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!

Excellent talk by Victoria Ott on Young 19th Century Women in Female Academies

Today, Victoria Ott, Associate Professor of History at Birmingham-Southern University, offered a presentation on young women in the Confederacy who attended school during the Civil War. It was a fascinating talk. According to Ott, the parents of such women often enrolled them in school to get them out of harm's way. During their time away from home, some young women took liberties they might not have taken before. For example, some engaged in courtship rituals, such as writing letters, with Confederate soldiers and on occasion, Union ones. Ott, who was born in Alabama, provided background on her interest in young women in the Confederacy. As a child, she was introduced to the motion picture "Gone With the Wind." By the time she got to graduate school, she needed a dissertation topic. Why not look for some real-life Scarlett O'Hara's in the archive? She never found such a woman. She did find women who were sometimes frustrated by how the war was changing their lives. Among such women were ones who protected the memory of the Old South. Her talk posed interesting tensions with the core purpose of this class, which is to look for emerging urban life. As I told the audience in my opening remarks, the issue of young women and education in the years surrounding the Civil War was fascinating without even thinking about cities. But indeed, the class tried to do just that. The longing of Ella Ballard, one young woman who attended a female academy in Frankfort, Kentucky, for a simple watch serves as an example of the emerging consumer culture that accompanied city life. Via an antebellum letter, she asked her father Rice Ballard, a Mississippi and Arkansas planter (and historical actor in my recently published book) to buy her one while he was in New Orleans. She even chatised him for forgetting her request. A postbellum letter from former University of Alabama President Josiah Gorgas to his two daughters Mary and Jessie, students at Sewanee, University of the South, uncovers his query about the outcome of a baseball game, a sport that was first played in New York City. Finally, Elizabeth Townsend, a young Huntsville, Alabama, woman of mixed race, was enrolled in Wilberforce University along with her sister and cousins on the eve of the Civil War. She traveled to Ohio on boats and a train, two forms of transportation that announced an urbanizing world. A letter she wrote in May 1861, just a month after the war began, finds her not addressing this momentous event, but instead a social she recently attended at school. Without question, these were privileged young women. Still, their lives were not without challenges. Surviving evidence permits us to see their small claims on power in a still patriarchal world. To which topic will this class turn next fall? I do not yet have a clue. Perhaps we will return to this subject. There's still so much to learn and recover in the archive. Special thanks to the students: Chris Edmunds, Morgan Johnson, Lin Kabachia, William Newman, Adam Rosenberg and Sarah Yielding for their enthusiasm and openness to learning. I want to also thank Kari Frederickson, Chair of UA's History Department; Lydia Ellington, Director of Gorgas House, Katherine Richter, Executive Director of the Tuscaloosa County Preservation Society,Joshua Rothman, Director of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South, History Department Office Manager Christina Kircharr, and my colleagues Jimmy Mixson and John Beeler, for their support.