prepping for 2015-16 school year

I miss Tide football. 

The t-shirt my mom gets next week.

But I also miss teaching. Cures for both woes are on the horizon. Regarding the latter, I had a great time today thinking about the possibilities for both "The Nineteenth Century City" and "Antebellum America" courses in the coming 2015-16 school year. It all began when Ian Crawford, House Manager at the Jemison Van de Graff Mansion, and Katherine Richter-Edge, Executive Director of the Tuscaloosa County Preservation Society,  met me at the Old Tavern Museum.

Me and the wonderful Katherine Richter-Edge and Ian Crawford.

Our mission: photograph three diplomas for two young women who graduated from female academies in this state for a possible student project.

One of the diplomas in question.

Why? Well, whenever I mention the experiences of American students in the antebellum, bellum and postbellum periods, I notice that some of my students pay very close attention. This is especially true for female students. I have wondered if it is because something specific about the past resonates with them. 

I am still thinking it through, but I have decided that it might be a good idea to explore the experiences of nineteenth century students as a class. In other words, we can put on our detective hats, look at old records -  letters, diplomas, church documents, Census data, etc. - and make a discovery or two.

Who wore this dress and what all did she see?

There were several female academies in the area during the nineteenth century. One opened even before the University of Alabama opened in 1831. Take a look at this late 19th century Tuscaloosa map and you will see mention of some of them.

Some of the possible questions ahead: 

How many of the students before us were daughters of the founding families of Tuscaloosa? 

Where did these young women study? 

How many of them went on to marry and have families. How many did not? 

How do the experiences of young white women and those of young African American women, among them, the mixed race descendants of white slaveholders who studied in the North, differ? Which circumstances contributed to young women studying in or outside of Alabama? My own research suggests possible answers to these last two questions.  

What do these women's collective experiences teach us about how higher education plays a role in an urbanizing America? 

It is my hope that the answers to these questions will help us learn more about a particular population and the world they inhabited. 

Along with mentally preparing for this project, which may have a multimedia prong similar to projects produced in earlier versions of both courses, I had a chance today to simply walk around the Old Tavern, which was built in 1827 and  moved to its present spot near Capitol Park in 1966. I wondered about the many conversations that took place here between politicians before the state capital was moved to Montgomery 20 years later. 

Was this the tavern that Nathaniel Kenyon, a Union officer with the 11th Illinois Infantry, mentioned in a copy of a diary at the University of Alabama's Hoole Library? At the time, he was a POW. When I told Ian and Katherine that Kenyon's diary mentions an African American woman who sold pies in Tuscaloosa, Ian immediately offered up a name for this woman. His response and our time together today were reminders of how much I love history. I am excited about the coming school year - even with all of the work still ahead.

Old Tavern Museum in Tuscaloosa.

A developing downtown Tuscaloosa.

I loved this old shoe, which is housed in the tavern.

Tavern patrons likely ate in this room.

This old rug would make a great wall hanging.

One of several quilts hanging in the tavern.

Emerging urban life seen in Birmingham hotel

As I prepare for the fall semester, I am already thinking about possible field trips for this course. We have focused twice on how Tuscaloosa fits into the story of emerging urban life in America. Perhaps we will travel to Birmingham and discover how that city figures into the same narrative. One place to visit, if we do as much, is the Hampton Inn's Tutwiler Hotel, which was built in 1910 as a nine-story fancy apartment house. 

Below are photos I took at this hotel, which pays homage to Birmingham's historic past well into the 20th century.While the Civil Rights movement is often the narrative to which we return to make discoveries about Birmingham, perhaps it will be worthwhile to also think about a longer narrative that includes human rights issues alongside additional topics, among them gender, culture, housing, industrialization and architecture.

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.

New book highlights prominent architect of Antebellum South

Today I learned more about the University of Alabama's antebellum campus at a  talk by Dr. Paul Hardin Kapp, Associate Professor from  the University of Illinois School of Architecture. Kapp is the author of a new book on the architecture of William Nichols, the man who designed buildings on UA's antebellum campus as well as antebellum buildings at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the University of Mississippi. He also designed the capitol buildings for the states in which these institutions sit. 

As I listened to Kapp, I could not help but think about my recent lectures on 19th century Landscape Architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who, not unlike Nichols, moved frequently throughout the south. These two men had very different missions. Olmsted is best known for designing several important parks, among them New York's Central Park, but also documenting what he saw as an unproductive slave society. 

Midday in North Berwick, seaside Scottish town.

In my Antebellum America course, which is being taught for the first time this spring, I directed my students' attention to how often Olmsted also made mention of the South's landscape. I don't think I will walk through Central Park, or the Midway at the University of Chicago again, without wondering how much his designs may have been inadvertently influenced by what he liked or did not like about his journeys through the southwest and West before the Civil War. At present, my historical training does not allow me to make too many guesses about this subject.



That said, having recently returned from the UK, specifically Scotland, I wonder how much Nichols, who is a native of Bath, England, was attentive to the south's natural landscape while he was designing various buildings. Frances Trollope, an English woman who also spent a good deal of time documenting what she saw via her travels throughout the United States in the late 1820s, certainly was. And she did not like much of what she saw. Of course, her ultimate mission was documenting the "manners" of Americans. Yes, Olmsted and Trollope were a cranky pair.

This old volcano helps define North Berwick's landscape, too.

Will there be opportunities to bring Nichols, Trollope, Olmsted and even Eliza Potter, a hairdresser of mixed race, who also traveled frequently, into conversation with one another next semester in "The Nineteenth Century City" course, which will be taught for a third time? Perhaps. 

For sure, it's my hope to continue using Tuscaloosa as a "lab" to learn more about emerging urban life and the ways in which higher education figured into a modernizing America. Dr. Kapp gestured toward such an idea when he mentioned the desires of Israel Pickens, the third governor of Alabama, to make sure this state had an institution of higher learning  after the state was founded in 1819. 

We will see how it all goes. 

I saw this pup playing with a new friend on the North Sea.

For now, it will be interesting to see ongoing efforts to document Alabama's bicentennial in the coming years. Tomorrow, many around Tuscaloosa will reflect on the 150th anniversary of the Union torching Tuscaloosa and UA buildings. 

On another note, I was happy to see Katherine Richter, Executive Director, of the Tuscaloosa County Preservation Society, and Ian Crawford, Manager at Jemison Mansion  at Kapp's talk. Richter and I have been discussing a possible project for the next iteration of "The Nineteenth Century City" course: focusing on the earliest schools for young women in Tuscaloosa. We shall see how that goes as well. For now, the countdown to this semester's end.

By the way, Crawford will be teaching a decorative arts course next fall. Do check out if you are looking for a new course. Consider "The Nineteenth Century City" as well.

Postscript: After writing this post, I thought about how the natural resources in Tuscaloosa and other parts of Alabama helped usher industry into this part of the country. What new stories can be told about modernity in the South with nature in mind? Also, how do we benefit from also addressing our country's complicated past? In addition to owning several plantations, Alabama Sen. Robert Jemison built bridges with Horace King, a former enslaved man who was a respected architect in the South.

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.

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.

Battle of New Orleans comes to Tuscaloosa

The purse once owned by a guest's grandmother.

Subtlety was one of the ever-present subtexts in last night's ball drawing attention to the 200th anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans. This fact reminded me often of our nation's complicated historical past and present.

A hand-drawn map of the epic battle led by Andrew Jackson was presented at the event, which was held at Tuscaloosa's historic Jemison Mansion. The map is one of several images posted here. Jemison House Manager and the ball's host Ian Crawford is the artist.

I look forward to  leading two separate conversations about the ball with students enrolled in my Antebellum American and Gender, Race and the Urban Space courses this week.

One especially memorable moment was entering Jemison and immediately noticing the purse of one guest. It was once owned by her grandmother (the Sherlock Holmes-like coat my husband wore was once owned by his father). Time and memory both seemed to be dislocated in such objects among other things at the ball, which received inspiration in part from Crawford
following the advice of his step-mother who pushed
him to follow his dreams.

This signage points to leisure moments in antebellum America.

A close up of the insert inside the invitation.

The invite to ball was printed on elegant paper.

Shield at entrance to Jemison.

Crawford's hand-drawn depiction of battle on canvas.