urban and natural space via a scavenger hunt

This past Wednesday, the students visited Smith Hall, home of the Alabama's Museum of Natural History. There, they went on a scavenger hunt, which challenged them to make linkages between emerging urban life and natural life. It's hard to build industry if you don't know what's out there. Eugene Allen Smith, a former UA professor, naturalist and geologist, spent a lot of time surveying the state of Alabama around the turn of the century. With his help, the state was able to build industry on coal and iron among other things. His life poses interesting tensions with Clarence King, first president of the United States Geological Survey from 1879-1891. King took his own survey crew west to help government's efforts to better understand the continent's landscape and resources. Afterwards, the students and I gathered under a covered seated area where they completed the words to a fictitious vaudeville play. Indeed, they are continuing to learn how emerging urban life permitted Americans to better balance work with leisure life. Last week, they were made aware of how historian Gunther Barth's conception of a growing "common humanity" in urban culture reveals how some people were ridiculed at the expense of others. When they made their own scripts, it was funny to hear them focusing on a "common humanity" to which most in Tuscaloosa can relate: one revolving around Alabama's football team. I look forward to sharing excerpts from their scripts in an upcoming posting. For now, Roll Tide as we prepare to play Tennessee today! Congrats to Morgan Johnson and Christopher Edmundson for being the first to answer the scavenger hunt questions, which mostly revolved around Smith's life via a museum exhibit.

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?

using a photograph to ponder race and the urban space

While waiting for yet another round of bad weather to pass through Tuscaloosa, I continued thinking about this fall course and where I might take the students on a field trip. Last year, a planned trip to Sloss Furnaces was cancelled because of weather (Weather is a common theme around here. This is interesting for someone who is from South Florida where we have time to prepare for hurricanes).

I am considering Sloss again, but also downtown Birmingham. What stories will we intuit about the past by examining buildings in this city whose initial rise in the late nineteenth century owed largely to the arrival of steel and the railroad?

I wonder, too, about the opportunities for discovering things that late nineteenth century American cities have in common with other cities in other "spaces." The photograph here features a woman of African descent in Puerto Rico in the late nineteenth century. Two things struck me:

1) Only a year before this photo was taken, the United States made claims on Puerto Rico, an archipelago whose name is translated as "rich port." Port cities in and outside of the United States are generally one of the first places we can look to see wealth as people and commerce have across time moved through ports. This was certainly true in the States during the nineteenth century, but also earlier and later.

2) The woman is standing against an old building where a peeling theatre sign hangs. Evidently, an increasingly modern world here presented time for leisure moments, something Gunther Barth points out in his study of city culture in America. He, among other things, uncovers how vaudeville,  another source of entertainment, figured into the rise of urban life in the States. That said, black face entertainment in vaudeville houses revealed the ongoing conflict between people based on wealth and skin color. Such conflict is also evident in Puerto Rico if we ponder the caption under this image, which first appeared in an 1899 book.  According to the caption, the woman is considered attractive partly because she is biracial and not entirely of African descent (One aside, Eileen K. Suarez Findlay has written an outstanding study on the turn-of-the-century surveillance of women of African descent). 

But being of African descent was not the only thing that resulted in racial division in America and the Atlantic World. As the students in this course will learn,   there was also tension between white Europeans, a topic addressed in part by, among others, Dr. Jenny Shaw of UA's History Department.