The Fall 2015 class project: female academies

Broaches once worn 19th century  West Alabama women students .

We've had our first class meeting and the students present are aware that we will make female academies in West Alabama our class project. Pictured here is some jewelry worn by young antebellum  women students who attended school in the area during the nineteenth century.

This jewelry is housed at the Old Tavern in downtown Tuscaloosa. Katherine Richter, Executive Director of the Tuscaloosa County Preservation Society, was kind enough to point out the jewelry. I described my recent visit to see her and Ian Crawford of Jemison Mansion in an earlier blog posting.

We will use a small body of evidence  - such jewelry, diplomas, report cards, and Census documents on the founding families of Tuscaloosa, to learn more about this population of young women who were pursuing degrees even before the University of Alabama opened in 1831.

Why does it matter? How do these objects push our thinking about emerging urban life? Well, first, we get to wonder about how their living conditions, interests and family life differed from students in later generations. We will definitely pay attention to the social and political scene of their day. It's always interesting to see how much has changed and stayed the same. 

We might also get to critically imagine how an urbanizing Tuscaloosa looked as the nineteenth century matured. The presence of the Black Warrior River contributed to traffic in the area even after the state capital moved to Montgomery in the mid-1840s. 

A female academy was housed in Tuscaloosa's Old Capitol building.

Even though people today still think of Tuscaloosa as being little more than a college football town, these young women reflect a changing America as seen in emerging urban life.

To what do we look to see such life? Gunther Barth's City People, one of our required readings, will offer a few things to consider. Like earlier iterations of this course, we will write short essays and combine what we learn individually into one script and make a digital presentation for public consumption.
Rather than a documentary or music video, we might considered a curated photo exhibit.

1861 letter from Huntsville's Elizabeth Townsend.

A possible field trip to Huntsville is being discussed, permitting us to include the female academies in that area into the discussion. That effort will be helped by my earlier research on children of mixed race who lived in that city before and after the war. Some of them were young women who attended Wilberforce. Many of their letters are housed in the Septimus Cabaniss Papers at UA's Hoole Special Collections Library. I discuss their lives in Chapter Five of my new book.

my new book addresses how we become "city people"

My new book arrived this week as I have by now said in virtually every social media site I have - except this one. That lapse is interesting given that so much in this book pivots on how southern white male slaveholders essentially played some role, whether they intended to do as much, in the "urbanization" of freedwomen and children. Certainly antebellum Cincinnati, as shown on a map in the page above, was ground zero for the resettlement of such women and children partly because of its position on the Mississippi-Ohio river waterway. It was easy to get them out of slave territory on this important river network. These were obviously people in whom such men had invested themselves emotionally and financially.

Via letters, business and legal documents, I carefully try to tell this difficult story that brings to light new ways of thinking about "intimacy" across the races. To say "intimate" is to go beyond the obvious and think about how people connect despite obvious power differentials that show up in everyday life. I think the city space is one place we have done this across time.

As the students in this class will learn, ghettoes are something that began to appear after the Civil War as Americans were increasingly separated on the basis of race. While there were communities like the so-called "Little Africa" and "Bucktown" where people of African descent congregated more often that not, they generally lived in clusters alongside of "native" whites as well as the German and Irish immigrants who began arriving as the century matured.

It takes real work to realize that city life as we know it today, even with the kind of gentrification that finds many white Americans returning to urban areas long populated by African Americans, is a historical development. We began to see it in this country between 1830 and 1910, give or take a decade.

That emerging urban life is something that can be studied and seen as something that is still with us. It's an abstraction, historian Gunther Barth tells us, in that it's essentially a way that people with very different backgrounds learn to share the same space and learn to find a "common humanity" despite their differences. Some do as much via sports. In other words, new immigrants learned how to be American by rooting for the baseball team in their town. They learned how to speak English by reading the metropolitan newspaper. They learned to see themselves and others by laughing in vaudeville houses.  Indeed, we learn how to be "city people."

I'll keep driving this point again and again as we use Tuscaloosa and Birmingham as a laboratory. Yes, we will leave the classroom more than once to see this emerging urban phenomenon that has changed, but remains the same via landscape - many buildings in the 1830-1910 window still stand - but also in how we interact. Stay tuned.