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.

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.

end of an era at Bryce

Bryce Hospital demolition is happening now.

I could not help but share this photo of Bryce Hospital. I took it a couple of days ago while walking on the University of Alabama's campus. The hospital opened in 1861. At the time, it was near the university, which now owns it.

Another view of the demolition.

The stories concerning this facility are as complex as any other topic in the United States before the war. Before the Civil War, Alabama Senator Robert Jemison saw the value in lobbying for its construction here as a means of revitalizing Tuscaloosa after the state capital moved to Montgomery in the 1840s. Peter Bryce, the first superintendent of the then-Alabama Insane Asylum, reportedly wanted to stay out of sectional politics and thus the first African American patient was admitted into the hospital, which was a segregated institution like most of the South for several decades.

As I looked at this hospital,  I thought of how my  "Antebellum America" students (and grads in a separate course) are presently learning about young southern womanhood via Anya Jabour's study on the subject. I invited them to think about whether Louisa Garland, wife of UA's President at the time Union soldiers arrived in April 1865, was one of "Scarlett's sisters." In other words, was she as headstrong as Scarlet O'Hara character in the 1939 film "Gone with the Wind"?

Mrs. Garland certainly felt like one of those southern women who went against the grain of others' expectations when she reportedly left the dome of Bryce where she and her husband had been hiding during the Union raid. She rushed across campus to the President's Mansion and reportedly asked the Union soldiers to put out the fire they'd started in their attempts to burn the mansion (I am unsure of whether they had also targeted the slave quarters behind it). Most of the rest of the campus was already in flames.

Bryce Hospital circa 1907.

Bryce and the University fit into the narrative of an industrializing and urbanizing Tuscaloosa as the century closed. It's worth it to think about the hospital, which is now relocated off campus, in this context in the months ahead as renovations continue.

It is the end of an era, or perhaps several, and the beginning of a new one. The university plans to save some of the structure for use as an arts facility.

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.

three days until the music video premiere

Still of clock in downtown Tuscaloosa

Still of student Rae Mann in Edelweiss, a local coffee shop.

Now that we've won the Iron Bowl against Auburn, we can turn toward completing the rest of the school year in fine fashion. The "world premiere" of the students' music video is just three days away.   It features not only the video itself, but a documentary of the students "discovering" the nineteenth century city in Tuscaloosa. Here are two still photographs from the project, which runs about 13 minutes.

The premiere happens 5:30-6:30 pm this Wednesday, December 3, at Jemison Mansion, 1305 Greensboro Avenue in Tuscaloosa. Dr. Robert Mellown, Associate Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Alabama, will be our guest speaker. There will be a silent auction of the students'  photography and refreshments.

Tim Higgins and Emily Dozier-Ewell, two members of the band Bible Study (whose music is featured in the video), will be present. Kori Hensell, composer of "Druid City," the song around which the video and documentary are deployed, will be there in spirit as she is now in Fairbanks, Alaska, pursuing an MFA. Talk about tensions between the frontier and the city!

Meanwhile, the students should also be studying for their final exam, which will take place December 9. Until then, Roll Tide!

Student radio and newspaper interviews went well; but before all that Bryce historian enlightens

Jess Leonard, Voni Cook and Emily Chadwell on air on 90.7 today.

Crimson & White writer Nick Privatera, far right, listens during his interview.

The class poses with the music video poster before the 90.7 radio interview.

Today was one of those days a professor could only dream of. The students really made me proud as they shared their experiences in this course with 90.7, The Voice, a University of Alabama radio program, and next, with a contributing writer for the Crimson & Tide, the University's school newspaper. All this after Steve Davis, Bryce Hospital historian, did a wonderful lecture on that historic facility, which is currently being restored. Thank you, Mr. Davis, for visiting our class today.

And thank you, Rich Robinson for inviting us to be on the air (tweet #druidcityshow, everyone!) Thanks also to Nick Privatera for not being entirely overwhelmed as you interviewed us. Please, everyone, come out and support the "world premiere" of our music video with music by Bible Study at 5:30-6:30 pm December 3 at Jemison Mansion, 1305 Greensboro Ave. Dr. Robert Mellown, Associate Professor Emeritus of Art History, will be our guest speaker and Davis has promised to try to make it as well. Meanwhile, Roll Tide!

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?

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

transportation and emerging urban life

Today the students were challenged to make connections  between the ways in which waterways and railroads played a role in an urbanizing America. We began with a discussion of David Cecelski's study of African American maritime workers in antebellum North Carolina. These men played a role in Wilmington's growth on the heels of navigational improvements along Cape Fear.

Our discussion went beyond Wilmington and included other waterway narratives. For example, the students learned that former South Carolina Congressman Robert Smalls was among the enslaved maritime workers who aided the South during the Civil War. A boat pilot, Smalls escaped on a steamer in 1862 with his family and other enslaved people and eventually served in the Union Army.

Altogether, there were several opportunities for the students to see the ways that railroads and water vessels were useful on many fronts including this momentous war. For sure, the Weldon Railroad, running north from Wilmington to Richmond and Petersburg, was a critical transportation artery in sustaining Robert E. Lee's army of northern Virginia during the latter stages of the U.S. Civil War.

The students were given homework assignments that require them to analyze three pages of a diary kept by Nathaniel C. Kenyon, a man who served in the 11th Illinois Infantry. A copy of this diary is in UA's Hoole Library. In it, Kenyon wrote detailed descriptions of the southern cities through which he traveled, among them Tuscaloosa. 

In light of today's reading on how enslaved men evidenced power in the maritime industry, I look forward to sharing excerpts from the students' work in an upcoming blog entry. I hope they are able to intuit the ways in which Kenyon also evidenced power although he was a prisoner of war. In what ways does his life compare to the men in Cecelski's study? What new things does he teach us about urban life in nineteenth century America?

Beeler points out the path of the L & N.

Afterwards, we walked down to the nearby Black Warrior River to hear a short lecture by Dr. John Beeler of UA's History Department on the development of railroads in Tuscaloosa. Hear an excerpt from his talk on this blog post.

Meanwhile, here's a brief chronology that allows us to see Tuscaloosa becoming part of an urbanizing Alabama:

1871: The Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad (renamed the Alabama Great Southern Railroad in 1878) is completed, creating a diagonal link across Alabama that includes Tuscaloosa.

1898: The trestle that runs by Tuscaloosa's Amphitheatre (2710 Jack Warner Parkway NW, Tuscaloosa, AL) is constructed across the Black Warrior River for the Mobile & Ohio Railroad. The M & O ran between Columbus, MS, and Montgomery.

1890s:  A system of locks built on the Black Warrior River permits a cheap way to move goods to Mobile, a Gulf port city, stimulating industry in Tuscaloosa.

1912: Chartered in 1850 in by the state of Kentucky, the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, formerly the Birmingham and Tuscaloosa Railroad,  arrives in Tuscaloosa, passing near campus. Its 20-mile Tuscaloosa Mineral branch line reaches Brookwood coal mines. L & N’s station (301 Greensboro Ave, Tuscaloosa, Alabama) is now used for weddings and other social events.

If there are any errors in this timeline, they are mine alone. I'm still learning this history. I welcome feedback.

Dr. John Beeler's map of Tuscaloosa railroads.