Category Archives: Culture

March 3, 2025

What I’m Reading, Spring 2025

By daseger

I’ve working my way through a stack of books this semester and looking forward to some notable new publications so I thought I’d put together a post to relieve everyone (including myself!) from the Revolutionary focus. As is generally the case with my reading lists, there’s no fiction here. I really, really wish I could read fiction, but I am for the most part an “information reader”: I’m looking for something or want to learn something. I aspire to read for pleasure but I’m not there yet. I’m always teaching and writing about history, so most of what I read is history too, but I have various sideline subjects: architecture, urban planning, folklore, art. I will often have a stack of books by my bed or desk which I will dip into for an hour or two, but for the past year I’ve been trying to break that habit and read through every book I pick up. I’ve been moderately but not completely successful in this aim. I’m also trying to kick my Amazon habit, but have been less successful in that goal! So here’s the list, in no particular order.

Big, sweeping cultural histories of monsters and fairy tales! I’ve been eagerly awaiting Humans. A Monstrous History, which was published just last month. I ordered a desk copy from the publisher, because if it’s as good as I think it will be, I will definitely use it in class. I think I know where Surekha Davies is coming from, because I read her first book on Renaissance ethnography, but she is really stretching it our here—“monsters” are a bit different in the medieval and early modern era. But every civilization has its monsters, and their creation tells us a lot about every civilization. I’ve had Warner’s Once Upon a Time for a while, but finally finished it, as I thought it would be a good companion book for the monsters.

American history always seems much more….tangible! I love books that can explain how just one thing—whether tangible or not, can be “revolutionary” so this book on the Franklin stove is right up my alley: I have a Franklin stove and have written about its companion technology, Rumford roasters! I have not received this book yet (I couldn’t order a desk copy as I don’t teach American history) but I am really looking forward to reading it. I have read No Right to an Honest Living and while it was a bit slow-going for me, I really learned a lot. I wanted to read it as I have thought and written about the Remond family here in Salem so much and I thought this book on Boston African Americans who lived at the same time might give me some insights into their lives, and it has.

Some women’s history (and literature) for Women’s History Month. These are two very accessible, informative, and complementary books: I read straight through them in a weekend. I am a fast reader but I also tend to “gut” books as they taught us in graduate school: you really can’t do that with either of these books. This is the anniversary year of Jane Austen’s birth so I expect we will get more Austen books but I suspect Jane Austen’s Bookshelf will do it for me: I liked this very personal window into her reading world.

A wide range of architecture. I guess I’m going for complementary reads here; I hadn’t planned on that, a pattern is emerging! Now that I think about it, I guess this is how I read. If I read an engaging book, I want more, or I want some kind of response. I’m not sure these that Inessential Colors and A Paradise of Houses will be complementary: I’ve only read the former and the latter is going to be published at the end of this month, I think. I pre-ordered it because its title gave me hope: Salem is just getting uglier and uglier with its new construction and I yearn for a reversal and “rebirth” back to urban integration and intention: do we even have a city planner anymore? Maybe this is not what Podemski is offering, but I’ll see. Works on pre-modern architecture that are not theory seem rare so I snapped Inessential Colors right up: it’s an academic book which explores the beginnings of the use of color in architectural renderings. I’ve been reading a lot of color theory for the next book I’m researching, on saffron, so it hit the sweet spot of architecture + color for me but it might be a bit specialized for most.

Different Forms of Memory. Here are another pair of books of which one (I’m showing two covers here because mine is on the left but I much prefer the right) I’ve read and the other I’m waiting for: I should have subtitled this post “books I planned to read.” I’m really interested in statues and other forms of public commemoration: Fallen Idols was an ok overview but it didn’t quite do it for me. I think I’ll read Erin Thompson’s Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments next. I’ve really become interested in Revolutionary remembrance because of my deep dive into the Revolution last year and this year’s commemorations. The Memory of ’76 looks like it’s going to answer a lot of questions I have about this topic, so I wanted to include it here as a reminder—it’s coming out in July.

Lightening (Liquoring) up. I have the occasional habit of posting my Friday cocktail creations to Instagram, and was rewarded with several books on alcohol this past Christmas! Kind of embarassing, but both of these gin books have some great recipes and Austen + alcohol—what could be better? I write quite a bit about the cordial consequences of early modern distillation in my book The Practical Renaissance, but Camper English has a much more accessible and expansive take on this trend: Doctors and Distillers is a really enjoyable book.

Would love some suggestions for engrossing historical fiction and public art marking history!

13 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in books, Culture

February 10, 2025

The First Loyalist of Salem

By daseger

I’ve been researching Salem’s Tories for a while, and I think it’s time to name the top guy. Gilbert Streeter, whose “Salem before the Revolution” essay is full of gossipy details and strident assertions (I don’t know if I would call it “history” but it sure is fun to read), refers to William Browne as “easily the First Citizen of Salem” in the early 1770s, but he lost that status over the course of 1774, and became the First Loyalist of Salem in my humble opinion. His classmate at Harvard, John Adams, later referred to Browne as “a solid, judicious character…They made him a judge of the superior court and that society made of him a refugee. A Tory I verily believe he never was.” I can’t really understand why Adams made that last assessment: Browne seems like the ultimate Tory to me, by his own words, and by his sacrifices, which included Salem’s grandest “mansion house,” a farmhouse in South Salem which later became the home of Revolutionary hero John Glover, and thousands of acres in Connecticut which he had inherited from his grandfather. He left all of that behind when he departed for England in the Spring of 1776, and it was formally confiscated by the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts several years later. This was not devestating to Browne: he moved on, taking on the not-uncommon role for Loyalists newly-arrived in Britain, that of tourist, for a few years before his appointment as the royal Governor of Bermuda.In his will, he left thousands of pounds to his daughters, but no property, He also refers to himself as “late of Salem.”

A Joseph Blackburn portrait of a young William Browne, donated to the Bermuda Historical Museum late in 2023 by Judith Herdeg of Chadds Ford, PA.

Browne’s commitment to the King is clear; he never faltered. His loyalism was manifest. He was one of the 17 rescinders of 1768, described by Adams as Wretches, without Sense or Sentiment, after they voted to rescind the Massachusetts Circular Letter which had been drafted by the House of Representatives (well, really Samuel Adams I believe) in opposition to the Townshend Acts.  The Letter, which was disseminated among the colonies, called for resistance, and Massachusetts Governor Francis Barnard ordered the House to rescind it or be dissolved. A vote was held in the assembly, which resulted in 92 nays and 17 yeas in favor of rescission, with Salem’s representatives Browne and Peter Frye (to whom I would give the title Second Loyalist) voting YEA. The non-rescinders were lionized in Massachusetts, and the rescinders demonized, quite literally by Paul Revere, who cast them into hell. But it was not so easy to dismiss the well-connected (and well-liked, by most accounts) Browne and Frye in Salem.

Paul Revere (1735-1818) & Benjamin Church (1734-1778), A Warm Place — Hell…. While gasping Freedom wails her future fate, and Commerce sickens with the sick’ning State… [Boston: Edes & Gill, 1768].87. A rare copy of this broadside sold last month at Christie’s for over $63,000.

On July 18, 1768, one of the most extraordinary meetings in Salem’s history occurred, a gathering that exposed the division of the town’s leaders over royal policy. It was a response to a petition of 58 men who wanted a public denouncement of Brown and Frye, expressed in more civil language, of course–or maybe not. And so the body voted to approve the action of the House of Representatives in not rescinding the Circular Letter and to thank the House for its defense of American liberties. After these votes, the moderator of the meeting, Benjamin Pickman (I think he would be my Third Tory), expressed a minority view, bolstered by other “placemen,” that what is proposed to be done (whether design’d or not) may tend to injure the Gentlemen who represented this town in the last General Assembly of this Province, and especially if so design’d, may discourage every suitable Person from serving the Town in any capacity whatsoever. About 30 men, Browne and Frye included, signed on to this addendum, but the majority judgement stood. The Boston Gazette and Country Journal followed up with an article identifying the connections (family, marriage, business) between the protesters and Browne, and anonymous letters to the editor of both Boston and Salem papers heaped scorn upon the Salem Rescinders for the next few months.

The division exposed by the town meeting in the summer of 1768 continued to harden, all the way up to the beginning of the Revolution. Browne was clearly respected and even liked, but he would not be able to survive the coming of General Thomas Gage in the early summer of 1774. As a customs official, Colonel of the militia, and one of the richest men in town with the grandest house, he was probably expected to welcome the new royal governor to the new provincial capital, but by all accounts he went above and beyond. Browne was too much in Gage’s company, and the contemporary accounts—and even the histories well into the nineteenth century—report that he “took offices from Gage” as the latter consolidated royal power over the Massachusetts government. The two offices in question were a permanent judgeship on the Superior Court as well as a seat on the new mandamus council, for which Browne took the oath of office from Gage in Salem in early August. The Patriots called for county conventions that same month, and the Ipswich Convention met on September 6 with 67 delegates representing each Essex County town in attendance. It called for the resignation of royal officeholders, and a delegation of Salem men delivered this demand to Browne in Boston shortly thereafter. He refused.  Salem’s (or the county’s) response was the resignation of the entire contingent of officers of the First Essex Regiment, rendering it impossible for Browne to continue as their colonel. There was further commentary: Browne was now “politically deceased of a pestilent and mortal disorder, and now buried in the ignominious ruins at Boston.” Clearly there was no going back for Browne: he was dead to Salem where his family had lived for five centuries. But I don’t think he wanted to go back: for him, service to his “country” meant service to his King.

P.S.William Browne has been dancing around several of my posts and I really wanted to be done with him, but I am not. There’s more to learn and write. The confiscation of his properties in 1779 has shed some light on his slaveholding in the Salem, Connecticut region, but several enslaved persons lived in his Salem, Massachusetts house as well. How did his New England past, especially this part of his past, affect his policies as the Governor of Bermuda, for which he generally receives high marks? That’s just one (more) question I have about William Browne.

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Culture

January 27, 2025

Headline History

By daseger

I went up to the Phillips Library in Rowley to look through some scrapbooks memorializing the Salem Tercentenary of 1926 late last week and found myself enchanted by the presentation and curation of one particular album put together by a certain Frank Reynolds. There were two big scrapbooks actually, and while I was expecting photographs (I guess that would be an album, rather than a scrapbook), there were only newspaper articles pasted in in a meticulous and chronological manner with attached white labels. At first I was disappointed, but then I went with it, and found the juxtaposition of the headlines really interesting. Then I came upon one particular article that really illustrated the concept of “headline history” and then I had my post.

Thus inspired, I divided my Tercentenary headlines into several categories:  1) The Big Row; 2) Getting Ready; 3) Advice to Tourists; 4) Dress Up; 5)) Crowds; 6) Presidential Address.

The Big Row was over the date of the founding of Salem, actually no, it was over what “founding” meant. Everyone knew that Roger Conant came down from Gloucester to Salem in 1626 with the “Old Planters” but William Crowninshield Endicott, Jr., the President of the Essex Institute, insisted that Conant and his colleagues were mere “fishermen and squatters” and Salem wasn’t really founded until his ancestor John Endecott arrived with the first royal charter in 1628. So Salem’s Tercentenary should be delayed for two years. The most eminent Salem historian of the time, Sidney Perley, made it clear that this was a ridiculous stance, and resigned in protest from his curatorial postition at the Essex Institute. Then Endicott resigned, and that was the situation in March of 1926, only a few months before the celebrations were to begin. I’m really not sure how it was resolved, but it took a lot of meetings and made a lot of headlines. Endicott went on to become President of the Massachusetts Historical Society, so maybe all the Boston Brahmins got together and offered him a bigger prize to back down.

Full speed ahead! We get some great headlines about getting ready. A lot of focus on cleaning Salem up. There was one big new project—a pineapple-topped bandstand on Salem Common—but much more of an emphasis on restoring and scrubbing (reports on parades later on often noted how clean Salem’s streets were). Hamilton Hall was stripped of its paint; the massive train depot was sandblasted.

There were some interesting marketing campaigns associated with the Tercententary. Every Salem store seems to have dressed up its windows with historical scenes; Parker Brothers reissued its first board game, The Mansion of Happiness. There seems to have been an outreach to Quebec, because of Salem’s large Franco-American population, but also to other areas of the country, and I think that might explain these odd witch headlines. The Salem Tourist Camp at Forest River Park seems extraordinary to me: this very same space hosted a refugee camp after the Great Salem Fire just twelve years earlier (and no, the Fire was not “kind to the city.”)

So many “antiques”! The word is used very broadly: houses, dresses, furnishings, all on display. There was a great opening of houses throughout Salem, and also a great opening of attics. While the parades presented a broad overview of Salem’s centuries, the open houses and performances were very focused on the Colonial: and its revival.

The entire July week was jam-packed: THREE parades, a big bonfire on the fourth in the Salem tradition, fireworks in the Willows along with a triple parachute jump from a hot air balloon and then an attempted quadruple jump two days later by Louise Gardner (who would fall to her death before an Atlanta crowd of 15,000 two years later), athletic competitions, lectures, a ball, all sorts of exhibitions. The Massachusetts papers covered everything in detail, as did some national papers, and there were a lot of headlines about crowds. For the Historical and Floral parade at the end of the week, the participants were estimated at 10,000 and the crowds at nearly 100,000.

By all accounts the Salem Tercentenary was a resounding success, but clearly there was a need for a presidential nod to cap it off. I had always thought that Calvin Coolidge was dissing Salem by not attending the big event as he always summered nearby, but apparently this year he was in another part of the country. So he sent Vice-President Charles Dawes, who interrupted his annual fishing trip to Maine. The Vice-President reviewed the first tercentenary parade, and gave a speech on how the radio could safeguard the constitution from rampant populism. But even that sounds better than President Coolidge’s note, below. So enthusiastic: “even if Salem ships no longer circle the world and the life of the community goes on in less picturesque and spectacular channels” Salem still has its history! You’d think Silent Cal would have congratulated the city on putting on such a big party, but no. The President does make the point that anniversary of the Declaration of Independence was being celebrated in the Salem year as Salem’s 300th and this year we have another concurrence with the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolution. From what I’ve seen so far, I think Revolution 250 is going to leave Salem 400+ in the dust, but we shall see.

Tercentenary font? Quincy is up this year: you can check out their schedule here.

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Culture, History, Salem

January 5, 2025

2025: the Anniversary Year

By daseger

I like to look ahead to the coming historical anniversaries at the beginning of every year, and in 2025 it’s pretty clear that two wars are going to dominate the commemoration calendar: the beginning of the American Revolution and the end of World War II. The Fall of Saigon occurred in 1975, so you could add a third. Here in Massachusetts, we’ve been gearing up for revolutionary remembrance for quite some time, under the aegis of a coalition called Revolution 250. Even the City of Salem, pretty passive when it comes to matters of heritage and seemingly oblivious to our City’s key pre-revolutionary and revolutionary roles, is getting in on the action by jumping on board the 250th anniversary of “Leslie’s Retreat” in late February. A Revolution Ball at Hamilton Hall—the successor to the pre-Covid Resistance Ball— will also be held in the midst of a very busy commemorative weekend in Salem. The commemorations of the battles of Lexington and Concord in April and Bunker Hill in June promise to be huge, even though the latter will be “fought” in Gloucester rather than Charlestown. Then the focus will shift to Cambridge, where Washington formed the Continental Army: I don’t think it was quite as orderly a process as the Currier & Ives lithograph below presents!

Revolutionary remembrance in Salem and Massachusetts: a view of “Leslie’s Retreat,” when a Salem crowd and dialogue convinced British Lt. Colonel Alexander Leslie and his soldiers to retreat while cannon were carried away, 1955 Emma Crafts Earley Map Salem Massachusettes With History, Phillips Library. This event is widely heralded in Salem as the “first armed resistance by the Colonies to British Authority,” which is just not true, but I think I can accept “the first armed resistance to British in 1775.” The Revolution Ball will be held on February 22: more information here. The Battle of Lexington, Bettman Archive; “An Exact View of the Late Battle at Charlestown, June 17, 1775.” and “Washington Taking Command of the American Army,” Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

While most of the Revolutionary commemoration will likely be exuberant, remembering the end of World War II will be much more nuanced, marking victory and liberation but also loss and destruction. The 80th anniversary of VE Day (May 8) could be “a shared moment of celebration” but obviously Holocaust remembrance will be more solemn, as will the anniversaries of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I probably shouldn’t even reference these atrocities in a post on history anniversaries as their remembrance is quite appropriately ongoing and perpetual, but the eighty-year mark is noted everywhere. A major exhibition, Portraits of the Hibakusha | 80 Years Remembered, featuring a series of 52 lenticular portraits of the survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has already opened and will travel to museums and galleries around the world. Eighty years ago this very month (on January 27), Auschwitz was liberated by soldiers of the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front of the Red Army: here is more information about the observances scheduled for this site on this particular International Holocaust Remembrance Day, from which Russia has been excluded for the third straight year.

It seems to me that in terms of public remembrance, we tend to remember bad things more than good, ostensibly because we do not want to repeat the bad. Ultimately (I think!) war remembrance is a hopeful process rather than a macabre one, but it is wearing and wearying. I teach a European history survey pretty much every semester and I always get wary when we approach the twentieth century, but there were two very consequential conflicts from my own period that will also be commemorated in 2025: King Philip’s War (1675-76) and the German Peasants War of 1525, both bloody conflicts between desperate insurgents and established regimes—well, perhaps the colonists of southern New England were not that established when an indigenous coalition under the leadership of Wampanoag chief Metacom, later known as King Philip, attacked English settlements over a 14-month period. Several Salem men, including Nathaniel Hawthorne’s first American ancestor William Hathorne, fought in this conflict, which left hundreds of colonists and thousands of Native Americans dead. Northeastern University Emeritus Professor of Public History Martin Blatt has called for more commemoration of King Philip’s War, but I don’t see any big event on the 2025 calendar. There is, however, some amazing scholarship on the War and its remembrance in New England over the centuries. The German Peasants’ War was the biggest uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution, extending to much of the Holy Roman Empire. It was notable for being not just a large peasant revolt but one in which an expansive “working class” (a term we don’t usually use before the Industrial Revolution), including miners and urban workers, rose up against serfdom and its remnants, brandishing a document callled The Twelve Articles which justified their demands in scripture. It’s the first sign of the potentially radical impact of the Reformation, and Martin Luther was so horrified by the rebels’ confusion of spiritual and secular “freedom” that he called for the “murderous theiving hordes of peasants” to be cut down. And so they were.

Because of its early expression of “class consciousness,” East Germany commemorated the 45oth anniversary of the Peasants War in 1975 with this stamp and other events. For the 500th anniversary in 2025, the Thuringian state has organized a traveling exhibition.

Lightening up quite a bit. Jane Austen was born in that consequential year of 1775, and given her popularity over these past few decades, I have no doubt that the 250th anniversary of her birth will be commemorated in a big way in Britian—and no doubt elsewhere. Just a few clicks and I realized that the events that constitute Jane Austen 250 make the very busy Revolution 250 calendar look quiet! In Bath, and Winchester, and throughout Hampshire there will be festivals and costume balls and dress-up days and parades. At Jane Austen’s House in Chawton, each book will get its own festival starting with Pride and Prejudice this very month and there will be a special year-long exhibition called Austenmania. Bath has been on the Austen bandwagon for quite some time so there’s a lot going on there but in Winchester, the city where Jane spent her last years and was laid to rest, there’s a bit of a controversy about a new statue to be installed on the Cathedral grounds. There are concerns about overtourism in general and the sanctity of its proposed location in particular, with one critic opining that “I don’t think we want to turn it into Disneyland-on-Itchen. I don’t think the Inner Close is the place to attract a lot of lovely American tourists to come and have a selfie with Jane Austen.” (sounds vaguely familiar) They’ve spent quite a bit of money on the statue, so I think it’s a go, but Winchester is clearly the only place in the region where there are any clouds on the horizon: everywhere and everyone else seems geared up for an enthusiastic Austen year.

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Culture, History

December 30, 2024

Mills Mansion Shines

By daseger

We arrived at my brother’s house in Rhinebeck on Christmas Eve, ate, drank and were merry for two days, and then I woke up on the 26th eager to explore yet another Hudon Valley mansion, what I always want to do when I’m in the area. There are loads of Hudson Valley posts if you want to see past tours: I apologize for the unwieldlyness of my now 14-year-old blog, but you can find most things by keyword searches in the search box. Eventually I will get around to providing an index. The house I chose to visit was ironically located very close to my brother’s house, yet I had never cared to stop in. It’s a big classical revival Beaux-Arts building called the Mills Mansion, located in the midst of the Staatsburgh State Historic Site on the river. I had hiked the trails that used to constitute its vast estate estate, but never ventured through its doors. I pictured enormous square drab rooms, but my vision was wrong. The tour was labeled a “Gilded Age Christmas” and it was indeed very glittery! My brother and brother-in-law came along with me (along with my husband), and they confirmed that the last time they had been in the mansion it was a bit tired, but what we all encountered was a very engaging space, encompassing the efforts of both state staff obviously, but also a very active Friends group. All the docents in the building were so enthusiastic, so obviously happy to be there and share the stories of the mansion and the Mills family. It reminded me of my colleagues at the Phillips House this past summer.

The Mansion was just one home of Ogden and Ruth Livingston Mills, very wealthy members of the fabled NYC 400. Mr. Mills inherited a California gold rush fortune, and Mrs. Mills was New York aristocracy: her Livingston lineage went back to the seventeenth century in the Hudson River Valley. I really can’t think of a better recipe for a Gilded Age couple! She had inherited a much smaller Greek Revival structure generally called Livingston Manor, and in 1895 she and her husband commissioned the prestigious New York City architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White to remodel and enlarge it, a mission which was accomplished in only one year. It was expanded from 25 rooms to 79, and 14 bathrooms were added–if you want to see and study Gilded Age bathrooms, this is really the place! The new Mills Mansion, called Staatsburgh at this time, had its own coal-powered electric plant and central heating but also 23 fireplaces, some of which are quite baronial as you will see below. All the usual classical details were added to the exterior of both the two new wings and the original house in the center, and a huge portico tied everything together. The entire complex was not only a family home and guest palace, but also a working estate of 1600 acres, with gardens and greenhouses, a dairy barn, and additional outbuildings. The entirety, including all of the furnishings, was donated to the State of New York by the Mills’ daughter Gladys Mills Phipps in 1938, following the dearth of her parents in the 1920s. And so a large chuck of riverfront land was preserved for all of us to enjoy. The obligation to steward was also granted to New York State of course, and given the size of the Mansion, that is probably a constant process: several docents, with obvious pride and excitement, informed me that they had just won a grant to restore the period kitchen so that it could be added to the tour. It was obvious to me that both material preservation and interpretation were ongoing initiatives: an exhibition space adjoining the visitor entrance presents the site in a broad social and geographical context, and then you proceed upstairs and get wowed.

The grand reception rooms: library, drawing room, central hall, dining room, service pantry off dining room, a “golden” drawing room.

Staatsburgh/ Mills Mansion was the Mills’ “autumn” house, and when they were in residence, they had lots of guests, attended to by a staff of 25. The bedrooms upstairs were separated and designated to single men and single women guests and married couples: bathrooms were interspersed liberally. There’s a rather widespread belief that Edith Wharton, who was very familiar with this region and its social scene, had used the Mansion for her depiction of Bellomont in the House of Mirth so I was looking for Lily Bart’s bedroom of course. That would make Lily’s hosts, the Trenors, Ruth and Ogden Mills, and Ruth does have a certain “ambitious hostess” reputation. Apparently she was very pleased that she could secure the services of celebrity architect Stanford White for her project before he designed the neighboring Vanderbilt Mansion. Ever the gracious hostess, Mrs. Mills even provided her guests with a safe in which they could deposit their valuables upon arrival.

Guest bedrooms and bathrooms and the safe.

The Mills Mansion docents did not stress Mrs. Mills’ competitive hospitality but rather her family life, and her fraility. She had a heart condition, so her bedroom, an extravagant raspberry damask confection, was located on the first floor adjacent to the reception rooms rather than upstairs. Her husband’s bedroom was just across the way, with a connecting bathroom in between. A smaller staircase connected these rooms to the Mills children’s bedroom upstairs, and doors could be closed to create a more private family “townhouse,” which I thought was pretty clever. All in all, our visit to the very festive Mills Mansion was the beginning of a perfect day after Christmas.

The Mills Family’s “townhouse” within the Mansion.

6 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Architecture, Culture

December 2, 2024

Watercolor Dining Rooms

By daseger

I love dining rooms in general and my dining room in particular; I love renderings of dining rooms in general and watercolor renderings of dining rooms in particular: that’s pretty much the post! In the Victorian house I grew up in, the dining room did double duty as a sitting room of sorts, while my first Greek Revival house had an open kitchen/dining area. But my present house has a room that can be nothing other than a dining room and it’s my favorite room in the house. Dining rooms seem to be in danger of disappearing now, and I really hope that trend reverses itself.

My Thanksgiving dining room with and without a watercolor filter—definitely not very artistic!

My regard for dining rooms has artistic rather than social origins: I love all the things associated with dining rather than the act of dining. And when I was relatively young—in high school I think—I came across the paintings of English artist Mary Ellen Best (1809-1891), who painted her interior worlds with such charm and detail that they became imprinted in my mind. Her dining room in York remains one of my favorites: she also painted her family dining at the home of her grandmother and an elderly neighbor in her dining room. Best opened window after window into mid-nineteenth-century interiors in both England and Germany, where she lived after her marriage. We see kitchens, parlors, and drawing rooms in intimate detail: her use of watercolor gives these rooms a dreamy effect so we’re not too overwhelmed.

A very different artist, of another time and place, was Edgar W. Jenney, an architect and interior designer who retired to Nantucket in the 1920s. He offers more of a preservation prespective in his interior renderings of old Nantucket houses, large and small, but he was also a commercial artist: I first came across him when I saw his very Colonial Revival “Salem Room” in an old House and Garden. He seems much more focused on the overall ambiance than the details of daily life we see in Best’s paintings, but watercolor softens his scenes.

Two Nantucket dining rooms, 1930s,  by Edgar Whitefield Jenney, Rafael Osana Auctions and Nantucket Historical Society.

All of the above are artistic compositions, but watercolor was used for professional renderings as well so you can find some lovely paper dining rooms in trade catalogs published by wallpaper, fabric, and furniture companies in particular: there are myriad sources at the Internet Archive’s Building Heritage Technology Library. Architectural and Interior Design archives are another obvious source for these images: I was introduced to the wonderful work of Wisconsin interior decorator Odin J. Oyen here which led me to the first stunning dining room design below here. These kind of searches can go on for days and even weeks so be careful! Work interfered or I would have kept on going.

Two dining room elevation renderings from Historic New England’s Collections from Irving & Casson/A.H. Davenport. A dining room from Mary Brooks Picken’s Sewing for the Home (1941) and a Baltimore dining room from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s The Homes of Our Ancestors (1925).

8 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Art, Culture

November 25, 2024

What if the Tudors had Thanksgiving?

By daseger

I’ve been teaching a first year seminar this semester on the Tudors and I’m not sure it’s been a successful class. These topical seminars are required for freshmen, and they are hybrid in nature: half topic, half introduction to college. I’m not good at melding the two halves together, and while I have a few Tudor fans in the course, there are clearly some students who just got stuck with this particular topic. Everyone is very polite, but you can tell when students are not really invested in a course. Anyway, I tried to wow them last week with a presentation on Tudor food, and several yawns indicated that I was not successful (it doesn’t help that this course is at 3:00 in the afternoon). I did quite a bit of research, however, so this topic has to do double duty as I am inflicting it on all of you! I’m hosting Thanksgiving this year as well, an unusual role for me, so I put two and two together and conjured up a Tudor feast with the help of Thomas Dawson, the author of The good huswifes jewell and The Second part of the good Hus-wifes jewell (1596-97).

“The Blessing” by Flemish artist Gordius Geldorp; my two favorite Tudor cookbooks by Thomas Dawson (I have these very convenient Nova Anglia Press editions but they have been digitized.)

Three staples of the American Thanksgiving meal were available in Tudor England: turkies, pumpkins, and potatoes. The first two could have ended up in a late November feast: there are recipes for turkey roasts and various pumpkin preserves and confits from the later sixteenth century. No mashed potatoes though: it will take Englishmen and -women a little longer to warm up to this particular “root.”  For those who could afford a diet consisting of more than pottage and bread, meat and fowl were far more popular than fruits or vegetables, so it follows that turkeys were embraced before pumpkins, which were perceived to be some sort of exotic melon. Apparently they were driven to the London markets, and in the 1570s Thomas Tusser included turkey in his “Christmas Husbandry Fare.” By that time, perhaps turkeys were too common for the courtly table, but as all the Tudor monarchs loved very showy feasts, they might have gone for a multi-bird roast, the early modern version of today’s turdrucken. I’ve seen references to five-bird roasts and more, in particular a pigeon inside a partridge inside a chicken inside a goose inside a turkey, often encased in pastry. Thomas Dawson provides a recipe “to bake a Turkie and take out his bones” which might be preliminary to a more extravagant engastration (new word for me!)

Pumpkins (called pumpions or pompions) were introduced into England about the same time as turkeys, and they have a similar crest of popularity: sought-after rarity to more humble fare. By the end of the sixteenth century they are included in texts about kitchen gardens and foods which can decrease famines. The Tudors did not see pumpkins as squash, because they didn’t have squash, so it was often identified as a melon (and occasionally a cucumber!) Dawson has a couple of pumpkin recipes: “to make a conserve of Mellons, or Pompions,” to sweeten them, and to make them into “confections,” so they could be on the holiday table in those forms, but not as a pie or tart: the first pumpkin pie recipe in England dates from the seventeenth century. If we’re going to have a Tudor fruit pie, I think it would be filled with peaches, pears, plums, quinces, damsons or even medlars, a forgotten autumnal fruit. A Tudor table would definitely have a savory pie too, or a sweet and savory and spicy pie like this veal variation from The good huswives handmaid (1597).

A conspicuous pumpkin in Sir Nathaniel Bacon’s Cookmaid with Still Life of Vegetables and Fruit, 1620s. Tate Museum: Dawson’s recipe for medlars in pastry, and two of Ivan Day’s beautiful pies with a recipe for Sweet Pies of Veal.

The Tudors did not embrace potatoes, so they would not be on either a courtly or husbandly table. I want to substitute mashed turnips or parsnips, but I don’t see any recipes, except for the occasional pudding. We always have creamed onions in my family, and that seems like a perfect Tudor dish, as they loved everything that was white and creamy—-but I could only find boiled onions. Stuffing is so Tudor: they stuffed (farsed) everything! There’s a perfect stuffing recipe in Dawson’s Second Part of the good Hus-wives jewell: “to farse all things.” Just take “a good handfull of tyme, Isope, Parselye, and three or foure yolkes of Egges hard rosted, and choppe them with hearbes small, then take white bread graited and raw eggs with sweet butter, a few small Raisons, or Barberies, seasoning it with Pepper, Cloves, Sinamon and Ginger, woorking it altogether as a paste, and the may you stuffe with it what you will.” There were no cranberries in England in the sixteenth century, but plenty of substitutes, whether you want a syrup (I would go for gooseberries) or the paste kind that comes out of can (Quince, of course!) And we call all wash it down with some Hippocras, a spiced wine “tonic” concoction named after the Father of Medicine.

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November 11, 2024

Past and Future at the Crane Estate

By daseger

It’s been a difficult week; I don’t understand the choice that my fellow Americans have made. But I do understand that I am well-insulated from said choice, by my age, occupation, residence and background. I’m a very privileged person; my first thought when I realized how the election was going was: well, I can go back to the sixteenth century and work on my saffron book. And I can, and I will. In the here and now, I realized I needed to immerse myself in something pleasureable: for me, that is always historic architecture. This past weekend, I was indeed very privileged to be able to visit a Samuel McIntire house here in Salem that will come up for sale in the coming weeks: pictures forthcoming. It was so charming, so crafted, so preserved, so comforting. And on Saturday my husband and I drove up to Ipswich for a tour of Castle Hill at the Crane Estate: it was so grandiose, so gilded, so well-situated, but still, somehow, so comforting. The estate is centered by the “Great House” or Castle Hill, a Jacobean Revival (??? not really sure about this label—the front facade is said to be based on the National Trust’s Belton House, a later Stuart structure. Stuart Revival? Carolean Revival? Restoration Revival?) built between 1924-1928 on an ocean-fronted drumlin which provides inspiring views of the surrounding sea and marshland. A complex of mansion, outbuildings, and surrounding landscaped gardens and grounds was commissed by Chicago industrialist Richard Teller Crane Jr. and his wife Florence, who purchased the property in 1910. They first built an Italianate mansion, but as Florence hated it and its stucco walls failed they commissioned Chicago architect David Adler to design a more enduring building in another European style. The house has 59 rooms encompassed in nearly 60,000 square feet, and was donated to the Trustees of Reservations after the death of Mrs. Crane in 1949. We toured about half the house, and then proceeded up to the roof to see its cupola and the surrounding terrain and ocean, along with Crane Beach, the best in New England.

Inside are grand halls and Anglo interiors: there are floors and panels extricated from doomed houses across the Atlantic. The library, with its Grinling Gibbons overmantle carving and woodwork from a Tudor manor house named Cassiobury Park, is definitely the star of the first floor although the perfect-green dining room was a close second for me. As we proceeded upstairs, the rooms seemed more “American” to me, although there was some beautiful French wallpaper (Zuber?) in one of the halls. As Mr. Crane made his fortune in plumbing, the bathrooms are impressive in both fixtures and decorations, but I didn’t get any good photographs! (All summer long, whenever I showed visitors the relatively plain bathrooms at the Phillips House, they would comment oh the bathrooms are much better at Castle Hill. There was a ship’s cabin feel to the charming third-floor Billiards Room, which presently has no billiards table. From here we ascended up to the cupola and roof.

Back down to the gorgeous green dining room, from which I spied the butler in the kitchen washing champagne glasses, his tuxedo so perfectly of the twenties time that I thought he might be a ghost! But no, he came closer and was actually Brendan, a student in two of my courses this semester. I knew he worked at Castle Hill but somehow I had forgotten, so when I saw him, it was kind of a shock; you know, the shock you feel when you see a familiar person in an unfamiliar place. Brendan was very much in his element and I was very happy to see him so: much of my week’s disappointment was for my students, who are going to have to deal with the consequences of this election early in their lives and for longer than I. Something about Brendan in his tuxedo made me think that he was game, along with his contemporaries. Almost immediately after that pleasurable encounter, I stepped out of the house onto the grounds  and ran into none other than Senator/Secretary John Kerry! He was mid-stride and did not look like he wanted to talk and I didn’t really know what to say anyway, but as he walked away I thought, wow, he’s probably doing the same thing as me, coming to this beautifully-preserved Massachusetts place on a gorgeous fall day trying to forget the election. He looked at Crane Beach for a while and then he was gone. That brief encounter made me think of Kerry’s perspective and realize that my frustrations pale in comparison: imagine serving your country in many ways over many decades and then that man is elected president, not only once but twice! Ah well, it was a beautiful day at the Crane Estate.

That green! Brendan, and a wing-less gryphon. I didn’t take Senator Kerry’s photograph because it would have been rude, and I was in the midst of snapping the gryphon. Happy Veterans Day to the Senator and all of his comrades.

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October 28, 2024

In Praise of a Handcrafted Halloween

By daseger

So here I am in Salem, supposedly the Halloween capital of the world, wondering where all the creative costumes are. I’ve tried to embrace the “holiday” (invasion) this year (well not really, but I did take several walks) but all I have seen for costumes are flimsy puritans, vampires and superheroes and a sea of those little felt witch hats: nothing original or creative or made from a natural fabric (well, maybe the hats). My stepson came down from Maine for the weekend to prowl about with his friends in a pirate costume that he had purchased from one of those Halloween superstores along the way: I said “you can’t put together a PIRATE costume yourself! He did have the cool idea of going as Tiny Tim as he is 6’5” and on one crutch because of a sprained ankle, but I have yet to see him put this costume together. I’m wondering where the creativity is? Salem is instagram city at this time of year and those cheap costumes are hardly instagrammable: more of an effort would certainly result in viral views. Dogs have better outfits out there: I’ve seen pumpkins, bees, and even avocado toast! There is certainly lots of historical inspiration for humans, including British fancy dress books and digitized fashion plates and some great photography books on Halloween. We’ll see: the big day approaches.

But what are we to wear? Some suggestions from Arderne Holt’s Fancy Dresses Described or What to Wear at Fancy Balls (1887). You can be a box of dominoes or a bowl of lemons, and also a hornet or a witch (if you must). I think the hornet costume could do double duty as a bee.

Costume books published in the US are a bit less elaborate and historical than their British counterparts in the later nineteenth century, and also more…..paternalistic (is that possible)? We will skip past all the Native American costumes and go straight to the usual Halloween suspects, with a bit of whimsy for Miss Chess and Master Chimney Sweep….plus a pint-sized Guy Fawkes. These are still pretty elaborate costumes though—I’d have to distil them down considerably in terms of detail. Masquerade and carnival: their customs and costumes (1892) also includes some from Robin Hood: perhaps the inspiration for a c. 1907 item in the collections of Historic New England?

From the same period is this incredible handcrafted “Imperialist” skirt from the John Bright Collection—a template for any political commentary surely. I am hoping for some political costumes this year but we’ll see.

When I was looking for inspiration for this post, I discovered a new book and dusted off another. The discovery is an amazing book of photography entitled Dressed for Thrills: 100 Years of Halloween Costumes and Masquerade (2002) by Phyllis Golembo.I’ve ordered this book but haven’t received it yet, so the photos below are from Golembo’s website. I can’t wait for the book to arrive so I can see every single photograph, because what I have seen is so very arresting: who knew that just photographing scraps of fabric could be so effective? We’ve all seen those photographs of early 20th century costumed revelers, from the time when tricks and masking were more important than the recognition of pop culture personas. They look eerie and odd. But somehow the costumes alone look eerier and odder still! The evil bunny mask below is frightening, and so is the Mickey Mouse costume, both from the 1930s.

The book I dusted off is a book I never opened and I have no idea when or where I got it: Jane Asher’s Fancy Dress, first published in 1983 (and later as Jane Asher’s Costume Book). It’s full of whimsical costumes modeled by British actors and actresses of the 1980s, including Terry Jones. One day last week I was showing an episode of Jones’ Crusades series to my students and the next I was looking at him dressed as a “blob”! Now these are costumes you can actually make, from around-the-house materials like cardboard toilet paper rolls (glued together to make a British judge’s wig). The little Elizabeth and peapod below are a little more involved, but this bat has wings made from a broken black umbrella!

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October 21, 2024

History is Gray

By daseger

For the past month or so, I’ve been considering the case of the Salem City Seal and various reactions to it. In the past, before last month, I’ve probably thought about the seal for 5 minutes; over the last month, I’ve been thinking about it for many hours—too many, certainly. If you haven’t read my previous posts, here is what happened, succinctly: several members of the Salem community complained that the seal, with its depiction of a Sumatran man, pepper plants, and Salem ship, was stereoptypical and insulting to Asian-Americans. Their condern and complaint was brought to the city’s Race Equity Commission, which had deliberations over the summer and concluded that “damage had been done” and the seal should be redesigned. The Race Equity Commission reported this finding to a subcommittee of the Salem City Council which concurred (I think), but somewhere in the process someone stepped in and suggested a public task force to add some transparency and public comment to what had heretofore been quite a closed process—I think at best 40 people knew that our circa 1839 seal was deemed suspect in a city of over 40,000.  And this is what the City Council finally voted on: the creation of a task force which will sit for 18 months and hear public testimony and garner historical perspectives. So that’s where we are and I think that’s a good place, in theory. In practice, I have my concerns, because I’m just not sure those in positions of authority have the capacity to grasp historical perspectives, frankly. In the Salem of my experience, every single public history issue has been black and white, villains vs. heroes, the powerful and the powerless, with an overcast of green, for money. Nothing is nuanced, multi-causal, two-dimensional, or gray, and that’s a problem, because most of history is gray. Salem has been without a professional historical society for a long time, and it shows.

 

Salem Stereotypes: Seal and Patch

My first concern about how this whole process will play out relates to stereotypes. The original accusation against the seal was that it represents a generic “oriental” stereotype. I can understand that, at face value. But before I gave the seal much thought, I always thought it was really cool for its cosmopolitan character, depicting a ship over there rather than in Salem Harbor. So I sent a note to our city councillors asking them to consider the very global nature of this very early civic symbol. About half wrote back, all but one branding the seal’s figure a stereotype. This got my dander up as it indicated a general closed-mindedness before we had even delved into the matter, and of course I couldn’t help but think about the certain stereotype which is everywhere in the Witch City. Wasn’t this a hypocritical position on the part of our Councilors, given that there is a crone-like character with a pointy hat riding on a broomstick on all of our police cars? And you know, people died who were not witches. (Edit: a city councillor informed that the City Council does not approve “mascots,” only the seal, so the omnipresent witch is not under their jurisdiction—I have to say that it’s not particularly uplifting to know that the Salem schools would choose the witch as their “mascot”).  No matter—there’s really no questioning this particular stereotype, and no constituency for its removal. The historical record regarding the intended depiction of the city seal’s character is pretty clear: he was supposed to be from the specific part of Sumatra (Aceh) which grew the pepper which was so sought after by Salem ship captains and merchants. He did look vaguely Asian to me except for the hat—the hat was a little different and a little distinctive and I thought I had seen it before. And then I remembered: Theodor de Bry, a Dutch engraver and publisher who specialized in depicting and disseminating images of “new” people as Europe intensified its voyages of expansion and conquest in the early modern era. Below is a 1599 engraving by de Bry’s son, and an image from nearly three centuries later of a group of Aceh men during the brutal Aceh War with the Dutch. Same hat, right? But again, it doesn’t matter:even if Salem’s seal features a unique provincial figure and not a general stereotype, if people label it as the latter it becomes one. There’s only so much history can do.

J.T. de Bry, Inhabitants of Sumatra, 1599, Bartele Gallery; Aceh envoys seeking British support against the Dutch in the Aceh War, 1873, Bridgman Images.

 

The “enormous condescension of posterity”.

George Peabody, Salem alderman and son of Joseph Peabody, one of the city’s wealthiest merchants, chaired the committee that designed the seal following the adoption of a new city charter in 1836. As a Sumatra trader himself, Peabody had familiarity with Aceh and its people, but again, I’m not sure this really matters. As expressed by public opinion, it seems to me that those for a complete redesign of the seal and against are rather equally divided, but last week a long column was published in the Salem News which condemned support of the Sumatran image as “toxic nostalgia.” It’s a well-written piece, so it commanded my attention, as did its almost-complete ahistorical argument: it’s an excellent example of labor historian E.P. Thompson’s famous quote, “the enormous condescention of posterity.” According to the author, “regardless of what the seal was meant to celebrate, it must be acknowledged that George Peabody was a product of his times and that the seal he designed reflects a lot of the imagery that came to be associated with western notions of superiority over eastern peoples.” Coincidental with the adoption of the seal in 1839 was the beginning of the shameful Opium Wars instigated by Great Britain upon a weak China, and as “some American merchants (including no doubt some from Salem) did engage in the Opium Trade and benefitted from the British actions in China” we should reject the seal on the basis of this connection? Are we also to reject the East Asian collections of the Peabody Essex Museum, all the Federal Salem houses built with fortunes made by pepper and spices, and the navigational expertise of Nathaniel Bowditch, whose miraculous return from Sumatra in 1803 made The New Practical American Navigator authoritative? Are we to reject anybody who had anything to say in 1839 and just wallow around in the progressive present? If so, it’s going to be a bit difficult to learn from the past. George Peabody’s time seems far less toxic to me than later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and its extensions unleashed a cascade of anti-Asian vitriol in the United States, and we should all note that one of Salem’s most famous native sons, Joseph Hodge Choate, argued against the Act before the Supreme Court in 1893.

 

 

History is not cherry-picking.

Proponents of the seal tend to talk about “history-erasing” and its critics focus overwhelmingly on the violence which characterized the trade with Sumatra, which led to two US interventions after American ships were attacked by Malay pirates. Indeed, it’s not a pretty picture, but history seldom is. It is certainly not true that it was a one-way trade imposed upon the Acehnese: American ships brought a lot of silver over there. I’ve been reading as much scholarship as possible since this seal business began, and last week Anthony Guidone, an assistant professor at Radford University in Virginia, forwarded me his dissertion, “The Empire’s City: a Global History of Salem, Massachusetts, 1783-1820” (George Mason, 2023). It’s a detailed interdisciplinary study: I hope it gets published soon so everyone can read it. Guidone gives us the complete picture of Salem’s first global age: the black and the white, and lots of gray. Trade with Asia brought great wealth to Salem but also intensified its connections with slavery and the plantation economy in the Caribbean. But at the same time, it also benefitted a much wider slice of Salem’s population than I had realized, including African Americans and women, and facilitated the creation of a diverse community of sailors (he makes great use of the Salem Crew Lists 1799-1879 at the Mystic Seaport Museum, a great resource). In summary, Salem’s trade with Asia impacted “nearly all aspects of life in the town, changing Salem’s economy, politics, race relations, material culture, civic identity, and historical memory.” Whew! Even though the dissertation ends in 1820, Guidone expands it a bit further to discuss Salem’s anniversary moments in the next decades and the adoption of the city seal. He sees the commemorative focus on commerce by newish institutions such as the East India Marine Society and the Essex Historical Society as evidence of the desire to “construct a narrative that posed an alternative to the town’s witch-hunting past” even as (or because of ???) encroaching commercial decline. I agree completely: members of these institutions tended to identify the witch trials as a “stain” rather than an opportunity and waved no witch flags. How backward they were!

I’ve got to admit, Paul Revere’s first Massachusetts seal from 1775 is my favorite, even though its central figure cuts a rather simplistic figure.

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