"standing at the seaside and staring at the ocean"

Photo Credit: Maliz Ong

Two weeks ago, the students turned in their first short essay assignment, which is now their second and final short essay in this course and is due December 6th.  I want to see them better integrate ideas from Gunther Barth's City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth Century America into their work. We discussed ways to do that as a class and moreover, how we will collectively make a class video that presents a narrative based on this assignment, which requires them to write about a building that existed in Tuscaloosa during the nineteenth century. Then we turned to completing Martha Sandweiss' Passing Strange. For the time being, they are comparing geologist Clarence King's experiences,which appear in Sandweiss' book, to those of Eliza Potter, the hairdresser of mixed race  whose experiences appear in her self-penned memoir. They must fold Barth's ideas into this assignment, too. I look forward to seeing what they write. When I created the prompts for this second assignment, even I was surprised to see the degree to which these two unlikely bodies had very similar experiences that might even approach them sharing a particular worldview were it not for the degree to which King as a white man certainly had more power than Potter, a woman of African descent. He was born into wealth in Newport. She was born into more curiously unknown beginnings in New York and accumulated a bit of money as a hairdresser to wealthy whites on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. What makes these two people similar? What makes them different? One strand easily in view when observing their lives is their desire to travel, something about which I was reminded while in Chicago recently. While at a conference, I passed time in a bookstore and there, saw a markdown copy of American travel writer Paul Theroux' The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road. As the blurb on the back of the book  promises, it is filled with blurbs from Theroux's earlier published books and "from travelers both familiar and unexpected," among them Mark Twain and Anton Chekhov. I bought it and am slowly reading it. Today I was drawn to the heading "Travel and Optimism,"  which offers this quote about travel:

It was the poor person's way of going abroad - standing at the seaside and staring at the ocean. All travelers are optimists, I thought. Travel itself is a sort of optimism in action.

This appeared in Theoroux' The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Britain. It made me wonder about the many times I have seen people, rich and poor, drawn to the lake or river fronts and indeed the seaside. The ability to do so becomes a sort of great equalizer, but only for a moment. Certainly one cannot forget the great horrors that took place across time in such a space including the African slave trade. Today, while one can own seaside property, few can entirely prevent others from a glimpse of a body of water that figured greatly, as the students should be learning, into the ways in which America became a modern and industrialized country. For example, like indigenous people, European settlers found value in building settlements beside water where ports and landings connected cities here and abroad to each other. On water, King and Potter often traveled, sometimes seeing different things and often feeling similar feelings, among them feelings of loneliness. Perhaps, as Theroux senses, they moved through space to lighten their spirits. Lest  I write too much, I will leave what else can be said about this matter to the students.

"he sought the freedom of the West"

Clarence King's travels are captured in Passing Strange.

Eliza Potter's travels are captured in her 1859 memoir.

As I prepped for our next class meeting, I was struck by the degree to which nineteenth century geologist Clarence King's penchant for travel often juxtaposes nicely against that of Eliza Potter, a hairdresser of mixed race. Though she was a woman of African descent, she also frequently traveled during this century. Via her memoir, A Hairdresser's Experience in the High Life, we learned earlier this semester of her desire in the 1850s to see "a Western world." That such a woman could have a cosmopolitan outlook is not very familiar to most readers in and outside academic circles.

The students will learn this week about King's desire to learn more about the world outside the United States and will be pushed to consider his desire with Potter in mind. Writes Martha Sandweiss in her monograph on his many experiences (the well publicized ones and not), "In London he sought the freedom of the West." This sentence poses tensions with the sentence in Potter's memoir uncovering her desire to "see a Western world."

Maps were handed out earlier this semester with the hope that the students enrolled in this class will pay careful attention to Potter's and King's movements. Along the way, we will almost certainly trouble this idea of what is meant when we hear the word "West" and how it means different things to many people, but something similar for those of a particular class. Perhaps they will also consider these two individuals' movements against Ada Copeland, King's wife who was born a slave in Georgia shortly before the Civil War. It will be interesting to see how much they see similarity and difference in the lives of King, Potter and indeed Copeland. The ultimate challenge, however, will be how to see the "nineteenth century city" in and outside the United States in their lives.

"competitive men will do almost anything to win"

This widely-read book made King a celebrity.

1952 James Stewart movie.

Yesterday the students watched excerpts from Bend of the River, a 1952 James Stewart movie with iconic images of American settlers heading west. We just read the first two chapters of Martha Sandweiss' Passing Strange: A Gilded Ages Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, which centers on the life of Clarence King, a geologist, and some of his adventurous pursuits, many of them on the western frontier. I asked them to bring the book and the movie together in order to better understand the complexities of King's life. As we continue to read, we will certainly see him in the 19th century urban space that is New York. But for now, we see him on the frontier. Just as I asked them a few weeks ago during our tour of Tuscaloosa's Jemison Mansion to see the mansion via the eyes of Eliza Potter, a mixed race hairdresser, yesterday I asked them to pretend that King himself was witnessing some of what we saw in the movie. In other words, put a real person in this work of fiction. Knowing his quirky personality and the degree to which he was a masterful storyteller, what would he say? Moreover, since looking at race, gender and class are helpful to understanding how complicated American life is, how could we weave such ideas in? All of students did a great job of completing a fill in the blank assignment, situating King in a particular scene of this movie. Regan, Ryan, Lauren, Aaron, Michael, Evelyn and Bryon participated in this assignment. In the interest of space, I will weave their answers together:

"Hi, my name is Clarence King. I was born in Newport, Rhode Island in 1842. Today, I find myself in Oregon observing the most interest things. I just saw a young lady doing chores get shot in the shoulder by a Native American.  After we reached Portland, I saw a maid helping the woman who had been shot. I ventured out to a dance and saw a young lady flirt with a very well to do gentleman during a dance. Oh, how it reminds me that the city is a place filled with young women looking for husbands. Later, I saw a man letting one of the women drive a wagon during another battle, this one with white men who were trying to take the settlers' supplies. Oh, how it reminds that competitive men will do almost anything to win . What I saw  is different from my days at Yale where me and my classmates merely read about Native Americans and battles or only admired the women. Oh, the stories I will have for those politicians and others back on the east coast. It all make s me feel very lucky, but sometimes confused. I record this knowing that I have been cleansed for some great work."

After they completed this short assignment, we discussed what the students wrote and the film, which certainly included stereotypical images of African Americans and Native Americans and moreover, images that sometimes situated white women in unfavorable light. One point I wanted to emphasize is King's own strange politics. While he was a supporter of Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, who believed western territories should decide whether they wanted slavery within their borders, King went on to marry an African American woman and even sometimes "pass" as African American as  he maneuvered between the frontier and his life on the east coast. I personally wondered if the "mad" scientist in him made him believe that he could withstand the hurdles of his many contradictions. We will consider this issue as we turn to the the next three chapters of Sandweiss' book.

"the best and brightest of his generation"

Martha Sandweiss' Passing Strange

Clarence King, explorer-writer-scientist

This week, the students will turn in their first short essays, which explore "the nineteenth century city" as it relates to Tuscaloosa. Again, they randomly selected a building that existed in this century and will demonstrate how it figures into the emergence of city life in the United States. While completing their papers, they will also read the first two chapters of Martha Sandweiss' book on a Gilded Age romance involving Clarence King, a Newport-born geologist who "passes" as an African American in order to marry Ada Copeland, an African American woman from Georgia. When I first read this book,which was a Christmas present from my sister-in-law, I was very interested in King and Copeland's relationship because it relates to my own research. While reading it again in preparation for this class, I was struck by the degree to which King allows us to see the significance of the West in the rebuilding of America after the Civil War. This is indeed a narrative about race relations in the United States, particularly in New York, a place where King could pull off being a black pullman porter while also being regarded by the likes of John Hay, Abraham Lincoln's private secretary and later Presidents' William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of State, as "the best and brightest of his generation" for his brilliant surveys of the West after the Civil War. But this book is also a story about space and place, two themes that are very critical in this course. I hope the students see as much at any rate. Among the questions before us: Where is the story of emerging city life during the nineteenth century in this book? How is it different in the postbellum period than it was before the Civil War? Which ideas from Gunther Barth's City People, our first text, and Eliza Potter's A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life, our second text, should we be considering in order to push our thinking about these and other questions?

seeing 19th century Tuscaloosa buildings closely

Kilgore House

Bryce Hospital

President's Mansion

Woods Hall

St. John Church

House in The Winter Guest

First National Bank

Manly Hall

I asked the students to pay close attention to long shots and close ups of the exterior of a house in the 1997 motion picture The Winter Guest, which was filmed in Scotland. They were asked to think about the structure on which they are writing for their first short essay, which is due next week. Further, I asked them to wonder about the people who once inhabited or visited their structure. They were then asked to draw a sketch, even an imperfect one, of their structures, which are presented above, and list adjectives to describe them. I was very pleased with their work.

The Winter Guest has been a favorite film of mine for years. As the late film critic Roger Ebert once wrote, it is not a film that tells a story as much as it is one that evokes a mood. This is something to which I wanted the students to be attentive as they watched four sets of characters over  the course of one day in this movie and view this house. When the semester began, I told them to think about space and place as both ideas related to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, during the nineteenth century. As the semester progresses, I see progress in their ability to do as much with this deliberately abstract concept with which the historical literature in recent years is grappling in our increasingly small, but still very complex world.

The students who participated in this assignment are Anne Marie, Lewis, Bryon, Michael, A.J.,, Ryan, and Regan. I look forward to seeing everyone's essays as well as their photographic and possibly video images of their historic structures. Information from their essays and some of their images will be presented in a short film that will be shown in our final class meeting.

drawing connections between the civil war and the 19th century urban space

Still image from Gangs of New York (2002)

Monday’s talk here at the University of Alabama by David Roediger, my University of Illinois dissertation adviser, made me wonder about how the urban space and culture figured into the Civil War. I became especially interested in this issue after seeing several images of how artists depicted American life during and after the war.

I found myself reaching for Drew Gilpin Faust’s study of death and the war, the first book on the war that I ever owned. This book was a part of what is known as the Book in Common reading in the Department of History at the University of Illinois. Once a year, everyone in the department gets a free copy of a book and we meet for a couple of hours and discuss it. The goal is to bring people with very different research agendas and political positions together to talk about a subject. In this case, it was death and the Civil War. 

To prepare for today's lecture, I scanned Faust's book just to see if the words city or urban showed up in her index. I was not surprised to see that neither did. This was clearly a book about death. But if you scan the pages, you will definitely see various cities mentioned in it. There was certainly lots of destruction in cities. Some of the destruction took place in New York City during the draft riots of 1863 not long after the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation. The riots were the largest civil insurrection in American history outside of the Civil War itself. The rioters were mostly working-class and mostly Irish men who resented that wealthier men were spared the draft. The protests eventually turned into an ugly race riot with Irish immigrants attacking African Americans. I mentioned to the students that race and class are often mutually intertwined in power struggles. 

These draft riots figure into a movie I have deliberately not shown in this class. It is always the one that everyone mentions when I say that I am teaching a class on the 19^th century city in the United States: Gangs of New York. After thinking about Dave's talk and today's lecture and what the students are learning about urban life via Gunther Barth's City People, I’d argue that this riot was about the draft and about the war, but as Barth tells us, it was also a way that white working class men were trying to make sense of the world in which they lived, which also happened to be urban. In such a setting one could easily see accumulating wealth. We saw something similar in our attention to Cincinnati where working class whites also  confronted African Americans.

Girl in mourning dress. Source: Library of Congress.

I discussed other things occurring in America's emerging city life as presented by Barth that compel us to think about the Civil War, among them the changing roles of women. Dave made this point when he showed a Winslow Homer image that appeared in Harper's Weekly. It showed a woman driving a buggy. Seated beside her is her husband who has lost one arm in the war. The image speaks volumes about the changing roles of women in the public sphere, an issue that Barth addresses several times, among them, his discussion of department stores where women worked, but also shopped because they were increasingly making household spending decisions. I wondered about the degree to which the mourning dresses that many women and girls wore after the war, a topic that Faust also addresses, figured into this consumer culture.