Paean to the Museum of the Fur Trade Quarterly

Heather Cox Richardson

One of my favorite publications—historical or otherwise—is the quarterly magazine of Chadron, Nebraska’s Museum of the Fur Trade. A yearly membership at the museum is $15, and it’s worth every penny, even if, like me, you live two thousand miles away from Chadron, Nebraska. It’s worth it because you get this nifty little magazine.

Nicotiana rustica

The journal is sixteen pages of totally cool information about the artifacts of the fur trade and daily life on the Plains before the twentieth century. It’s always stuff you had never even thought to wonder about. The Fall 2011 issue, for example, has an article by James Hanson on the use of “Circassian Tobacco” in nineteenth-century Russian America. This was apparently an important trade good, exceedingly popular with the Alaskan natives. Turns out it was the same form of tobacco originally cultivated in eastern America. That species, Nicotiana rustica, had been replaced in Virginia by 1620 by a milder South American species, but when eastern Americans abandoned it, Nicotiana rustica traveled to Asia and Europe where its biting flavor remained popular. The article follows Nicotiana rustica through Ukraine and back to Russian America. Five pages of text and photographs and you have learned something you never even thought to wonder about.

But the big news for me—and for anyone who teaches the history of the American West—in the Fall 2011 issue was a wonderful article by W. Raymond Wood exploring the enormous importance of cats on the frontier.

Apparently, the brown rat, also known as the Norway rat, came to the American West with Euroamericans and quickly infested local Indian communities and the frontier forts in their vicinities. In the 1830s, a man at one fort recorded the numbers of rats he trapped: in February 1836 alone he got 89. Mind you, these are just the ones he caught.

In the West, rats and the native field mice decimated stored food. One military leader complained that every day the rats ate five bushels of his fort’s corn supply. Even worse, perhaps, their tunnels undermined any man-made structure, from Mandan earth lodges to military forts.

A detail from George Caleb Bingham's painting

Such a destructive rodent infestation put a premium on cats. Quite literally, for a settler a cat could make the difference between a successful career on the frontier and bankruptcy, because only a cat could protect expensive food supplies. Cats became among the most valued of frontier possessions, as Laura Ingalls Wilder suggested when she recounted the aftermath of a rodent chewing off her father’s hair while he slept. She entitled a chapter of Little Town on the Prairie “The Necessary Cat,” and told how her father paid a small fortune for a newborn kitten to beat back the advancing mice. Thanks to Wood’s article, that passage from Wilder fits into a larger squirming, squeaking story. Now, too, George Caleb Bingham’s famous painting “Fur Traders Descending the Missouri” (1845) makes a great deal more sense . . . and it’s clear that the animal hunched on the bow is a cat, not, as some would have it, a fox.

This magazine is a little gem. I look forward to every issue.

Scholarly Journals

Dan Allosso

Along with the rest of the subscribers to H-Net’s mailing list, “C19-Americanists,” I got an appeal today from the editors of Poe Studies and ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance. Washington State University is cutting their funding, and the editors are soliciting support. They admit that the administration’s move “is a fiscal one,” but the editors also suggest there is a bad “climate for higher ed” in Washington, and that administrators lack “awareness about the value of humanities journals,” and by implication, the humanities.

All these claims may be true. And these two journals are probably wonderful, and well worth continuing, even at the expense of cutting other WSU programs—which I assume would be necessary. But in light of the appeal's wide circulation to the mailing list, I think it raises some interesting questions beyond the immediate situation in Washington

Before today, I had never heard of either of these journals. I’ve certainly never held either of them in my hands, or read anything from them. So I’ve got to assume the editors are appealing to people like me in hopes we’ll feel a general sense of solidarity with other Americanists or humanities folks, a sense of antagonism toward clueless administrators, or a fear that our favorite journal may be next in line.

I do subscribe to a few journals (or rather, I get them as a result of membership), but I usually don’t read them in hard copy, even the articles that really grab my attention. Allan Kulikoff’s article in the June Journal of the Historical Society was very interesting (I blogged about it here). I read it online—can’t actually find my hard-copy June issue right now, but it’s still right there if I want to refer to it again.

I’m not suggesting that the Washington journals should be discontinued. Honestly, I think it’s criminally short-sighted how little of 21st century America’s money is invested in education. So yes, the journals should get funding and we should build fewer military drones. But it might also be a good time for those of us who support scholarly communication and refereed exchanges of ideas, to ask ourselves whether the way it’s always been done is the best way to do it now.

Since I don’t think anyone is getting rich writing for or publishing academic journals (correct me if I’m wrong), it doesn’t strike me that there’s an entrenched financial interest resisting change. So the question is, can we find less costly, more effective ways to do the things that journals do for the academy? Many journals are available online as a matter of course, with no increase in cost; so it seems reasonable to assume that online publishing does not add significant expense to the publishing process. I may be wrong, but it seems like a journal’s major expenses would be staff and printing/distribution.

Obviously, you can’t have a refereed journal without referees. But there seem to be important institutional interests supporting this process of validating and professionalizing fields of study. So I suspect there will continue to be ways to get this done—and to get it paid for. The function will be preserved, so it’s the form we’re worrying about.

Is part of the problem a continuing belief in the validation our writing acquires by being printed on paper? Isn’t this belief especially redundant in the case of peer-reviewed journal articles? Would the Washington journals be able to survive in electronic-only form? I don’t know the answer to this (I emailed them the question, and I’ll let you know what they say); nor do I know whether the Washington State administrators would be willing to negotiate, if they were presented with a lower-cost option than the journals’ current budgets. I’m just suggesting that it’s time to think about these issues. As I think the Washington State journal advocates implied in their letter to the list, our favorite journal could be next.

Foxed Paper and the Slight Smell of Mold: Reading, Browsing Actual Print Periodicals

I cross-post this modified bit on archives and the work in the paper trenches, which is at Religion in American Culture.

Randall Stephens

Last week I visited the Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary Library in Gladstone, Mo, just north of Kansas City. The staff was terrific and a bonus was an enormous collection of discarded books for sale--$1 or 50 cents/ea. I picked up Tim LaHaye's Battle for the Mind, and, oddly enough, a copy of Gordon Wood's Empire of Liberty.

Ideally, I hoped to browse through some denominational magazines and periodicals from the 1950s and 1960s for my next project on Christianity and rock/anti-rock. I was pleasantly surprised. The library had loads of Baptist and SBC serials dating back to the early years of the Cold War. Some of the titles I browsed through: Baptist Quarterly Review; Home Life; Baptist Training Union Magazine; The Student (A Baptist-style Jesus People-ish magazine, which Sam Hill actually wrote in). In addition to all that there were extensive runs of Christianity Today and Christian Century, along with quite a few other gems.

The Southern Baptist Periodical Index was a real help. But blast the indexers for not cataloging what I wish they had! (Page after page after page on "Missions.") I have seldom used the Index to Religious Periodical Literature (Chicago: American Theological Library Association.) But it's a tremendous resource for work on post-war American religion. And it gives a pretty good indication of the more popular magazines and journals that circulated at the time. See below the first page of the edition for 1971, listing a range of publications. (Click to enlarge.)

So, here are a few questions for all the HS blog research nerds and archive troglodytes out there: What do you suppose were the largest circulating and/or most influential denominational or public opinion periodicals of the 1950s and 1960s? Which ones are the best for getting a sense of what men, women, and children in the pews, suburbs, and cities were thinking? Why?