Posts Tagged ‘American history’
Writing with scissors…
Over at the New York Review of Books, Christopher Benfey has a fascinating– and illuminating– review of Ellen Gruber Garvey’s Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance, in which the author makes the case that scrapbooks—which everyone seems to have kept during the nineteenth century—“are the direct ancestors of our digital information management.”
There are examples of politically-focused compendia (Garvey’s primary interest), but also wonderful tastes of more artistic applications: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman… and Mark Twain:
Mark Twain was perhaps the king of American scrapbook culture. According to the OED, he was the first writer to use “scrapbook” as a verb, writing in 1881 about the origins of his book A Tramp Abroad, “I scrap-booked these reports during several months.” Prolific in inventing ways to lose money, especially in his attempts to predict how books would be published in the future (not, he found to his chagrin, with type fashioned from clay), Twain successfully marketed his own patented design for a more efficient scrapbook, outfitted with no-muss adhesive pages and an index awaiting entries. Twain’s scrapbook can be seen as the ancestor of the lavish “Keeping Memories Alive” scrapbook industry today, with its glitter and fluff and hobby stores…
Twain’s loose and baggy non-fiction books Roughing It, The Innocents Abroad, and A Tramp Abroad were assembled from his own carefully maintained travel scrapbooks, and retain some of the pleasingly serendipitous and fragmented feel of life on the road.
Still, as Twain’s buddy William Dean Howells noted, “anyone may compose a scrapbook, and offer it to the public with nothing like Mark Twain’s good-fortune. Everything seems to depend upon the nature of the scraps, after all.”
Readers can find the whole story (before they hop over to Pinterest) at “Scrapbook Nation.”
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As we reach for the paste, we might recall that it was on this date in 1750 that the first professional theatrical production of a Shakespeare play– an “altered” version of Richard III— was mounted in New York City at its first formal performance space, The Theater on Nassau Street. Sitting just east of Broadway, it was a two-story wooden hall with a capacity of about 280. Actor-managers Walter Murray and Thomas Kean set up shop there, and opened with the Bard. But their repertory also included the first documented performance of a musical in New York — John Gay’s The Beggars Opera, which they premiered on December 3rd of that same year.
The site of the theater in 2004
Redistricting on the grandest scale…
Dr. Andrew Shears is a geographer by both vocation and avocation. Fascinated by American history, and by what might have been, he created the map above…
I discovered a list that really intrigued me like none other: the List of U.S. State Partition Proposals. For a geographer/cartographer who’s a U.S.-specialist and who’s interested in alternate history, this was Kryptonite for my productivity. From this list, I stumbled onto listings for U.S. Territories that Failed to Become States and the listing for the hypothetical 51st State. I even came across a nice little book called Lost States, a humorous account from Michael Trinklein that briefly explores a number of random states that never quite happened.
After reading all of these things, and all of the linked pages connected — that’s where Wikipedia really sucks you in — I, of course, allowed my own mind to wander and I came up with the beginnings of a historical geography narrative for the United States of my own, drawing on each of these sources. How could I spell this out? Well, I’m no novelist, because I just really don’t have the imagination or skills necessary to put together a story in that format. However, I can make maps here and there, and I firmly believe that maps can do a pretty good job telling a story.
What did I end up with? My own alternate history U.S. map of 124 states…
As one watches the U.S. government congeal into an unappetizing mess– as representatives, “serving” districts and states shaped though decades and decades of gerrymandering, vote narrow interests in search of advantage in elections-to-come– we might ponder Dr. Shear’s reminder of how differently it might all have looked… if only for the reminder that it didn’t have to be– nor does it have in the future to be– this way.
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As we wonder what in the world became of Mr. Smith, we might recall that it was on this date in 1861 that President James Buchanan signed into law the Congressional Act creating the “organized incorporated Territory of Colorado.” The land had come to the U.S. in 1848 as part of the spoils of the Mexican-American War. Then populated virtually exclusively by Native Americans, white settlers flooded in with the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush in 1858. Pressure from those new arrivals, along with a different kind of pressure felt by Washington as Southern states were seceding in the run-up to the Civil War (this was the period immediately before Lincoln’s inauguration), spurred the action– which expanded the Union and gave it access to the gold and other minerals in the Southern Rockies.
“Even bad coffee is better than no coffee at all”*…
Hot or iced, drip, French press, espresso, Chemex or Keurig, each of us downs about 23 gallons of joe a year on average. It’s in our blood. It’s also on our streets, where Starbucks outposts outnumber hospitals and colleges. And even on our resumes: 161,000 people list “coffee” as a skill on LinkedIn.
But the truth is, our cup is half empty. We could be drinking a lot more coffee and, in fact, we used to. In 1946, when America’s thirst for coffee peaked, each of us swallowed about 48 gallons a year on average, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture — more than twice current consumption. “We’d drink coffee with breakfast, coffee with lunch, and coffee with dinner,” says John Sicher, publisher of Beverage Digest. “And mostly, we’d drink it at home.”
The whole dark-roasted story at “America’s coffee cup is half full.”
* David Lynch
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As we reach for another soft drink, we might recall that it was on this date in 1905 that Paul P. Harris, a Chicago attorney, met with three friends– Gustave E. Loehr (a mining engineer), Silvester Schiele (a coal merchant), and Hiram E. Shorey (a tailor)– to found The Rotary Club, the world’s first service club. It was so named, as the friends intended to rotate the site of their meetings among members’ offices. Now known as Rotary International, the organization has 34,282 local clubs and over 1.2 million members worldwide.
[coffee photo sourced here; Rotary founders, here]
“A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both”*…
The U.S. Census has long been a lightning rod for controversy. Does it wildly undercount minorities? Wildly overcount minorities? Or—as Michelle Bachmann warned us—is it a liberal plot orchestrated by ACORN?
But no one has ever accused our Census Bureau of being a hotbed of…graphic design. Until now.
A Handsome Atlas celebrates Uncle Sam’s data chops by reproducing three Statistical Atlases from the latter decades of the 19th century…
It’s the work of Jonathan Soma, cofounder of the Brooklyn Brainery and stat freak (tracker of everything from Tokyo breakfast habits to bike lanes)… and it’s fascinating.
… you can follow the decline of Charleston, South Carolina, after the Civil War and the sudden ascendency of Milwaukee following the arrival of Miller, Pabst, Schlitz, and Blatz.
Curious footnotes in American history pop up everywhere, as Soma discovered when he spotted an apparent flaw in a U.S. map. “Where Oklahoma should be, we had I.T.,” he says. “It turns out it was Indian Territory. In 1905 the Native Americans who lived there applied for statehood. They wanted to create something called the State of Sequoia. But they were shot down, and two years later Oklahoma was made.”
Together the Atlases show a country emerging from crisis to redefine itself: more urban, diverse, and if you lived in Illinois or Kentucky, substantially more wasted [as illustrated in the chart above]…
The first Statistical Atlas of the United States of America was published in 1874 to coincide with the nation’s centennial. Two of the most stunning Atlases, from 1880 and 1890, were produced by Henry Gannett, who went on to co-found the National Geographic Society. His final Atlas even contains intimations of the Information Age. The 1890 census was the first to use a punch-card tabulating machine devised by Henry Hollerith, whose company would form the foundation of IBM…
In one regard the census has changed dramatically. While the 2000 Census broke down race into 63 categories, a century earlier we came in only five “colors.” The language of these Atlases oozes xenophobia. Maps and charts refer to “natives” and “non-natives.” Non–European Americans are lumped in as “other foreign.” And slave populations are often omitted altogether.
Then there are the “deaf mutes, paupers, and prisoners,” gathered under the heading: “Defective, Dependent, and Delinquent Classes.” Or this antiquated guide to the “insane” of 1870. I mean, who would be insensitive enough to call for a national database of the mentally ill these days?
Read the whole colorful story in Jeffrey Rotter‘s “The Motley Roots of Data Visualization in 19th Century Census Charts.”
* James Madison
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As we regret that we haven’t got more fingers and toes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1789 that George Washington became the first and only president to be unanimously elected by the Electoral College, a feat he repeated on the same date in 1792.
Washington’s overwhelming popularity made for a relatively smooth kick-off for the Republic. Still, the electoral system soon began to cause problems. History.com explains:
The peculiarities of early American voting procedure meant that although Washington won unanimous election, he still had a runner-up, John Adams, who served as vice president during both of Washington’s terms. Electors in what is now called the Electoral College named two choices for president. They each cast two ballots without noting a distinction between their choice for president and vice president. Washington was chosen by all of the electors and therefore is considered to have been unanimously elected. Of those also named on the electors’ ballots, Adams had the most votes and became vice president.
Although Washington’s overwhelming popularity prevented problems in 1789 and 1792, this procedure caused great difficulty in the elections of 1796 and 1800. In 1796, Federalist supporters of John Adams cast only one of their two votes in an effort to ensure that Adams would win the presidency without giving votes to any of the other candidates. This led to a situation in which the Federalist Adams won the highest number of votes and became president, but Thomas Jefferson, the opposing Democratic-Republican candidate, came in second and therefore became his opponent’s vice president.
In 1800, the system led to a tie between the Democratic-Republican candidates for president and vice president, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. This sent the vote to the House of Representatives, where Federalists voted for Burr instead of Jefferson, whom they despised. As a result, the Congressional vote ended in a tie 35 times before the Federalists decided to hand in blank ballots and concede the White House to Jefferson.
In 1804, the 12th Amendment to the Constitution ended this particular form of electoral chaos by stipulating that separate votes be cast for president and vice president.
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library”*…
From Babel…
The Library of Babel, “The Library of Babel,” Jorge Luis Borges
In Borges’s classic story, the entire universe is a library, a infinite labyrinth, which contains all books — that is, every possible ordering of letters and symbols, so that one full book of gibberish might differ from another only in the placement of a single comma. “Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me,” Borges’s narrator muses at the story’s end, “but I suspect that the human species — the unique species — is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.” Sigh.
… to Buffy…
Sunnydale High Library, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
At the other end of the cultural spectrum (but then again, maybe not really), sits the Sunnydale High Library, squarely on top of a Hellmouth. Don’t let that scare you away, though! This place has every book you’ll ever need on vampires, spirits, demons and beyond, and happens to be staffed by a very winsome librarian. There’s also a book cage full of weapons, just in case.
…”The Best Fictional Libraries in Pop Culture.”
* Jorge Luis Borges
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As we renew our library cards, we might recall that it was on this date in 1829 that Henry Trumbull registered (officially published) his biography of Robert Voorhis (1770-1832), an African American slave who later became a recluse in Massachusetts:
LIFE AND ADVENTURES
OF
ROBERT,
THE
HERMIT OF MASSACHUSETTS,
Who has lived 14 Years in a Cave, secluded from human society.
COMPRISING,
An account of his Birth, Parentage, Sufferings, and
providential escape from unjust and cruel Bondage
in early life–and his reasons for becoming
a Recluse.
Taken from his own mouth, and published for his benefit.
PROVIDENCE:
Printed for H. TRUMBULL
— 1829 Price 12 1-2 Cents
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