozen or so Cornerstone company members travelled the country to rural communities, where they worked with locals to transform theatrical classics, creating such memorable, thoroughly local shows as an interracial Romeo and Juliet in Port Gibson, Mississippi; Three Sisters from West Virginia in Montgomery, West Virginia; and The Marmarth Hamlet in Marmarth, North Dakota. (See this complete timeline of Cornerstone’s productions.)

Over the course of the week, we often read a lot of interesting things that don’t warrant a full blog post about it- but at the same time are worth sharing.

Recommended by Aaron:

The Bowery Boys had a great write up on the history of Jones Woods, the historical forest overlooking the East River on the Upper East Side, which was a meeting place used by Irish and German New Yorkers until it burnt down in the 1890’s.

Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York took a look at how nearly 100 years of New York history and a slowly evolving neighborhood can be seen in a look at the corner of 10th and Greenwich Ave.

Ephemeral New York featured a great etching by William C. McNulty done in 1931 depicting a bustling industrial New York viewed from under the Brooklyn Bridge.  Its a stark contrast from the photo of the same bridge featured in The Newtown Pentacle this week.

Recommended by Leah N.:

The I-75 Project is the plan for a public art project that would place “historical markers” documenting the decline of the U.S. manufacturing economy and other social and economic changes over the last 30 years. The markers would be placed along I-75 at various rest stops, so that motorists through the area would pull over, read the sign, and think about the consequences of globalization and other issues. It’s a provocative if uneven project, as is often the case when contemporary artists contend with history.

I highly recommend the AmericanRadioWorks series Pueblo, U.S.A., documenting the impact of growing Latino immigration in the United States. As a former resident of the Old North State, I was especially interested in Nuevo South, looking at how a large influx of immigrants working in the poultry processing plants has impacted one small North Carolina town.  The final chapter of Nuevo South looks specifically at how immigration is changing what had previously been only black-white race relations.   Parts of Pueblo U.S.A. were done collaboratively with Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, whose bilingual Nuestros Historias, Nuestros Sueños is also worth listening to and viewing.

And in case you missed it, NBC is developing a workplace comedy about the lives of historical re-enactors at a Plimouth Plantation-style living history museum.  If this show somehow hits the sweet spot between The Office, Party Down, and the potential hijinks of historical interpreters interacting with the average American tourist, I think history nerds everywhere are in for a treat!

I’m still wrapping my mind around James Brindle’s project of printing and binding the entire Wikipedia article on the Iraq War, complete with every edit made between December 2004 and November 2009. The 13-volume set includes 12,000 changes and nearly 7,000 pages.

Brindle uses the printed and bound editions of the Iraq War article primarily to talk about the promise of digital technologies to record vastly more reams of information about any topic, and how this is particularly useful to (future) historians interested in the twists and turns of debates about contentious, ongoing topics. His project, he says, lays bare how our culture makes narratives about the past. “This is historiography,” Brindle writes. “This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.”

"106,900 innocent Iraqi civilians to date have been brutally murdered in cold blood by Bushler and his henchmen."

Brindle makes some interesting points about how his projects helps us think about writing history and the impact of the digital revolution both for creating new forums for debate and new ways of archiving those debates.  But the project–the object, really–also seems a rich source for understanding debate over the war itself. Yes, the edits are all preserved (I hope safely) in digital form somewhere, but the actual object is resonant in a different way. Its size–the length of a standard set of encyclopedias, as one blogger noted–reflects the proportions of the debate in U.S. society during the period. I’d love to see a line graph showing peaks and troughs of editing activity; it would be interesting to correlate the graph with a timeline of events in Iraq and at home. I am also feeling the need for some sort of historiographical essay–oh, bane of graduate school!–for the entry. Brindle suggests that the whole entry, with edits, is a sort of historiography itself, but I still want some analytical insight into the Wikipedia article’s changes, and who made them. Did editors see this as a form of debate (and what does it mean that “debate” includes the possibility of erasing the entire viewpoint of someone you disagree with?) or an outlet for frustration or a pulpit for nationalism?

I recognize that to some extent the bound edition of a Wikipedia article and its edits is a sort of stunt, but I think it is a completely thought-provoking and worthwhile one.  Questions I’m considering: What else does the printed version drive home about the Iraq War that the digital version does not? Where are the overlaps–and the disjunctures–of “public historiography” with academic historiography? Does this project make you think differently about how we write history now, or will write it in the future?

This would make a really compelling museum object, right? What would the label say? Anyone want to take a stab at writing one?

The National Archives has recently been putting up an amazing collection of photographs from the 1970s, originally produced for a project called DOCUMERICA. The newly created Environmental Protection Agency commissioned freelance photographers to capture scenes of environmental degradation, as well as scenes of everyday life from 1971 to 1977.  The project reminds me a lot of the New Deal-era photography projects, and it appears that photographers like John Vachon worked in both the 1930s/1940s and the 1970s.

The DOCUMERICA collections vary in theme and place, but taken as a whole they really capture many of the changes happening in American society at the time, as well as many of the intractable problems–poverty, in particular–that persisted.  To refresh your memory of the era, here’s a helpful bit from Who Built America, Volume 2:

“Nobody,” wrote Time magazine, “is apt to look back on the 1970s as the good old days.” After a quarter-century of rapid growth, wages, productivity, and output dropped sharply in all of the great industrial nations. Recessions became more severe and more frequent, while unemployment rose to double the average level of the immediate postwar years. Many Americans connected this economic turmoil to liberal foreign and civil rights policies. Throughout the 1970s, the radical right gained more notoriety and support for attacking government activism and traditional liberalism. (p. 683)

We are still living in the shadow of many of the problems from the 1970s and the “solutions” offered in the following decades. It’s perfect timing, really, for the National Archives to publish these photos in a widely accessible venue like Flickr.  The DOCUMERICA series is a rich archive, full of many thought-provoking and teachable images.  Here are a few:

This photograph of a family celebrating the Fourth of July in Minnesota shows a multi-racial family in the previously racially homogenous upper midwest, as the original caption notes: “The County Was Settled in the Mid-1800’s by Germans, Norwegians and Swedes Who Are Clustered in Various Communities.”  The photographer’s original caption also describes the changes going on in agriculture, though: “Brown County Is Predominately a Farming Area Where the Farms Are Being Consolidated. in the Past Each Family Owned Land. Now the Farms Are Growing Larger and Are Operated by Two Or Three Generations of the Same Family.”  Such changes have had big impact on the economy and environment both locally and nationally; our growing waistlines also are related to the birth of “Big Ag” the photographer outlined.

Many of the photographs capture the malaise of the gas shortage, while at the same time showing the pollution caused by the United States’s reliance on cars.

A few sets of photographs capture the hyper-development of southern Florida during the period, as thousands of retirees fled south, shifting not only the physical landscape, but also the political and economic landscape of the ascendent “Sunbelt.”

(And don’t miss some scintillating pictures of retirees in their calisthenics classes!)

One set in particular captures inner-city poverty in a number of cities, including New York, El Paso (Texas), Patterson (New Jersey) and Chicago.  As the photographer Danny Lyon observes, “The Inner City Today Is an Absolute Contradiction to the Main Stream America of Gas Stations, Expressways, Shopping Centers and Tract Homes. It Is Populated by Blacks, Latins and the White Poor. Most of All, the Inner City Environment Is Human Beings, as Beautiful and Threatened as the 19th Century Buildings [around them].”

It’s interesting to compare Lyon’s photograph of a young Hispanic woman in Patterson, New Jersey to the iconic Migrant Mother series from the Great Depression and to consider why one became so famous and one so obscure.  What kind of lesson can you imagine around these two images, and what kind of conclusions might students draw about race, poverty, the economy and changing political values in the intervening years?

September 1st–it’s officially football season now!  That makes it high time I posted another blog entry on the social history that inspired the names of sports teams. Let’s take a look at the Philadelphia Eagles, shall we?

Might these lovely ladies--sporting the NRA's eagle logo--have been found on the sidelines of the Philadelphia Eagles' first home games?

N.F.L. owners may be big funders of conservatives today–one blogger joked the acronym might as well stand for “Not For Liberals”–but the first team owners of the Philadelphia Eagles had very different political allegiances when they named their team in 1933 after the eagle logo of the National Recovery Administration. Or perhaps they were hoping to tap into the popularity of the program and found that the ubiquitous blue eagle logo would give the team some free advertising. Then again, since it was the second attempt to establish a professional N.F.L. franchise in Philly, maybe the owners wanted a “New Deal” for Philadelphia football?

The blue eagle logo–which my grandmother remembers seeing in stores and during parades in her hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts–was displayed prominently in the windows of businesses that agreed to new codes for hour limits, minimum wage and production standards. The codes were negotiated among business leaders, labor leaders and Roosevelt administration bureaucrats, though most realized that without a strong union movement, there wouldn’t be sufficient oversight of industry to enforce them. Section 7a of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which gave employees “the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing…free from interference, restraint, or coercion of employers”–became known as the Magna Carta of Labor. Gone were the days of yellow-dog contracts and forced membership in company-sponsored unions. Section 7a ushered in a a new era for labor, as millions of workers joined industrial unions. In some industries, particularly mining, which had great enforcement strategies in place, workers were able to leverage their new power into even greater concessions on wages, hours, and issues like child labor. In other industries, especially where unions were headed by radicals, African Americans or Mexican Americans, employers ignored N.R.A standards. The N.R.A. had only limited successes, then, before it was declared unconstitutional in 1935. Even so, the strengthened labor movement that grew out of Section 7a led to the wave of strikes in 1934, the big Democratic majorities elected in 1936, and the leftward turn of the Second New Deal–including the most radical legislation of the period, the Wagner Act.

The National Recovery Administration, and the Public Works Administration that fell under its authority, had a big impact on Pennsylvania, though. The Great Depression had hit the state’s manufacturing base hard: 270,000 workers lost their jobs between 1927 and 1933 as 5,000 manufacturing firms closed. Cities and rural areas both suffered; one report had rural Fayette County’s unemployment rate at 37%. In 1931, Pennsylvania governor Gifford Pinchot–a Republican!–declared “the only power strong enough, and able to act in time, to meet the new problem of the coming winter is the Government of the United States.” Despite these problems, however, Pennsylvania was one of only six states to vote for Hoover in 1932. Even so, between July 1933 and March 1939, the Public Works Administration spent over $6 billion on more than 34,000 construction projects; the Civilian Conservation Corps employed 200,000 men in Pennsylvania alone. Anyone who has ever driven across the state will also be thankful that the P.W.A.-built Pennsylvania Turnpike provides a welcome alternative to drab I-80. New Deal programs were popular enough that in 1936 Democrats were finally elected to majorities in the state house and to the governorship for the first time since the 1890s. Still, throughout the 1930s, the New Deal coalition barely held in the state, as conservatives exploited tensions between ethnic white and black workers, especially in Philadelphia. (See here for even more about the New Deal in Pennsylvania.)

Maybe Eagles players, like all N.F.L. union members, should pay homage to the legacy of their namesake during the next round of negotiations with owners? In any case, knowing this history will add a fun dimension to the first game of the Eagles season, when they face off on opening Sunday against the other N.F.L. team with a name that calls to mind labor history and workers, the Green Bay Packers!

There may only be a few more weeks of summer left, but it’s still hot and sticky in New York City.  So there’s time enough to blog about my favorite summer song and a bit of the social history behind it.  Just try and resist the many charms of Joe Cuba’s 1966 boogaloo hit “Bang, Bang”:

Bruce Davidson, COUPLE BY JUKEBOX IN SOCIAL CLUB, 1966, from the series East 100th Street

Boogaloo (bugalú in Spanish) emerged out of the close contact between Puerto Ricans and African Americans in Harlem and East Harlem in the mid 1960s.  At the time, African-American youth–the children and grandchildren of the first and second Great Migrations– were playing in the street, attending school, and partying in rec centers and clubs with the large generation of Puerto Rican kids then coming of age in New York.  Joe Cuba (born in New York to Puerto Rican immigrants) and his band created a song that would appeal to their mixed black and Puerto Rican audiences: you’ll hear distinctively Latino percussion and rhythms laid over a characteristically African-American backbeat.  The band members shout out R&B phrases like “Sock it to me” and Spanish phrases one after another.  Then they call out soul foods–“cornbread, hog maw, and chitterlings”–and suggest a few Puerto Rican versions of the same foods: cuchifrito and lechón.  The song is downright giddy, with stops and starts, showcasing musicians like Cheo Feliciano improvising lyrics and Jimmy Sabater playing the life out of his timbales.  It’s easy to picture a group of kids crowded around a record player in some tenement basement in East Harlem; that’s the intended vibe, anyway, of the children singing along with the chorus in the song.  “The overall effect” as sociologist Juan Flores describes it,

is one of collective celebration, gleeful partying where boundaries are not set so much by national and ethnic affiliation, or even language or formalized dance movements, but by participation in that special moment of inclusive ceremony… [The] defining theme and musical feautre of boogaloo is precisely this intercultural togetherness, the solidarity engendered by living and loving in unison beyond obvious differences.

Juan Flores, From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 82.

The year before “Bang, Bang,” the Joe Cuba Sextet had scored another hit referencing the African American experience: the signature line of “El Pito (I’ll Never Go Back to Georgia)” was borrowed from Dizzy Gillespie’s “Manteca.”  “I’ll never go back to Georgia” captures the voice of a Southern black migrant vowing never to return to Jim Crow.  Gillespie first wrote the lyric in the 1940s, and Jimmy Sabater was struck both by the sentiment and the way the cadence of the line perfectly fit a clave rhythm.  And in 1965, when the song came out, the political timing was just right to make “El Pito” a rare crossover hit for Latin and black audiences.  In the liner notes for a recent re-issue of the album, pianist and arranger Nick Jiménez relates that the Georgia legislature even protested the song.

Within a few years, Nuyoricans would turn away from explicitly referencing black music and culture, embracing salsa as “Our Latin Thing.”  Around the same time, hip-hop, pioneered by both African-American and Latino musicians in the South Bronx, would end up being marketed and thus largely thought of as black music.  Boogaloo, though, was a purposeful sharing of cultural and social experience in song in the mid-1960s.  It also just happens to be the perfect playlist for mid-August in New York City.

Isaiah West Taber, "Chinese butcher and grocery shop, Chinatown, S.F.," c. 1905, black and white photograph; from The Bancroft Library at the University of California,

The recent calls by right-wing politicians and media figures to repeal the 14th amendment to the constitution may appear to be so much political hyperventilating, a preposterous idea that will evaporate as quickly as it arrived in the headlines. But the nativist impulses behind such a proposal are strong, and as old as the amendment itself, which was born in an era that also saw the first serious debates about placing legal restrictions on immigration.

The very idea of “illegal” immigration came into being only when the federal government passed the Page Act in 1875, which denied entry to Chinese and Japanese prostitutes, felons, and contract laborers (also known as “coolies”). (Seven years later, Congress passed the more sweeping Chinese Exclusion Act.) Before that, Congress had been silent on the question of who could immigrate to the U.S. The question of who could become a naturalized citizen was first established in 1790, when the Naturalization Act provided that any “free white person” residing in the U.S. for two years was eligible for citizenship. For the next eighty years, Congress felt no need to pass any laws one way or the other about immigration or citizenship.

If much of today’s anti-immigrant ire is aimed at those arriving from Mexico and other Spanish-speaking nations to the South, during the nineteenth century immigrants from China were public enemy number one. In the 1860s, political pressure began mounting in California and other western states to deny civil rights to Chinese immigrants and even exclude them from the country entirely. In 1868, Congress passed the fourteenth amendment to the constitution, which ensured (among other things) “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Given strong social sanctions against mixed-race marriages and the virtual absence of Chinese women in the U.S., there were precious few Chinese-American babies being born who would have benefitted from the 14th amendment’s “birthright” provision. Any possible path to citizenship for Chinese immigrants quickly disappeared, however, when Congress passed the Naturalization Act of 1870. Attempts by Senators Senator Charles Sumner (the stalwart abolitionist and architect of Reconstruction) and Lyman Trumbull to have the law expand eligibility for naturalized citizenship to “all persons” were defeated, and the final law instead granted eligibility to “white persons and persons of African descent.” The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 reiterated and amplified this stance by explicitly denying any Chinese eligibility for naturalized U.S. citizenship.

In the wake of the Naturalization Act’s passage, Frederick Douglass praised Sumner for being “in the right place on the Chinese question. As usual you are in the van[guard]—the country in the rear.” How much in the rear Douglass could hardly have guessed. The legal barrier to Chinese citizenship stood until 1943, when wartime alliance with China helped to prompt a long overdue repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act’s provisions against citizenship for Chinese in the U.S.

The 14th Amendment has been everywhere in the news these days, what with calls to repeal the provision that provides citizenship to anyone born in the United States, to its application of “equal protection under the law” in Perry vs. Schwarzenegger in declaring California’s ban on gay marriage unconstitutional.

This part of Judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling in California really caught my eye, though:

The states have always required the parties to give their free consent to a marriage.  Because slaves were considered property to others at the time, they lacked the legal capacity to consent and thus unable to marry.  After emancipation, former slaves viewed their ability to marry as one of the most important new rights they had gained.

As Judge Walker notes, freedpeople immediately began to reunite their families and legally register their marriages following emancipation.  The urge to form families was powerful: even before the war was over, former slaves appeared before Union army officials demanding legal marriage:

Weddings, just now, are very popular and abundant among the colored people.  I have married during the month twenty-five couples, mostly those who have families, and have been living together for years.

–Union Army chaplain, quoted in Eric Foner and Joshua Brown, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 83.

When the war finally ended, freedpeople traveled great distances to find their families and placed ads in newspapers to find relatives long separated by the auction block:

This meeting again of mother and daughters, after years of separation and many [hardships], was an occasion of the profoundest [deepest] joy, although all were almost wholly [without] the necessities of life.  This first evening we spent together can never be forgotten.  I can see the old woman now, with bowed form and gray locks, as she gave thanks in joyful tones yet reverent manner, for such a wonderful blessing.

–Louis Hughes, whose wife found her mother and sister in Cincinnati, Ohio after the Civil War

The Colored Tennessean, August 12, 1865, courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society

Because marriages between slaves before emancipation had no legal standing, many couples rushed to have their marriages officially registered and made solemn during Reconstruction.

After while I taken a notion to marry and massa and missy marries us same as all the niggers. They stands inside the house with a broom held crosswise of the door and we stands outside. Missy puts a li’l wreath on my head they kept there and we steps over the broom into the house. Now, that’s all they was to the marryin’. After freedom I gits married and has it put in the book by a preacher.

–Mary Reynolds, who was a slave in Louisiana, in an interview for the W.P.A. Slave Narratives Project

Here Anna Marie Coffee recounts getting a license in 1868, the same year the 14th Amendment was adopted.

I went to church in Monticello [Kentucky], and there I finally married Henry Coffee.  Henry, he’d been in the war, and belonged to the 6th Kentucky Calvary.  Us was the third colored couple to get [a] marriage license in 1868…  Then [we] moved to London [Kentucky], and Henry farmed and done first one thing and another to make a living.  We bought a nice little place and lived real nice, and worked in the church.

–Anna Marie Coffee, interview for the Works Progress Administration Ex-Slaves Narratives project

Alfred R. Waud, Marriage of a Colored Soldier at Vicksburg by Chaplain Warren of the Freedmen's Bureau, drawing, c. June 1866, The Historic New Orleans Collection, http://www.hnoc.org.

The above sketch shows a chaplain marrying an African-American couple in the offices of the Vicksburg, Mississippi Freedmen’s Bureau. The sketch was the basis for a news illustration published in Harper’s Weekly.  The significance–and novelty–of the marriage of two former slaves was newsworthy in 1865.  Eventually the Freedmen’s Bureau became strong advocates of legalized marriages and helped former slaves find their families.  But Bureau agents were only responding to the demands of freedpeople, as historian Eric Foner recounts:

Two years after the end of the Civil War, freedman Hawkins Wilson sought the assistance of the Freedmen’s Bureau in locating family members he had not seen since being sold away from Virginia twenty-four years earlier.  “I am anxious to learn about my sisters,” Wilson wrote, “from whom I have been separated for many years.”  He went on to list the names of “my own dearest relatives”: his sisters, brothers-in-law, nephews and nieces, and uncles, along with their owners at the time of his sale.  He also enclosed recent experiences.  Since emancipation, Hawkins related, he had learned to read and write, secured a job in a furniture workshop, became a sexton in the Methodist Episcopal Church in Galveston, Texas, and played a leading part in mass meetings at which former slaves demanded the rights of citizenship.  He had also married ” a very intelligent and lady-like woman.”  “Thank God,” Wilson added, “that now we are not sold and torn away from each other as we used to be.”

-Foner and Brown, Forever Free, 84.

Wilson’s story reminds us that families existed, whether the law and society recognized them or not, under slavery.  The right to solemnize and legalize these relationships was paramount in the aftermath of slavery; through their actions, freedpeople demonstrated that full citizenship meant the right to marry and form families.  These historical reflections seem to be strikingly relevant in today’s debates about gay marriage.

1916 version of Castello Plan map of New Amsterdam; originally created by Jacob Cortelyou in 1660

Yesterday’s vote by New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Board cleared the way, at least for now, for the construction of the Cordoba House Islamic community center on Park Place in lower Manhattan.

Lost in the national uproar is the local fact that there is already a mosque, Masjid Al-Farah, located on West Broadway a mere twelve blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center. Daisy Kahn, who is helping to spearhead the project, argued in a Wall Street Journal interview “No one should be asked to leave their neighborhood. This is our neighborhood and we’ve been part of it for 27 years.”

Actually, muslims have lived, worked, and worshipped near this now toxically symbolic patch of real estate for considerably longer than that. From its earliest days of European settlement, when members of the Dutch West India Company landed on the southern tip of the island of Manahata, there were muslims in New Amsterdam. As the seventeenth century wore on into the eighteenth, African slaves and sailors who practiced the muslim faith were among many who helped to transform a tiny commercial outpost into the growing port city of New York. Embedded in a diverse Atlantic world economy, New Amsterdam (and to a lesser extent the English-ruled New York) prized commerce over religious dogma and its citizens enjoyed relative religious and cultural freedoms.

CNN online, of all places, has a nice summary of the history of mosques in Manhattan.

I spent July 2010 driving across the United States, and spent many nights holed up in motel rooms in cities I’d never been in before.  I quickly came to rely on guest directories, or those binders in every room that list some places to eat, maybe include a map or two and otherwise orient the disoriented.

One of these directories was of particular note. While staying in Springfield, MO, the motel we stayed in (not pictured at right) contained an interesting history of the civil war- interesting so far as I hadn’t necessarily heard this take on the events.

The first paragraph of the history of Springfield wrote “Missouri was proudly founded as a slave-holding state.” It then went on to talk about the civil war and mentioned that Springfield was the site of “The Battle of Springfield, a proud confederate victory.” (Although I’m not a historian, I’m making the assumption that they were talking about The Battle of Wilson’s Creek, which was actually a Confederate victory). Tourists were then directed to sites where they could see graves and monuments to “confederate heroes who bravely fought and died for Missouri.”

And then there was no further mention of the Civil War– or any war at all, it kind of went on about what a great place Missouri is for families and fun.

I’m hopeful that people are not learning their history from hotel guest directories, and historians have bigger battles to wage over historical accuracy; however, I think its important to be aware how many competing narratives of history there are out there.