student photography offered in a charity silent auction at Dec. 2 event

Get a sneak peek at student photography that will be presented at the December 2 event addressing the experiences of young women and education in an urbanizing America. The photography is part of a silent auction. Proceeds benefit Jemison Mansion and the Tuscaloosa County Preservation Society. Some background: students enrolled in "The Nineteenth Century City," a History course at the University of Alabama, were charged with exploring the ways in which young women pursuing an education figured into an urbanizing world. Throughout the semester, they visited several sites in Tuscaloosa to see buildings, among them Gorgas House, the Drish House, Jemison Mansion, the L & N Railroad Station, the Old Tavern, the Alabama Museum of Natural History, the ruins of the the former Alabama State Capitol building and later, a "female" academy, and other places, among them the Black Warrior River. These sites and others permit us to witness how the "nineteenth century city" is still with us as seen in advancements in technology that made it possible for people, raw materials and products to get from Point A to Point B, but also in how an increasingly wealthy country and global market provided ways for some individuals to participate in leisure activities that also reflected rising industry. The arrival of department stores and professionalization of baseball by the late 19th century serve as examples. The photos represent this query. To see the photos in person, visit UA's Gorgas House 4-5:30 pm December 2, 2015. Our guest speaker is Birmingham Southern University Associate Professor of History Victora Ott. Her talk is titled "A Safe Place to Hide?: The Role of Female Academies in the Confederate South." There will also be a poster display unveiling primary sources the students studied as well as a chronological history of local colleges that young women attended, among them Sims Female Academy, Alabama Female Academy, Alabama Female Athenaeum, Tuskaloosa Female College, Alabama Central Female College, Hills Female College and UA, which opened its doors to women in 1893.

my new book addresses how we become "city people"

My new book arrived this week as I have by now said in virtually every social media site I have - except this one. That lapse is interesting given that so much in this book pivots on how southern white male slaveholders essentially played some role, whether they intended to do as much, in the "urbanization" of freedwomen and children. Certainly antebellum Cincinnati, as shown on a map in the page above, was ground zero for the resettlement of such women and children partly because of its position on the Mississippi-Ohio river waterway. It was easy to get them out of slave territory on this important river network. These were obviously people in whom such men had invested themselves emotionally and financially.

Via letters, business and legal documents, I carefully try to tell this difficult story that brings to light new ways of thinking about "intimacy" across the races. To say "intimate" is to go beyond the obvious and think about how people connect despite obvious power differentials that show up in everyday life. I think the city space is one place we have done this across time.

As the students in this class will learn, ghettoes are something that began to appear after the Civil War as Americans were increasingly separated on the basis of race. While there were communities like the so-called "Little Africa" and "Bucktown" where people of African descent congregated more often that not, they generally lived in clusters alongside of "native" whites as well as the German and Irish immigrants who began arriving as the century matured.

It takes real work to realize that city life as we know it today, even with the kind of gentrification that finds many white Americans returning to urban areas long populated by African Americans, is a historical development. We began to see it in this country between 1830 and 1910, give or take a decade.

That emerging urban life is something that can be studied and seen as something that is still with us. It's an abstraction, historian Gunther Barth tells us, in that it's essentially a way that people with very different backgrounds learn to share the same space and learn to find a "common humanity" despite their differences. Some do as much via sports. In other words, new immigrants learned how to be American by rooting for the baseball team in their town. They learned how to speak English by reading the metropolitan newspaper. They learned to see themselves and others by laughing in vaudeville houses.  Indeed, we learn how to be "city people."

I'll keep driving this point again and again as we use Tuscaloosa and Birmingham as a laboratory. Yes, we will leave the classroom more than once to see this emerging urban phenomenon that has changed, but remains the same via landscape - many buildings in the 1830-1910 window still stand - but also in how we interact. Stay tuned.

on the issue of fashion, urban life and democracy

1939 movie "Gone with Wind" captures antebellum dress.

1920s attire featured into Harlem's vogue moment.

Postwar wealth's rising hemline.

The college "uniform"

"The Nineteenth Century City," a course I generally teach in the fall, provides a reason to to reflect on how far we have come on the issue of women's fashion in the United States. An expanding mass consumer market, innovations in technology, the growth of the "ready-made" clothing industry, and a host of other things have made it possible for people to make decisions about what they want to wear and moreover, to even change the meaning of what looks fashionable and what does not.

These days, one does not have to wear a dress and corset obviously to look fashionable, hip, or with the times, pun intended.

How did we make this transition? It's worth thinking about and even mulling over how urban living figures into this transition.

Gunther Barth is a historian to whom this course often turns because of how he positions emerging urban life. He says we saw it come into being in the United States between the years 1830 and 1910, give or take a decade.

Evidently, we can look way back to start pondering the many answers to the aforementioned question (How did we make this transition?). Along the way, we will be required to think about women's growing presence in public spaces and how people from very different backgrounds feel included simply because they can wear something wealthy people wear despite ongoing structural oppression. That they can figures  into many complex American experiences and yet another way democracy is a word on which we can think deeply -  the next time we dress to go out on the town, or the Quad.

my new book unveils an unlikely nineteenth century city narrative

Some of the content below originally appeared in  a posting on my   Gender, Race and the Urban Space blog:

I am writing on this blog less as I teachThe Nineteenth Century City class in the Fall. I may return to it from time to time as I make new discoveries while teaching a new graduate course titled "Gender, Race and the Urban Space" and a new undergraduate course titled "Antebellum America."

Although I am not blogging as often on this site, I do want to take the time to share something related to the theme if often address: black urban life. My book Remember Me to Miss Louisa: Black and White Intimacies in Antebellum America is now available for pre-order on bookseller websites like Amazon.

The book, which will be published by Northern Illinois University Press this June, uncovers the ways in which (always have to get the requisite "ways  in which" academic speak in there) women and children of color migrated outside slave territory before the Civil War with the assistance of an unlikely body - southern white men. Ohio and Cincinnati in particular was filled with newly freed black and mixed race women and children owing partly to its place on the Mississippi-Ohio river network.

Ultimately, relying greatly on correspondence from African American women and children and legal documents as well as published contemporary writings, the book demonstrates that while white men can hardly be excused from their participation in oppressing people of color during the antebellum period, they unveil themselves as being uncomplicated as most human beings when they made decisions to demonstrate some measure of concern for certain enslaved women and the children they had with them. The book is yet another that shows the struggle of unmarried mothers of color in cities, but, again, white men are a  part of the conversation in anticipated and unanticipated ways. In providing black or mixed race women and children with the means to leave often rural spaces, white men were inserting them knowingly or unknowingly into emerging urban life in America. Indeed, the "nineteenth century city" is often the setting for my book.
That newly freed black and mixed race women and children manifest in such a setting is significant partly because far too often we do not often see people of African descent in chronicles of rising of industry and urbanization in the United States. Instead, we hear a great deal about such inventions as steamboats and when we hear of white-black interaction, it often involves race riots such as the kind that indeed took place in Cincinnati and other cities like Philadelphia and New York before the Civil War.

The explosion of literature on urban history, one of the fastest growing subfields of African American history, is widening the lens on black urban life during the nineteenth century. I look forward to sharing what I've discovered about the experiences of black women and children in antebellum and postbellum Cincinnati and elsewhere. Yes, given the racial hostility in Cincinnati, that city often served as a staging ground for some new migrants who eventually moved on to places as varied as Colorado, Kansas, Washington state, northern Mexico and some even returned to the South.

That said, I have entertained the idea of ending this blog and addressing my students and others via only my teaching and technology site. That site was created because technology - as in films, videos and music clips -  is so important to how I teach and even conduct research (film and theatre were prongs in my first graduate degree).

One day at a time on it all. In the meantime, back to teaching - and celebrating the coming release of my first historical monograph. Great way to start the new year.

slideshow of images from "Druid City: A Music Video" Premiere at Jemison Mansion

Here's a slideshow of photos from our December 3, 2014 premiere of "Druid City: A Music Video" featuring the music of local band Bible Study. Special thanks to Courtnee "Voni" Cook, a student enrolled in "The Nineteenth Century City" during the Fall 2014, for sharing these photos with us.

A Look at Tuscaloosa's Past with Katherine Richter

I am now prepping for the Spring 2015 semester while also resting. As promised, however, here are images from my recent visit to the Tuscaloosa County Preservation Society's  office in the basement of Jemison Mansion in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. There, Katherine Richter, Executive Director of the society, was kind enough to share some of the many archival documents in this building with me. I look forward to incorporating some of them into my teaching in the year ahead.

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!

downtown Tuscaloosa field trip was amazing

The students listen to my digital lecture during our recent field trip.

The students and I had a good time visiting downtown Tuscaloosa this past Wednesday. We gathered footage for our music video featuring the sounds of local folk band Bible Study. The  "world premiere" of the  video will be held at 5:30 pm December 3 at Jemison Mansion in Tuscaloosa.

Also, on November 3, four students enrolled in this course this semester and one student enrolled last fall will accompany me and Dr. John Beeler to the Tuscaloosa County's Preservation Society's Annual Awards Banquet at Christ Episcopal Church (this church was featured in "Tuscaloosa: The Nineteenth Century City," the final student project from last fall).

On Wednesday, we did a tour that featured this church among other sites (I recorded my lecture-tour on how signs of emerging urban life manifest in present-day Tuscaloosa the night before and uploaded it to Vimeo.com. Doing as much allowed the students to hear me while they walked, permitting me to capture footage of them along the way).

One aside: I just curated a couple of dozen photographs that the students have taken in and outside of Tuscaloosa. These images bring to mind some of the ideas and topics we have been discussing about emerging urban life. Some of these photographs will be on display at the December 3 event. For now, we thank Ian Crawford and Tim Higgins of Jemison  (and Bible Study) well as Katherine Richter, Director of the Tuscaloosa County Preservation Society, and finally, music critic/author  Ann Powers for their role in helping us document Tuscaloosa's starring role in nineteenth century urban history this fall! Roll Tide!

Next week, we turn to our final course reading. We will learn about the ways in which the experiences of  nineteenth century geologist Clarence King epitomize the across time tensions between urban life and the frontier. What new things can King's disdain for New York City and love for mapping the West for the U.S. government teach us? How do the Civil War, Gilded Age and rising Jim Crow practices expand our knowledge of urban life? Finally, how do race, gender and class aid our ability to find meaning in an industrializing America?

PS Music by the Junkyard Kings, another local band, was also considered for the video. We are desperately trying to help them get access to our university's new recording studio on the old Bryce Hospital property so they can make a demo. Their song "Roses" is as wonderful as Bible Study's "Druid City." Thank you, Louise Manos, for introducing us to this band.

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?