on what it means to see "america"

Where are mass and void in this stock photo  house?

Last week, I wanted to push the students’ thinking about what it means see "America," or be "American." Thinking about this is important because we are discussing American culture during the nineteenth century. I gave them a prompt that reeled in information they received from various sources including Gunther Barth’s City People, a lecture on the recently demolished Kilgore House, and a lecture on narrating buildings. The prompt was “When I think of Barth's 'city people' and institutions, the triumphs and failure of human beings as seen in the story of the Kilgore house, and the ability to build structures designed - successfully or not - to have an impact on others, I see/don’t see the American spirit because…” They had to select "see" or "don't see" and then fill in the blank. Since it was a challenging prompt, it is only fair that I try to answer it, too. Today I decided to do as much while incorporating some of their answers to last week’s homework assignment. I wrote, "I do see the American spirit because each of those things - Barth’s take on the emergence of 'city people' in the United States during the nineteenth century, the Kilgore House, a structure that was built on UA’s campus in the late 19the century, and the ways in which buildings can have an impact on our ability to see great complexity. Complexity is a concept that is very American." To work backwards, Sarah Riches told us how we can see both mass, or something hard and very present, but also space, or something that is empty and almost non-existent, in the built environment (Her lecture was helpful because each student randomly selected a building that existed in Tuscaloosa during the nineteenth century. They will, among other things, be asked to “narrate” that building. She gave them a vocabulary to help them do as much). Two of the concepts she shared  - mass and void - make a building complex. Think about it. How much could we appreciate in a building that was only thickly made of brick? How much more would we appreciate seeing, perhaps, a column or some other interesting feature that interrupts the eye and gives the building real character, or complexity?  This idea of opposites, or complexity, resonates with Sarah Reynolds’s talk on the Kilgore House, a campus structure that was demolished earlier this year amid some public outcry. It once housed a Bryce Hospital administrator and his family as well as some lively young women who attended the University of Alabama at the turn of the century. The gaiety in these women’s lives contrasted sharply with some of the challenges faced by nearby Bryce patients, some of whom, as we learned via Reynolds, may have found some sense of purpose in helping to build the Kilgore House. One can only hope. Moving on, we may detect how Barth, a late urban historian who was initially attentive to the lives of Chinese workers, speaks over and over again about how the city is a place where human beings could be individuals, even aggressively individual in that classic American sense. At the same time, the city that emerges in the nineteenth century was a place where people had to attempt to find a common humanity, something that is very un-individualistic. Last week, the students hopefully saw how such humanity could be glimpsed in the metropolitan press and department stores.  Newspapers, as Barth writes, allowed people to see versions of themselves that were orchestrated by an editor. That they could was quite different from their rural or Old World days when they might have looked to a minister for such orchestration, as Aaron, one student in this class wrote while quoting Barth. Even “immigrants,” as Evelyn wrote, “looked to the papers as a tool to ‘Americanize’ themselves.” Similarly, department stores, as Aaron also wrote, “shaped the identities of 19^th century urban women.” Such stores even seemed to service all people, as Regan wrote, because they were a “central…point” in “downtown life.” These stores, as Ryan wrote while also paraphrasing Barth, created a “higher demand for more manufactured goods” and thus the “consumer market…[which] expanded to [include] lower class people.” Ultimately, both institutions were places where people, as AJ wrote, had “ [an] outlet to get away from their…worries.” I will be interested in seeing what the students have to say about the “common humanity” Barth presents as we move on this week to two more institutions - the ball park (or baseball) and vaudeville. Moreover, will they be able to see whether this “common humanity” included people like Eliza Potter, a mid-nineteenth Cincinnati hairdresser of mixed race, whose memoir we turn to next week, or Clarence and Ada King, an interracial couple who lived in late nineteenth century New York, whose lives are captured in a book we will read in the last third of this semester? Hopefully, they will understand how the imagination, creativity, work ethic and other concepts that describe Americans are often quite true, but are unveiled with complexity when we look very closely at all of the people residing in this country, even ones who were not “city people.” We might ask ourselves why some of them resided outside the urban space. Was it a result of their own choosing, or someone else’s? Did they have the freedom, a very American concept, to flourish like the individuals that Barth often describes?