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| 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?
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