last words for the semester...and this blog

This is the last entry for this blog. I have been toying for a year with whether to move all of my entries from several blogs to one space and I think this is the moment when I should go for it. I will blog from my "catalogue" blog under Wordpress. I think that I have a better sense of my readership when I use that site. Also, my entries seem to move to the various search engines faster. What follows is a reprint of today's entry from that blog. Even though I can't dance, and know I'm getting old because my students have to tell me everything that is hip, videos like the one below, which was made totally unsolicited, remind me of some of the things I love about my job: you may not think the students are paying attention, but they are. That the student who made this video wasn't even my student, but heard about heard about what we were doing in my "The Nineteenth Century City" course from others and asked to follow the class all semester, was so cool. I am nervous about sharing because I can't dance, but what the heck. One aside: although I do not fully explain as much in this video, Gunther Barth's "common humanity" thesis, which we take up in "The Nineteenth Century City" course, among other things, refers to how nineteenth century people from very different class, ethnic, racial and national backgrounds find a "common humanity" in urban spaces as they attempt to cope with the pressures of living in such spaces. In his book City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth Century America, he points to various things that emerged along with urban life in America to explore this point, among them baseball. In cities like New York, he argues, even if you couldn't speak English, you could feel like a New Yorker when you learned to cheer for the same team. The idea here is that although inequities and suffering persist, via spectator sports like baseball, which traces its origins to cities in the second half of the nineteenth century, people participate in a "common humanity" even if it is only for a couple of minutes, or a couple of hours.city people I asked my students to think about this concept and the limits of its utility while doing things they enjoy today like watching or playing football or attempting dances like the Nae Nae (I still don't know how to do that Stanky Leg). The goal was to get them to think about whether this way of adapting allows to see "the nineteenth century city" is still with us (i.e. this way of connecting across our diverse backgrounds even though technology nowadays permits us to do as much even outside of the city. For sure, the Internet and cable television lets people see dances and spectator sports almost anywhere). Chris Edmunds, one of the students in course, created his own video, which addresses Barth's common humanity thesis with more depth. Thanks, Nick Privitera, for your interest in our class. And thank you students - Chris, Lin Kabachia, Morgan Johnson, William Newman, Adam Rosenberg, Chance Sturup, and Sarah Yeilding - for pushing my thinking while I learn with you. Oh, and here is a slideshow of photos from our culminating event for the semester, which was held last week at Gorgas House. Happy Holidays!

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.

revisiting Barth via an antebellum hairdresser

Cincinnati circa 1846, Courtesy Perry Castaneda Map Collection, University of Texas

Potter's memoir was published in 1859.

As we turn to Eliza Potter, an antebellum hairdresser of mixed race for next Wednesday's class, we should keep what we have learned about emerging urban life via Gunther Barth's important study in mind.

How does Potter adhere to Barth's shaping cities as a place where we can see a "common humanity"? Who are the "city people" she meets? What are her impressions of them? How might she have encountered the watermen in David Cecelski's study?

Are the people she meets experiencing the "civilizing process" required of urban dwellers? Is Potter experiencing this process? If so, how do we explain her willingness to "tell all" in a book that was seen as scandalous in her day?

Is she a part of the "feminine public" that found women shopping and working in department stores and attending or performing in shows in vaudeville houses before the century closed? Why or why not?

What do we make of her wanderlust, or her desire to see a "Western" world? What does she mean when she says this? What accounts for her restlessness? How do we situate her against ongoing debates favoring the frontier, or open spaces, against the crowded city. As we start thinking about the final exam, it is worth it to think about these debates and which historical actors and historians figure into them. A review of previous Powerpoints will certainly help in this regard.

In the meantime, we should come to class prepared to talk about the woman who loved to move through space, but also enjoyed her own home under her own vine and fig tree in a particular city. Which city?

pondering emerging urban life via department stores and vaudeville

Receipt from a turn of the century Tuscaloosa department store.

Tomorrow we will examine how department stores and vaudeville houses fit into emerging urban life in America. It will be the last time we turn to Gunther Barth's study of modern urban culture. Then again, maybe not. For sure, we will want to keep in mind so much of what we have learned over the past eight weeks and put it to good use as we read excerpts from Martha Sandweiss' examination of nineteenth century geologist Clarence King and the memoir of nineteenth century Cincinnati hairdresser Eliza Potter, among other readings.

For now, we may collectively wonder how the vaudeville house  allowed urban dwellers to see something about themselves onstage in the same way that the metropolitan press permitted the same group to do something similar. What did audience members see onstage? What made them laugh?

We may also reflect on more basic questions, among them: How did newspapers help department stores? Or why were vaudeville and department stores inviting spaces for women and children? 

Then again, questions that possibly lead to troubling conversations may have answers worth pursuing, too. Indeed, how does the diversity in department stores and vaudeville encounter the heterogeneous public to which Barth turns to describe nineteenth century American urban dwellers? 

Who enters these spaces? Who cannot? 

How did technology contribute to both developments becoming big business?

Turn of the century vaudeville sheet music.

Finally, what legacies did vaudeville and department stores leave us? It's worth it to think about such an idea. Today, so much entertainment comes through a smartphone or Netflix or Youtube. Shopping is done online or elsewhere (However, I do remember when 1960s and 1970s variety televisions were quite popular. I loved Hee Haw and any show featuring the Jackson Five including The Carol Burnett Show, which definitely builds on the foundation of vaudeville. I also remember when my mother shopped at stand-alone department stores like Burdines in downtown Miami in the 1970s. In time, we - like everyone else - headed to malls).

Burdines began as a Bartow, FL, dry goods store.

While we think over possible answers and even new questions, I invite you to take a look at two images from the University of Alabama's digitized Hoole Collection. The first: a 1914 receipt from from Tuscaloosa's Savage Department store. The store must have had quite a following as five years earlier, The Tuscaloosa News featured a store advertisement announcing the arrival of fall and winter hats, which were the "very latest" from New York and Paris. 

However, lest the "ladies of Tuscaloosa and West Alabama" thought the prices at Savage, which was located at 612-614 Greenburg Avenue, were out of reach, the store promised a shopper of modest means that she could have "a new style, nobby and attractive fall hat" at a "small cost."

Who were the patrons of this store owned by "J.A. Savage & Son?" Where did they wear such fancy hats? How were their lives different and similar to say the women described in bigger cities such as New York and Chicago?  While these are questions for which we have no likely answers, we might think them through just the same if for no other reason than the opportunity to once more situate Tuscaloosa into the narrative of emerging urban life.

Similarly, a search of the Hoole archive also turned up vaudeville sheet music composed in 1921 by Jeff Branen and Lloyd Evans (Seeing as Barth says emerging urban life is between the 1830s and 1920, give or take a decade, both primary sources are within range). 

Was this music in the household of a former Tuscaloosa resident or relative of a former resident? Was the music ever performed publicly? If so, where and for whom? 

Finally, why do things like baseball and vaudeville - which begin in cities - resonate with people who live in rural spaces; and vice versa; why are television shows about Alaska - Northern Exposure was a big favorite of mine during the 1990s - or the Great American Country network so popular to urban dwellers? Is this another instance when we can see how the frontier and countryside things are things for which we yearn no matter how "modern" and "urban" we become?

Dr. Richard Megraw on baseball and the "nineteenth century city"

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.