The Dressmaker, the Mob, and the Fashionable Housewife*

Nicole White

“What is the most decadent thing anybody could ever do? Get all dressed up, do their make up, and stay at home.” -Marc Jacobs

Jazz music, speakeasies, flappers, and the mob were all part of Kansas City in the 1920s, but the Paris of the Plains was also swarming with creativity and innovation. In the early twenties, Walt Disney started an animation company called Laugh-O-gram Films on E. 31st Street in Kansas City where he created black and white animated short films based on classic fairytales. He befriended a small mouse in the building, which was said to have inspired his creation of Mickey Mouse. Later that decade, Ernest Hemingway, who had previously worked for the Kansas City Star, drove his wife back to the city for the birth of their second child while, at the same time, he was putting the finishing touches on one of his greatest masterpieces, A Farewell to Arms. And just around the corner, dressmaker Nell Donnelly Reed was making her mark in history.

Nell, born in 1889, grew up in the humble town of Parsons, Kansas and developed an interest in sewing at a young age. After moving to Kansas City and marrying Paul Donnelly, she quickly grew tired of cooking, cleaning, and handling other day-to-day domestic minutiae in the unflattering, drab clothing available to middle-class housewives. She asked herself, "Why not put a frill on it, the way I do on my holiday aprons?" As a result, Nell quickly reinvented the house dress in a way that would have made June Cleaver swoon. Her friends and family were so smitten by her dresses that they encouraged her to start a business. Nell told the New York Times, "I'll make women look pretty when they are washing dishes." And she did just that.

A Century of New York City Photographs

Heather Cox Richardson

The New York City Municipal Archives has put on-line more than 800,000 images. This is simply an astonishing collection. A must for anyone who studies New York City and the U.S. in general.

Click here for more

Contemporary Images of the Indians in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show

Heather Cox Richardson

I have recently tumbled over two youtube videos that show provocative images of the Indian performers in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. These videos compile images from the collections of the Library of Congress.

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show is well

known. It was William F. Cody’s venture to cash in on the rodeos that were popular across the West. He launched the Wild West Show in 1883, promising to bring the “real” West to customers back east. He showed cowboys and stagecoach robberies and battles between soldiers and Indians, promising to eastern audiences that they were seeing the reality of life in the late nineteenth-century American West.

Historians have torn Buffalo Bill’s claim to shreds, pointing out how carefully Cody crafted the performances to illustrate his own beliefs about the meaning of America and the West. But, “true” or not, the show was a roaring success. In 1887, Cody boasted: “I kick worse than any quartermaster’s mule ever kicked if I don’t clear a thousand dollars a day.” That year, he took the show to England to perform for Queen Victoria.

The Wild West Show was popular enough that Thomas Edison expended some of his early film to record pieces of it. The first video shows images from his experiment spliced together. It reveals the performers parading through a

packed street as they entered a town. Indians and cavalrymen move in a column amid a churning throng of boys and men. It’s a male crowd; only one girl is immediately obvious, and she seems notably uncomfortable in the setting. Many modern Americans forget that, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Indians were not uncommon sights in urban America. This chaotic street scene (complete with boys darting right in front of a horse, which shies away) is an eye-opener.

The rest of the clips on the video show Annie Oakley, a cowboy riding a bronco, and two scenes of Indian dances. The dances are good illustrations that Cody’s “real” West was carefully crafted to show what eastern audiences wanted to see. The filmed dances say far more about racist audiences than Indian cultural practices.

Those dancing scenes contrast powerfully with the still images on this second video. These are photographs taken in the late nineteenth century by artist Gertrude Kasebier. Her goal was to take images of the Lakota in the Wild West Show that would reveal them as individuals. She preferred to capture her subjects at rest, without the accouterments of their stage personas. Her images are quite a contrast to those in the Edison film.

Early Color Film

Heather Cox Richardson

In the late 1930s, Charles Cushman began to experiment with color film. For the next three decades, his photos documented the technological and social changes in America in striking images.

The images bring home the human dimension of history. Tractors didn’t just replace horse-drawn carts; farmers driving tractors down dirt roads passed farmers driving their horse-drawn carts the other way. Seeing the men in Cushman’s images brings home the human element imbedded in historical change. It’s impossible not to imagine the pride of the farmer with the new-fangled tractor as he sports the newest technology past his less-well-off neighbor, and to suspect that the man with the horses feels both left behind and superior to the man who has jumped on the latest fad. The photos draw you—and with luck, students—in, putting human experience of the twentieth century’s momentous changes front and center.

They are well worth a look.

Race, Place, and Jesus in American History: An Interview with Paul Harvey and Edward J. Blum

Conducted by Hilde Løvdal and Randall Stephens

Hilde Løvdal and Randall Stephens: Why did the two of you take on this project, which became your book, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (UNC Press, 2012)?

Paul Harvey and Ed Blum: On one level, the book began the first times we recognized that the Jesus images surrounding us in churches, Sunday schools, and on movie screens had histories. The book came from that feeling of dissonance when we saw representations of Jesus as white and knew, somehow, in our guts that it just wasn’t right.

On another level, the book emerged from years of studying independently the links between race and religion. We determined that it was time to take on the biggest symbol in the United States when it came to both: Jesus himself. We had read Stephen Prothero’s American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, FSG, 2003, loved it, but felt like it missed how profoundly race transformed imagery of Jesus and how much the racial images of Jesus influenced American history. When discussing our book idea with Martin Marty, he asked what it would look like to write a racially integrated story of Jesus as opposed to the ways Prothero segregated race into a few chapters. When we did that, we found profoundly complicated stories that not only featured racial conflict, but also demonstrated cross-racial exchange.

We started the book before we even met in person. Ed had reviewed Paul’s book Freedom’s Coming for H-NET and asked how the book would have looked different if it took into account art, literature, film, and material culture. At that point, we struck up an email conversation and planned an edited volume on race, religion, Jesus, and material culture. As we talked more and met every six months as part of the Young Scholars in American Religion, we decided that there was a monograph to be written. Six years later (and several very different iterations of the book thanks to amazing peer reviewers), we have the book!

Løvdal and Stephens: What is your intended audience for the book?

Harvey and Blum:

1. American historians. We both love our profession and the people in it, and this book connects to the major themes in American history that we teach from colonization and slavery to suburbia and the information age.

2. Students of American history and US religious history. We wrote the book in ways that our undergraduate students could understand, and we even created a website for the book – www.colorofchrist.com with hundreds of images, primary sources, songs, discussion questions, syllabi, and powerpoint presentations – for students and teachers to read the book, analyze it, and create their own research agendas from it.

3. Scholars of religion in the United States. Too often, religious history is written as separate from the broader trends of the overall discipline or focuses too much on ideas. We joined the many wonderful US religious historians who have been looking to connect our sub-discipline to the bigger points of the profession and to show how religion influenced all forms of society, culture, politics, and life.

4. Thoughtful religious leaders and people who want to know the stories behind the Jesus imagery they see around them and be able to make new choices about how they talk about their faith and display it.

Løvdal and Stephens: Several other prominent religious history scholars have worked on Jesus in America. You mention the influence of Prothero.  What about other scholars like Richard Wightman Fox (Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession, HarperCollins, 2004) when you wrote this book?

Harvey and Blum: Absolutely, although the book that first influenced us was Kelly Brown Douglas’s The Black Christ, which was a short, but wonderful, study of African American perspectives on Jesus from slavery through the works of black liberationist James Cone and womanist Delores Williams. These three books were always in the forefront of our thought. We have used and incorporated material from these authors, and thank them in the acknowledgements.

At the same time, we felt we had a different story to tell. On certain points, especially the impact of power and access to media resources in terms of how Jesus is represented in American history, we challenge some of the arguments that Fox and Prothero make. Both works tend to suggest that Jesus always has been made over in the image of the maker. But in The Color of Christ, we show that this is not simply the case. Jesus was made both like and unlike communities, and the “I-Thou” distinctions mattered.  Moreover, many people throughout US history have not had the representational power or means to create Jesus in their image and have transformed him in other profound ways.

We think the main difference between our book and those of Prothero and Fox is encapsulated by our different covers. While they present Jesus either as a larger-than-life air balloon or the different icons, we focus squarely on how people - everyone from teenagers in Brooklyn to presidents in the White House - have lived with the material realities of Jesus in their midst.

Løvdal and Stephens: How can a local understanding or regional understanding of Jesus say something about a national view?

Harvey and Blum: Local and regional factors are paramount to The Color of Christ. We place a lot of emphasis in the work (just to give one example to answer the question) on Jesus in the South. In many ways, the Jesus of the South – a suffering saint – became a dominant American Jesus. Ironically, that Jesus was formed first in the worldview of slaves and abolitionists. “The Christ of American civilization is the slave,” one abolitionist wrote. Many historians have suggested that the proslavery argument won the “battle for the Bible,” since slavery in general can easily be defended reading the Bible in the common-sense way that people did in the 19th century (and many do today).

But we point out that while slaveowners may have won the battle for the Bible, slaves and abolitionists won the joust for Jesus. After the war, that “southern Jesus” was reclaimed by whites; the very term for the overturning of Reconstruction, “Redemption,” suggests that white southerners saw their postwar political struggle as a kind of cleansing of a sin that had stained their region. Their triumph came to be represented symbolically in the famous closing sequence of Birth of a Nation, where the Aryan Jesus blesses the victory of the heroic Klan over the demonic forces of carpetbaggers and their black allies.

Then, later in the twentieth century, black artists (including a number of southern folk artists discussed in the book) and civil rights activists reclaimed Jesus once again, turning him once again into a figure empathetic to the black southern freedom struggle. This is best represented in Clementine Hunter’s magnificient painting “Cotton Crucifixion,” which depicts the crucified Jesus hanging over a mule-powered wagon full of cotton.

The West (or Wests) is critically important too. For Native American messianic movements, such as Wovoka’s Ghost Dance, the appeal of a neo-Christ who would bring back the Buffalo was tied to their frontier experiences. And the climate of southern California was instrumental in making Hollywood into the twentieth-century hub of Jesus media production. By having more than 300 days per year of good filming weather, southern California and Hollywood played a vital role in transforming how Jesus was presented physically and geographically.

Løvdal and Stephens: How did you want your story to unfold from one era to another or from one generation to another?

Harvey and Blum: We structured the book by era and it is divided into three parts: “Born Across the Sea” (colonial period to the Civil War) “Crucified and Resurrected” (Civil War to World War I) and “Ascended and Still Ascending” (1920s to the present). Each part tells a different story. Most importantly, we want to show the “long duree” of images (or the lack thereof) of Jesus in American history. The dearth of imagery among Protestants in early America, for example, meant that what imagery that existed came mostly from Catholics and was, literally, “born across the sea.” Even in the “age of visions” – the First Great Awakening – Jesus often appeared as a sort of ineffable brightness, not something that could be described in physical terms. In the 19th century, the Jesus that we are all familiar with was born and disseminated through the religious voluntary agencies, and their attendant means of mass production, that came with the evangelical explosion of that era. This Jesus was crucified in the turmoil of the Civil War, but resurrected after to bless the reunion of the country (and to bless white supremacy, we argue).

The Head of Christ (1941) Warner Sallman

Then, in the final part which focuses on the last 100 years or so, we trace the “ascendancy” of omnipresent Jesus imagery, from Warner Sallman’s ubiquitous “Head of Christ” (and countless imitations and parodies of it), to Jesus in literature, film, and music, and finally to Jesus in contemporary humor (movies, “South Park,” and the like). The mass media of the twentieth century (and into the social media revolution of the 21st) have made Jesus inescapable globally, even as the meanings of his imagery have become almost impossibly tangled with the history of that imagery. The white Jesus survives through all this turmoil, but he is, we say, “white without words.” In short, the white Jesus is the “default” image, to which all others ultimately must defer, even in positions of challenge or parody.

Løvdal and Stephens: Could you say something about the malleability of the image of Jesus? How can Jesus appear so different depending on who is using his image?

Harvey and Blum: Great question, and that is really the heart of the book. We can best answer that by mentioning the three main myths our book explores about Jesus imagery and shifting appearances. First, there is a myth that humans create God or gods (especially Jesus) in their own image. This myth claims that people invariably represent Jesus to look like themselves. So whites make a white Jesus, blacks a black one, Asians an Asian one. But American history shows this is not true, and the myth hides how much racial groups have interacted and affected one another throughout U.S. history. No racial group in the United States has been separate enough to form distinct and impenetrable religious cultures. Moreover, lots of people have worshiped Christ figures that look nothing like them. For centuries, African Americans and Native Americans embraced white images of Jesus, debated them in their midst, and tried to replace them but generally did not. The myth hides the powers of money, of technological access, and of production capabilities. Slaves did not have the time or the manufacturing power to make or market pictures of Jesus as a black man, but they were inundated with images of white Christ figures. And then it gets even more complicated. When the white Jesus helped slaves run to freedom, he was defying white supremacy. So even racial images can be used to work against racism.

The second myth is that the United States has always been a "Jesus nation" or a "Christian nation." When we take seriously discussions of the race and color of Christ, we find that Jesus has been a lightning rod for struggle, conflict, and tension. For every occasion where someone makes Jesus into an icon of entrepreneurial salesmanship, as Bruce Barton did with his bestselling book of the 1920s The Man Nobody Knows, there are other Americans who have made Jesus a lynch victim (like W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes did in the 1930s), as a Native American who promised the defeat of the whites and the return of the Buffalo (as Wovoka did), or as a socialist who would get beat up by American mobs (as muckraker Upton Sinclair did). Jesus has not defined American culture; he has purely been at the center of the titanic and oftentimes bloody struggles over what the culture would be.

The third myth is that liberation theology emerged in the 1960s and was primarily a northern, black male phenomenon. This myth went into full blast during the Reverend Jeremiah Wright debacle of the 2008 presidential campaign when he could be heard on cable television and YouTube videos shouting "God damn America" and "Jesus was black." Media outlets searched for the genesis of these ideas and they turned to the 1960s. They located the work of James Cone as most influential and connected him to Wright and then Wright to Obama.

But liberation theology has a much longer history, and that history included Native Americans, women, and whites far more than the short history lets on. As early as the 1830s, some white Americans, black Americans, and Native Americans challenged expressly the whiteness of Jesus and several presented Jesus as on the side of disempowered people. In the present, there are many non-blacks who use darkened images of Jesus and some white artists even create them.

Advice to Farmers

Dan Allosso

People have been giving advice to farmers throughout American history.  Sometimes farmers themselves have written about their favorite techniques or innovations, but often experts have tried to compile the “best practices” of the past and add new ideas developed by scientists and technologists.  The progressive era amped up this process, and turned the USDA and land grant “Agricultural and Technical” universities into big producers of information for rural people.

But that process is a story for another day.  Today, what caught my attention is an old (1880) book I found in the UMass library stacks, called Farming for Profit (online here).  Written by John Elliot Read (who claims in the introduction to be “a practical farmer, acquainted with the details of farm management, and thoroughly used to manual labor”), the book promises to show “How to Make Money and Secure Health and Happiness on the Farm.”  I think it’s interesting that even a volume designed to be an “Encyclopedic” and “Comprehensive” source of “Mechanics” and “Business Principles” in 1880 puts the rural lifestyle front and center.

Farming for Profit is a fascinating combination of late-nineteenth century technique and culture—both of which can be compared with what came after.  At some point, I’m going to make a more thorough study of how the two elements of farm tech and farm life changed over time.  For right now, I thought these items were interesting:

In the illustration at the top, across from the title-page of the book, we get a more or less classical view of farm life—not of technology.  There are no new machines in the picture, and the buildings don’t even seem to be in the best repair.  The impression I get is of an ancient and venerable way of life.  Peaceful, slow-moving, and dignified.  Later in the book, there are more practical illustrations, like this diagram of an ideal farmstead.  And in another illustration, we see more evidence of a transition in farming: the first view is of corn plants (old-fashioned ones, not the super-hybrids we're used to seeing today) that have been “drilled or planted,” while the second shows corn planted in hills.  Hill-planting was the old technique colonists learned from the Indians, so it’s interesting that it still finds its way into a manual from 1880.  That suggests that maybe the author was a practical farmer with lots of experience in the fields. 

A Day in the Life: Art and History

Heather Cox Richardson

Everyone knows the iconic image of John, Paul, George, and Ringo from the cover of Abbey Road. That image launched deep investigations into its hidden meanings—“Paul is Dead,” anyone?—and into the stories it might be telling about the Beatles.

There was a story behind the image, too, and it’s one in which art and history intersect. As with any photo shoot, at the August 1969 session with the Beatles, the photographer Iain Macmillan took a number of different shots. They swept in bystanders, cars, different expressions on the musicians’ faces, different interactions.

What can these photos tell us about history?

I wonder, not only because it’s Friday, but because of another treasure trove of images recently discovered in Chicago. Vivian Maier was an emigrant from France in the 1930s and worked as a child in a New York sweatshop. When she was older, she worked as a nanny in Chicago. She had few friends, apparently, and interacted with the world largely through her camera. She left her photos, largely unseen, in a storage locker in Chicago, which put them up for sale when her payments became overdue after her death. John Maloof, writing an Images of America book about a Chicago neighborhood, bought them.

What he found was, to my mind, incredible. These are simply stunning pieces of art, chronicling the world of the streets in Chicago, primarily, as well as New York and distant countries. Her use of line, light, and texture is extraordinary.

Her photos are works of art, but they are also unusual snapshots of life in the mid-twentieth century. What can they tell us about the world in her era?

The historical reading of photographs intended to tell a societal story is straightforward compared to reading the Abbey Road photos or the Vivian Maier collection. Jacob Riis was making a point about urban poverty; Nick Ut was making a point about the Vietnam War with his 1972 image of Kim Phuc. A recent article honoring the late Tim Hetherington suggested that the key to successful war photography was an understanding of the complexity of the conflict and the ability to capture images encapsulating that story.

Artists, of course, have a different imperative. Their stories are not, necessarily, driven by current societal concerns. But if art historians can use paintings to interpret the world in which the images were made, shouldn’t historians be able to use artistic photography to interpret the modern world? And if so, how?

What can the Abbey Road photos tell us about their era?

Ye Complicated Cartoons of Yesteryear

Randall Stephens

Political cartoons of today are quite unlike those of previous decades, and very unlike those of previous centuries. (Caveat: This is just me speaking as the armchair amateur.) Quite a few op-ed cartoons that run in Newsweek, the Globe, the New York Times and elsewhere are easy enough to figure out at a glance. Many a cartoonist makes his/her case with a visual pun and a on-liner. Look at quite a few prints from the postwar era to the present and you might note the grace and simplicity of the style and the clarity of meaning. (CLICK the detail of the cartoon to enlarge this famous 1956 Herblock cartoon.)

Not so with 18th and 19th century political and social satires. A tangle of text bubbles, symbols, and, in the case of 18th- and early 19th-century cartoons, gutter vulgarities crowd the page. It is fun to look at these antique prints that fed off political battles and showcased the personality clashes of the day. In my classes we spend quite a bit of time unraveling the meaning of various satirical etchings and lithographs. (Finding the dog urinating on something in an 18th century political cartoon is a like a Where's Waldo game.) And note the typically bizarre sexual quality of the devil in the print below.

So, here's "A political, anatomical, satirical, lecture on heads and no heads; as exhibited at St. J--ms's 1766" from the Library of Congress. (CLICK the image to enlarge.) And the description from the LOC site runs as follows:

Print shows the Earl of Bute holding up a bust of William Pitt as the starting point of his lecture on "Heads and No Heads"; on a table before him and on a shelf to the left are several busts identified by number with corresponding descriptions in the printed caption. A woman assistant, on the left, says "I hand them in" and the devil, on the right holding a burning candle in one hand and a candlesnuffer in the other, says "I hand them off", two extinguished candles sit on the table. Nine men form the audience in the foreground, each utters a comment, such as, "Good Lord deliver us", "A good Exhibition this", "Yes, the Characters are well drawn", and "My, all Birds of a Feather".

Hmmm. . . . A send-up of types? The accompanying text is a thicket. This one is still a real head-scratcher for me! Chris Beneke? Maura Farrelly? John Fea? A paleocartoonologist? Some enlightenment?

An Interview with Jacqueline Riding on Mid-Georgian Britain

Randall Stephens

Jacqueline Riding is a historian and consultant who is completing her PhD in 18th-century British art and culture. She served as the curator at the Theatre Museum, the Guards Museum, the Tate, the Palace of Westminster, and was founding Director of the Handel House Museum in London. Her Mid-Georgian Britain, “the latest addition to the growing Living Histories series, charts the growth of the empire and looks at the growing importance of London as a capital city where the rich and poor rubbed shoulders. Jacqueline Riding creates a vivid portrait of the daily reality of life for a middle-class family in this age of growing affluence.”* Ever wonder what life was like in an 18th-century city? How did people eat, work, and play? What did they think about the world around them? Riding's concise, immensely entertaining book gives a snapshot of an amazing, vanished world.

Randall Stephens: Your book, Mid-Georgian Britain is a readable, fascinating account of life in the 18th century. Did your own work as a curator and scholar of art and culture influence how you composed the book?

Jacqueline Riding: Thank you very much. The basic chapter structure and length were set out by the publishers, although I did change a few of the headings. For example I think “Charity and Citizenship” is a key theme of the period and I have done a lot of work on the Foundling Hospital (my PhD is on an artist, Joseph Highmore, who donated a history painting to the charity). So I changed the chapter heading accordingly. The tight word length meant I had to be disciplined and the text feels pithy and quite fast-paced, which I like. It was important to stop worrying that so much inevitably gets left out. Even so, some of the themes were out of my comfort zone (dental pelicans anyone?!). So I learned something new too. Word length permitting, I was keen to show contrasts and find unusual facts or opinions rather than trot out the usual Georgian suspects. Having said that I could not resist Dr. Johnson. I think my background in curatorship means I think of an historical period in 3D—a case in point was recreating Handel’s house in Mayfair. I believe it is important not to be confined by a particular academic discipline, to study an historical period in the round. One of the benefits of being an art historian is that you know your way around a picture library, so I was very eager to get really good quality images. Ultimately, if I gave an interesting snap shot of the period, which encourages people to look further and even visit some of the locations mentioned, then I've done my job.

Stephens: Could you say something about how the London of the early 21st century differs from the London of, say, the 1750s?

Riding: Well, if they thought it was big in the mid-eighteenth century, they should see it now . . .

Stephens: Throughout Mid-Georgian Britain you quote a host of contemporary authors. Do you have a favorite character/author from that period?

Riding: It would have to be William Hogarth. He’s quite simply a hero, a real London bruiser with a heart made of putty.

Stephens: You include sections in the book on “Love and Sex, Marriage and Family,” “Home and Neighbourhood,” “Work,” “Food and Drink,” and more. What did you find most interesting to research and write about?

Riding: As I say, most of the headings were provided by the publisher although “Love and Sex . . .” was one of my modifications—partly so I had the excuse to illustrate the syphilitic skull and condom. When you are asked to rattle through a thirty-year period covering as many bases as possible you start to realize how little you know or at least how relatively limited your expertise is. No one is an expert on “the eighteenth century”—it’s just not possible. Humbling but true.

Stephens: Are you working on any projects now that you can tell us about?

Riding: I am indeed. For anyone interested in mid-Georgian art and charity I have an article in Art History Journal titled “The mere relation of the suffering of others’: Joseph Highmore, History Painting and Charity.” I have an article coming out in April’s History Today on Charles Edward Stuart and I am also writing a narrative history on the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 for Bloomsbury Publishing (eta 2013).

Religious History and Prints/Cartoons from the Library of Congress

Randall Stephens

I regularly browse the Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs Division for pictures to illustrate essays, forums, and interviews that appear in Historically Speaking. I also use that extensive, priceless catalog quite a bit to gather material for courses I teach. (A note to authors: the images at the LOC are almost all copyright free!) The LOC includes thousands of hi-res maps, photographs, prints, cartoons, paintings, and more, ready to download.

In the spring I'll be offering an upper level undergraduate class on Religion and American Culture. I love to teach it. No decadal history is this. It runs from the precolumbian period to the present. (Religious history is a hot topic. Not that my course's enrollment reflects that fact. The 2011 AHA has as its theme "History, Society, and the Sacred.")

Below are some amazing LOC images from the 18th and 19th centuries, well-suited for the classroom. ( I include the brief LOC description above each image.) While we go over these in class, I like to ask students general questions like: What is the cartoonist or print maker trying to convey? Who would find the image humorous or illuminating, and who would find it offensive or disturbing? Why? What can we learn about the issues of the day by analyzing the picture? In what sense does the picture reveal the contested nature of religion in public life?

"Enthusiasm display'd: or, the Moor Fields congregation," 1739. The print shows evangelical minister Geroge Whitefield preaching at Moorsfield, London. He is supported by two females, one holding a mask and labeled "Hypocrisy", the other a Janus-faced "Deceit".


"Dr. Squintum's exaltation or the reformation," 1763. Cartoon showing Rev. George Whitefield standing on a three-legged stool, and preaching in the open air; an imp pouring inspiration through a clyster-pipe into his ear; a grotesque Fame, being a female evil-spirit, listens to his discourse with an ear-trumpet, and repeats it in an ordinary trumpet; the Devil clutches gold from under his stool; etc.


"Slavery. Freedom," 1832. Two contrasted scenes divided by a huge cask in which stands, full-face, an obese and repulsive preacher with a heavy jowl, pig's eyes, and a thatch of hair over a low forehead.


Detail from a Puck magazine cartoon, "Superstition Has Always Ruled the World," April 19, 1901. Satirizes the Millerites, followers of William Miller, who predicted the return of Jesus in the 1840s.


"The salamander safe." A millerite preparing for the 23rd of April." A playful caricature of a Millerite, an adherent of the Adventist preacher William Miller who predicted that the world would end on April 23, 1844.


"Our common schools as they are and as they may be [Anti-catholic, anti-Tammany cartoon showing] (1) 'Sectarian Bitterness' of private schools; (2) 'Distribution of the Sectarian Fund' - all to Catholic and none to public schools; (3) 'Union is Strength' - children of all races and religions playing together," 1870.


"Church and state - No Union upon any terms," 1871. A Thomas Nast cartoon showing a woman symbolizing Justice(?) standing at door of building "State", as soldiers block steps to members of different religions.


"The Mormon Problem Solved," 1871. Cartoon of Brigham Young telling Pres. Grant "I must submit to your laws - but what shall I do with these" (hundreds of wives and children); Grant replies: "Do as I do - give them offices."


"Temperance, a centennial allegory." Circa. late-19th century.

Representing Empires (to Students)

Heather Cox Richardson

This simple graphic depiction of France, England, Portugal, and Spain from 1800 to the present strikes

me as a useful way to start a class on modern world history. It could also work in a class on colonial or modern American history—less so for a nineteenth-century course on the U.S.

The growth and conflicts and jockeying of the dots are interesting enough, but when the video gets to the 1960s, the explosion is so dramatic any student can see just what a world watershed the mid-twentieth century was.

For a single country, see also this animated history of Poland. HT to Ralph Luker at HNN

The Western Image, Continued

Heather Cox Richardson

The classic version of the American Western hero is Louis L’Amour’s Flint. Flint is a westerner, adopted by a gunslinger, then educated at fancy eastern schools. He plays the eastern game, becoming a rich businessman in the cutthroat world of industry. But his life has a twist. The secret to his eastern success is that he listens to the little guy, the cabbie who hears a stock tip, the waitress who learns about a business takeover. He values them and their hard work; he treats them as equals.

When an eastern doctor incorrectly diagnoses Flint with cancer, he chucks over his fame as a robber baron to go back to his roots. There, he sticks up for the small ranchers against the big guys, backed by the eastern system. He wins, of course. He’s better with cards, guns, and women than any easterner ever born. And he’s a lot smarter.

Does this image still appeal to Americans?

This TV show (below), appropriately named Outlaw, starts this week.

Cincinnati Daguerreotype Time Machine, 1848

Randall Stephens

What if we could see, in vivid detail, the world of a mid-19th century American city? We can. Sort of.

On a sunny Sunday in September 1848, two clever daguerreotypists, Charles Fontayne and William S. Porter,

placed their camera on a rooftop next to the Ohio River. From Newport, Kentucky, they captured a sweeping panoramic view of Cincinnati. The massive, detailed image that resulted reveals a bustling western city. The original ranks as one of the Cincinnati Public Library's greatest treasures.

The huge picture contains amazing detail. (See the zoom-in from the YouTube clip embedded here.) Visible in the picture are open windows, a distant clock tower, merchants, free blacks, a railroad station, steamboats, factories, shops, and more. Combine all that visual evidence with the 1850-51 Cincinnati Directory, detail from local papers, booster works of the day, statistical reports, and a full picture emerges.

Wired magazine features the 1848 waterfront daguerreotype in its August 2010 issue. "The panorama could be blown up to 170 by 20 feet without losing clarity," writes Julie Rehmeyer. To reach that level of precision a digital camera version would have to record a staggering 140,000 megapixels per shot. The total stitched-together panorama contains nearly 9-billion pixels. Rehmeyer describes the restoration and stabilization of the plates through the latest technology. Her explanation of the daguerreotype (the latest technology of that day) gives a good sense of how this all worked.

The Cincinnati Library intends to make a zoomable version available on-line next year. Until then, see The University of Rochester and George Eastman House, which has a 180mb version of one part of the Cincinnati Waterfront image on-line. (Warning: That's a massive file.)

I wonder if the zoomable version will be available by the next time I teach my course on American history from 1783-1865. I can see pairing this image up with primary and secondary source materials. Students might answer questions about how the panorama confirms or challenges the reading. What can we learn from the visual record that we can't learn from print? What does the look, design, layout of an America city tell us about this age?

As far as a selection from a primary source . . . any of these would work: James Handasyd Perkins, Annals of the West: Embracing a Concise Account of Principal Events . . . (1852), Charles Cist, The Cincinnati Miscellany (1846), or Eliza R. Steele, A Summer Journey in the West (1841). On the secondary source side: Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford, 2007), Leo Damrosch, Tocqueville's Discovery of America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), or David S. Reynolds, Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson (Harper Perennial, 2009).