using a photograph to ponder race and the urban space

While waiting for yet another round of bad weather to pass through Tuscaloosa, I continued thinking about this fall course and where I might take the students on a field trip. Last year, a planned trip to Sloss Furnaces was cancelled because of weather (Weather is a common theme around here. This is interesting for someone who is from South Florida where we have time to prepare for hurricanes).

I am considering Sloss again, but also downtown Birmingham. What stories will we intuit about the past by examining buildings in this city whose initial rise in the late nineteenth century owed largely to the arrival of steel and the railroad?

I wonder, too, about the opportunities for discovering things that late nineteenth century American cities have in common with other cities in other "spaces." The photograph here features a woman of African descent in Puerto Rico in the late nineteenth century. Two things struck me:

1) Only a year before this photo was taken, the United States made claims on Puerto Rico, an archipelago whose name is translated as "rich port." Port cities in and outside of the United States are generally one of the first places we can look to see wealth as people and commerce have across time moved through ports. This was certainly true in the States during the nineteenth century, but also earlier and later.

2) The woman is standing against an old building where a peeling theatre sign hangs. Evidently, an increasingly modern world here presented time for leisure moments, something Gunther Barth points out in his study of city culture in America. He, among other things, uncovers how vaudeville,  another source of entertainment, figured into the rise of urban life in the States. That said, black face entertainment in vaudeville houses revealed the ongoing conflict between people based on wealth and skin color. Such conflict is also evident in Puerto Rico if we ponder the caption under this image, which first appeared in an 1899 book.  According to the caption, the woman is considered attractive partly because she is biracial and not entirely of African descent (One aside, Eileen K. Suarez Findlay has written an outstanding study on the turn-of-the-century surveillance of women of African descent). 

But being of African descent was not the only thing that resulted in racial division in America and the Atlantic World. As the students in this course will learn,   there was also tension between white Europeans, a topic addressed in part by, among others, Dr. Jenny Shaw of UA's History Department.

"the game almost reduced their daily tensions"

 Spaulding Collection, New York Public Library

As Americans learned how to make time for work and play, baseball became a popular sport. But how do we make connections between it and the growth of cities? The students in this course will learn as much next fall. 

Indeed, by the 1880s, men who were confined to New York and Pittsburgh factories and offices, headed to ball parks.  In this course, we will learn how city dwellers found opportunities to enjoy themselves through baseball which was just one of many spectator sports drawing crowds in and outside the urban space. Cricket and horse racing  were among the most popular until many turned to baseball and football in the second half of the nineteenth century. Like football, baseball eventually became big business.

One of three course readings

But whereas football was initially associated with the wealthy and educated in the United States, baseball early on made room for working class urban dwellers. But by the time it got professionalized in the late nineteenth century, the ball clubs - not the players - increasingly had the most power and this was true for decades. Moreover, for decades this sport, like many, was segregated, oppressing certain players even more.

We will learn how baseball figures into the needs of urban people who, as Gunther Barth tells us, not only needed something to divert their attention from their depressing environs, but something that mirrored their own struggle for success. Writes Barth, "the game almost reduced their daily tensions because its ups and downs seemed more momentous than their own lives."

Coming Fall 2014

Sarah Forbes Bonetta Davies

I just hung fliers around campus and tenHoor Hall for this course. I will teach it for the second time next semester. One of the fliers features a photograph of Sarah Forbes Bonetta Davies, a woman of West African royal ancestry who was reportedly orphaned in 1848 when her parents were killed in a massacre. Two years later, the king of Dahomey presented her as a "gift" to Queen Victoria. After becoming the queen's goddaughter, Davies apparently spent the rest of her life between her home in England and Africa until her death in 1880. 

I was struck by Davies' elegant hairdo in this photograph. It made me think of one of the historical actors the students will learn about in this course:  Eliza Potter, a hairdresser of mixed race.  A native of New York, Potter, too, traveled to Europe, working as a nursemaid and later as a hairdresser for wealthy people on both sides of the Atlantic. All this as she eventually  owned a home with her "own fig tree," as she put it, in Cincinnati. Through studying Potter's life, the students will learn how gender, race and class figure into an increasingly urban America. The growth of cities begins in earnest in the early nineteenth century. By 1920, more Americans lived in cities than the countryside.

I also used an image depicting the cover of Bloomingdale's 1886 catalog on a flier because this course will also address, as Gunther Barth has written, how by the late nineteenth century, department stores helped define city life in the United States. So did other things including, believe it or not, baseball, a sport played by New York businessmen during this century.

I am still pondering how this course will incorporate architecture into the curriculum. Last fall, the students in this course became "experts" on Tuscaloosa buildings that were built in the nineteenth century. Their efforts culminated in a short film. I am wondering if we might try something different, perhaps a music video. We shall see. 

Finally, I am also wondering about the best way to highlight the specific experiences of men of color as I am now reminded of the "watermen" who spent time in port cities on the Eastern Seaboard and inland. What new things can their experiences teach us about how nature, or specifically, how waterways figure into America's growing urban economy? I may turn again to David Cecelski's study on this issue (students taking my Black Urban Culture course this spring read an excerpt from his book). In the meantime, I look forward to teaching this class next fall. The class will meet 3 to 5:30 pm every Wednesday.