the issue of honoring our past and future "almost to a fault"

We had a good first meeting. Following an overview of what’s ahead, the students were challenged to be alert to the arrival of urban life in the United States in the nineteenth century (and even earlier if we keep Philadelphia, New York and even Mobile, Alabama, in mind).

The Charlestown section of Boston anchors The Town.

I did a brief lecture Wednesday on the tensions between rural and urban life across time as unveiled in our short reading on the opinions of early American leaders like Thomas Jefferson, who cherished agrarian ideals. Next, I offered brief words on how to look for instructive moments in the 2010 motion picture The Town, which is set in Boston. I showed them excerpts from this sometimes troubling movie that revolves around Doug MacRay(Ben Affleck), a young man who has conflicted feelings about participating in a bank robbery ring. The movie’s name draws inspiration from the Charlestown section of Boston, which was notorious for bank robbers.  

From the start, this film presents the ethnic loyalties that often define urban areas, among them the Charlestown community. MacRay is of Irish descent as are all of the young men from the neighborhood who help him with his heists. Wayne, one student in this course,  picked up on how these young men were descendants of Irish immigrants who came to “Boston to escape their old life and find jobs.” His insight is appreciated as we will indeed look at the ways in which nineteenth century urban dwellers in the United States claim power via employment, race, ethnic origins and even gender.

I was more than impressed, too, by other comments from other students who looked for additional tensions between the past and present, urban and rural and the so-called Old and New World:

Undre noted the cobblestone streets in the film, which made him think of  European cities that predate American ones.  

Rae and Devon were both drawn to the Bunker Hill monument, which is shown in an opening scene in The Town. Sitting in the Charlestown section of Boston, this 221-foot stone pillar was dedicated in 1843 to commemorate the first major battle of the American Revolution. Said Rae, “It is very interesting to me…that we build monuments to the past in the middle of an urban [space] that also [honors] technology and advancement.” She added, [we seem to honor] “our past and our ancestry almost to a fault while also searching” for new things “almost to a fault,” too.  Devon wrote: "the monument and the surrounding buildings have a distinct older look [but] when the shot widens you see a more modern city."

Jess noted how the robbers met up in an ice-skating rink after the film’s opening robbery. This was interesting to Jess, who said, “I think ice-skating…is really a rural pastime.” He saw tensions between such a rural setting, i.e. the frozen pond and an urban one - the rink.

Jess also picked up on the anonymity of the city life which shows up in interpersonal interactions including MacRay's personal involvement with Claire Keesey   (Rebecca Hall), the manager of the bank he robbed. There is so much anonymity in a city, even a bank robber on the run “thinks he can get away with” such a relationship, Jess said.

Wayne was tuned into how the word “Charlestown” was shown on the screen at the beginning of the film. The word “faded in and out and thus seemed to highlight the word “town” as if to also highlight ideas about community and what it means to belong to a particular neighborhood or space. This is an idea everyone will want to continue to think about as we turn to the opening pages of Gunther Barth’s City People for our next meeting.

Jasmine noted the tensions between urban life and nature as revealed in Keesey's presence first, in the bank and later, beside the ocean where she was freed. 

Emily homed in on how the movie showed “the dissonance between the family business of robbery” and “typical familial relations.” Said Emily, “The old ideas of trying to work hard to afford the city are being achieved, but the means of doing so are illegal.”

Voni offered an impressive list of tensions between the past and present as presented in this film, among them her awareness that Boston has “Old World charm,” but “New World problems” as evident in how “young guys target and overpower old” ones.

Ben Affleck stars in The Town (2010).

Ben astutely noted “a very literal conflict” between the modern moment in which the initial bank robbery takes place and the “old style combination lock” on the bank vault. He also noted historic parts of Boston and paid attention to how even the city itself was a “huge character” in this film. 

As Ben watched MacRay’s unease with his old life as a robber and his desire to get out of his old neighborhood  - the scene between MacRay and James Couglin (Jeremy Renner) is powerful in this regard -  Ben decided, “The idea of living in one place for most of your life [and] moving somewhere [else] for a better life is modern."

Offering summary thoughts, Will said, “There is an urban feel in this movie with the setting being in Boston. The Old World [also] comes into play with the florist [who is a] mob ruler (Pete Postlethwaite).  Will reminded us, too, about how Charlestown "as a whole is close” as seen in the number of regulars in the “town bar." That said, any apparent closeness in this bar was not unchallenged. Class tensions in this community affected MacCray's relationship with Keesey.

Next week, we will meet in front of Gorgas Library at 3 pm. We will then walk over to the former site of the Kilgore House on campus before heading back to our classroom in tenHoor to hear a lecture by Dr. Susan Reynolds, Associate Editor of Alabama Heritage magazine, which was once housed in this now-demolished house. 

The students are invited to be curious about how the Kilgore house and the University of Alabama figure into emerging urban life in the United States. They can start by watching the short film located on the right hand side of this blog. This short was completed by students enrolled in this course last fall. 

One aside: this fall, the class has set out to do a music video that will also address nineteenth century urban life. Among the music options they are considering is a song called “Queen City” from the Junkyard Kings, a local band. Indeed, Tuscaloosa, not unlike Cincinnati, was once known as Queen City. We will learn why in the weeks ahead.

drawing connections between the civil war and the 19th century urban space

Still image from Gangs of New York (2002)

Monday’s talk here at the University of Alabama by David Roediger, my University of Illinois dissertation adviser, made me wonder about how the urban space and culture figured into the Civil War. I became especially interested in this issue after seeing several images of how artists depicted American life during and after the war.

I found myself reaching for Drew Gilpin Faust’s study of death and the war, the first book on the war that I ever owned. This book was a part of what is known as the Book in Common reading in the Department of History at the University of Illinois. Once a year, everyone in the department gets a free copy of a book and we meet for a couple of hours and discuss it. The goal is to bring people with very different research agendas and political positions together to talk about a subject. In this case, it was death and the Civil War. 

To prepare for today's lecture, I scanned Faust's book just to see if the words city or urban showed up in her index. I was not surprised to see that neither did. This was clearly a book about death. But if you scan the pages, you will definitely see various cities mentioned in it. There was certainly lots of destruction in cities. Some of the destruction took place in New York City during the draft riots of 1863 not long after the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation. The riots were the largest civil insurrection in American history outside of the Civil War itself. The rioters were mostly working-class and mostly Irish men who resented that wealthier men were spared the draft. The protests eventually turned into an ugly race riot with Irish immigrants attacking African Americans. I mentioned to the students that race and class are often mutually intertwined in power struggles. 

These draft riots figure into a movie I have deliberately not shown in this class. It is always the one that everyone mentions when I say that I am teaching a class on the 19^th century city in the United States: Gangs of New York. After thinking about Dave's talk and today's lecture and what the students are learning about urban life via Gunther Barth's City People, I’d argue that this riot was about the draft and about the war, but as Barth tells us, it was also a way that white working class men were trying to make sense of the world in which they lived, which also happened to be urban. In such a setting one could easily see accumulating wealth. We saw something similar in our attention to Cincinnati where working class whites also  confronted African Americans.

Girl in mourning dress. Source: Library of Congress.

I discussed other things occurring in America's emerging city life as presented by Barth that compel us to think about the Civil War, among them the changing roles of women. Dave made this point when he showed a Winslow Homer image that appeared in Harper's Weekly. It showed a woman driving a buggy. Seated beside her is her husband who has lost one arm in the war. The image speaks volumes about the changing roles of women in the public sphere, an issue that Barth addresses several times, among them, his discussion of department stores where women worked, but also shopped because they were increasingly making household spending decisions. I wondered about the degree to which the mourning dresses that many women and girls wore after the war, a topic that Faust also addresses, figured into this consumer culture.

on what it means to see "america"

Where are mass and void in this stock photo  house?

Last week, I wanted to push the students’ thinking about what it means see "America," or be "American." Thinking about this is important because we are discussing American culture during the nineteenth century. I gave them a prompt that reeled in information they received from various sources including Gunther Barth’s City People, a lecture on the recently demolished Kilgore House, and a lecture on narrating buildings. The prompt was “When I think of Barth's 'city people' and institutions, the triumphs and failure of human beings as seen in the story of the Kilgore house, and the ability to build structures designed - successfully or not - to have an impact on others, I see/don’t see the American spirit because…” They had to select "see" or "don't see" and then fill in the blank. Since it was a challenging prompt, it is only fair that I try to answer it, too. Today I decided to do as much while incorporating some of their answers to last week’s homework assignment. I wrote, "I do see the American spirit because each of those things - Barth’s take on the emergence of 'city people' in the United States during the nineteenth century, the Kilgore House, a structure that was built on UA’s campus in the late 19the century, and the ways in which buildings can have an impact on our ability to see great complexity. Complexity is a concept that is very American." To work backwards, Sarah Riches told us how we can see both mass, or something hard and very present, but also space, or something that is empty and almost non-existent, in the built environment (Her lecture was helpful because each student randomly selected a building that existed in Tuscaloosa during the nineteenth century. They will, among other things, be asked to “narrate” that building. She gave them a vocabulary to help them do as much). Two of the concepts she shared  - mass and void - make a building complex. Think about it. How much could we appreciate in a building that was only thickly made of brick? How much more would we appreciate seeing, perhaps, a column or some other interesting feature that interrupts the eye and gives the building real character, or complexity?  This idea of opposites, or complexity, resonates with Sarah Reynolds’s talk on the Kilgore House, a campus structure that was demolished earlier this year amid some public outcry. It once housed a Bryce Hospital administrator and his family as well as some lively young women who attended the University of Alabama at the turn of the century. The gaiety in these women’s lives contrasted sharply with some of the challenges faced by nearby Bryce patients, some of whom, as we learned via Reynolds, may have found some sense of purpose in helping to build the Kilgore House. One can only hope. Moving on, we may detect how Barth, a late urban historian who was initially attentive to the lives of Chinese workers, speaks over and over again about how the city is a place where human beings could be individuals, even aggressively individual in that classic American sense. At the same time, the city that emerges in the nineteenth century was a place where people had to attempt to find a common humanity, something that is very un-individualistic. Last week, the students hopefully saw how such humanity could be glimpsed in the metropolitan press and department stores.  Newspapers, as Barth writes, allowed people to see versions of themselves that were orchestrated by an editor. That they could was quite different from their rural or Old World days when they might have looked to a minister for such orchestration, as Aaron, one student in this class wrote while quoting Barth. Even “immigrants,” as Evelyn wrote, “looked to the papers as a tool to ‘Americanize’ themselves.” Similarly, department stores, as Aaron also wrote, “shaped the identities of 19^th century urban women.” Such stores even seemed to service all people, as Regan wrote, because they were a “central…point” in “downtown life.” These stores, as Ryan wrote while also paraphrasing Barth, created a “higher demand for more manufactured goods” and thus the “consumer market…[which] expanded to [include] lower class people.” Ultimately, both institutions were places where people, as AJ wrote, had “ [an] outlet to get away from their…worries.” I will be interested in seeing what the students have to say about the “common humanity” Barth presents as we move on this week to two more institutions - the ball park (or baseball) and vaudeville. Moreover, will they be able to see whether this “common humanity” included people like Eliza Potter, a mid-nineteenth Cincinnati hairdresser of mixed race, whose memoir we turn to next week, or Clarence and Ada King, an interracial couple who lived in late nineteenth century New York, whose lives are captured in a book we will read in the last third of this semester? Hopefully, they will understand how the imagination, creativity, work ethic and other concepts that describe Americans are often quite true, but are unveiled with complexity when we look very closely at all of the people residing in this country, even ones who were not “city people.” We might ask ourselves why some of them resided outside the urban space. Was it a result of their own choosing, or someone else’s? Did they have the freedom, a very American concept, to flourish like the individuals that Barth often describes?

meet the students

Four features of city life are presented in City People

.

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.