history
The Pioneer Experience
07/05/2010 14:42
We all lived in a single room that probably measured no more than 14x20 feet. We slept in beds we’d roped ourselves, on mattresses we’d stuffed with straw in the barn. We cooked on an open hearth, thankfully with the help of Aunt Marie, the Director of the Pioneer Farmstead.
The Museum was open over the Fourth weekend, of course. So technically, we were one of the exhibits. And this place gets a LOT of traffic (a regular patron told me he’d recently been to Williamsburg, and was disappointed because Genesee had set his expectations so high. I’ve never been to Williamsburg, but I can believe it -- Genesee is that good). But before opening at 10:00 AM and after closing at 5:00, we had the Village to ourselves. We fetched our own water, fed the animals, read (and wrote with quills and ink) by candle and firelight, learned how to shoot a 1793 “Brown Bess” flintlock, and even made a few nails at the village blacksmith shop. But that's just the tip of the iceberg (ice would have been nice...did I mention it was HOT!!)
The place is fantastic, but it’s the people that really make it great. The clothes were REALLY HOT!! I’ll be writing more about the whole experience, and setting up a permanent page with slide-shows and videos. That may take a few days, as we sort through the thousand-plus pics and videos we took...but in the meantime, here were our thoughts as we were leaving, before we even changed out of our HOT period costumes:
Pioneer House
05/15/2010 19:44
American History
05/10/2010 22:13
As I’m getting ready to read for my comprehensive exams, I’m struck by the number of books that are crossing my path about the role of history in society. Especially in popular culture and secondary education. This year began with a book about teaching history in “Intro Class,” and ended with a bunch of things jumping off the shelves at me: Lies My Teacher Told Me and Teaching What Really Happened (Loewen), Thinking Through the Past (Hollitz), Telling the Truth About History, (Appleby, Hunt, Jacob), and Who Owns History (Foner). Makes me think I have some particular interest in this angle of the history thing...
Seriously, though: lies my teacher told me? Are we to imagine some cabal of historians, textbook editors, publishing executives, school committees and teachers; all conspiring to defraud young Americans with propaganda about the American past? Really?
Wouldn’t it be more realistic to imagine that most people don’t know what really happened (and maybe think it’s impossible to know), and in the absence of knowledge opt for the most convenient and reassuring stories they can find? Even the historians who continue to over-write the central stories of America’s identity: are they saying the people who came before them were all propagandists and liars? Or something more subtle and interesting; which could be as simple as “okay, yeah, that happened. That’s all well and good. But what about this?”
With a universe of past events to talk about, you can write a lot of different stories. A historian acquires a point of view through education and life experience. So it matters whether the historian lived through the Revolution, the Great War, the Depression or the Cold War, etc.
Nothing earth-shattering here. These ideas are all old hat to professional historians and graduate students. We study historiography, the history of history-writing, to understand not only what happened, but what people said about what happened. What people believed was important about the past, and how that changes over time.
But we don’t do such a good job of telling that story to our relatives, friends and neighbors outside the profession. When Presidents’ Day rolls around, we all smile at each other and wink. “Parson Weems,” we’ll say to each other knowingly. But how many of our own kids get through high school without knowing that the Cherry Tree and other myths of Washington’s youth were fabricated by an itinerant book-peddling minister?
So I thought while I’m reading both the history and the historiography of the 19th & 20th century U.S., that I’d try to write about it for high school students and college undergrads. That I’d try to identify not only “what really happened,” but also what historians and regular people believed happened. What they thought was important, and how that changed over time. This can be tricky, because the same histories we read to find out what happened have to be read again, differently, to find what was on the historian’s (and presumably his audience’s) mind. This can be tricky, but it’s a skill high schoolers and undergrads need to develop if they’re going to keep from just passively believing everything they’re taught and told in life. It’s a form of critical thinking, and it’s a way of digging deeper into the past that reveals very clearly how important that past is to the present and the future.
At some distant future date this may be a book project. To me, 2 years seems like long-term planning. In the meantime, it’s my field reading and notes toward some type of story that digs into the American past and our stories about it.
Seriously, though: lies my teacher told me? Are we to imagine some cabal of historians, textbook editors, publishing executives, school committees and teachers; all conspiring to defraud young Americans with propaganda about the American past? Really?
Wouldn’t it be more realistic to imagine that most people don’t know what really happened (and maybe think it’s impossible to know), and in the absence of knowledge opt for the most convenient and reassuring stories they can find? Even the historians who continue to over-write the central stories of America’s identity: are they saying the people who came before them were all propagandists and liars? Or something more subtle and interesting; which could be as simple as “okay, yeah, that happened. That’s all well and good. But what about this?”
With a universe of past events to talk about, you can write a lot of different stories. A historian acquires a point of view through education and life experience. So it matters whether the historian lived through the Revolution, the Great War, the Depression or the Cold War, etc.
Nothing earth-shattering here. These ideas are all old hat to professional historians and graduate students. We study historiography, the history of history-writing, to understand not only what happened, but what people said about what happened. What people believed was important about the past, and how that changes over time.
But we don’t do such a good job of telling that story to our relatives, friends and neighbors outside the profession. When Presidents’ Day rolls around, we all smile at each other and wink. “Parson Weems,” we’ll say to each other knowingly. But how many of our own kids get through high school without knowing that the Cherry Tree and other myths of Washington’s youth were fabricated by an itinerant book-peddling minister?
So I thought while I’m reading both the history and the historiography of the 19th & 20th century U.S., that I’d try to write about it for high school students and college undergrads. That I’d try to identify not only “what really happened,” but also what historians and regular people believed happened. What they thought was important, and how that changed over time. This can be tricky, because the same histories we read to find out what happened have to be read again, differently, to find what was on the historian’s (and presumably his audience’s) mind. This can be tricky, but it’s a skill high schoolers and undergrads need to develop if they’re going to keep from just passively believing everything they’re taught and told in life. It’s a form of critical thinking, and it’s a way of digging deeper into the past that reveals very clearly how important that past is to the present and the future.
At some distant future date this may be a book project. To me, 2 years seems like long-term planning. In the meantime, it’s my field reading and notes toward some type of story that digs into the American past and our stories about it.
Maps and Time
01/08/2010 22:07
Comparing maps is fun. Visual information sometimes beats the hell out of numerical, doesn’t it? So I’ve been thinking about cities and the countryside, as they’ve been changing over time. In America, that means as people settled the frontier (that is, as whites displaced the natives), and populations increased. Farms, villages, towns, cities. When did they arise? What did people go there expecting? How did those expectations change over time (as technology like telegraphs and railroads changed the space/time arrangements...and as new people came, who maybe hadn’t been party to the original reasons for moving. Who maybe were fed a story that didn’t completely match up with the reason the original people moved...)
Anyway, there was a certain pattern of settlement in, say, 1900. (this map is a piece of one available here)You could look at the numbers and compile a population density map that would tell you something about where lots of people lived, and where only a few lived (it was still up to you to figure out why).
Then, in 2008, using a completely different set of criteria, a different group of people (in government agencies) made a new map (available here). It too says something about where people live. This time, by way of metropolitan and “micropolitian” areas, measured on a county-by-county basis, more-or-less from population density. Or, from total population, which amounts to the same thing.
When you look at the two maps, you notice that they’re similar, but not identical. When you put them one on top of the other (It's cooler when you can use Photoshop's sliders to mess with the opacity of the layers, but hopefully you get the idea), you see some places where there are lots of people now, that weren’t there a hundred years ago. More interesting, you see some places where there used to be lots of people, but now there are not. What does that mean?
In the case of the four little dots in southern Iowa marked “V” (for 45 to 90 people per square mile), there seem to be stories behind these places. The one immediately southwest of Ottumwa is Centerville. Once upon a time it was a booming coal-mining town. The one near Des Moines is Creston. It was a “shop town” for the Burlington Northern Railroad.
The one in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is where the big copper mines at Houghton, Hancock, and Calumet were located. Nothing there anymore but trees. So, you get the idea. It’s change over time. The question is, are there interesting stories underneath?
In the case of the four little dots in southern Iowa marked “V” (for 45 to 90 people per square mile), there seem to be stories behind these places. The one immediately southwest of Ottumwa is Centerville. Once upon a time it was a booming coal-mining town. The one near Des Moines is Creston. It was a “shop town” for the Burlington Northern Railroad.
The one in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan is where the big copper mines at Houghton, Hancock, and Calumet were located. Nothing there anymore but trees. So, you get the idea. It’s change over time. The question is, are there interesting stories underneath?
Bradlaugh in cartoons
01/05/2010 09:44
From May 9 1883 Judy, or The London Serio-Comic Journal, p. 226
"Bradlaugh" is apparently a proper noun among Londoners, meaning irreligious. "Are you a religious man?" "No, I believe in Bradlaugh." And his face is recognizable enough to be funny on the dog.
More like this at http://www.bradlaugh.com/primary/primary.html
"Bradlaugh" is apparently a proper noun among Londoners, meaning irreligious. "Are you a religious man?" "No, I believe in Bradlaugh." And his face is recognizable enough to be funny on the dog.
More like this at http://www.bradlaugh.com/primary/primary.html
Why history?
12/30/2009 14:33
Because, let’s be real. The City of Dreadful Night is more interesting as an artifact than as a poem. James Thomson’s life interests me, as does his vision of a nightmarish, dystopian London in the 1870s. But that does not in any way make me want to read the poem.
Does this make me a lowbrow, literalist, anti-intellectual materialist? Maybe, from a certain point of view. There’s a silk smoking-jacketed, punting-on-the-Cam, NPR-in-the-background perspective that likes its historical explanations laced with allusions to canonical literature. But that sort of thing leaves me wondering, was this really in the minds of the people in the story? Or is it just a shorthand way to tell the story to a particular type of audience? And, if it’s shorthand, what is it missing? That’s one thing Williams seems to have been keenly aware of: the tendency to reduce complexity and smear out ongoing evolution in an idea like “city” or “country” until it’s a handy, but misleading, archetype.
As I was showering this morning, I was ticking off the books I might say influenced me to study history. It’s been in my head for a few years that Neal Stephenson’s “Baroque Cycle” really got me interested, but I think it was more of a reminder than a discovery. The cool thing about Quicksilver and its sequels is the richness of “alien” (in the Carlo Ginzburg sense) material available in the past. And I thought it was cool, how Stephenson studiously puts known people in known situations, but is completely free to speculate about what’s going on in their heads.
But he’s not completely free. He has to convince his post-modern, sci-fi audience that these people are plausible. That means they have to seem authentic and fit the time, but be recognizable to his readers as heroes and villains. So, in what world are they authentic? The thing that interests me now about Quicksilver is how historians deal with these issues.
Another book that sticks with me is Colin Tudge’s little Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers. Because it’s far-out, and yet plausible (and of course, because it has neanderthals in it). I like the way he reaches a little past what we know, to speculate about what might have been. There are so many possible perspectives and subjective “realities” in the past, that it seems like an enormous invitation to find the weird, the alien, the deviant. Maybe it’s this age of conformity that makes me look for dissenters and resistors in the past. I like Tudge’s idea (I had it too, but he puts it really well. I will probably use it for a story someday) that the neanderthals were superior individuals, who “lost out” to better organized, collectivized sapiens.
What does this have to do with history? Individual/collective, rural/urban, all these binaries we use to understand the world. Joan Scott says “meanings are constructed through exclusions.” Any definition, she says, “rest[s] always...on the negation or repression of something represented as antithetical to it.” Why repression? Because identity is all about reducing a universe of words describing a thing to the two or three “important” ones that define it. But important to whom? When? Why?
Scott says “oppositions repress the internal ambiguities of either category.” (all this is in Gender and the Politics of History, p. 7) I’d say this binary view is particularly interesting when you’re looking at something like male/female or rural/urban. But it’s a simplification of the actual processes of identity formation and grouping. Identity is about taking adjectives and making them nouns. Grouping is about drawing boundaries between items that include these reified qualities and other items that do not.
Unlike set theory in math class, it’s not as easy in life to pick the “defining” quality. And it’s not a value-free or a power-neutral process. Am I the only person in the world who’s annoyed when the cute moose on Nickelodeon or Steve on Blues Clues does the “one of these things is not like the other” puzzle with my kids? Fer crine out loud! Leave the little ladybug with the off-color spots alone! She just wants to be with the other bugs!
But that’s the way we’re wired, I guess. It’s all evolutionary. Until it’s not, and then it kills us.
U.S. History
12/29/2009 17:30
Last semester I TAed a class in U.S. History, 1876 to the present. I thought it went fairly well, but there were some things I thought I'd change, if I had it all to do myself. So, rather than forget what those things were, I went ahead today and wrote up a syllabus of how I would teach the class. Might not be the ultimate -- if I ended up teaching it several times, it would probably develop some more each time. I just wanted to use what I remembered of the students reactions to the material (and my own) to see what it would look like...
One thing I wasn't happy with was the emphasis on generational conflict. We covered it in the Victorian era, and then again in the 20s, the 50s and the 60s. There were some things we passed by -- there's not a lot of time to cover nearly a century and a half, after all. Another thing was (and maybe I'll get in trouble with some older faculty members for this, but here goes), I think the focus on Viet Nam was overdone. And I don't think you can really sustain the argument that the 60s hippie movement was as historically important as Civil Rights or the Women's movement. So I dumped it in favor of the environment, which I think is going to turn out to be historically big.
Anyway, I now have something I can show people, if I go looking for adjunct or continuing ed. jobs while I'm studying. Should probably put together an undergrad Environmental history syllabus too...
One thing I wasn't happy with was the emphasis on generational conflict. We covered it in the Victorian era, and then again in the 20s, the 50s and the 60s. There were some things we passed by -- there's not a lot of time to cover nearly a century and a half, after all. Another thing was (and maybe I'll get in trouble with some older faculty members for this, but here goes), I think the focus on Viet Nam was overdone. And I don't think you can really sustain the argument that the 60s hippie movement was as historically important as Civil Rights or the Women's movement. So I dumped it in favor of the environment, which I think is going to turn out to be historically big.
Anyway, I now have something I can show people, if I go looking for adjunct or continuing ed. jobs while I'm studying. Should probably put together an undergrad Environmental history syllabus too...
Field Reading Lists
12/22/2009 12:34
I've added a new page to Rural History, called "Field Reading List," on which I'll list and say something about the books I'm reading for a "Field" in Rural History. This means that I'll be answering a question on Rural History during my comprehensive exam next fall.
Seems to me, we PhD students (not only at UMass, but everywhere) spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel. Figuring out what to read for fields is one of those areas. I'm doing three fields in the next year, the other two reading lists will go up in the next few days on radicalhistory.net, which I've just acquired. I'd love to see what other people are reading, and what they think about what they're reading. So, I'm putting my titles and thoughts out there...
Seems to me, we PhD students (not only at UMass, but everywhere) spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel. Figuring out what to read for fields is one of those areas. I'm doing three fields in the next year, the other two reading lists will go up in the next few days on radicalhistory.net, which I've just acquired. I'd love to see what other people are reading, and what they think about what they're reading. So, I'm putting my titles and thoughts out there...
History from the Outside, In (as opposed to, from the bottom, up)
10/18/2009 15:15
According to Joan Scott, “Positive definitions rest always...on the negation or repression of something represented as antithetical to it.” The definition of anything involves the exclusion of those things that are not considered part of, or germane to, or important in its nature. But its “nature” is based on its perceived use or value to particular people in a particular time and place.
Perhaps a good way of thinking about definition is in terms of set theory rather than some type of unitary equality. A thing (noun) is a set of attributes (adjectives); the most crucial ones “defining” its nature. Looking at it this way would enable us to observe changes in the set of attributes considered most important, and to ask questions about these changes.
Scott goes on to point out that “categorical oppositions repress the internal ambiguities of either category.” (Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 7) When people define things as binary pairs, the characteristics that separate them may not do so as completely as the definers believe. The point of differentiation between the two opposite things may not be as clear-cut and unambiguous as it seems to the definers. And, there may be other characteristics of the “opposites” that are similar or the same -- but these are not considered “essential” at the particular time and place where definition is being done.
Scott says a major element of Derrida’s deconstruction spoke “precisely to this arrangement [in which] the second term is present and central because required for the definition of the first.” This tends to ignore the “non-essential” characteristics and focus on the binary, which in the end may validate the initial definition to an undeserved degree. But it’s okay as far as it goes. Conflicts over meaning thus “attempt to expose repressed terms, to challenge the natural status of seemingly dichotomous pairs, and to expose their interdependence and their internal instability.” I’d add that, inasmuch as meanings continue to be “constructed through exclusions,” the changing relevance of specific elements in a definitional set over time, is a particularly interesting question for the historian. What happens when an apparently “natural” category’s definition changes? Especially, when characteristics that were once considered “essential” slip in importance, to be replaced by other characteristics that were less important when the initial dichotomy was formed? Does the binary evaporate? Or does it persist, even though the elements that constituted the initial definition-by-exclusion are no longer relevant?
Scott says traditional history is based on “a politics that sets and enforces priorities, represses some subjects in the name of the greater importance of others, naturalizes certain categories, and disqualifies others.” (9) She reminds us that “history, through its practices, produces (rather than gathers or reflects) knowledge about the past,” which means that “history operates as a particular kind of cultural institution endorsing and announcing constructions of” (she says gender, I’m going to substitute) social identity.
What I’m thinking, as I’m reading this, is that I can formulate an “outsider history” along some of the same lines Scott used to define gender history. And it might be interesting, to look at gender through that lens. Because it doesn’t retain its outsider status. So part of my toolkit could include ways to look at that change, from outside to inside. See what happens to people and ideas, when they achieve some type of legitimacy.
One of the things I’d want to do, would be to keep it about people and ideas. Not ideas and categories. Even if the “meanings of concepts are taken to be unstable [and to] require vigilant repetition, reassertion, and implementation,” (5) my question is, why do people choose to continue expending energy on their maintenance? There’s got to be some personal reason in each choice, or the whole thing devolves into a sort-of ahistorical chronicle of the memes. But that’s probably a topic for another day...
Perhaps a good way of thinking about definition is in terms of set theory rather than some type of unitary equality. A thing (noun) is a set of attributes (adjectives); the most crucial ones “defining” its nature. Looking at it this way would enable us to observe changes in the set of attributes considered most important, and to ask questions about these changes.
Scott goes on to point out that “categorical oppositions repress the internal ambiguities of either category.” (Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 7) When people define things as binary pairs, the characteristics that separate them may not do so as completely as the definers believe. The point of differentiation between the two opposite things may not be as clear-cut and unambiguous as it seems to the definers. And, there may be other characteristics of the “opposites” that are similar or the same -- but these are not considered “essential” at the particular time and place where definition is being done.
Scott says a major element of Derrida’s deconstruction spoke “precisely to this arrangement [in which] the second term is present and central because required for the definition of the first.” This tends to ignore the “non-essential” characteristics and focus on the binary, which in the end may validate the initial definition to an undeserved degree. But it’s okay as far as it goes. Conflicts over meaning thus “attempt to expose repressed terms, to challenge the natural status of seemingly dichotomous pairs, and to expose their interdependence and their internal instability.” I’d add that, inasmuch as meanings continue to be “constructed through exclusions,” the changing relevance of specific elements in a definitional set over time, is a particularly interesting question for the historian. What happens when an apparently “natural” category’s definition changes? Especially, when characteristics that were once considered “essential” slip in importance, to be replaced by other characteristics that were less important when the initial dichotomy was formed? Does the binary evaporate? Or does it persist, even though the elements that constituted the initial definition-by-exclusion are no longer relevant?
Scott says traditional history is based on “a politics that sets and enforces priorities, represses some subjects in the name of the greater importance of others, naturalizes certain categories, and disqualifies others.” (9) She reminds us that “history, through its practices, produces (rather than gathers or reflects) knowledge about the past,” which means that “history operates as a particular kind of cultural institution endorsing and announcing constructions of” (she says gender, I’m going to substitute) social identity.
What I’m thinking, as I’m reading this, is that I can formulate an “outsider history” along some of the same lines Scott used to define gender history. And it might be interesting, to look at gender through that lens. Because it doesn’t retain its outsider status. So part of my toolkit could include ways to look at that change, from outside to inside. See what happens to people and ideas, when they achieve some type of legitimacy.
One of the things I’d want to do, would be to keep it about people and ideas. Not ideas and categories. Even if the “meanings of concepts are taken to be unstable [and to] require vigilant repetition, reassertion, and implementation,” (5) my question is, why do people choose to continue expending energy on their maintenance? There’s got to be some personal reason in each choice, or the whole thing devolves into a sort-of ahistorical chronicle of the memes. But that’s probably a topic for another day...
Carnegie & contemporary excuses
09/16/2009 21:15
Carnegie (1835-1919) was a self-made industrialist, possibly the original “rags to riches” story. He was also worth $298 billion (in 2007 dollars) at his death. “The man who dies…rich, dies disgraced,” he said at the end of “Wealth.”
The essay was written for the June 1889 North American Review (Boston, est. 1815 to “foster a genuine American culture”). On July 1 1889, the Amalgamated Association of Iron & Steel Workers struck at the Homestead steel mill July 1, 1889 after manager (Frick) cut wages, arguing that better technology (paid for by company) allowed them to produce 2x the steel as before. Some of Carnegie’s arguments are annoyingly paternalistic, but also funny. Higher wages, he suggests, would be squandered by workers. Better to retain them as corporate profits, so the industrialist can use them to endow a park, and art museum, or a library. Wait a minute! What happened to property rights? Isn’t this socialism directed by the oligarchy? Don’t we have a word for that? Oh, yeah. Fascism.
Of course, he does have a point. A bump in wages would probably put more beer in the bellies of industrial workers. So there’s a question behind all this, about public and private spending, and who decides what constitutes the “public good.” But is it credible that a guy like Carnegie, living when he did, knowing who he knew, could say the rich are more virtuous than the poor, or better qualified to decide on, then manage programs for the public good? “If thou dost not sow, thou shalt not reap,” Carnegie warns all the ne’er-do-wells who’d like a piece of that public pie. He forgets to mention, “oh, by the way: I fenced in all the fields.”
It’ll be interesting to see what the undergrads do with this piece. It couldn’t be much more contemporary – all the language, assumptions, and arguments are in play every night on the news. “Imperfect as they may appear to the idealist, [capitalist ideals] are…the best and most valuable of all that humanity has yet accomplished.” Leads directly to “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good…” Thanks anyway, Mr. Obama. I’m not buying your false choices.
Book History
06/17/2009 17:58
In the Introduction to A Handbook for the Study of Book History, Ronald and Mary Zboray explain what they think the field of Book History is about:
The several disciplines that touch book history all share an understanding: printed artifacts do not give direct insight into the past; rather, that insight is mediated. that is to say, meaning does not leap directly from writers’ to readers’ minds through printed pages, but rather is produced through interventions, or mediations. For example, a writer writes for a “market”; editors and publishers reconfigure the writer’s work into book form and decide upon its packaging and distribution; booksellers display the book where potential buyers may be likely to see it; finally, different readers understand the book in a variety of different ways. By the time the book is read, it has traveled through many such mediations. Some scholars see these mediations as distortions—just as messages become mangled when whispered from person to person in a line—but book historians take these mediations as their principle object of study. Why? Because the mediations of producers, disseminators, and consumers of printed materials provide insight into how a society produces meaning. (p. 4)
So what about this? On one hand, it makes me fairly sure I don’t want to be primarily a book historian (I’d miss the people). On the other, the idea that the book is an artifact, and that it travels this path and meaning is added, subtracted, or changed along the way, makes a lot of sense.
The mediations the Zborays list seem very modern – I can almost see them thinking about their own process of writing, negotiating with their agent, working with content and then line editors, taking advice from packaging and marketing reps at the publishing house, going on author tours, etc. Thomas Paine wrote a pamphlet like Common Sense for a “market” too, but not in the same way; not with all the modern bells and whistles. And what about a guy like Charles Knowlton, who self-published his books (that is, paid the printer directly), and carried them from place to place in his saddle-bags? The lack of mediation in these cases (or the authors’ and readers’ lack of awareness of mediation) might be as important as the presence of mediation in more contemporary cases.
The point that books are commodities is well taken (Gilmore makes it strongly in Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life, too). They didn’t get from place to place by magic – somebody had to carry them, and had to have a reason to carry them. But do the steps between the author’s act and the reader’s act really alter the book’s meaning that much? The closer the author and the reader are in time and space, the less likely that seems. But on the other hand, what about Erasmus Darwin? How did his works get to places like Ashburnham and Ashfield and Brimfield, with enough energy behind them that people went ahead and named their children after the author? At the very least, the way decisions are made regarding what gets printed/distributed, and what doesn’t, seems to be very relevant to my project…
The several disciplines that touch book history all share an understanding: printed artifacts do not give direct insight into the past; rather, that insight is mediated. that is to say, meaning does not leap directly from writers’ to readers’ minds through printed pages, but rather is produced through interventions, or mediations. For example, a writer writes for a “market”; editors and publishers reconfigure the writer’s work into book form and decide upon its packaging and distribution; booksellers display the book where potential buyers may be likely to see it; finally, different readers understand the book in a variety of different ways. By the time the book is read, it has traveled through many such mediations. Some scholars see these mediations as distortions—just as messages become mangled when whispered from person to person in a line—but book historians take these mediations as their principle object of study. Why? Because the mediations of producers, disseminators, and consumers of printed materials provide insight into how a society produces meaning. (p. 4)
So what about this? On one hand, it makes me fairly sure I don’t want to be primarily a book historian (I’d miss the people). On the other, the idea that the book is an artifact, and that it travels this path and meaning is added, subtracted, or changed along the way, makes a lot of sense.
The mediations the Zborays list seem very modern – I can almost see them thinking about their own process of writing, negotiating with their agent, working with content and then line editors, taking advice from packaging and marketing reps at the publishing house, going on author tours, etc. Thomas Paine wrote a pamphlet like Common Sense for a “market” too, but not in the same way; not with all the modern bells and whistles. And what about a guy like Charles Knowlton, who self-published his books (that is, paid the printer directly), and carried them from place to place in his saddle-bags? The lack of mediation in these cases (or the authors’ and readers’ lack of awareness of mediation) might be as important as the presence of mediation in more contemporary cases.
The point that books are commodities is well taken (Gilmore makes it strongly in Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life, too). They didn’t get from place to place by magic – somebody had to carry them, and had to have a reason to carry them. But do the steps between the author’s act and the reader’s act really alter the book’s meaning that much? The closer the author and the reader are in time and space, the less likely that seems. But on the other hand, what about Erasmus Darwin? How did his works get to places like Ashburnham and Ashfield and Brimfield, with enough energy behind them that people went ahead and named their children after the author? At the very least, the way decisions are made regarding what gets printed/distributed, and what doesn’t, seems to be very relevant to my project…
The Knowltons and the Kneelands
06/14/2009 10:39
Like Knowlton, Abner Kneeland was a member of a respected central Massachusetts family. Abner was a grandson of Timothy Kneeland, the third resident of Gardner. The Kneeland family remained prominent in Gardner, where Charles’ brothers Emery and Augustus settled and became chair manufacturers. Gardner is five miles from Templeton, where Charles grew up. Kneeland was 26 years older than Knowlton, and was employed as a schoolteacher about the time Knowlton was born. Two years later, he published his first book (the American Definition Spelling Book), and by the time Charles was five, Abner was in Langdon, NH, being ordained as a Baptist minister.
It might be interesting to trace the lives of these two men, since they came from similar backgrounds and ultimately found each other in the freethought movement, where they were both imprisoned for unpopular beliefs (where was Kneeland incarcerated? Cambridge, like Knowlton?). Since a very small minority of people with their backgrounds developed these views (as far as we currently know), and since Kneeland wrote about the beginnings of the labor movement (and Knowlton’s brothers were small-scale capitalists, probably employing a couple of dozen workers in their chair factory), this connection might lead in interesting directions.
Changes in the Land
06/04/2009 16:26
Erasmus Darwin
05/14/2009 14:54
Erasmus Darwin translated Linnaeus from Latin to English, inventing dozens of botanical terms in the process. His two long poems, The Economy of Vegetation and The Loves of Plants (combined as The Botanic Garden) introduced mainstream readers to the sciences, especially plant biology, with hundreds of pages of essays and notes explaining the concepts in Darwin’s verse. Erasmus used the poems to comment on the events of the day, making no secret of his support for abolition of slavery and the French Revolution.
Zoonomia was Erasmus Darwin’s major scientific publication and the leading medical/biological book of its day. Published in London in 1796, Zoonomia was reprinted the same year in New York, by “T. & J. Swords, printers to the Faculty of physic of Columbia College,” and again the following year by Thomas Dobson of Philadelphia. A “second edition” was published in 1803 by “Thomas and Andrews” of Boston. By 1818, a “Fourth American Edition” was printed in Philadelphia, by Edward Earle. The continued popularity of Zoonomia over more than two decades suggests a wide readership outside of medical schools. The 1815 “Catalog of the Library of the United States” lists Zoonomia, The Botanic Garden, and Erasmus’ posthumous poem, The Temple of Nature.
Like his grandson, Erasmus Darwin wrote about evolution through natural selection. Chapter 39 of Zoonomia, “On Generation,” presents Erasmus’ ideas on competition, extinction, and how “different fibrils or molecules are detached from…the parent…to form” the child. The Temple of Nature goes even farther, declaring “all vegetables and animals now existing were originally derived from the smallest microscopic ones, formed by spontaneous vitality” in ancient oceans.
Zoonomia was immensely successful. In addition to American and Irish editions, it was translated into German, Italian, French and Portuguese. The European Magazine said Zoonomia “bids fair to do for Medicine what Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia has done for Natural Philosophy.” The Vatican responded to Darwin’s ideas by placing Zoonomia on its Index of banned books. The Temple of Nature was reviled by the Anti-Jacobin Review for its “total denial of any interference of a deity,” while the Gentleman’s Magazine called the poem “glaringly atheistical.” Even Erasmus one-time friend, Unitarian Joseph Priestley, said “if there be any such thing as atheism, this is certainly it.” Priestley was living in Pennsylvania by this time, and may have seen the poem in T. & J. Swords’ 1804 American edition.
Erasmus Darwin was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1793. His fame in the new United States may be partly due to his friendship with Franklin and sympathy for revolutionary struggles in America and France. And it may be partly due to Zoonomia, which was read widely in the nation’s new medical colleges. But Erasmus popularity among regular people may also spring from his straightforward, secular presentation of evolutionary ideas, and his skepticism of authority. Erasmus warned against unreasoning belief. “In regard to religious matters,” he said, “there is an intellectual cowardice instilled into the minds of people from their infancy; which prevents their inquiry: credulity is made an indispensable virtue; to inquire or exert their reason in religious matters is denounced as sinful; and…is punished with more severe penances than moral crimes.”
So the questions for me to address include, who read all these editions of Darwin in the U.S.? Was Darwin part of a written “tradition” including other popular, straight-talking skeptics like Franklin and Paine? What was it in Darwin’s writing that inspired so many people to name their children after him?
UMass Library
05/07/2009 17:44
When I put up the Darwins page (maybe tonight), I should make a list of the towns, in addition to the map. With population figures from around 1800. Seems like the Darwins are from small, newer towns, generally in the western part of the state. As I was looking in the Vital Records today (page by page, because I’ve already done the easy ones that are online and can be searched), it seemed to me that if there were lots of really old-fashioned sounding biblical names, I was pretty certain NOT to find a Darwin. There were also a few other people who had a lot of kids named for them. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Clay, Luther, Wilberforce, etc. It might be interesting to try to correlate the Darwins with politics, demographics, Shaysite (as in Daniel Shays) towns, etc.
Oh, that’s the view out the 14th floor window I was sitting next to, and the Fit got better than 40 mpg.
At Library with Soundtrack
05/06/2009 16:07
“Rabble Rouser” by KMFDM now—how does this relate? Hmm. Will I feel constrained? Inside the box? And what will I do to avoid that?
“Yiddish Dance” or something like that by Del Castillo—I think this one’s just making it hard for me to think straight.
Now “La Pistola y El Corazon,” by Los Lobos, which is easier because I’m not trying to understand the words. Need to make a page for the Erasmus Darwins, and follow up with the historical societies. And later this week, get down to the UMass library and get to work finding the rest of them in the Vital Records that aren’t online yet.
“Where Are We Running” – Lenny Kravitz. I should put up a page on the mercury controversy in the Boston Surgical and Medical, too. That might be a first paper for a sci/med focus. (now “Flash” by Lenny—I swear it’s random! “I am not gonna waste this moment, cuz these moments don’t last.”) And the Chilean stuff: do I have enough of that for another paper? Probably not without going back and doing some primary work. I wonder if Brown Univ. has anything on José Tomas Urmeneta (who went there – when? 1860s? What would he have taken back? Maybe that’s an angle.
“Lose Yourself” – well, it’s a workout mix. “you only get one shot, don’t miss your chance to blow.” Knowlton and the church – if I take it back to Yale and bring forward the Ashfield theme of divisiveness (Baptist vs. Congregationalist)? Where do I want to put these things? I really haven’t paid attention to the ways historiographical styles match up with themes, or the publications that specialize in these. Will have to start scanning journals, I suppose.
“Miserlou” reminds me of whacking rabbids on the Wii. Now “Jai Ho” -- I’ve been emailing. Lucy’s English teachers are CYA-ing big-time. Good news is I can work with her on her writing this summer. AGUA? Maybe that’s something, if I follow dependencia through to neo-liberalism. Water would be a good topic, and Bolivia might be fun to visit on a research grant…New England and Latin America? JQ Adams? The first agrarian republic and influence in either direction? Spanish America is so much older than New England. I wonder if there’s any contact at all?
“Rock is Dead,” – I’m not much of a Manson fan, but I love this song. Looks like there might be something to look into on the Spanish/New England front, judging from JSTOR. Even if I want to stay in the 19th C. And, I have to look at labor and Heighton before next fall. Track down what may have happened after he fell off the radar. What’s happening to labor history, now that the labor historians are all reaching retirement age?
“Overkill” again. Probably a sign it’s time to leave.
More people’s history of science
04/30/2009 17:15
Cornelius Drebbel, a Dutch “mechanic” and alchemist, demonstrated a submarine in the Thames in 1620. He kept people submerged in comfort for three hours, using bottled oxygen. Why does no one know about this? Because there was no word for OXYGEN for another two centuries. Drebbel had “empirically learned to generate it by heating saltpeter. Robert Boyle later credited Drebbel with recognizing that the air we breathe is a mixture of various ‘airs,’ one of which is essential for sustaining life.” (252) According to wiki, Drebbel also invented a chicken incubator connected to a mercury thermometer (which he also invented), that automatically kept it at a constant temp. This is one of the first feedback-based control systems. Drebbel died in poverty, a tavern-keeper, in 1633.
Again, the what-if possibilities seem endless. What if the elite scientists like the members of the Royal Society (founded 1660) had been more open to empiricism, and less dependent on a priori theorizing? If I can connect the dots, even loosely, between these ideas…
Reading in the old days
04/28/2009 10:09
William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 1989)
This is thought of as a “seminal text” in American book studies. 100 pages in, I can see why. Gilmore died in 1999, while working on a book called Republic of Knowledge. AAS has a typescript from 1998 called “The Regional Book Trade” that might be useful. I wonder if there are archival materials anywhere (Worldcat doesn’t know)?
The interesting thing about this study of books in the 18th century is that it’s about disenchantment and disillusionment. Modernity, Gilmore says, is a profoundly unsatisfying and unsettling state. And it was so from 1785-1830. “History would be a trivial pursuit were it not morally instructive,” he continues. The “new mass culture centered on the printed and written word” that began during and just after the American Revolution has something to tell us about social change in the information age, and also maybe about the dream deferred.
more later…
This is thought of as a “seminal text” in American book studies. 100 pages in, I can see why. Gilmore died in 1999, while working on a book called Republic of Knowledge. AAS has a typescript from 1998 called “The Regional Book Trade” that might be useful. I wonder if there are archival materials anywhere (Worldcat doesn’t know)?
The interesting thing about this study of books in the 18th century is that it’s about disenchantment and disillusionment. Modernity, Gilmore says, is a profoundly unsatisfying and unsettling state. And it was so from 1785-1830. “History would be a trivial pursuit were it not morally instructive,” he continues. The “new mass culture centered on the printed and written word” that began during and just after the American Revolution has something to tell us about social change in the information age, and also maybe about the dream deferred.
more later…
before Darwin
04/23/2009 10:51
a few more notes from Millhauser’s Before Darwin
The idea that evolution was “in the air” is supported: “it had recently made a considerable stir in France, with that infidel Lamarck and his party, and all the authority of Cuvier had been needed to put it down. Lyell was obliged to devote a good many pages of his Principles of Geology to repudiating it…for geology, blink the fact or gloze over it as one would, contradicted Scripture.”
The reluctance of major scientific figures doesn’t necessarily represent the feeling of all scientists (unless you subscribe to the “great man” theory and think they were all the scientists). Lyell was a knight and baronet. Cuvier was a baron. Erasmus Darwin delayed publishing his theory of evolution from 1770 to 1796, and he didn’t have the personal attachment to religion that his grandson did. It’s interesting, though. They’re willing to go only so far.
“since the turn of the [19th] century…the theory has had no outstanding, serious, and determined popular apologist or representative…Among the informed few the idea is detested: a disgusting and exploded folly, kept alive only in atheistic, revolutionary France; it may also be a little feared.” (71) Millhauser’s impressionistic style seems to capture some interesting clues. There’s a relationship between popular, out-loud debate and acceptance of new ideas (even among the elite). All kinds of things may be believed by “the informed few,” but they’re not dangerous unless spoken of. Reminds me of J.S. Mill and birth control.
“About the middle of the seventeenth century, James Ussher, Archbishop of Armargh, carefully computed the date of creation and set it at 4004 B.C.” (194, n. 2) (Fall of the House of Ussher?)
If I need to go back to the primary sources on geology, here are the ones Millhauser talks about:
Whewell, Indications of Creator
John Woodward, An Essay Towards a Natural History of the Earth, ~1670
Thomas Burnet, the Sacred Theory of the Earth, 1684
William Whiston, A New Theory of the Earth, 1696
W. Worthington, The Scripture-Theory of the Earth, 1773
James Hutton, Theory of the Earth, 1785, gradualist
John Whitehurst, Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth
Lyell, Principles of Geology, 1830-3, “uniformitarian”
Archbishop Sumner, Treatise on the Records of Creation, 1816
Granville Penn, Comparative Estimate of the Mineral and Mosaic Geologies, 1822
William Paley, A View of the Evidences of Christianity and Natural Theology
Vestiges was reviewed in G.J. Holyoake’s Movement and Anti-Persecution Gazette (119 no reference given) (Jan 8 1845, 9-12 by William Chilton; Feb 26, Mar 5 & 19 1845)
Also: “The compositor and former bricklayer William Chilton recognized Vestiges as an attempt to remove the radical edge from the weapons of materialism; see his “ ‘Materialism’ and the Author of the ‘Vestiges’,” Reasoner 1 (1846): 7-8.
“Francis Bowen, a philosophical conservative at war with Kant, Mill, Comte, and much besides, devoted some fifty-odd pages of his North American Review to a technical refutation of Vestiges, fortified by an exposure of its atheistic tendencies” (119-20).
Even those you’d expect to support Vestiges, didn’t. “Thomas Henry Huxley begins with a tart remark that Vestiges continues to appear although exploded, and continues enthusiastically in this key.” as always, Huxley is ambivalent about the impact on the public’s understanding of the issues. “Darwin feared ridicule; as early as 1844, in a letter that spoke a little superciliously of Lamarck’s ‘absurd though clever work,’ he anticipated comparison with this inept new version of it...When he published, then, he indicated his disapproval of Vestiges in terms that contrasted markedly with his courtesy toward such minor precursors as Matthews.” (148-9) But then, by the same token, he totally ignored his most significant precursor, his grandfather. So in a sense, bad treatment by Darwin is high praise.
“Wallace (who had once found the book stimulating to his own mind [and wasn’t above admitting it!]) always spoke of it with the respect due a pioneer” (150).
“Huxely…did not see it giving a substantial hint to Schopenhauer, or confirming Emerson’s intuition of nature, or intruding an argument or two into the contemptuous Spencer’s ‘Development Hypothesis,’ or gripping the attention of Lincoln as had only a half dozen books in his career. He did not see the first breach in the wall.” (151)
The idea that evolution was “in the air” is supported: “it had recently made a considerable stir in France, with that infidel Lamarck and his party, and all the authority of Cuvier had been needed to put it down. Lyell was obliged to devote a good many pages of his Principles of Geology to repudiating it…for geology, blink the fact or gloze over it as one would, contradicted Scripture.”
The reluctance of major scientific figures doesn’t necessarily represent the feeling of all scientists (unless you subscribe to the “great man” theory and think they were all the scientists). Lyell was a knight and baronet. Cuvier was a baron. Erasmus Darwin delayed publishing his theory of evolution from 1770 to 1796, and he didn’t have the personal attachment to religion that his grandson did. It’s interesting, though. They’re willing to go only so far.
“since the turn of the [19th] century…the theory has had no outstanding, serious, and determined popular apologist or representative…Among the informed few the idea is detested: a disgusting and exploded folly, kept alive only in atheistic, revolutionary France; it may also be a little feared.” (71) Millhauser’s impressionistic style seems to capture some interesting clues. There’s a relationship between popular, out-loud debate and acceptance of new ideas (even among the elite). All kinds of things may be believed by “the informed few,” but they’re not dangerous unless spoken of. Reminds me of J.S. Mill and birth control.
“About the middle of the seventeenth century, James Ussher, Archbishop of Armargh, carefully computed the date of creation and set it at 4004 B.C.” (194, n. 2) (Fall of the House of Ussher?)
If I need to go back to the primary sources on geology, here are the ones Millhauser talks about:
Whewell, Indications of Creator
John Woodward, An Essay Towards a Natural History of the Earth, ~1670
Thomas Burnet, the Sacred Theory of the Earth, 1684
William Whiston, A New Theory of the Earth, 1696
W. Worthington, The Scripture-Theory of the Earth, 1773
James Hutton, Theory of the Earth, 1785, gradualist
John Whitehurst, Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth
Lyell, Principles of Geology, 1830-3, “uniformitarian”
Archbishop Sumner, Treatise on the Records of Creation, 1816
Granville Penn, Comparative Estimate of the Mineral and Mosaic Geologies, 1822
William Paley, A View of the Evidences of Christianity and Natural Theology
Vestiges was reviewed in G.J. Holyoake’s Movement and Anti-Persecution Gazette (119 no reference given) (Jan 8 1845, 9-12 by William Chilton; Feb 26, Mar 5 & 19 1845)
Also: “The compositor and former bricklayer William Chilton recognized Vestiges as an attempt to remove the radical edge from the weapons of materialism; see his “ ‘Materialism’ and the Author of the ‘Vestiges’,” Reasoner 1 (1846): 7-8.
“Francis Bowen, a philosophical conservative at war with Kant, Mill, Comte, and much besides, devoted some fifty-odd pages of his North American Review to a technical refutation of Vestiges, fortified by an exposure of its atheistic tendencies” (119-20).
Even those you’d expect to support Vestiges, didn’t. “Thomas Henry Huxley begins with a tart remark that Vestiges continues to appear although exploded, and continues enthusiastically in this key.” as always, Huxley is ambivalent about the impact on the public’s understanding of the issues. “Darwin feared ridicule; as early as 1844, in a letter that spoke a little superciliously of Lamarck’s ‘absurd though clever work,’ he anticipated comparison with this inept new version of it...When he published, then, he indicated his disapproval of Vestiges in terms that contrasted markedly with his courtesy toward such minor precursors as Matthews.” (148-9) But then, by the same token, he totally ignored his most significant precursor, his grandfather. So in a sense, bad treatment by Darwin is high praise.
“Wallace (who had once found the book stimulating to his own mind [and wasn’t above admitting it!]) always spoke of it with the respect due a pioneer” (150).
“Huxely…did not see it giving a substantial hint to Schopenhauer, or confirming Emerson’s intuition of nature, or intruding an argument or two into the contemptuous Spencer’s ‘Development Hypothesis,’ or gripping the attention of Lincoln as had only a half dozen books in his career. He did not see the first breach in the wall.” (151)
Hall of Science
04/21/2009 13:15
Erasmus in Darwin books
04/21/2009 11:57
There’s a rush to publish books on Darwin for his bicentennial. A pile of books on prominent display in the library. Half on Darwin and half on Lincoln. It’s great that people want to call attention to evolution, especially given the rise in Creationism and its cousins. But it’s interesting what people who write about Charles Darwin have to say about his grandfather, Erasmus.
David Quammen, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (New York: WW Norton, 2006)
Discussing Charles Darwin’s thought process around 1837, Quammen says “As a heading on the first page of [notebook] ‘B’ he wrote “Zoonomia,” in genuflection to a book of that title published forty years earlier by his own grandfather” (27). He goes on to say that Erasmus was a boozy, gouty sire of bastards, and that “Zoonomia, mainly a medical treatise, included a section in which old Erasmus had floated evolutionary ideas of his own, suggesting that ‘all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament,’ and that the common lineage possessed a capacity ‘of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity,’ with those improvements transmissible from parents to offspring.” But “Erasmus Darwin had never pressed this idea too far, nor clarified it, nor supported it with evidence,” all things that Charles now committed himself to do. (28)
Quammen identifies both Erasmus and his son Robert as freethinkers (34), but suggests that Charles was afraid to go that far, because he was worried about an academic career.
Darwin was befriended at Edinburgh by “a dazzling young instructor,” Robert Grant. Grant “venerated” Erasmus Darwin “as an evolutionary pioneer” (72). Quammen doesn’t take the hint, and insists on calling him “old Erasmus” throughout.
Quammen mentions the Vestiges a few times in passing, without ever really explaining it or its place. In his story, it was racy, popular (he says Queen Victoria read it), and unprofessional. Darwin wanted to publish something better. Quammen says Darwin was hng up on the idea of evidence and solid references. Is this accurate, or anachronistic? Does it really stand, as an argument for Darwin’s apparent disrespect – not only for Vestiges, but for Zoonomia?
Cyril Aydon, Charles Darwin (New York: Caroll & Graf, 2002)
Aydon says he writes from a lifelong fascination with Darwin and his work. He describes Erasmus as a giant: “one of the most famous men in England. King George III had offered him the post of Royal Physician…He had written a book called The Botanic Garden, which set out the whole of current botanical knowledge in the form of an extended poem. It had taken literary London by storm. He later wrote a massive work on animal life, entitled Zoonomia, in which he put forward a theory of what would later come to be called evolution. The Zoonomia was one of the most talked-about books of its day. It was paid the complement of being pirated in New York, and the even greater compliment of being placed on the Papal Index.” (3)
“In July 1837, with his Journal ready for the press, [Darwin] opened a small brown notebook, and wrote on its title page the single word Zoonomia. It was the title of the book in which his grandfather Erasmus had set out his ideas on the subject of animal evolution sixty years before. Darwin had read it as a student, and found it unconvincing. His admiration had been reserved for Paley’s Natural Theology, and its Argument from Design. But now, at twenty-eight, as he began to set down his thoughts on the subject of species and their origins, from the perspective of his five-year voyage, Paley was dismissed, and he proudly, secretly, claimed his intellectual inheritance.” (122)
But still secretly. Timid Darwin. And Paley’s argument from design? Give me a break! Aydon blames some of Darwin’s timidity on his wealth, but also on the fact that Vestiges was savaged in the Edinburgh Reiview by Adam Sedgwick, Darwin’s old Geology mentor. Aydon says Darwin imagined his own ideas being treated similarly, concluding “Whatever else ‘Mr. Vestiges’ had achielved, he had made it even less likely that Darwin would ever voluntarily expose his ideas to the risk of similar treatment.” (167)
Others (Michael Shermer) point out that when Charles left Edinburgh for Cambridge, he matriculated in Theology. Still others (Richard Darwin Keynes) suggest that Charles didn’t credit Erasmus, Lamarck, or anyone else because he thought the principle of development he was “proving” for the first time was actually so obvious as not to need acknowledgment. In this sense, Charles is supposed to have perceived himself as the guy who proved a point that should have been obvious to everyone? Doesn’t add up.
David Quammen, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (New York: WW Norton, 2006)
Discussing Charles Darwin’s thought process around 1837, Quammen says “As a heading on the first page of [notebook] ‘B’ he wrote “Zoonomia,” in genuflection to a book of that title published forty years earlier by his own grandfather” (27). He goes on to say that Erasmus was a boozy, gouty sire of bastards, and that “Zoonomia, mainly a medical treatise, included a section in which old Erasmus had floated evolutionary ideas of his own, suggesting that ‘all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament,’ and that the common lineage possessed a capacity ‘of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity,’ with those improvements transmissible from parents to offspring.” But “Erasmus Darwin had never pressed this idea too far, nor clarified it, nor supported it with evidence,” all things that Charles now committed himself to do. (28)
Quammen identifies both Erasmus and his son Robert as freethinkers (34), but suggests that Charles was afraid to go that far, because he was worried about an academic career.
Darwin was befriended at Edinburgh by “a dazzling young instructor,” Robert Grant. Grant “venerated” Erasmus Darwin “as an evolutionary pioneer” (72). Quammen doesn’t take the hint, and insists on calling him “old Erasmus” throughout.
Quammen mentions the Vestiges a few times in passing, without ever really explaining it or its place. In his story, it was racy, popular (he says Queen Victoria read it), and unprofessional. Darwin wanted to publish something better. Quammen says Darwin was hng up on the idea of evidence and solid references. Is this accurate, or anachronistic? Does it really stand, as an argument for Darwin’s apparent disrespect – not only for Vestiges, but for Zoonomia?
Cyril Aydon, Charles Darwin (New York: Caroll & Graf, 2002)
Aydon says he writes from a lifelong fascination with Darwin and his work. He describes Erasmus as a giant: “one of the most famous men in England. King George III had offered him the post of Royal Physician…He had written a book called The Botanic Garden, which set out the whole of current botanical knowledge in the form of an extended poem. It had taken literary London by storm. He later wrote a massive work on animal life, entitled Zoonomia, in which he put forward a theory of what would later come to be called evolution. The Zoonomia was one of the most talked-about books of its day. It was paid the complement of being pirated in New York, and the even greater compliment of being placed on the Papal Index.” (3)
“In July 1837, with his Journal ready for the press, [Darwin] opened a small brown notebook, and wrote on its title page the single word Zoonomia. It was the title of the book in which his grandfather Erasmus had set out his ideas on the subject of animal evolution sixty years before. Darwin had read it as a student, and found it unconvincing. His admiration had been reserved for Paley’s Natural Theology, and its Argument from Design. But now, at twenty-eight, as he began to set down his thoughts on the subject of species and their origins, from the perspective of his five-year voyage, Paley was dismissed, and he proudly, secretly, claimed his intellectual inheritance.” (122)
But still secretly. Timid Darwin. And Paley’s argument from design? Give me a break! Aydon blames some of Darwin’s timidity on his wealth, but also on the fact that Vestiges was savaged in the Edinburgh Reiview by Adam Sedgwick, Darwin’s old Geology mentor. Aydon says Darwin imagined his own ideas being treated similarly, concluding “Whatever else ‘Mr. Vestiges’ had achielved, he had made it even less likely that Darwin would ever voluntarily expose his ideas to the risk of similar treatment.” (167)
Others (Michael Shermer) point out that when Charles left Edinburgh for Cambridge, he matriculated in Theology. Still others (Richard Darwin Keynes) suggest that Charles didn’t credit Erasmus, Lamarck, or anyone else because he thought the principle of development he was “proving” for the first time was actually so obvious as not to need acknowledgment. In this sense, Charles is supposed to have perceived himself as the guy who proved a point that should have been obvious to everyone? Doesn’t add up.
2 books on the Vestiges
04/16/2009 16:55
This quote comes from the Introduction of Milton Millhauser’s Just Before Darwin (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1959). The other book, which I ran across accidentally, because it mentions Charles Bradlaugh, is crammed full of good info. So I ordered a copy of James A. Secord’s Victorian Sensation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Should be here next week (because I won’t pay extra for shipping).
I’m reading these because I’m beginning to get the impression that ideas of biological evolution were popular among regular people for several decades before Charles Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species. It almost seems that Charles Darwin was merely the figure who forced the scientific establishment (represented by the Royal Society) to consider a topic they’d been studiously avoiding ever since Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus published his Zoonomia in 1796!
Millhauser says part of the problem with Vestiges is that it was in English, and it was inexpensive. This made it available and affordable for the masses. “Once again,” Millhauser says (is he referring to Erasmus Darwin?), “the public was informed, by a by a glib pseudo scientist without even Lamarck’s pretensions to authority, that the true Adam of the human race was a baboon” (5). This sums up the issue nicely: it has to do with public, rather than scientific, understanding of humanity’s origins. It has to do with the control of scientific information by an elite class of authorities (naturally drawn from the upper classes and educated at the best “public” schools). And it has to do with the inevitable demise of a biblical creation story that no educated Englishman actually took seriously, but that nearly all believed should be upheld (as Plato’s Noble Lie) for the common people, especially in lieu of an alternative story that maintained the authority of the established church.
Millhauser dismisses Erasmus Darwin and Charles Lyell in an endnote, saying “they each devote to evolution only a small portion of a work dealing with some other major theme” (191 n. 4). This is true, and Vestiges deserves recognition as the first complete book on the subject to achieve wide readership. But it ignores the relationships between the ideas of Darwin and Lyell and those of Chambers. Making his case for a study of Chambers, Millhauser identifies the issue of synthesis, and especially of synthesis by amateurs. He says “An early Victorian layman might still feel…that he had perceived a truth that the professionals had somehow managed to ignore or even to hush up, and that this might provide the principle of unification, the frank definition of the central tendency of science, for which the world was waiting” (8). This is an idea that has particular resonance for me at this point, not least in the political implications such a changed understanding of the world might have on regular people in the early 19th century.
MIllhauser’s story of Robert Chambers’ young life is interesting, but his coverage of the Vestiges’ reception and impact focus entirely on the elite. Even his claim that the “development hypothesis” was “in the air” only deals with the air immediately surrounding elite scientists and their writings. Millhauser claims about 28,000 copies of the Vestiges were sold in Britain and a similar quantity in the U.S. But he doesn’t elaborate on this at all. I’ll have to wait a few more days, and find out about that in Victorian Sensation.
Erasmus Darwins in Massachusetts
04/15/2009 18:30
That’s right. Erasmus Darwin came up with the idea that all life on earth was descended from a single microscopic ancestor in 1770. In 1796, he published the first volume of his Zoonomia, which was heralded as the Principia of the medical profession, and discusses his ideas on evolution. And in 1803, Darwin’s posthumous poem The Temple of Nature elaborated his position even more explicitly. Darwin also founded Birmingham’s Lunar Society, translated Linnaeus, and was a member of the Royal Society, the Linnean Society, and the American Philosophical Society. When his grandson Charles published On the Origin of Species, his critics thought they’d be able to silence him by quoting verbatim from tracts written against his grandfather’s theories.
Erasmus Darwin never visited America, and although he was a political radical and a supporter of American independence (and critic of the Pitt government’s repressions in the 1790s), I’m surprised that he was so well-known in a remote western-Massachusetts hill-town like Ashfield. Looking a little farther, I’ve found there are sixty-three towns in Massachusetts where children were apparently named after Darwin before 1849! I also found 96 towns where there is no record of a child named “Erasmus” or “Darwin” in the Vital Records. (these two groups represent all the towns whose records I was able to find online)
It’s possible that a few of the children named “Erasmus” may have been named for the fifteenth-century humanist, or for remote family members (close ones would have showed up in the records I was searching). But I think most of them were named for the scientist, especially because in most cases they’re actually named “Erasmus Darwin.” Similarly, there is no record of “Darwin” being a common family name in these Massachusetts towns, and Charles Darwin’s only significant publication before 1849 was his The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, published in 5 parts, 1838-1843.
In all, I found 112 children named “Erasmus,” “Erasmus Darwin,” “Darwin,” or, in a couple of cases, “Erastus Darwin.” But this initial search of Vital Record books available online missed 187 towns, whose records are not yet available electronically. So the odds are high that there are many more Erasmus Darwins I haven’t yet discovered!
As bizarre as the mere fact of all these young Darwins in early nineteenth-century Massachusetts towns, is where the towns were. If people were going to be naming their children after a British scientist (obscure or famous), you’d expect them to live in cities, close to institutions of higher learning like Harvard, wouldn’t you? Well, you’d be dead wrong.
Most of the people naming their children after Darwin lived in central or western Massachusetts. I found most of them in Worcester, Hampshire, and Franklin Counties. Though they weren’t completely absent from the Boston area, there were more towns close to the coast without a Darwin than with one. The towns marked in green on the map have at least one “Darwin.” Several have more than one. Two, Ashfield and Leominster, have six.
I’ve started looking into the histories of these towns, to see who these “Darwins” were. And, perhaps more importantly, who their parents were. In looking at the first dozen or so, it seems that some of them were educated people, ministers or doctors. Others were farmers, shoemakers, and tavern-keepers. The whole thing suggests that people in some of the remotest parts of Massachusetts were thinking about issues and reading books I would never have expected them to be so interested in. It’s a whole different picture of the intellectual life of regular people in the early 19th century than you get in the “standard” texts!
I’m going to try to write little sketches of the lives of some of these people, because I think they’ll turn up interesting insights. Maybe this’ll turn into something, if I can pull together enough of them and they turn up some of the surprises that seem to be lurking in this material…
Metahistory
04/14/2009 18:14
I read Hayden White’s Metahistory. Okay, I admit, I only read some of it.
I remember reading articles of White’s in historiography class (seems like a long time ago -- only 2 years!). He seemed to be the voice of reason, set against the irate ravings of Arthur Marwick. And the position he took seemed eminently reasonable.
White does make some good points in his introduction. He raises some interesting questions about the nature of narrative, how story forms and archetypes can function as interpretive prompts for the reader (and maybe for the historian). But then he goes off on a wild, ridiculous, nearly unreadable tangent for about 400 pages, before he concludes that since all knowledge is basically invalid, you can believe any type of history you want.
Needless to say, I skipped most of those interminable 400 pages.
I reread the beginning of Marwick’s article, where he responds to White. I’ll have to look at them more closely, but it seems a shame that clear, plain-language writing frequently advocates reactionary politics, while radicals who have a legitimate case against the status quo often let themselves become lost in their rhetoric.
My thoughts on White in more detail here.
I remember reading articles of White’s in historiography class (seems like a long time ago -- only 2 years!). He seemed to be the voice of reason, set against the irate ravings of Arthur Marwick. And the position he took seemed eminently reasonable.
White does make some good points in his introduction. He raises some interesting questions about the nature of narrative, how story forms and archetypes can function as interpretive prompts for the reader (and maybe for the historian). But then he goes off on a wild, ridiculous, nearly unreadable tangent for about 400 pages, before he concludes that since all knowledge is basically invalid, you can believe any type of history you want.
Needless to say, I skipped most of those interminable 400 pages.
I reread the beginning of Marwick’s article, where he responds to White. I’ll have to look at them more closely, but it seems a shame that clear, plain-language writing frequently advocates reactionary politics, while radicals who have a legitimate case against the status quo often let themselves become lost in their rhetoric.
My thoughts on White in more detail here.
Pseudo-Science
04/13/2009 15:18
“The term pseudo-science was introduced into the history of science by George Sarton and the other founders of the discipline, and it reflects their positivistic convitcion that the history of science is a narrative of the progressive victory of the physical, mathematical sciences over religious, metaphysical, and occult views of nature…In Comte’s account [in Cours de philosophie positive, 1830-42], the decisive epochal break separating the dark ages of religion and metaphysics from the Age of Reason and Enlightenment is the result of the Scientific Revolution and the consequent utilization of science by the intellectual and political elite to master nature and perfect society. “Recent scholarship showing the persistence of ancient traditions of esoteric religion and occult philosophy well into the modern epoch poses a fundamental challenge to these historiographical models—particularly when primary sources show that Bacon, Newton, and other founders of the modern age had a deep reverence for the truths hidden in the myths and symbols of the prisca theologia.” (Preface)
Okay, so starting at the top: pseudo-science assumes there’s a regular, authoritative science that people are being silly, backward, or perverse in trying to evade. This seems clear, looking backward. We believe we understand how science progressed from its primitive roots to its mature, legitimate current form. But, as Conner has shown in his People’s History of Science, that assumption too may be incorrect. And certainly, the people who were driving “science” forward in the early modern period had no roadmap showing them which were the “legitimate” and which the erroneous elements of their studies.
So, we have “natural philosophers” like Bacon, Boyle, and Newton. All of them have classical educations (this may be the main thing that distinguishes them from the “low mechanicks” who produced a lot of the technological innovation leading to new scientific theories, following Conner again), so they presumably believed in some sort of continuity in the “grand design.” This means that, whether they believed in an active, historical god or in Spinoza’s deistic/pantheistic “whatever,” they believed in order. Newton was looking, after all, for a universal law of gravity; not a local one.
Next, there’s the question of periodization. A split between a dark age and an Enlightenment makes sense, for the enlightened. What about everybody else? I suspect the two designations obscure a lot of change that may have been happening in the lives and societies of regular people during the “dark” ages; just as they hide the fact that a lot stayed the same for most people after the Enlightenment. Tied to this is the idea of learning to “master nature and perfect society.” For whom? And, for whom?
The fact that superstition persists to this day doesn’t necessarily challenge the scientific world-view, or the history of science. I hope these articles aren’t going to stop with a suggestion that because these early scientists were Christians, there’s something to it. On the other hand, the idea that they may have found social, moral, and even scientific insights in esoteric and mythological documents that were at the time part of the classical canon doesn’t seem far-fetched. The implications of their scientific discoveries (or systematizations of other people’s discoveries, if you go with Conner’s implication that the elite scientists’ role was mostly communicating the discoveries of technologists and trying to create over-arching, generalized natural philosophy out of them) were often scary; because they directly challenged the “truths” that formed the basis of early-modern society. So they’d be expected to try to reconcile their scientific insights with those of “other magisteria.”
But the question whether there are in fact other magisteria is one of those “prefiguring” issues Hayden White describes in Metahistory (which I’m also reading -- stay tuned for a post). Assuming there’s a unity (in scientific knowledge, general human understanding of the universe, and particularly history) means we’ve already made an interpretive choice. Whether the choice is for comedy or tragedy doesn’t really matter. The only way out (for Smith, and maybe for Northrop Frye, who he draws on) is satire.
But there is evidence the new scientists had a sense they were doing something fundamentally different. John Friend (1675-1728) was a disciple of Newton’s and wrote a history of science in 1725-6 in which “the mystical religious outlook of the Paracelsians could not be tolerated. Friend rejected Paracelsus as an idle systematizer whose whole cosmology and religious-vitalistic outlook toward nature were the very antithesis of the new science.” (7)
John William Draper (1811-1882) see his History of the Intellectual Development of Europe (1863) and History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874)
See also Andrew Dickson White, The Warfare of Science (1877) This is also a partial transcript of religion vs. “atheism” in the form of science, so it serves 2 purposes.
These people might be useful for a little “Who’s Who in the History of Atheism” if I wanted to do such a thing…whether or not they’re atheists is a possible issue (but is it, really?)…
James Joseph Walsh (1865-1942) made the case for religion. His 1907 book The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries claimed that the church had done much to encourage medicine, including supporting anatomical studies in the Italian universities and establishing hospitals.
See also Herbert Butterfield, “The Whig Interpretation of History,” (1931)
People's History of Science
04/11/2009 11:33
I came upon this by accident in the Keene State College stacks (never underestimate the power of browsing on either side of the title you were looking for!). As the title suggests, Conner presents the progress of science as the work of regular people, solving problems in their day-to-day lives and crafts. He’s definitely in the tradition of Zinn, who called it “a delightfully refreshing new look at the history of science” (I noticed on Amazon there’s a “people’s history of the world,” blurbed by Zinn, that might also be something for me to take a look at).
Midway through the second chapter, I decided I needed to buy this book. So these are my thoughts on the first two chapters. I’ll read the rest when my own copy arrives (so I can write in it). Maybe at that point, I’ll look at the controversy that apparently surrounded this “revisionist,” “proletarian” history.
This book is filled with not only a really interesting argument about history, but some great, overlooked details of the past. In his introduction, Conner mentions that when American plantation owners decided to grow rice, they relied on their African slaves not only for labor, but for the entire technique they employed in the Carolinas and Georgia. This is a really interesting thought: that the slaves were the masters of this technology, intellectually (as well as morally) superior to the whites who’d enslaved them. Conner goes on to say that smallpox inoculation was widely practiced in Africa, and was introduced to America by a slave named Onesimus, and to England by a farmer named Benjamin Jesty.
Conner believes with Karl Popper, that knowledge “for the most part advanced through the modification of earlier knowledge.” This seems to be demonstrated by the story he tells. I can’t tell, yet, but I think he’s going to say that Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shift is too top-down, and doesn’t reflect the way knowledge works outside of the academy. This seems like a legitimate point, so far…
One of Conner’s heroes of “anti-elite” science seems to be Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (Paracelsus). I’m looking forward to reading that chapter, and I expect to find some good story material there. It doesn’t look like he delves too much into medicine, but I’ve already got some sources for that. He says the “imperialism of physics” really took off in the 20th century (especially with the Manhattan Project), and reminds us that “the appeal of neutrality [in “objective” academic science – see Haskell] operates in support of the status quo, which is underpinned by …assumptions of which the scientists themselves are often unaware.” (12) Conner also says the practice of “rigidly separating the histories of science and technology serves to reinforce the fallacious notion that science arose from the realm of pure thought, floating in the clouds above the world of mundane human pursuits.” (15) In addition to the obvious political results of this view, I think it reinforces the Platonic/Cartesian dualism that’s still at the center of most of our philosophical problems in the world today.
Conner says his thesis is that “artisans contributed not only to the mass of empirical knowledge that furnished the raw material of the Scientific Revolution, but the empirical method itself.” I think this is a modest claim, it already seems in the first chapters that he’s demonstrating more than this.
One element where Conner’s account doesn’t seem to square with his claims is the repeated declarations of early scientists that they got their ideas from artisans and regular people. In almost every account in the early chapters, Conner says the “scientists” history has credited with major discoveries (Jenner, William Withering, etc.) had pointed to the common people who were the source of their insights. So there’s something more complicated going on here. The “scientists” are definitely taking common empirical knowledge to a different place (the Royal Society) where different rules of legitimacy, credit, and value apply (sometimes not to their benefit, cf Jenner). So there’s a class thing happening in the present, as these ideas are moved from the popular to the elite venue. But then, there’s a (deliberate?) process in the recording of these “discoveries” that focuses entirely on the elite scientists, and completely forgets the common people they were careful to credit. There’s almost a sense that “it’s not Knowledge until the Royal Society says it’s Knowledge,” so why bother talking about the ultimate source? But is this due to the scientists, the Society, or the historians? Seems to me, a huge part of it is the historians. So I’m not sold on Conner’s claim that the problem is that “the history of science has been shaped not by historians of science but by scientists themselves.” (17) It seems more likely to me that historians recognized the extreme importance of science in the social change they were recording, and were completely aware of what they were doing.
Conner says social historians who present “bottom up” views have managed to broaden “the social context in which historic events have been understood,” but he warns that often they’ve failed to abandon “the point of view of the dominant social classes.” They tell the stories that “history” has judged are meaningful, from the bottom. Not the stories that mattered at the time, on the bottom. But he does point out that in the “nascent capitalist economy, the benefits of increased productivity were no to the producers but to a privileged few whose access to capital allowed them to gain control of the productive process. The artisans who forfeited their knowledge [to Royal Society members who “liberated” trade secrets as self-proclaimed benefactors for the world] were for the most part eventually forced into dependency as wageworkers.” (22) This is one of several places in the early pages, where Conner got me thinking about the current “intellectual property” debates.
In the second chapter (on pre-history), Conner suggests that the shift from a foraging way of life to agriculture may have been the original “Fall,” forced on the ancients by increasing human population density and a corresponding decrease of food sources. Clearly, in this scenario, there would always be the option of walking away from the center, to find a new wilderness. Why, then, did many choose to stay? (cf the end of Blade Runner, when the hero leaves the distopian Los Angeles, and as the credits roll is flying over the primeval forests of the Pacific northwest. If they were always there, why stay in LA? This is the big question hidden in the movie) Conner points to a really important issue: the early agriculturalists would have been the “gatherers,” in the hunter-gatherer world. Women, he says. But also children and the old. This would be true of much of neolithic technology, metals were probably discovered in kilns. Pottery was not hunters’ work. Agriculture and technology was developed by those who stayed behind. Vulcan was a woman.
Discussing the “brain vs. hand” controversy, Conner takes the issue back to Engels’ essay on The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man. Engels called the “cerebral primacy” a “deep-seated social prejudice related to the class position of professional thinkers and their patrons.” (32) It’s interesting (and very useful to me) that there was so much thinking about this type of thing in Victorian England. Not to mention comparative mythology, mysticism, and all the “dead-end” science and meta-science that didn’t end up as part of the admittedly “tunnel-vision” path of science Conner is focusing on here. Now, what I have to do is pick out the actual pieces I’m going to use…
Calomel
04/11/2009 09:15
The harmful effects of mercury weren’t unknown to early doctors. Along with bloodletting, calomel was often used as a “depletive,” since medical theories of the time held that first inflammation, and later “excitement of the blood” was the cause of most illness. Early in the nineteenth century, the general public also began to understand the danger of mercurial medicines, and to distrust physicians who relied on them. This distrust was fueled by critics in the popular press like William Cobbett, who quipped that Benjamin Rush’s heroic practices were “one of the great discoveries…which have contributed to the depopulation of the earth.” Another source of testimony against the use of calomel came from “sectarians,” alternative medical practitioners who sprang up to challenge traditional doctors in the early nineteenth century. Thomsonian botanical healers, hydropaths and homeopaths took advantage of warnings in medical texts and horror stories of patients injured or killed by heroic treatment, to suggest that the traditional doctors were doing more harm than good.
Traditional doctors in the early 1800s were very concerned about their profession. While the previous generation had been trained by “preceptors” in a system very much like traditional apprenticeship, a series of medical schools established in the decades surrounding the turn of the century began sending M.D.s into the field. This new generation was eager to make its mark, and aspired to the respect and status afforded lawyers and ministers, the other professional men in their communities. Doctors formed associations, lobbied for standards and licensing laws, and fought back against the quacks and heretics who challenged the efficacy of their methods.
The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (BMSJ) was one of the earliest American medical publications, and it circulated widely. Beginning in 1828, the BMSJ offered doctors from New England, New York, the western territories, and as far away as New Orleans a forum for sharing cases, and a place to read about medical advances, the ongoing battle against sectarian “quackery,” and the struggle to establish medicine as a distinguished and respected profession. The editors of the BMSJ were keenly aware of the public’s distrust of heroic treatment, and especially of calomel. But rather than addressing these concerns open-mindedly, they adopted a policy of deriding and alienating anyone who spoke ill of their panacea. Their rejection and demonization of skeptics and dissenters damaged the respect and public credibility they were so anxious to gain. The continued use of calomel and the BMSJ’s dogged defense of mercurial medicine from the late 1820s to the early 1840s did a lot to convince the public that American medicine wasn’t ready to be taken seriously.
It’s clear from the pages of even the earliest issues of the BMSJ that doctors were aware of the dangers of calomel, and the specific symptoms presented by mercury poisoning. In a March 1828 letter on a case involving a woman with “Apoplexy,” the author says he prescribed a scruple (20 grains) of calomel for four days, until the patient’s “mouth became very painful, much swelled and inflamed from the calomel.” An Ohio doctor writes a letter suggesting a solution of water and “tartarate of antimony for checking mercurial salivation.” Another article quotes the City Physician of Boston, declaring that in a recent smallpox outbreak, “Calomel was given only a few times…but its administration, it was conceived, was followed by bad consequences, inasmuch as the ptyalism, peculiar to the disease, was very much increased, the breath more offensive, and the exhalations intolerable even to the patient himself.”
In late 1829, a correspondent calls BMSJ readers’ attention to an article on “Gangrenous Erosion of the Face” in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences. The writer describes a case of his own, in which a four-year old girl was treated with calomel for typhoid fever. Soreness in her mouth led quickly to gangrene that advanced until it covered the girl’s cheek from eyelid to ear, and two thirds of the lips and chin. Her teeth fell out, and “twelve days from the first appearance of the danger, the little patient died, completely exhausted.”
A month later, Dr. R. A. Merriam describes several cases. In the first, a ten-year old girl was treated, with eight doses of calomel over the course of three weeks. When Merriam first saw her, she had swelling and soreness in her mouth that the other doctor had called canker. This progressed “uninterruptedly to gangrene and sphacelation [morbidity] of both lips, and the greater part of the right cheek, before her death, and left such a hideous spectacle…as made it desirable she might not survive. Our wishes were realized.” In another case, a forty-year old man “to whom much mercury had been given, and pursued for a considerable time, in small doses, and even after profuse ptyalism had been established…His mouth and face swelled; he could not distinctly articulate for several months; his teeth fell out; and portions of his lower jaw, including the sockets of the teeth, came out. At the end of nine months he died…” In both cases, Dr. Merriam is careful to note that the treatments leading to their deaths had been prescribed by someone else before he’d first seen the patients.
Merriam refers to Dr. Samuel Jackson’s July 1827 article on “Gangrenopsis” in the Philadelphia Medical Recorder, in which Jackson “more than hinted” mercury was to blame. Merriam agrees that “it cannot be disguised, that the action of this most powerful weapon against disease, produces sometimes very disastrous effects.” He notices that Dr. Webber “has not even appeared to suspect” mercury, even though it was probably prescribed in all the cases he cited. Merriam sees no reason to suppose that a new disease has been discovered, as Brown suggests. While other sources of infection can cause facial gangrene, he’s “satisfied that the gangrenous erosion was caused by the operation of mercury” in the cases cited.
A month later, Charles Hubbard of Winthrop Maine writes to dispute Brown’s suggestion that mercury causes “gangrenous erosion” of the face. He relates the case of a four-year old boy he treated for “autumnal remittent fever.” Hubbard says he gave the boy calomel several times, in combination with other drugs, “to evacuate the stomach and bowels.” There was “no salivation, soreness of the gums, or mercurial fetor of the breath, during his illness,” Hubbard says. But “in the tenth day of the fever, the frightful gangrene made its appearance. We then observed a very disagreeable fetor…At the time of dissolution, which happened on the 35th day of his sickness…the ulcer had spread to within an inch of the eye above, and was on a level with the base of the lower jaw…The affected parts had a jet black appearance, with an indescribably bad fetor.”
“Is this a disease sui generis?” Hubbard demands. “It does not arise in consequence of general debility…Nor can it be the production of mercury.” This is clearly the point Hubbard wants to make, but he has nothing to hang his conclusion on except this declaration. Hubbard argues that Jackson didn’t say mercury had definitely been used in all his cases, and that where it was administered, “it had not produced its constitutional effects,” meaning it had purged, but not salivated the patients. Hubbard’s distinction suggests that he secretly considers that ptyalism is required for gangrene to set in. But he damages his argument by admitting in closing that he’s only ever seen one other case, while he was a student, and he didn’t take any notes.
In the letter immediately following Hubbard’s, E.G. Davis of Boston admits the connection between mercury and facial disease, and proposes a cure. Davis’ patient was a twenty-year old woman, who’d taken unknown medication from a previous doctor. Based on her symptoms and the “mercurial fetor” of her breath, Davis concluded “excessive use of mercurials.” The woman’s “gums, submaxillary glands, cheeks and tongue were greatly swollen; the latter was covered with a dense hard, black secretion; the jaws could scare be separated, the utterance was inarticulate; the flow of saliva was constant.” Davis believed he cured her with a blister applied to the back of her neck. The BMSJ editors’ willingness to publish both sides of the argument, at this point, suggests either a disagreement among the editors or that mercury was not yet the political issue it would soon become.
...to be continued.
Retro-futurist Anticipations
03/25/2009 16:58
Things to track down:
HG Wells Anticipations and Wells’ life.
Other people to consider? Oscar Wilde?
Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923) (also built the Crystal Paris, Santiago rail station, etc) and also.
Also Edison’s life in pics (Pop Sci 1929)
Maybe the thing that killed the airship was its military use in WWI. If not for that, it may have prospered, and the French and British may have continued working on it, as well as Count Zeppelin. Also, and here’s a brief timeline:
Sir William Ramsay (1895) discovers helium in rock – large concentrations found in France.
In 1896, “Public Opinion” reprints an American military article on “The Influence of the Air-Ship on War.”
1901 Smithsonian article on “Count von Zeppelin’s Dirigible Airship.”
1903 Outing presents “Yachting Among the Clouds.”
In 1909, McClure’s Magazine featured a long article on “The Aërial Battleship.”
1919 artcicle on “Commercial Production of Helium”
Pop. Sci 1923 was talking about US airships and helium…
Even 1945 Pop Sci was still hoping for a new airship age…
And then there’s real transportation for the people – bicycles!
And the occasional steam-bike.
Okay. Back to the causes of WWI. For my purposes, this might be boiled down to basically, Bismarck and the isolation of France from GB. The 3rd Republic , probably some good things in the Boulanger and Dreyfus crises (and) – this would be a good way to incorporate CB, Thiers, the Paris Commune, Zola, and even to flash back to Disraeli, Rothschild, and Paine v. Burke.
HG Wells Anticipations and Wells’ life.
Other people to consider? Oscar Wilde?
Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923) (also built the Crystal Paris, Santiago rail station, etc) and also.
Also Edison’s life in pics (Pop Sci 1929)
Maybe the thing that killed the airship was its military use in WWI. If not for that, it may have prospered, and the French and British may have continued working on it, as well as Count Zeppelin. Also, and here’s a brief timeline:
Sir William Ramsay (1895) discovers helium in rock – large concentrations found in France.
In 1896, “Public Opinion” reprints an American military article on “The Influence of the Air-Ship on War.”
1901 Smithsonian article on “Count von Zeppelin’s Dirigible Airship.”
1903 Outing presents “Yachting Among the Clouds.”
In 1909, McClure’s Magazine featured a long article on “The Aërial Battleship.”
1919 artcicle on “Commercial Production of Helium”
Pop. Sci 1923 was talking about US airships and helium…
Even 1945 Pop Sci was still hoping for a new airship age…
And then there’s real transportation for the people – bicycles!
And the occasional steam-bike.
Okay. Back to the causes of WWI. For my purposes, this might be boiled down to basically, Bismarck and the isolation of France from GB. The 3rd Republic , probably some good things in the Boulanger and Dreyfus crises (and) – this would be a good way to incorporate CB, Thiers, the Paris Commune, Zola, and even to flash back to Disraeli, Rothschild, and Paine v. Burke.
Turn of the Century Tech
03/24/2009 18:08
Ideas from today’s research:
William Thomson: Transatlantic Cable – Lord Kelvin
1851 Dover-Calais cable.
1853 Port Patrick-Donaghadee cable
1856 Atlantic Telegraph Co., William Thomson a director.
1858 Ireland-Newfoundland cable. Proves Thomson’s mirror galvanometer, but quickly fails.
1865-6 Two attempts, 2nd a success (plus recovers the first cable and completes it). Thomson knighted.
1892 Victoria creates Thomson (then Pres. of Royal Society) Baron Kelvin of Netherhall.
(Alexander Russell, Lord Kelvin: His Life and Work, 1912)
Paris Pneumatic post network
1867: Wheatstone Automatic telegraph – “electric Jacquard” used morse code on punched tape.
1874: Jean Maurice Emile Baudot’s 12x line multiplexer uses 5-unit binary electrical pulses. Baudot’s apparatus was very stressful to operate, due to the timing requirements. But in general, technological improvement changed telegraphy from a high-skill to a low-skill job.
The telephone completely eliminated need for skilled intermediary. June 1877: 230 phones, July: 750, August: 1300, 1880: 30k.
Samuel FB Morse and Jedediah Morse – Illuminati conspiracy.
A couple more books on Tesla (and also on Edison, Westinghouse, Steinmetz, etc.) came in today, so there’s info to process…
1905: “How to recognize the Autos of Today” and. Also the Berliet “French Mercedes”, How to recognize buses, and, and; taxis (and their history). Edison, batteries, more batteries and White Steam Cars
In the air, the Davidson Aeroplane, the Lebaudy airship (and a wiki) and the Antionette Co. (Fr) made planes and efficient gas engines 1903-12. An Antionette engine powered Paul Cornu’s first helicopter in 1907. The Wright Bros first flight and Alberto Santos Dumont (Brazilian airship maker and first European flight), and, and , and, and a wiki. And of course, Count Zeppelin.
Finally, a Renault racer, an Oldsmobile Van, a Steam Motorcycle, and Sir Marcus Samuel Bart., who started Royal Dutch Shell.
William Thomson: Transatlantic Cable – Lord Kelvin
1851 Dover-Calais cable.
1853 Port Patrick-Donaghadee cable
1856 Atlantic Telegraph Co., William Thomson a director.
1858 Ireland-Newfoundland cable. Proves Thomson’s mirror galvanometer, but quickly fails.
1865-6 Two attempts, 2nd a success (plus recovers the first cable and completes it). Thomson knighted.
1892 Victoria creates Thomson (then Pres. of Royal Society) Baron Kelvin of Netherhall.
(Alexander Russell, Lord Kelvin: His Life and Work, 1912)
Paris Pneumatic post network
1867: Wheatstone Automatic telegraph – “electric Jacquard” used morse code on punched tape.
1874: Jean Maurice Emile Baudot’s 12x line multiplexer uses 5-unit binary electrical pulses. Baudot’s apparatus was very stressful to operate, due to the timing requirements. But in general, technological improvement changed telegraphy from a high-skill to a low-skill job.
The telephone completely eliminated need for skilled intermediary. June 1877: 230 phones, July: 750, August: 1300, 1880: 30k.
Samuel FB Morse and Jedediah Morse – Illuminati conspiracy.
A couple more books on Tesla (and also on Edison, Westinghouse, Steinmetz, etc.) came in today, so there’s info to process…
1905: “How to recognize the Autos of Today” and. Also the Berliet “French Mercedes”, How to recognize buses, and, and; taxis (and their history). Edison, batteries, more batteries and White Steam Cars
In the air, the Davidson Aeroplane, the Lebaudy airship (and a wiki) and the Antionette Co. (Fr) made planes and efficient gas engines 1903-12. An Antionette engine powered Paul Cornu’s first helicopter in 1907. The Wright Bros first flight and Alberto Santos Dumont (Brazilian airship maker and first European flight), and, and , and, and a wiki. And of course, Count Zeppelin.
Finally, a Renault racer, an Oldsmobile Van, a Steam Motorcycle, and Sir Marcus Samuel Bart., who started Royal Dutch Shell.
Scientists
03/20/2009 16:05
John Gribbin, The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of Its Greatest Inventors (New York: Random House, 2002).
This is a conflicted book. The first thing the author tells us in the Introduction is that “the most important thing that Science has taught us about our place in the Universe is that we are not special.” Of course, he then goes on for 647 pages telling us all about the special people who proved this fact. He tells us that “what is much more important than human genius is the development of technology, and it is no surprise that the start of the scientific revolution ‘coincides’ with the development of the telescope and the microscope.” But technology is also developed by intelligent people – some might call them geniuses. And he repeatedly argues against rapid change, believing instead that “we see science progressing by evolution, not revolution.” (561) He reminds us that catastrophism was connected with religious arguments like the story of the Great Flood (314), which may explain some of his dislike for theories of rapid change. But the reader gets the impression he's arguing against Thomas Kuhn (an Amazon reviewer picked this up, too. Is Gribbin known for this? I haven't read anything else by him), even though he never mentions Kuhn.
The best feature of The Scientists is its focus on the wider cast of characters surrounding the well-known names, and on the families of the famous scientists and the environments they lived and worked in. This provides a basis for Gribbin’s argument that science advances through the contributions of many. The story of evolution is richer when Darwin is surrounded by Charles Lyell and Alfred Russel Wallace, not to mention his grandfather Erasmus (who in addition to his original theories of evolution translated Linnaeus into English -- and who I’ve been interested in for a while, so I ordered Desmond King-Hele’s book on him) and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Gribbin doesn’t mention Robert Chambers’ Vestiges). Similarly, Gribbin explains the connection between chemistry (molecular bonding and especially Linus Pauling’s discovery of hydrogen bonds), X-ray crystallography, and Watson & Crick’s elaboration of the DNA molecule. It’s interesting that Pauling (originally a quantum physicist) was quite close to solving the puzzle, and that Rosalind Franklin’s “crucial X-ray data” played a “vital role” in the building of the double-helix model, for which she never received proper credit. (565)
This is a conflicted book. The first thing the author tells us in the Introduction is that “the most important thing that Science has taught us about our place in the Universe is that we are not special.” Of course, he then goes on for 647 pages telling us all about the special people who proved this fact. He tells us that “what is much more important than human genius is the development of technology, and it is no surprise that the start of the scientific revolution ‘coincides’ with the development of the telescope and the microscope.” But technology is also developed by intelligent people – some might call them geniuses. And he repeatedly argues against rapid change, believing instead that “we see science progressing by evolution, not revolution.” (561) He reminds us that catastrophism was connected with religious arguments like the story of the Great Flood (314), which may explain some of his dislike for theories of rapid change. But the reader gets the impression he's arguing against Thomas Kuhn (an Amazon reviewer picked this up, too. Is Gribbin known for this? I haven't read anything else by him), even though he never mentions Kuhn.
The best feature of The Scientists is its focus on the wider cast of characters surrounding the well-known names, and on the families of the famous scientists and the environments they lived and worked in. This provides a basis for Gribbin’s argument that science advances through the contributions of many. The story of evolution is richer when Darwin is surrounded by Charles Lyell and Alfred Russel Wallace, not to mention his grandfather Erasmus (who in addition to his original theories of evolution translated Linnaeus into English -- and who I’ve been interested in for a while, so I ordered Desmond King-Hele’s book on him) and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Gribbin doesn’t mention Robert Chambers’ Vestiges). Similarly, Gribbin explains the connection between chemistry (molecular bonding and especially Linus Pauling’s discovery of hydrogen bonds), X-ray crystallography, and Watson & Crick’s elaboration of the DNA molecule. It’s interesting that Pauling (originally a quantum physicist) was quite close to solving the puzzle, and that Rosalind Franklin’s “crucial X-ray data” played a “vital role” in the building of the double-helix model, for which she never received proper credit. (565)
Intellectual Origins
01/15/2009 14:01
Adair was apparently a legendary professor, who mentored a generation of historians. I first ran into him in the introduction to Daniel Sisson’s published dissertation. Sisson pretty much lifted his thesis, it turns out, from Adair’s introduction. But Adair was much more careful in his statement than Sisson turned out to be in his extrapolation of it.
This dissertation was unpublished forever, but the list of borrowers of the original document at Yale is supposedly a who’s who of history, at least in the minds of the borrowers. Many of Adair’s grad students seem to have found hints and ideas in it that they were able to pursue in their own studies.
Adair begins by situating his study as a post-Beard analysis of Jefferson and Madison’s political ideas. He asks whether something more should be added to Beard’s economic analysis, to explain why, although Hamilton and Madison’s economic ideas were “practically identical,” Madison, “the great antiparty philosopher of the Constitutional Convention, went into opposition and helped organize a highly effective party with Jefferson—supposedly Hamilton’s direct antithesis in economic doctrine”? (9-10)
The answer, Adair says, is that Jefferson and Madison shared a political outlook informed by the classical traditions going all the way back to Aristotle. Hamilton was also a student of the classics, Adair says; but his scholarship was shallower, and he failed to adapt what he learned in the ancient texts to the conditions in early America. He was too much of an idealist.
This is an interesting argument, and intuitively it’s very satisfying. Elite education in the eighteenth century was classical, and all three men (and John Adams, and the rest of the members of the Constitutional Convention) had a shared language. Adair makes his case that the founders didn’t just come up with their political philosophy by watching their neighbors in the Virginia piedmont, as some Turner-influenced historians apparently claimed. But the question of specifically how each man was able to adapt this shared classical heritage into their various plans for the American republic is left largely unanswered.
Adair leans heavily on the Scottish philosophers, especially David Hume, as progenitors of the founding fathers’ world view. He lists the books Madison studied under (Scottish) John Witherspoon at Princeton. In addition to Leibniz, Newton, and Descartes, Madison read Shaftesbury, Locke, Hume, Hutcheson, Mandeville, and Adam Smith. (26) The inclusion of Smith suggests the Republicans were not the economic illiterates that supporters of Hamilton make them out to be. Fisher Ames described Madison as “a thorough master of almost every public question that can arise, or he will spare no pains to become so.” (28) In a note, Adair mentions that by the 1850s, the prominence of continental political classics in school curricula was decreasing, resulting in an observed decrease in references to the ancients in political speeches. (31) But all evidence suggests Madison and Jefferson (and their serious contemporaries) arrived on the scene at the peak of classical scholarship.
Adair says Jefferson’s most powerful influence was Aristotle, and that the hope that a class of virtuous yeomen could stabilize a republic was lifted directly from the Politics. He describes Shay’s rebellion as a debtors’ revolt, echoing an interpretation based on politically motivated contemporary sources (like Knox’s letters to Washington). Leonard Richards’ recent study of the members of the rebellion contradicts the traditional story. Adair says the “ominous event” (quoting Madison, 61) sent the founders rushing back to their shelves for answers in “Thucydides, Xenophon, and Aristotle.” Maybe this was part of the solution…but maybe it also limited the effectiveness of the final solution. The two missing pieces of Adair’s puzzle seem to repeatedly be: how did regular people react to all this classically-inspired politics, and how accurately did the founders really understand their situation, before they fit it to the models written by the masters two millennia earlier?
Adair hints at the possibility of over-applying classical analogies, but only among Jefferson and Madison’s adversaries. Hamilton is described as brilliant, but with a shallow understanding of the classics (76). Adams’ use of Thucydides account of the sedition at Corcyra in his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States is shown to be not only “the most tenuous” of analogies (65), but also to miss the point that Shays and his rebels were behaving symbolically rather than trying to take over the State of Massachusetts. Adair argues that because the principals of the debates believed these analogies significant, we should consider their relationship to the events. This is probably true with respect to Adams’ paranoia, and may be an approach to assessing not only the strengths (as Adair suggests), but the weaknesses of the founders’ vision.
Gouverneur Morris’ posthumous opinion of Hamilton is quoted at length, and probably contains the seeds of a book or two:
Our poor friend Hamilton bestrode his hobby to the great annoyance of his friends, and not without injury to himself. More a theoretic than a practical man, he was not sufficiently convinced that a system may be good in itself, and bad in relation to particular circumstances. He knew well that his favorite form [monarchy] was inadmissible, unless as the result of a civil war; and I suspect that his belief in that which he called an approaching crisis arose from a conviction, that the kind of government most suitable, in his opinion, to this extensive country could be established in no other way. (77) (from)
“For nearly a generation American political thinkers had shared Locke’s exclusive concern,” Adair says, “with curbing the powers of kings. But now in the summer of 1787, the Convention delegates were almost unanimously agreed that the people themselves presented an additional problem.” (109) And perhaps the delegates’ nearly unanimous opinion highlights yet another problem. Ironically, after arguing that Beard ignored politics and ideas, Adair blames Hamilton for economic policies that “divided the American people into sharper cleavage than had existed since 1776.” (114) The reduction of the Confederacy’s problems to Hamilton’s national financial schemes, and the reduction of Hamilton to “a victim of his Plutarch and his Tacitus,” is the book’s greatest weakness. (Adair even quotes Woodrow Wilson: Hamilton was “a very great man, but not a great American,” to which a previous reader wrote in the margin, “TOSH!”)
Adair says Hamilton’s reductive mistake was his assumption of class struggle, that ultimately “faction [would] pivot entirely upon the conflict of haves and have-nots.” (120) Madison saw past this Hobbesian error after long review of his classics, Adair says, and “challenged the basic postulate upon which the ancient mixed government depended for its justification; and in so doing he exploded the justification for a permanent will in the community to keep the immutable strife of the few and the many within bounds.” But he never really says what those other elements of factionalism were, or how Madison proposed to keep them in check or play one against the other to stabilize his system. This is where a look back at Turner, who Adair threw out in the preface, might be helpful. Both Jefferson and Madison had experienced the frontier, and when the Louisiana Purchase was completed Madison breathed a sigh of relief and added a generation onto his expectation for America’s survival. (160) But Madison did the math, and decided that by 1930, Americans would “necessarily [be] reduced by a competition for employment to wages which afford them the bare necessities of life. The proportion being without property…cannot be expected to sympathize sufficiently with its right to be safe depositories of power over them.” (161) “It would be impossible to base a republican government on a minority, without creating ‘a standing military force, dangerous to all parties and to liberty itself.’” Madison’s classics apparently held no answer; he simply hoped when the time came “the wisdom of the wisest patriots” in a future generation would pull them through (from “Notes on Suffrage” written during the Virginia Convention of 1829-30).
The American Revolution of 1800
12/29/2008 13:56
This was originally a PhD dissertation, apparently for Douglass Adair, who Sisson says inspired his research. It begins well, and I was impressed enough after 30 pages to want a copy of this for my library (which is saying something, as I’ve pared that down to about 30 books). The reviewers almost unanimously hated it, and the book does bog down pretty quickly, while at the same time not going deep enough into unpublished primary material. Most of Sisson’s primary quotes seem to be lifted from secondary sources or published selections of his subjects’ papers.
Even so, Sisson’s thesis is provocative. He challenges historians with finding the modern two party system too soon in post-Revolutionary America, insisting that this was emphatically NOT the goal of anyone in the 1790s. Instead, he builds a definition of revolution based on Jefferson’s understanding of the classics. Following the Gracchi brothers, Sisson says, Jefferson and his Republican associates built a “second city” revolutionary movement to take power away from the Federalists they believed were betraying the spirit of ’76 and moving toward monarchy.
Sisson quotes Jefferson’s claim that “The Revolution of 1800 was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.” One of his reviewers points out that this quote comes from a private letter, and is taken out of context. Regardless, it may highlight Jefferson’s understanding of what he was doing in the 1790s. Sisson opens an interesting train of thought here. Why did the ’76 revolution fail to produce the changes Jefferson wanted, requiring a second “revolution” in 1800? What did the 1790s teach Americans about the operation of democracy, in a world where there wasn’t the unanimity they may have expected? Did the Republicans think they were wiping out the monarchists and finishing the revolution, while at the same time they were showing Americans how to operate their democracy? Did Henry Adams undermine Jefferson’s own interpretation of his campaign and presidency?
Sisson claims “During the period of High Federalist ascendancy Jefferson noted again and again the Federalists’ lack of faith in the meaning of the first American Revolution.” (11) There’s a lot of space to examine the real intentions of the diverse group that united to produce the revolution, and no reason to suppose that Jefferson’s interpretation of its “meaning” is the true or legitimate one. It succeeded because he rallied the people to it in 1800, but was he following or shaping public opinion? Sisson also observes that Jefferson “adopted a posture of philosophical vagueness that allowed his opponents to read into his intentions a positive view of the future.” Jefferson’s ability to clothe (disguise?) his program to create a mass movement for it is interesting, but it’s precisely the idea of partisanship that Sisson is arguing against.
Sisson mentions Bernard Bailyn and Douglass Adair repeatedly; the best things I get out of this book may be echoes of them, and the references to their work—that I’ll now go and find.
Sisson portrays Adams’ firing of Pickering from his cabinet as his moment of clarity, when he realizes the High Federalists have betrayed the revolution and “plung[es] a sword” into his own administration. (21) It’s interesting that he refuses to throw Adams under the bus; but he needs to sustain that argument that the original revolution lived on in the minds of the founders, so how could Adams betray it? Even though his argument is weak, I come away from it with new interest in both Jefferson and Adams.
Jefferson’s remark that “The same political parties which now agitate the U.S. have existed through all time,” (50) pretty much damns Sisson’s argument that the politicians of 1790 were unaware of partisanship. His point that they abhorred the idea of parties and factions in their writing begs questions about the purposes of the writings he quotes. Could Jefferson and his contemporaries have desired a one-party state in the same way current politicians desire “bipartisanship”? As a code for “us getting our way and the other guys seeing the errors of their ways?
Were the Republicans and Federalists REALLY scared it was going to come down to war again? Or were they using popular reaction to the French Revolution for political purposes? No doubt they were sincere; but maybe that’s the problem. Maybe we don’t like to see the “founding fathers” using all these tawrdy political devices to achieve what we consider our historic destiny?
To the extent that the standard histories see the 1790s as the beginning of a completely modern 2 party system, I think Sisson makes a compelling counter-argument. Ironically, it reminds me a lot of the 2008 campaign. Two parties each trying to completely wipe out the other, a candidate with a revolutionary goal which he dissembles in order to build a mass movement and avoid alarming his opponents, charges by ideological purists that “he’s not going far enough.”
Sisson opens some space around (what he claims is) the standard interpretation and stirs things up, as does Jefferson’s observation that the same parties have always existed. If this is the case, then what did the founders EXPECT to happen after they won? And, if the binary, 2-party choice continually reproduces these poles, is this really the way to go? If the only choices are black and white, then people will choose the pole they think is closest to their real color, even though it’s a poor match. Maybe the mistake is in mobilizing campaigns around these poles (or believing that’s what the founders were about), rather than changing the game so that everyone gets more of what they want. If Sisson’s point is that the founders thought they were doing that, then it was an interesting one.
Hahvud
01/20/2009 23:08
Drove down to Harvard today, to look at the Norman Himes papers at the Countway Medical Library Special Collections. The Library isn’t in Cambridge, it’s in Boston on Shattuck Street, between about five hospitals. Oddly, I was just reading an 1811 letter from Nathan Smith to Dr. George Shattuck last night. The reading room I was in was called Holmes Hall, which I assume is for Oliver Wendell Holmes, but I didn’t ask. It’s a nice, wood-paneled room, lined on three sides with books. Not ancient medical texts, but lots of reference books: Who was who, National Biography, that sort of thing. The entire wall behind the librarian’s desk was a card catalog. Luckily, I didn’t have to use it. They had a nicely-bound finding aid that had been typed up by someone on a grant from Ortho Pharmaceuticals in 1973. That was about the time Mary Lee Esty was writing her biographical essay on Knowlton for them, too.
The archive has 133 boxes of Himes papers. I asked for four, and they appeared in minutes. There was no one else there today, though. Maybe it’s still break at Harvard. Or everybody was out watching the inauguration. The notes Himes took on Knowlton didn’t reveal any major secrets. There was a copyright date for the first edition of the Fruits of Philosophy in Rhode Island, which supports the story that Knowlton spent some time there in 1831. But the majority of the notes covered things I’ve already learned at Ashfield, Deerfield or online. It’s a lot easier, now that I can find all the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal articles on Google Books.
In the future, my research trips will probably be more focused on primary sources. I really need to read all the Boston Investigators from the 1830s, while Kneeland was in Boston. And I have to find out where Knowlton appeared and spoke at Free Enquirers’ conventions and meetings. I suspect he did a lot more of that than even Himes suspected. One interesting connection, that Laura Lovett at UMass suggested to me last fall, is that Himes was researching connections between the birth control movement and eugenics. I don’t think it went back to the 1830s, but the utopians like Owen and Wright may have contributed ideas to the early eugenicists, even if they weren’t thinking along those lines themselves. Maybe a topic for a paper someday.
The archive has 133 boxes of Himes papers. I asked for four, and they appeared in minutes. There was no one else there today, though. Maybe it’s still break at Harvard. Or everybody was out watching the inauguration. The notes Himes took on Knowlton didn’t reveal any major secrets. There was a copyright date for the first edition of the Fruits of Philosophy in Rhode Island, which supports the story that Knowlton spent some time there in 1831. But the majority of the notes covered things I’ve already learned at Ashfield, Deerfield or online. It’s a lot easier, now that I can find all the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal articles on Google Books.
In the future, my research trips will probably be more focused on primary sources. I really need to read all the Boston Investigators from the 1830s, while Kneeland was in Boston. And I have to find out where Knowlton appeared and spoke at Free Enquirers’ conventions and meetings. I suspect he did a lot more of that than even Himes suspected. One interesting connection, that Laura Lovett at UMass suggested to me last fall, is that Himes was researching connections between the birth control movement and eugenics. I don’t think it went back to the 1830s, but the utopians like Owen and Wright may have contributed ideas to the early eugenicists, even if they weren’t thinking along those lines themselves. Maybe a topic for a paper someday.
