Some of the content below originally appeared in a posting on my Gender, Race and the Urban Space blog:
I am writing on this blog less as I teachThe Nineteenth Century City class in the Fall. I may return to it from time to time as I make new discoveries while teaching a new graduate course titled "Gender, Race and the Urban Space" and a new undergraduate course titled "Antebellum America."
Although I am not
blogging as often on this site, I do want to take the time to share
something related to the theme if often address: black urban life. My
book
Remember Me to Miss Louisa: Black and White Intimacies in Antebellum America is now available for pre-order on bookseller websites like
Amazon.
The
book, which will be published by Northern Illinois University Press
this June, uncovers the ways in which (always have to get the requisite
"ways in which" academic speak in there) women and children of color
migrated outside slave territory before the Civil War with the
assistance of an unlikely body - southern white men. Ohio and Cincinnati
in particular was filled with newly freed black and mixed race women and children
owing partly to its place on the Mississippi-Ohio river network.
Ultimately,
relying greatly on correspondence from African American women and
children and legal documents as well as published contemporary writings,
the book demonstrates that while white men can hardly be excused from
their participation in oppressing people of color during the antebellum
period, they unveil themselves as being uncomplicated as most human
beings when they made decisions to demonstrate some measure of concern
for certain enslaved women and the children they had with them. The book
is yet another that shows the struggle of unmarried mothers of color in
cities, but, again, white men are a part of the conversation in
anticipated and unanticipated ways. In providing black or mixed race
women and children with the means to leave often rural spaces, white men
were inserting them knowingly or unknowingly into emerging urban life
in America. Indeed, the "nineteenth century city" is often the setting for my book.
That newly freed black and mixed race women and children manifest in such a setting is significant partly because far too often we do not often see
people of African descent in chronicles of rising of industry and
urbanization in the United States. Instead, we hear a great deal about
such inventions as steamboats and when we hear of white-black
interaction, it often involves race riots such as the kind that indeed took place in Cincinnati and other cities like Philadelphia and New York
before the Civil War.
The explosion of literature on
urban history, one of the fastest growing subfields of African American
history, is widening the lens on black urban life during the nineteenth
century. I look forward to sharing what I've discovered about the
experiences of black women and children in antebellum and postbellum
Cincinnati and elsewhere. Yes, given the racial hostility in Cincinnati,
that city often served as a staging ground for some new migrants who
eventually moved on to places as varied as Colorado, Kansas, Washington
state, northern Mexico and some even returned to the South.
That said, I
have entertained the idea of ending this blog and addressing my students and others via only
my teaching and technology site.
That site was created because technology - as in films, videos and
music clips - is so important to how I teach and even conduct research
(film and theatre were prongs in my first graduate degree).
One
day at a time on it all. In the meantime, back to teaching - and
celebrating the coming release of my first historical monograph. Great
way to start the new year.
Today, Victoria Ott, Associate Professor of History at Birmingham-Southern University, offered a presentation on young women in the Confederacy who attended school during the Civil War. It was a fascinating talk. According to Ott, the parents of such women often enrolled them in school to get them out of harm's way. During their time away from home, some young women took liberties they might not have taken before. For example, some engaged in courtship rituals, such as writing letters, with Confederate soldiers and on occasion, Union ones.
Ott, who was born in Alabama, provided background on her interest in young women in the Confederacy. As a child, she was introduced to the motion picture "Gone With the Wind." By the time she got to graduate school, she needed a dissertation topic. Why not look for some real-life Scarlett O'Hara's in the archive? She never found such a woman. She did find women who were sometimes frustrated by how the war was changing their lives. Among such women were ones who protected the memory of the Old South.
Her talk posed interesting tensions with the core purpose of this class, which is to look for emerging urban life. As I told the audience in my opening remarks, the issue of young women and education in the years surrounding the Civil War was fascinating without even thinking about cities. But indeed, the class tried to do just that. The longing of Ella Ballard, one young woman who attended a female academy in Frankfort, Kentucky, for a simple watch serves as an example of the emerging consumer culture that accompanied city life. Via an antebellum letter, she asked her father Rice Ballard, a Mississippi and Arkansas planter (and historical actor in my recently published book) to buy her one while he was in New Orleans. She even chatised him for forgetting her request.
A postbellum letter from former University of Alabama President Josiah Gorgas to his two daughters Mary and Jessie, students at Sewanee, University of the South, uncovers his query about the outcome of a baseball game, a sport that was first played in New York City.
Finally, Elizabeth Townsend, a young Huntsville, Alabama, woman of mixed race, was enrolled in Wilberforce University along with her sister and cousins on the eve of the Civil War. She traveled to Ohio on boats and a train, two forms of transportation that announced an urbanizing world. A letter she wrote in May 1861, just a month after the war began, finds her not addressing this momentous event, but instead a social she recently attended at school.
Without question, these were privileged young women. Still, their lives were not without challenges. Surviving evidence permits us to see their small claims on power in a still patriarchal world.
To which topic will this class turn next fall? I do not yet have a clue. Perhaps we will return to this subject. There's still so much to learn and recover in the archive.
Special thanks to the students: Chris Edmunds, Morgan Johnson, Lin Kabachia, William Newman, Adam Rosenberg and Sarah Yielding for their enthusiasm and openness to learning. I want to also thank Kari Frederickson, Chair of UA's History Department; Lydia Ellington, Director of Gorgas House, Katherine Richter, Executive Director of the Tuscaloosa County Preservation Society,Joshua Rothman, Director of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South, History Department Office Manager Christina Kircharr, and my colleagues Jimmy Mixson and John Beeler, for their support.
