Emerging urban life seen in Birmingham hotel

As I prepare for the fall semester, I am already thinking about possible field trips for this course. We have focused twice on how Tuscaloosa fits into the story of emerging urban life in America. Perhaps we will travel to Birmingham and discover how that city figures into the same narrative. One place to visit, if we do as much, is the Hampton Inn's Tutwiler Hotel, which was built in 1910 as a nine-story fancy apartment house. 

Below are photos I took at this hotel, which pays homage to Birmingham's historic past well into the 20th century.While the Civil Rights movement is often the narrative to which we return to make discoveries about Birmingham, perhaps it will be worthwhile to also think about a longer narrative that includes human rights issues alongside additional topics, among them gender, culture, housing, industrialization and architecture.

pushing ourselves to make connections over and over again

As we barrel toward the end of the semester, the students have a choice to read an excerpt from one of two books: Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance by Carla Kaplan or Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche. While both titles seem odd for a course on the "nineteenth century city," here is where the tire really hits the road. In the same manner that the students are being pushed to see "emerging city life" in the physical space of Tuscaloosa, they will be challenged to do the same via these two readings. Along the way, they will return to ideas they have learned this semester.

Miss Anne in Harlem will open the door for them to return to the idea of the "public feminine," or the ways that women began to politically inhabit spaces outside the home. But this time they will do as much in the context of white women in Harlem in the opening decades of the 20th century.  Among the women who venture to this space to partake in the black arts scene are British heiress Nancy Cunard and ex-pat Sylvia Beach, who once owned Shakespeare & Company, a bookstore in Paris and published James Joyce' Ulysses.

Fast forward to Americanah, which finds a Nigerian female college student returning "home," but not before commenting on all that she heard, saw and experienced in America. Think of her as a counterpart of sorts to Frances Trollope, the Englishwoman who failed at opening a bazaar in antebellum Cincinnati, but did well at writing a book in 1832 about Americans' bad manners. 

In both books, race, class and gender are still before us. Why? It's worth thinking about why such a conversation matters because they inform how people inhabit the public space today. Also, both books should push us to wonder about what it really means to be "American" across time, or how does the American city differ from other non-U.S. cities that found the likes of Beach, Cunard and Trollope, but also Ifemelu, the well-traveled protagonist in Americanah.

As we turn to the last edit of our music video, we will ponder, too, how the rural space is never entirely left behind even in a world increasingly defined by urban life. Why?

I want see the students to keep pushing themselves to make linkages across time. Where do we see the city and the many things that announce urban life in the characters and real people in these two readings? Where do we see the  "city people" that Gunther Barth describes, ones who lived in the emerging urban space between 1830 and 1910, give or take a decade?

Finally, next week I am pleased to announce that Steve Davis, historian for Bryce Hospital, will visit our class. The students' earlier learned about Bryce Hospital after visiting the former site of the Kilgore House, which once housed Charles Kilgore, a Bryce engineer and his family. The house, which was demolished last year, was the site at the University of Alabama to house female students. How do we insert mental health into the story of a modernizing world? After learning about the nervous breakdown of U.S. geologist Clarence King in Martha Sandweiss' study in last week's reading, it will be great to have more context via Mr. Davis.

pondering the nineteenth century urban space via the daily newspaper

My own research relies partly on looking at nineteenth century newspapers.

In tomorrow's class we will look at the ways in which baseball and the "metropolitan press" contributed to emerging urban life. In light of last Saturday's field trip, which was canceled, Dr. Richard Megraw will join us to lead a discussion on the former.

I will draw on my own knowledge of the sport to make connections to the metropolitan press. To be sure, I will try to approach the lecture with new eyes. Indeed, I was a newspaper journalist for the better part of a decade, having started as a high school intern before working as a staff copy editor, reporter and assistant editor for three newspapers once owned by Knight-Ridder (now The McClatchy Company), a large chain once based in my hometown. By 2000, I could see the decline of daily newspapers with the public's growing attention to the Internet and left the company. After working as a freelancer for a bit, I applied to graduate school. Eleven years later, I'm teaching and have more time to tell a story as an academic.  I sometimes miss the adrenaline rush from running after after a good story. I miss, too, having a copy editor (So does my husband who once jokingly said - I hope - of one of my academic typescripts, "If I never see this again, it won't be too soon").

During my newspaper days, I had no knowledge of how newspapers contributed to nineteenth century urban dwellers sharing a "common humanity," as Gunther Barth writes. On the basis of my own research on the migration of freedwomen and children to Ohio, it certainly appears true. In the pages of archival newspapers I've seen hints of a rapidly changing world. Take for example,  Jourdan Anderson, a former enslaved man and Dayton, OH-resident whose 1865 letter to his former master was printed in the New York Daily Tribune. Apparently his master wanted him to return to the South after the Civil War and work for him. Anderson worried about the impact of such a move on his two daughters Milly and Jane. He wanted them to be safe from sexual abuse. Anderson also wanted back-pay from his earlier days of working as an enslaved person.

I recall, too, reading about Cincinnati white man of means who published a notice alerting area merchants that he'd no longer be paying the bills of his wayward wife; the African American domestic worker who avoided conversation with the abolitionists  knocking on the door of the house in which she worked, lest her employer hear her doing as much(these visitors were in search of signatures for their cause; she was trying to keep her job); and numerous newspaper advertisements for school books, which evidently unveiled the growing access to education some people had by mid-century. It is a topic that the students and I have discussed. I've seen, too, many advertisements from people in search of property in an increasingly crowded Cincinnati.


In the years leading to the Civil War, and prior to the formation of ghettoes, African Americans were by and large dispersed throughout Cincinnati’s white residents, among them, Irish and German immigrants fleeing a famine and a failed revolution in their homelands, respectively. Between 1840 and 1850, Cincinnati’s population increased from 46,338 to 115,434. It was third behind only New York and New Orleans in volume of commerce.

How do such individuals from varying backgrounds find the "common humanity" via the metropolitan press?  How do issues like entertainment, leisure and language figure into this conversation from the perspective of readers? How does honesty figure in from the perspective of newspaper businesssmen? What practical purposes did newspapers serve? The students should be curious about the answers to these questions and  come to class prepared to have a productive conversation on these and other issues.

cities need nature, one astronomer says

This is UA's old golf course. Lots of bird calls here. I took this photo last week.

Check out this cool story heard today on National Public Radio (NPR). It's about how cities and nature can work together. It's so Frederick Law Olmsted, 21st century-style. Apparently, even songbirds change their tunes while living in cities. Makes me wonder now about the bird in our backyard lately. Must be a migratory one on his way somewhere south of here. Sounds like he's singing "Jeter, Jeter, Jeter" (That one's for you, my late Mississippi-born-Yankees-fan Grandpa).

serendipity reigns in clarksdale indeed

Bill Howell, the innkeeper at The Clark House, the nineteenth century structure  that I mentioned in my last blog entry, keeps a blog. In fact, he mentioned our visit to Clarksdale in his most recent entry. Click here to see how he makes me sound professorial! Thanks, Bill (and his wife Madge who I did not get to meet). On his blog, you will see me standing beside my aforementioned "dear friend" Francine Luckett, wife of Bill Luckett, the Mayor of Clarksdale. We met years ago when I was a journalist. By the way, Bill ends his blog entry by saying "serendipity reigns." I'd have to agree and it does as much over and over again. Fran is an Ole Miss Alum and we look forward to returning to Clarksdale (because there will be no hotel rooms in Oxford) when Alabama plays Ole Miss on October 4! Roll Tide! :)

Innkeeper Bill Howell, Fran and John Beeler, Alabama doctor-person

Me and Francine Luckett, First Lady of Clarksdale, MS

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.

Tuscaloosa, The Nineteenth Century City, a short film

We presented our short film, "Tuscaloosa, The Nineteenth Century City" today. Katherine Richter, Executive Director of the Tuscaloosa County Preservation Society and University of Alabama graduate, spoke after the film was shown. You may see the entire short here. Enjoy.

... it is difficult (even today) to think of Tuscaloosa, a town into which people come primarily for football games, as a city.

I have been tinkering with footage and images and text written and/or gathered by the students, me and my colleagues for the upcoming "world premiere" of our humble short film "Tuscaloosa, 'The Nineteenth Century'." The event will be held  at 4 pm December 4 in Room 118, tenHoor Hall on the campus of the University of Alabama. Katherine Richter, Executive Director of the Tuscaloosa County Preservation Society, will speak.

As an aside, the film is brought to you by "Room 118 Productions." Posted here are some of the photos that the students took of local buildings. The film will also have snippets of footage from urban spaces outside of Tuscaloosa. In this short clip, note how we kept what we have learned about the tensions between frontier life and the urban space in view. Another aside: the footage of the bridge at the beginning of this clip was taken last month when I was in Chicago attending a conference.

Meanwhile, it was wonderful hearing recently retired University of Alabama art historian Dr. Robert Mellown speak last week about his new book, as a presenter in the Alabama Center for the Book Lunchtime Speaker Series in Gorgas Library. Though I did not see a particular student in attendance, I was pleased to hear him say he needs to get to Gorgas and pick up Mellown's book as he - and the rest of the class - prepare to revise their final essays on local buildings. Their essays are a key inspiration behind the short film.

In our last in-class regular meeting, which will be held tomorrow, the students will discuss the first chapter of Jungle, Upton Sinclair's famous novel, and consider it alongside the late nineteenth century Second Industrial Revolution. They will see a short excerpt from PBS' Chicago: City of the Century documentary, which will push their thinking about Jungle. This reading is one of the ways we will prepare for this coming Sunday's field trip  to Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, Alabama. Sloss curator and historian Karen Utz will be one of our tour lecturers.  We are grateful for her support.

I look forward to hearing how the students synthesized everything they have learned to date after that visit to Sloss. They certainly did a great job of doing as much when we used an Bravo Channel Actor's Studio interview approach to simply ask one another about the significance of Gunther Barth's City People. May the synthesizing (and editing) continue.

On a final note, Roll Tide! I was able to get some footage from the festivities on Saturday when Alabama played LSU. It will be incorporated into the section of the film in which the viewer hears something along the lines of, "Granted it is difficult to think of Tuscaloosa, a town into which people come primarily for football games, as a city. But by the middle of the nineteenth century it was just that." As the film and our research makes clear, in the United States you need only 2,500 people to have a city and Tuscaloosa had as many as 4,500 before the state capital moved to Montgomery in 1845.

"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?

meet the students

Four features of city life are presented in City People

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Yesterday this class of ten students shared their thoughts on the first two chapters of Gunther Barth’s City People via a short essay assignment. In the first chapter, Barth describes the “modern city culture” emerging in the United States during the nineteenth century. For him, modern means “present.” "Culture" generally refers to institutions like the apartment house that first appeared in urban areas in the U.S. during the nineteenth century, giving places like New York, Chicago and other urban areas a particular identity. Interestingly, Barth, a Harvard-trained historian who died in 2004 after teaching for years at the University of California, defines city as an abstraction even as he considers it a real space in which people came up with solutions to new problems, among them the isolation felt from residing in an area different from their more rural past, or previous life in another country.  I was curious about whether the students perceived the city that Barth describes as a hopeful place. About half of them seemed to feel as much. The rest generally saw a bit of hope, but also despair.  Anne Marie honed in on how people’s “sense of identity” often came from opportunities to work. Michael saw cities as places where one could “find yourself” and begin “anew.” Regan noted that improvements in technology led to sturdier buildings that made cities better through the years. Byron was attuned to the challenges of city living, saying those who moved to cities often did so to “survive.” Evelyn was drawn to the ways in which people adapted to city life. She mentioned the gridiron streets that helped city dwellers live in a more orderly way. Electric street cars “brought efficiency to transportation,” she also wrote. These and other factors such as dividing one’s home from one’s work place and one’s sources of entertainment figured into the “harmony” urban dwellers needed, she added. Ryan was attentive to the ways in which city life posed hurdles for women, especially those who “left farm life” to contend with “hard factory work.” Lewis understood the degree to which new arrivals were “strained by urbanization and industrialization” while they dealt with “Old World concerns” and “rivalries.” Aaron realized that the tensions felt caused some groups to become more cohesive and gave them “a sense of place.” Similarly, A.J. noted how individuals residing closely beside each other forced them to become a “community,” albeit not always a “close-knit one.” Aaron noted the “poetic” quality of Barth’s writing, saying his use of “great minds and great poets’ helped flesh out his view of the city. Finally, Lauren detected that cities were places where one could find “high culture” even as “the immense amount of people and buildings crammed into” small spaces left “many with a dirty impression” of urban living. I thought the responses from the students were generally a good start. I look forward to seeing them deepen their thinking as we look at some of the institutions Barth believes helped define city life in the United States. We start next week with the metropolitan press and the department store. Along the way, we will be very attentive to how race, class and gender, and ethnicity sharpen our view of city life. From time to time, per the suggestion of one student who was struck by how some of the architecture in the States receives influence from older cultures/civilizations, we will also focus briefly on nineteenth century city life outside of this country. My colleagues have steered me to readings about places as different as Germany, Mexico, France, Cuba and Brazil that should be helpful. In the meantime, please meet the students via the short video pictured here. Music provided in part by Weldon Burger, native of Greensboro, NC.