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Archive for the ‘American History’ Category

Patrick Mulcahey Corrects Dallas Buyers Club

Posted in American History, Reading on November 13, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Patrick Mulcahey has published a passionate, insightful corrective to the movie Dallas Buyers Club on the Huffington Post. Drawing on the larger history of AIDS activism and his own experience working with Project Inform, he writes the work of gay men back into the story. (The fact that a movie about the AIDS crisis needs to have this type of corrective is pretty shocking). I think this is my favorite part: “I’m a writer myself. I get the attraction to the unlikely hero, the conversion story — St. Paul struck by lightning on the road to Damascus. But nobody goes on to claim that St. Paul invented Jesus. Dallas Buyers Club steals our story and tells it like we weren’t even there.”

By the way, Patrick is not only the winner of 6 daytime Emmys, he is also my cousin.

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New Picture of Edmonia Lewis!

Posted in American Art, American History, Seeing, Stuff I like, Women's History on February 2, 2013| 1 Comment »

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore has recently announced that it has acquired a previously unknown picture of Edmonia Lewis, a sculptor who was Harriet Hosmer’s contemporary in Rome. The museum’s Deputy Director of Audience Engagement Jacqueline Copeland came across the image in a box of photographs in an antique shop and recognized the artist. Copeland will discuss finding the image at a brown bag lunch on Feb. 7.

The photograph is not the most astounding Lewis discovery–her sculpture Cleopatra was found in the storage room of a mall! And Marilyn Richardson only discovered her date and place of death two years ago.

On a less happy not, in Ken Burn’s Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson there is a reference to African-American artists that is illustrated by a picture that I think is clearly meant to be Lewis.  But is a picture of Vinnie Ream, a white woman who was another sculptor who passed through Rome. And Lewis’s birthplace is still unknown.  (At least I think, unless there has been another Lewis discovery).

Thanks to Sandra Payne for alerting me to the discovery of the photo.

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Sick from Freedom

Posted in American History, Harriet Jacobs, Reading, Women's History on June 15, 2012| 1 Comment »

I have been from this blog for too long.  Hopefully, this post will be the start of more regular updates.
I was excited to read about Jim Down’s forthcoming book Sick from Freedom in the New York Times this week.  The book addresses the health crises which freed people faced after the Civil War.  As press material for the volume explains, “With emancipation, African Americans seized the chance to move, migrating as never before. But in their journey to freedom, they also encountered yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, dysentery, malnutrition, and exposure.”  This book forms an important part of our ever-evolving understanding of Reconstruction.  I may show my students this article in the fall to help them understand historiography. (Another good book which complicates our understanding of this time is Ronald E. Butchart’s Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861-1876, which I reviewed for the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society last year.)

Downs’ interest in this project was inspired in part by his work on the Harriet Jacobs Papers. I joined the HJ team after he had left, so we never crossed paths, except when I used his research reports to write annotation. I do wish the Times had mentioned that the papers had been published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2008, and that the volumes include important annotation about disease in the post-emancipation South.  (Instead, the article links to the kind-of-clunky website I helped put together in 2002, which has my name in the web address.  It looked ok for the time!) But it was still good to see Harriet Jacobs mentioned.

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Harriet Hosmer: A Cultural Biography on Lambda Literary

Posted in American History, Reading, Women's History on March 19, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Marie J. Kuda has written a nice review of Harriet Hosmer: A Cultural Biography on Lambda Literary.  I especially appreciate the fact that Kuda puts the book in the context of the larger historical project of uncovering  “the female enclaves buried under patriarchal scholarship.” And, to be immodest, of course I like this: “Culkin has added a highly readable, well annotated study to the increasing pantheon of creative lesbians supported by networks of friends and lovers.”

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Harriet Hosmer in Midwest Book Review

Posted in American Art, American History, Reading, Women's History on December 16, 2011| 1 Comment »

Harriet Hosmer: A Cultural Biography is included in the November edition of  Midwest Book Review’s Biography Shelf.  There are some other books that look fascinating as well, including “Stay By Me, Roses: The Life of American Artist Alice Archer Sewall James, 1870-1955.”  Hopefully now that winter break is almost here, I will have a chance to read a few of them.

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Rachel Maddow, Ken Burns, and Prohibition

Posted in American History on October 4, 2011| 1 Comment »

I’m a little behind on my television watching, as the new tv season collides with the busiest part of the semester.  But I have been taping (I mean DVRing) Ken Burns Prohibition and interested to see what he does with the topic. I did enjoy watching Rachel Maddow, who loves her cocktails, interview Burns last week.

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A Brief Trip to New Bedford

Posted in American History, Harriet Jacobs, Women's History on September 22, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I’ll be on whirlwind trip to New Bedford tomorrow, to speak at “Old Dartmouth Roots: A Genealogy & Local History Symposium” at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. My panel is titled “Unlikely Connections: The Grinnells and the Howlands; the Jacobses and the Knoxes.” The conversation, or at least my part, will be about Harriet Jacobs‘ two connections to New Bedford.

One connection was through the prominent Grinnell family. For years, Jacobs’ worked for Nathaniel Parker Willis and second wife, Cornelia Grinnell Willis, who had been adopted by her uncle, the merchant and politician Joseph Grinnell. Cornelia helped arrange the purchase that led to Jacobs’ freedom. Although Jacobs always resented the fact that she had to be purchased to be free, she stayed close to family throughout her life. The Willises, after Nathaniel’s death, lived in Jacobs’ boarding house in Cambridge in 1870. Bailey, the youngest Willis child who became a prominent geologist and explorer, often visited Harriet and her daughter Louisa in Washington D.C. when they were all living in Washington, D.C., in the 1890s and two of the Willis daughters–Edith and Lidian–as well as Cornelia helped care for Jacobs during her final illness. Bailey accompanied Harriet’s body from D.C. to Cambridge after her death in March 1897; she was buried in Mt. Auburn Cemetery. Louisa stayed in contact with the family, living with Edith in her final years.

Jacobs other connection to the area was through her half-brother Elijah Knox. He was born to a freewoman in Edenton, N.C., was indentured to the age of 21, and eventually moved to New Bedford. One of his son’s was named William Jacob Knox, his middle name likely a nod to Harriet and her brother, John S. Jacobs. William had five children, all of whom were well educated and successful. Two of the brothers–William, Jr., and Lawrence–were among only 30 African American to receive Ph.D.s in Chemistry between 1919 and 1935; William worked on the Manhattan Project and was a civil rights leader in Rochester, NY, among other accomplishments.

By the way, the New Bedford Whaling Museum has a great Flickr stream.

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Women’s History in Public

Posted in American History, NYC, Women's History on August 25, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Sometimes, you can encounter women’s history outside of textbooks, women’s history classes, and monographs–and it is always very exciting to me when it happens.  This week, I have read two great blog posts on sites not devoted to women’s history.  The first is Louise Bernikow’s article “The Radical Rich,” on NYCityWoman, about 3 wealthy women who fought for suffrage in NYC. There are some great lines in this piece- from the opening sentence (“By the early 20th century, New York was a city of women in revolt”) to the description of Alva Vanderbilt Belmont (“Like a lioness loosed from her cage, Belmont became an important strategist and leader for suffrage”).  There is also a fantastic slideshow.  The second post is Susan Amper’s post about Anna Katharine Green’s mystery novel The Leavenworth Case, published in 1878.  Amper notes, “Green’s first novel predates the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes by nine years, yet it seems much more modern.” I can’t wait to read it.

Another great site in women’s history this summer is the exhibition “Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore” at The Jewish Museum, on the Upper East Side.  It offers a fascinating glimpse into the lives of Claribelle and Etta Cone, siblings who helped introduce avante-gaurde modern art to the US through the amazing collection they amassed and their friendship with Matisse.  It is open until Sept. 25–see it if you can!

 

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Lucretia Mott talk at the Framington Quaker Meeting House

Posted in American History, Stuff I like, Women's History on August 22, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Carol Faulkner, chair of the History Department at Syracuse University, will give a talk titled “Lucretia Mott, Quakers, and the Early Women’s Rights Movement” at the Framington Quaker Meeting House, in Framington, NY, on Aug. 27 at 2 PM.  The Meetinghouse, built in 1816, was the site of the Genesee Yearly Meeting of Friends and, according to its website, was a “national crucible for major reform movements in the nineteenth century.” It has been the center of major preservation and restoration effort since suffering major damage in a windstorm in 2006.  Faulkner has just written a wonderful new biography of Mott–Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America–and this is sure to be a wonderful talk in a fascinating setting.  I wish I could be there–if you are in the area, check it out!

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Happy Anniversary, Brooklyn Bridge (a few days late)

Posted in American History, NYC on May 26, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Tuesday was the 128th Anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge.  It is one of my favorite NYC sites–I wrote about my personal history with the bridge as part of the NEH Along the Shore workshop last summer.  In that workshop I also learned that Irish immigrants protested the opening celebration of the bridge, as the date coincided with Queen Victoria’s birthday

For your enjoyment–a television commercial for the 100th anniversary, with appearances by some great ’80s characters.

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