visits to three sites push our thinking on two very different historical actors

Today the class visited the Old Tavern in downtown Tuscaloosa as well as two nearby mansions, one named for former Alabama senator Robert Jemison and the other for antebellum physician John Drish. Katherine Richter, Executive Director of the Tuscaloosa County Preservation Society, made arrangements for all three visits. Greg Austin, staffer at Jemison, gave a wonderful tour. Along the way, we were joined by University of Alabama Press' Sales and Marketing Director J.D. Wilson and his colleague. The goal: revisiting the lives of Clarence King, the first President of the United States Geological Survey, and Eliza Potter, a hairdresser of mixed race as revealed in historian Martha Sandweiss' biography on King and Potter's 1859 memoir. Both King and Potter were not unfamiliar with the high life. King's birthplace, Newport, RI, was a place Potter visited often when called on to style the hair of wealthy women. Like King, who mapped the west for the U.S. government, opening the way for industry, Potter also traveled to Europe. Both people could be pretty cranky about society. Knowing what we know about these two very different people who were widely traveled, how would they have encountered the buildings we visited? Would either be drawn to one, none or all and for what reasons? The students have hand-outs they will complete. We will discuss more when we meet after the Fall Break. I enjoyed hearing their initial thoughts about Potter (some liked her while some liked King, the subject of last week's reading, more). I look forward to next week's discussion. Happy Break! P.S. Thank you, J.D., for the University of Alabama Press' best-selling book on Alabama haunted houses. I look forward to reading it while thinking about a recently published book by historian Tiya Miles. Given the Halloween holiday, the visits to Drish and Jemison, which may both be haunted, seemed especially fitting.

urban and natural space via a scavenger hunt

This past Wednesday, the students visited Smith Hall, home of the Alabama's Museum of Natural History. There, they went on a scavenger hunt, which challenged them to make linkages between emerging urban life and natural life. It's hard to build industry if you don't know what's out there. Eugene Allen Smith, a former UA professor, naturalist and geologist, spent a lot of time surveying the state of Alabama around the turn of the century. With his help, the state was able to build industry on coal and iron among other things. His life poses interesting tensions with Clarence King, first president of the United States Geological Survey from 1879-1891. King took his own survey crew west to help government's efforts to better understand the continent's landscape and resources. Afterwards, the students and I gathered under a covered seated area where they completed the words to a fictitious vaudeville play. Indeed, they are continuing to learn how emerging urban life permitted Americans to better balance work with leisure life. Last week, they were made aware of how historian Gunther Barth's conception of a growing "common humanity" in urban culture reveals how some people were ridiculed at the expense of others. When they made their own scripts, it was funny to hear them focusing on a "common humanity" to which most in Tuscaloosa can relate: one revolving around Alabama's football team. I look forward to sharing excerpts from their scripts in an upcoming posting. For now, Roll Tide as we prepare to play Tennessee today! Congrats to Morgan Johnson and Christopher Edmundson for being the first to answer the scavenger hunt questions, which mostly revolved around Smith's life via a museum exhibit.

Bryce historian visits our class today

Certain portions of UA's Bryce Hospital are being restored.

Today Steve Davis, long-time historian for Bryce Hospital, will visit our class before we head over to the University's radio station for an interview about our December 3 music video "world premier."

I'd hoped that the students would have a chance to visit Bryce, which opened in 1861, before the semester ended. But it is presently undergoing repair following its recent transfer to the University. At least Davis can share with us some of the things he might have shared if we had been able to see it up close.

Almost a year ago, Davis kindly gave me and Dr. John Beeler of the History Department a tour of this facility, which sits on UA's campus. I can still remember standing in the dome, seeing far over into Northport and beyond, wondering what it was like the day the Union soldiers arrived to torch the campus in April 1865. I could see the President's Mansion from the dome and am not surprised that, as the story goes, the wife of the University's then-president descended the narrow corridor of stairs from that very room and high-tailed it across campus to save the mansion. As I prepare to teach the Civil War in my "American Civilization to 1865" survey class, I wonder what it must have felt like for the enslaved people in the area to know that they would soon be "free."

Bryce's history goes beyond the antebellum period. In fact, it offers opportunities to keep learning about leisure activities in an urbanizing world. The students are aware that as Americans began to work by a clock and not the sun, they made time to also play. Some attended baseball games. Some went to vaudeville houses. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, some listened to the radio and went to the movies.

During last year's tour, Davis showed us a theatre in Bryce where first-run movies were shown. Indeed, if you wanted to see a recently-released motion picture at the turn of the century, lucky Tuscaloosans  may have first seen it at Bryce. As I walked around the theatre and its peeling walls, I recall it reminded me of the theatre in my elementary school in Miami, although with fancier accents.

Author Harriet Beecher Stowe

I am personally looking forward to Davis' talk because we recently read about how Clarence King, the U.S. geologist who mapped the West for the U.S. government, had a nervous breakdown. Also, the students in my survey class are presently learning about how Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the 1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin that Abraham Lincoln once quipped "started" the war,  once suffered from "melancholia." So did her husband. According to Jean Fritz, author of Harriet Beecher and the Beecher Preachers, which my survey class is reading, one antebellum treatment for depression was taking cold baths at resorts. I welcome learning more about mental health during the nineteenth century and how people who faced such challenges were treated at Bryce.

Perhaps Davis will also share more about Charles Kilgore, the Bryce engineer who once lived in a house near the hospital's campus. Earlier this semester, the students and I visited the former site of this house, which opened the door to co-ed housing at UA.

On a radio interview and History and Hollywood

Tomorrow around 4 pm, the students in this course will be live on the air at the University of Alabama's radio station, discussing the upcoming "world premiere" of their music video featuring music by Bible Study at 5:30 pm December 3 at Jemison Mansion (UA Art History Emeritus Dr. Robert Mellown will be our guest speaker). Check them out tomorrow if you can by visiting 90.7.

On other fronts...as the semester draws to a close, I thought I’d take one last opportunity to share with you some of the thoughts of the students enrolled in this class. While we are still concerned with emerging urban life in America during the nineteenth century, I have challenged them to see how some of the issues we’ve addressed have across-time resonances.

During  two class meetings in the past two weeks, I did as much by asking them to look at two motion pictures. One is the 2013 documentary Muscle Shoals, which explores all of the great music that came out of one Alabama town as white and black bodies came together in a music studio, particularly during the late 1960s and early 1970s. I’d earlier invited them to see  the 1991 film The Commitments as a means of continuing to explore the cross-fertilization of music and cultures, but this time with working class white Dublin, Ireland front and center. But given that we had just ended Martha Sandweiss’ study on Clarence King, a nineteenth century geologist who is best known for having mapped the West for the U.S. government than for having passed as “black” in order to marry an African American woman after the Civil War, I figured it might be worthwhile (and risky) to pick another film, maybe one that pushed us to think about nationality, urban life, labor and race, but also secrets.

The students took took the bait and watched the 1996 motion picture Secrets & Lies, which concerns a black British professional woman’s  discovery that her birth mom, a factory worker, who had earlier given her up for adoption was white.  In this case, London was in the backdrop. Her half-sister, also white, is a street sweeper.

Regarding all three movies, I was quite concerned about how the “city” functions in terms of how certain bodies come together and part and how ideas about nationality and race and even gender can teach us something we hadn’t thought about it earlier when we were solely concentrated on urban life in America before the turn of the century.

 No matter the quality of their participation, or whether they participated at all, I want to thank the students for being open to this exercise, which is the sort that might be more fitting for a graduate class. I think they did pretty good. See excerpts from their short reflections on the “History and Hollywood” hand-out below (I want to thank my colleague Jimmy Mixson for sharing all of these prompts, which he uses in his course on medieval history).

While continuing to think deeply about the urban space in a maturing America, they were pushed to consider how a movie captures via story lines music, lighting, setting, costume, dialogues some of the things we’ve discussed including urbanization, women in public spaces in an urbanizing world, class and racial politics. Here are excerpts from the students’ replies to Secrets & Lies:

Caroline: In Secrets & Lies, the role and struggles of women can be seen through the different narratives. One woman struggles to enjoy her mundane housework; another woman experiences personal shame of coming face to face with her decision to give up her child for adoption; one woman is shocked at the realization that her birth mother is in fact white; and another young woman with “unladylike” manners [is a street sweeper] and doesn’t have much motivation to broader her horizons. 

This movie’s plot correlates well with Clarence King’s story. It shows that it is in fact not unusual to have a white or black relatives without physically looking like it...Class differences can be seen in this film [and Muscle Shoals].   In Muscle Shoals, it is seen with successful city people come to a simple rural part of Alabama. In Secrets & Lies, it is seen in the different professions of the newly discovered sisters. While one sister is an optometrist, another is a [street sweeper].
Similarities between the mother of the two sister and Clarence King can be made. The mother had a dark past that she probably tried to hide from her family and King deceived Ada Copeland every day …in order to keep them  both safe.

Wayne: The mother [who gave away her child years earlier] lives in a lower class area of London….Her brother doesn’t visit often because his wife doesn’t like [his sister]…The [entire family] has issues….The only one who was able to face the consequences of their decision was the adopted child. The racial and social separation within one family all draw them together towards the end.

Voni : Shelter is a common way in which we see city values emerge. [It] narrates who can afford certain luxuries.

Devon: The lighting [in Secrets & Lies] is kind of dark, but I think that is because of English weather.

Jasmine: When the [social worker] asked the mixed [race] woman about her childhood, I felt like she [revealed] the fact that she was [in fact] mixed and how she [herself] felt about it.

Here are the students’ replies to Muscle Shoals:

Rae: I grew up mere miles ...from Muscle Shoals. I think we always expect[ed] this deep cultural/musical development from this area. I would love to know what influenced the great musicians to produce this music. Was it because of rural influences that so greatly differed from the rural space?... The [music] studio [has resonances with] the drive that we see in people in the urban space. This drive to develop something, to succeed, to survive and to be something different. This movie truly gives us a look at what the “common humanity” that music has …for an entire generation of artists. Music that flowed from Muscle Shoals was able to transcend race and class in the 60s and 70s in Alabama and the world…The filmmaker juxtaposed a vivid rural panorama with short clips of industry, transportation, technology and natural resources. [These things] helped drive urbanization in the nineteenth century and was influencing an area [that was] not so urban.

Caroline: In Muscle Shoals, many aspects of urbanization were depicted. We get to see how women in public, especially strong women like Etta James and Aretha Franklin, was more widely accepted and even admired [unlike in the nineteenth century]. These women had a major impact on the music industry…The relationships between the black and white musicians [was an] incredible improvement [from the past]. The artists didn’t let the struggle between their races get in the way of what they were trying to make…The filmmakers were very deliberate with their portrayals of Muscle Shoals. After a big name artist or producer would talk about their incredible soul and magic in the town, the filmmaker [chose] to depict the stillness and natural beauty of Muscle Shoals. I think this was done to display how ironic it must have been to those performers that a place like this could create such a phenomenon.

Jeff: The music that came from...Muscle Shoals [was] some of the greatest hits [and] should forever be considered some of the greatest music because it came from the heart....It was music that moved...millions around the world.

Wayne: The movie notes how soulful rivers seem to develop near rivers and "seems to come out of the mud." Musically, the film uses long, sorrowful guitar chords and also folk style music during interviews. Yet, the music highlighted in the film is funk, rock 'n roll and soul music. The rock 'n roll and soul music played an important role in urban areas because it allowed people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds to develop a sense of unity [as they] became interested in new music. However, the music that helped urban [people] was produced in an area with high racial tension and by men who considered themselves to be "country folk."

Devon: The people who wanted to record  or play with the band from Muscle Shoals all expected them to be black. Everyone seemed to think that only certain types of people could play that type of music. However, everyone who worked there did so because of their passion for music.

Ben: I wished the film discussed what happened to Muscle Shoals as a music hub as not many hits come from it anymore. Was there an event or simply the change [in] popular culture away from funk and soul [that contributed to the decline]?

Jasmine: The scene showing the large bridges and dams as well as the big power plant and train shows urbanization in Muscle Shoals.

Finally, the students were also asked to share the unanswered questions that a particular film left them with and tell me whether they think film is an appropriate medium for teaching history (This issue is extremely important to me. I noticed when I used 1940s and 1950s films about America and even Europe's urban and frontier past in last year's class, the students with few exceptions - such as the time I showed  Bend of the River  starring James Stewart and Rock Hudson or Little Old New York starring Alice Daye - seemed bored. This time, more of them paid more attention as I cautiously used more recent films as teaching tools).

On the issue of whether film is an appropriate medium for teaching history, here's what some of them had to say:

Ben: I’d say [film] is a very good tool for anything from American history, music history or cultural history.

Emily: Films are never perfect. They don’t always apply perfectly to a lesson. They sometimes strive from accuracy for a good story.

Voni:  Film allows for a more interactive way of learning especially for visual learners. The disadvantages of film, like any media, that the creator has an objective they are trying to portray so we must extract the history from that.  

Undre: Film produces a teaching experience that can be interactive. This interactive lesson could come from pausing the video and discussing how it relates to the topic of the class. Disadvantages of using film could be that lesson valuable to the curriculum are over-kill [for]  students paying attention to the wrong elements of the movie. Another disadvantage can come from using non-biased films to teach a biased lesson.

Jasmine: The film [Muscle Shoals] is great for showing the emerging urban life in Alabama. It is a virtual time line not only covering music, but it also covers what is going on in the world outside of music (for example, the clip about Martin Luther King Jr. and clips of the segregation at the University of Alabama).

Wayne: I am a visual learner. I enjoy seeing images of urban areas and visually seeing personal expressions of racial and cultural situations....Muscle Shoals [in particular] is very useful as a medium for teaching history. Its advantages are that it is able to [present] American life outside the studio while also providing entertaining songs that most can sing along to...[The music] studio presented was a great example of the great [things] that can happen when open-mindness is allowed.

Rae: Film does a great job of illustrating history in a way textbooks can't. However, film can skew history or present it very one-sided. 

Jeff: [Film] is [an] appropriate medium because it is...entertaining. [But] sometimes it doesn't portray the entire history; just what [the filmmakers] want to show us.

an elusive dress owner parts curtain on Gilded Age

Elsie Whelen Goelet Clews

Today I saw an interesting blog entry on the search for the owner of several dresses in the Gilded Age collection of the Costume and Textiles Collection at The Museum of the City of New York. Phyllis Magidson, Curator of Costumes at the museum, and others, often mulled over the "Elsie" whose trousseau lingerie was unidentified in the collection for  quite some time. Turns out the owner may have been none other than Else Whelen Goelet Clews, a turn of the century debutante in New York. They decided as much when they studied a 1906 summer white cotton dress on a mannequin. A window on Clews' turn of the century life was thus opened.

The topic resonated because the students enrolled in "The Nineteenth Century City" at the University of Alabama are presently attentive to the Gilded Age, which, generally speaking, marked a historic moment of wealth for some, although not all, in the United States. Indeed, the very word "gilded" references the veneer, or gold covering on some of the more grim social realities. A lot of those realities, of course, were in urban spaces, as the nineteenth century came to a close.We need only remember the photographs of Jacob Riis.  Mark Twain tackled this issue in his 1873  The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, which is a satire on problems during this period no matter the wealth in view. Yes, the term "gilded age" can be traced to Twain.

As we complete our look at Clarence King and Ada Copeland King in Martha Sandweiss'  study on love in the Gilded Age, we can see that things are not always as them seem. From the looks of  the blog posting on Clews  and our recent look at the lives of those in the high life via mid-nineteenth century hairdresser Eliza Potter's memoir, mystery and beauty often accompanies many an urban tale.

Elsie Whelen may have worn this 1906 dress.

As Phyllis Magidson writes, the twice-married Clews, was an intriguing woman. It is worth it to juxtapose her life experiences against what we have learned thus far about the lives of the rich and famous. For example, Magidson mentions Newport, Rhode Island, a favorite resort town that was not unfamiliar to either Clarence King or Eliza Potter. Clews apparently met her marine painter and sculptor Henry Clews, Jr., her second husband, there while attending a dog show. How do we find meaning in her life when we consider it alongside the many things we are learning about the Gilded Age in Sandweiss study? Is it possible to see how the issue of money, or class, has across time and across space resonances especially when we turn to The Commitments, a 1991 motion picture, which takes us to working class Dublin in another century?

How does the idea of class change when we step outside the Gilded Age and the United States? Is race still front and center? We should be prepared to have a thoughtful discussion on this issue tomorrow.

To learn more about the Costume Collection at the City Museum, read more on Magidson's blog. Meanwhile, here is a photo that Emily Chadwell, one student in this course, took last week at the Tuscaloosa County Preservation Society's Annual Banquet.

Voni Cook, AJ Estep, Will Jones, Emily Chadwell and I pose with Dr. Rachel Stephens.

the poster for our December 3 Music Video "World Premiere"

I was so happy to learn that the students are okay with using the above image by Caleb McCants, a student in the class, for the poster promoting our music video (the Faculty Resource Center's design staff did an amazing job on this). They all took terrific photographs unveiling the tensions between America's (and Tuscaloosa's) urban and rural past and present. Some of those images will be displayed December 3 at Jemison Mansion during a small reception before the video launch. Again, we thank Ian Crawford at Jemison for this opportunity. And of course, we thank Bible Study, a local band, for allowing us to visually interpret their wonderful tune "Druid City."

Jasmine Wells, a Public Relations major at UA (and the person unknowingly featured in the photo which was taken during our recent downtown tour and creates room to push our thinking about the "public feminine" as defined by Gunther Barth and others), is helping with publicity. She even made a Facebook page. Ben Smith, who works in technology for the Athletic Department, has threatened to remaster my edited video. I welcome his skills.

On other fronts, yesterday we discussed Clarence King and Ada Copeland's relationship in New York City during the Gilded Age as presented in Martha Sandweiss' study. We pondered black-white interactions in and outside of the urban space by watching a good part of Muscle Shoals, a documentary highlighting the white musicians who played behind many African American singers in the 1960s and early 1970s. Next week, we will continue this conversation by bringing the urban space into fuller view although in the context of Dublin, Ireland, via the 1991 Alan Parker film The Commitments.

I am vigilant about historicizing black-white encounters and pushing the students to do the same. What happened in 19th century New York that couldn't or could happen in 1960s rural Alabama or 1980s Dublin (or 1863 New York for that matter) when it comes to how black and white bodies come together - and part?

Finally, I just received the best news. Dr. Robert Mellown, a recently retired, but ever-busy UA Professor of Art History will be our guest speaker at the Dec. 3 music video launch at Jemison Mansion. We are truly honored to hear him discuss his efforts to aid the restoration of local structures including Jemison and Bryce Hospital. He will sign copies of The University of Alabama: A Guide to the Campus and Its Architecture (University of Alabama Press, 2013) at this event.

trailer for class music video now ready

Five students and I as well as Dr. John Beeler attended the Tuscaloosa County Preservation Society's Annual Award Banquet last night. Dr. Rachel Stephens of the University of Alabama's Department of Art and Art History and I were honored as Educators of the Year. Special thanks to Katherine Richter, Ian Crawford and Tim Higgins and so many others present for making us feel welcomed.

It was wonderful seeing A.J. Estep, a student in last year's class, join Emily Chadwell, Voni Cook, Will Jones and Ben Smith, four students from this year's class, at this event. Estep's classmates created the documentary "Tuscaloosa: The Nineteenth Century City"  and this this year's students are making a music video. As true last year, Tuscaloosa is in the starring role.

My students know I readily admit that my interest in Tuscaloosa's role in emerging urban life is best pursued with them by my side as the trailer for the class's music video, which is presented in this posting, demonstrates. See the students "discovering" Tuscaloosa's landscape and pushing their thinking about this city's urban and rural past and present - and their own. The music video features the music of Bible Study, a local band. It premieres at 5:30 December 3 at Jemison Mansion, 1305 Greensboro Avenue in Tuscaloosa. Light snacks and beverages and a student art exhibition will be followed by a Q & A.

Tomorrow we will continue exploring Clarence King's life and that of his wife Ada Copeland King in New York City during the Gilded Age. King was a geologist for the U.S. Geological Society who "passed" as an African American in order to marry a woman who was a born enslaved. I am greatly interested in how the students are able to insert King and his wife into the story of emerging urban life.  It is worth it, too, to think about King's interest in "slumming," (i.e. visiting African American neighborhoods; in his case lower Manhattan).

His quiet excursions appears to be an across-time phenomenon. Certainly over the Fall Break I read with great interest a story in Vanity Fair about the American-born George Whitman who opened the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris in 1951. Prominent members of the Harlem Renaissance and the Beat Generation were among the writers who frequented the shop, which is now run by his daughter. 

As it turns out - according to the article at any rate - Whitman was born in New Jersey in 1913 and raised in Salem, Massachusetts. He spent four years trekking around North and South America (King might have been his nineteenth century counterpart up to a point). His curiosity about the world around him and perhaps those who are quite different from himself manifests in his interest in "urban back alleys." He shares such a desire  not only with King, but  with Carl Van Vechten, a white photographer-patron of the Harlem Renaissance. I think, too, about the women who appear in Carla Kaplan's recent study on 1920s Harlem (students in my graduate course will read excerpts from this book next Spring). Andy Warhol's friendship with Jean-Michel Basquiat also flirts in this direction.

At the risk of collapsing time too much, I have already asked the students to be curious about popular interest in black life and moreover, the ability of whites on both sides of the Atlantic to engage themselves in what generally surfaces as "black" music. As I asked them, what "work" does the "city" do in such encounters? Last week, I presented the 1991 Alan Parker film "The Commitments," which finds a white Irish band in Dublin playing 1960s R & B and the recently released documentary "Muscle Shoals," which unveils white musicians backing many African American greats in rural Alabama.

Muscle Shoals. Dublin. Harlem. Late nineteenth century and postwar race, class and gender dynamics. Let's come to class tomorrow ready to pull these connections apart, and if we are lucky, make some time to watch a bit of one or both movies. Thank you, Librarian Brett Spencer, of UA's Gorgas Library, who will soon be leaving for Penn State, for always ordering films and videos for this course and other courses. The History Department will miss you!

turn of the century urban traffic

Clarence King surveyed the Far West for the U.S. government.

And I thought traffic around Tuscaloosa could be trying. Up top is footage of traffic in London, San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles at the turn of the century. It reminds me of a clip I posted earlier with "La Femme D'Argent," an electronica tune by the French band Air, playing underneath (check that video out to the lower right). My colleague, Dr. Bart Elmore, who did a mash-up for a soundtrack under a short film students in this class produced last fall, hipped me to "La Femme."  During a talk before the premiere of the film in our own ten Hoor hall, Bart mentioned that it was interesting to see how well modern-day European  music went with images from nineteenth century Tuscaloosa. Certainly many local buildings, among them Jemison Mansion, have European influences.

And speaking of the nineteenth century, Clarence King, a geologist born in that century and subject of one of this course's readings, once claimed Manhattan "as his new frontier." He was particularly drawn to the lower portion of the island where he could see the urban poor. This practice, which was called "slumming," allowed him to escape the stress he felt when he was with his wealthy friends and business associates.

King also spent time in London where he befriended folks in both the upper and lower classes. According to historian Martha Sandweiss, he "moved easily between one world and the other." However, no matter where his travels took him, King seemed to be drawn most to the poorest in society. Whereas he found a homogenous white working class in London, those in lower Manhattan were black and newly arrived white European immigrants. But by the turn of the century, African Americans, who had been in lower Manhattan since the seventeenth century, were increasingly moving to Harlem where they were joined by people of color from the South, the Caribbean and Latin America.

Americans..."we like to do whatever makes us happy even if that leaves us alone.”

Gulf of Mexico near the Florida Panhandle and Alabama.

The students did a fairly good job of comparing the lives of nineteenth century geologist Clarence King and Eliza Potter, a hairdresser who lived during the same century. Michael decided they were similarly challenged when it came to the issue of character. “Eliza was a horrible gossip,” Michael wrote, adding that “Clarence lived a double life.” He also detected how they both reflected the ways in which interracial relationships were a part of nineteenth century life. “Eliza Potter was a mixed race woman,” he said, and “Clarence King [was having] a relationship with an African American woman." His words in this regard resonate as my own research reveals the degree to which black-white unions occurred - forcibly or otherwise - throughout this century even though many white Americans generally saw people of color as being inferior. No matter their station or skin color, nineteenth century city dwellers like King and Potter battled loneliness, something Gunther Barth pointed out in his attention to nineteenth century urban culture. Indeed, Aaron noted how "both [individuals] seemed to be characterized by loneliness despite the fact that they were surrounded by people.” Added Evelyn, both “Clarence and Eliza…find themselves lonely” although for different reasons. King’s home was the “primeval forest” unlike Eliza who boasted about her house “in the heart of the city” of Cincinnati. Regan saw how both individuals “used their loneliness as [a] motivation to seek…adventures.” Said Anne Marie, they were “born travelers. They live[d] to tell the tales of their adventures over land and sea.” That said, A.J. rightly observed that Eliza had to be more careful than King because she was a woman of mixed race. Wrote A.J., “She went through some bad times, which she was either a part of or witnessed "[For example], she got off a boat in New Orleans, but [did not] stay long for fear of being sold into slavery.” Ultimately, both people, as Ryan wrote, “did whatever pleased and made them happy.” In this way, they captured “American life. We like to do whatever makes us happy even if that leaves us alone.”

While I was generally pleased with their responses, helping the students better synthesize all that has been learned this semester has been my biggest challenge. As they looked for meaning in the movements of King and Potter, it would have been great to see them invoke some of what  Barth teaches about nineteenth century American life.  As the semester ends, we turn to working collectively on our class video about buildings in Tuscaloosa. The idea is to find the nineteenth century “city” in Tuscaloosa’s history (and perhaps in Alabama's history. The above photo features the Gulf of Mexico, which touches the shores of Mobile, a critical southern and urban port in this state). Along the way, the students will be revising their essays about the building they randomly selected. It is my hope that they work harder to make connections between course readings and indeed outings – last week, they had a scavenger hunt at the Eugene Allen Smith Photography exhibit at the Alabama Museum of Natural History; Anne Marie and Lewis finished first and with the most correct answers - and their own research.

"standing at the seaside and staring at the ocean"

Photo Credit: Maliz Ong

Two weeks ago, the students turned in their first short essay assignment, which is now their second and final short essay in this course and is due December 6th.  I want to see them better integrate ideas from Gunther Barth's City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth Century America into their work. We discussed ways to do that as a class and moreover, how we will collectively make a class video that presents a narrative based on this assignment, which requires them to write about a building that existed in Tuscaloosa during the nineteenth century. Then we turned to completing Martha Sandweiss' Passing Strange. For the time being, they are comparing geologist Clarence King's experiences,which appear in Sandweiss' book, to those of Eliza Potter, the hairdresser of mixed race  whose experiences appear in her self-penned memoir. They must fold Barth's ideas into this assignment, too. I look forward to seeing what they write. When I created the prompts for this second assignment, even I was surprised to see the degree to which these two unlikely bodies had very similar experiences that might even approach them sharing a particular worldview were it not for the degree to which King as a white man certainly had more power than Potter, a woman of African descent. He was born into wealth in Newport. She was born into more curiously unknown beginnings in New York and accumulated a bit of money as a hairdresser to wealthy whites on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. What makes these two people similar? What makes them different? One strand easily in view when observing their lives is their desire to travel, something about which I was reminded while in Chicago recently. While at a conference, I passed time in a bookstore and there, saw a markdown copy of American travel writer Paul Theroux' The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road. As the blurb on the back of the book  promises, it is filled with blurbs from Theroux's earlier published books and "from travelers both familiar and unexpected," among them Mark Twain and Anton Chekhov. I bought it and am slowly reading it. Today I was drawn to the heading "Travel and Optimism,"  which offers this quote about travel:

It was the poor person's way of going abroad - standing at the seaside and staring at the ocean. All travelers are optimists, I thought. Travel itself is a sort of optimism in action.

This appeared in Theoroux' The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Britain. It made me wonder about the many times I have seen people, rich and poor, drawn to the lake or river fronts and indeed the seaside. The ability to do so becomes a sort of great equalizer, but only for a moment. Certainly one cannot forget the great horrors that took place across time in such a space including the African slave trade. Today, while one can own seaside property, few can entirely prevent others from a glimpse of a body of water that figured greatly, as the students should be learning, into the ways in which America became a modern and industrialized country. For example, like indigenous people, European settlers found value in building settlements beside water where ports and landings connected cities here and abroad to each other. On water, King and Potter often traveled, sometimes seeing different things and often feeling similar feelings, among them feelings of loneliness. Perhaps, as Theroux senses, they moved through space to lighten their spirits. Lest  I write too much, I will leave what else can be said about this matter to the students.