Tag Archives: books

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

January 13, 2025

A Bewitching Bicentennial Book

By daseger

Salem has been a tourist city for more than a century, so there has been a succession of guide books spotlighting the city’s landmarks and attractions from their particular chronological perspectives. I think I’ve referenced every guide book here, with the exception of the one I am featuring today: The Illustrated Salem Guide Book. Beyond Witch City, published for the Bicentennial in 1976. If you read all the Salem guides in chronological order, two themes are readily apparent: the increasing commodification of history and creeping witches crowding everything else out. The bicentennial book is an exception to both of these trends: it’s a breath of fresh air, guiding its readers to a more cohesive Salem 1976 rather than just downtown “attractions,” and its “Beyond Witch City” subtitle is accurate. It has wonderful illustrations and writing: the efforts of my neighbor Racket Shreve, a well-known maritime artist, and Robert Murray, respectively. It’s just a very special little book: I really love it. It actually makes me nostalgic for a city I never lived in!

One of the key differences between The Illustrated Salem Guide Book and its predecessors and successors is that it was published by the Salem Bicentennial Commission rather than a tourist agency. So the focus is much more on hospitality and non-profit attractions than salesmanship. As you can see above, it proudly bore the (competition-winning) Bicentennial logo as well as a Samuel McIntire swag on its back cover. Inside, we read that “This Guide Book is intended both as a portrait of Salem—an evocation of Salem, old and new, as well as a practical directory for How, What, Where and When.” The combination of aims makes for a thoughtful and accessible book; in its own words, “practical and irreverent.” This book was only one of Salem’s Bicentennial projects: the Commission also organized Visitor Hospitality Centers (in all of Salem’s churches—staffed by volunteers), the development of Fort Lee & Fort Pickering as natural preserves (1976 must have been the last time anyone paid attention to these sites), work on a Salem bikeway, the reconstruction of Samuel McIntire’s Washington Arch (recently restored), “Operation Sail” focused on the waterfront, and several Salem Symposiums “examining Salem’s Past, Present and Future.” This was a very ambitious and engaging agenda. It’s the evocative mission that I’m the most interested in, and while that quality is probably best illustrated by Racket’s illustrations, Robert Murray’s writing is also essential towards realizing this aim: On Oliver Street, an old clockface, empty of hands, hangs on the coach house behind No. 31, its gold numerals luminous at Noon. Attached to the rear of No. 5, two identical carvied friezes, attached side by side upon a stable wall: a touch of Federal surrealism. Beneath the friezes, a sign: Beware of Dog. Murray is particularly good on the history of Salem’s churches: I learned quite a bit. Racket provides some great illustrations of these buildings, and then they both take us all around Salem–not just to the “pretty” spots.

There’s a lot of Salem pride in this book. I was really happy to see a sentiment that I discovered when I was writing about urban renewal for our forthcoming book: an assertion that Salem had “triumphed” over urban renewal, and transformed all those Federal dollars into an initiative that actually focused on renewal rather than destruction. Murray emphasizes  the “imaginative” choice by the Salem Redevelopment Authority to substitute historic renovation for demolition. Salem has won national recognition for its adaptation of its old glories for its modern needs. This is true, and not appreciated sufficiently. Present-day witch-pitching people spin the story that witchcraft tourism “saved” Salem, but I don’t know, 1976 Salem looks pretty dynamic: all of the Essex Institute houses are open, as is its Phillips Library, there’s an ongoing archaelogical dig at the Narbonne House, “a group of rusty oil tanks huddle together aware that they are disliked and soon to be removed” for Pickering Wharf, Pioneer Village is deemed “an excellent place to begin a study of the evolution of the American home.” There were lots of restaurants: Red’s Sandwich Shop, the Lyceum, the Beef & Oyster House, In a Pig’s Eye, Strombergs, the Gutenberg Press Restaurant & Pub, and more—and if you had a party of six you could have dinner at the Daniel’s House: just phone Mrs. Gill and byob.

This little book succeeds in capturing Salem’s past and present from a 1976 perspective: it is not characterized by sickening sentimentality or boosterism. Salem emerges as a city shaped by its past and being shaped by its present. I wish its author and illustrator would create a Salem guide book now (for the 400th anniversary!), because I think it would be very interesting.

What was lost and what remains—the cement slide at Forest River Park! Below, the guide’s map and Racket’s Hamilton Hall Antique Show (a benefit for the then-Peabody Museum of Salem) covers.

10 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Salem, Tourism

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 1, 2024

Salem 1774: Tea, Fire and a new Congress

By daseger

I just want to wrap up Salem’s long hot Revolutionary summer of 1774 with a finale first week of October and then I’ll be turning to Salem’s intense Halloween—I am not escaping this year because I’m working at the Phillips House and both my husband and I are so busy we can’t really handle the commute to Maine. So I’ll be going to various “attractions” and writing about them; it should be……….interesting. But today, a “tea party,” a “great fire,” and the convening of a brand new autonomous Provincial Assembly for Massachusetts, all right here in Salem in the first week of October 1774. After reading about the pre-Revolution all summer long I now subscribe completely to super-historian Mary Beth Norton’s assessment of the importance of 1774: here in Massachusetts, maybe even here in Salem, the Revolution began.

The Massachusetts Spy piece gives you a sense of what the late summer and early fall was like in Massachusetts: a ship arrived with 30 chests of tea, its purchaser confronted and cargo sent off to Halifax. Local and county meetings continue, as do congregations to prevent the royal courts to convene. Legal officials who are appointees of the Governor/King “recant and confess.” Boston is ever more fortified by Royal troops and Benjamin Franklin is America bound! You can feel it coming (but of course hindsight is 20/20). Salem remains the official port of entry (with Marblehead) and colonial capital, all the elected representatives to the General Court called by General Gage for October 5 received instructions from their communities throughout the month of September to resist royal encroachments on their liberty and call for a return to the William and Mary charter from nearly a century before. And then Gage called off the big assembly!

Boston Evening-Post, 3 October 1774.

Too much tumult! There would be no royally-convened General Court assembly at Salem on October 5: it was postponed by Governor Gage to some “distant day”.  Ultimately a more representative body will convene, but before everyone that Salem happening there were two fires in town: one very little, the other, “great.” The little one was a PUBLIC burning of tea conveyed to Salem in a cask which was loaded onto a wagon belonging to Benjamin Jackson in Boston. I find this whole story so interesting because several weeks before 30 chests of tea had arrived in Salem but people seem more upset by this little cask! An unfortunate and anonymous African-American man, “belonging to, or employed by Mrs. Sheaffe of Boston,” had requested the cask be conveyed to Salem, and it was, and he was identified as offering it for sale rather than his owner/employer: “it was taken from him and publicly burnt,” upon its arrival, “and the Fellow obliged immediately to leave town” on October 3. Some chroniclers have labeled this a “Salem Tea Party,” but I’ve read too much about tea resistance in Salem in the revolutionary Summer of 1774 so it seems like a minor affair to me.

Several days later, the long suffering Tory Justice of the Peace Peter Frye, whose statement is above, had his house and commercial buildings destroyed in the “Great Fire” of 1774, which devoured a block of buildings in central Salem. Frye had tried to find his way back to “friendship” with his Salem neighbors, but they had never been able to forget his commercial and judicial dealings contrary to Patriot proclamations. He would leave Salem for Ipswich shortly after the fire, and cross over to Britain in the next year. Salem had a bit of a reputation as a Tory town before 1774, but it had certainly lost that identity by this time.

While the fire was still simmering and smoking, representatives from across Massachusetts converged on Salem for the meeting of the General Court, even though they all knew it had been canceled by Governor Gage the week before. They wanted to meet. They made a show of waiting around for the Governor, and then met on their own, in a completely autonomous assembly, a new Provincial Congress. This body, with John Hancock as its chair, became the de facto of Massachusetts, strengthening its resolve and powers with successive meetings in Concord (October 11-14) and Cambridge. But it started in Salem.

John Hancock drawn by William Sharp.

 

Two events in commemoration of the formation of the Provincial Congress:

In Salem, October 7: 250th Anniversary of the First Provincial Congress: https://essexheritage.org/event/250th-anniversary-of-the-first-massachusetts-provincial-congress.

In Concord, October 11: Exploring Our Democracy— Our Rights and Responsibilities: https://www.wrighttavern.org/programs/#october11.

 

6 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in History, Salem

August 12, 2024

Nancy Drew & the Peabody Sisters of Salem

By daseger

What do a fictional detective and three very real women of mid-nineteenth century Salem have in common? Well, books have been written about them, and in certain editions of these books there are silhouette endpapers. That’s it, that’s the post. Well not really, there’s a bit more I want to say but mostly I want to show. When I was a girl my very favorite books after my Black Beauty and Little House on the Prairie phases were Nancy Drew mysteries. I had a whole bunch and always wanted more. Most of my Nancy Drews were later editions—1960s and 1970s I think—and they weren’t great- looking books to tell you the truth. Nancy was on the cover, in whatever setting she was dealing with in that volume, and inside were some boring oval portraits. So I didn’t really think about the books at all, just Nancy. Then someone gave me an older book, it must have been one of the first editions of the series, and inside were these amazing endpapers of orange silhouettes! I remember distinctly thinking at the time, wow, older is better, older is (more vivid, more creative, more rare, more CRAFTED) better. So then I wanted more older Nancy Drews, of course, Nancy Drew BOOKS, not just Nancy Drews. I had also become more concious of what a book was as an object, or I should say simply conscious. So I sought out the orange silhouette endpapers (and found some more red than orange), then black ones, which came a bit later, and then finally “the diggger” depictions which are not quite silhouettes but still cool.

My Nancy Drew endpaper obsession continued on for quite some time, but I progressed to other books, including Louise Hall  Tharp’s Peabody Sisters of Salem, about Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody of Salem, who had interesting Salem childhoods with their teacher parents and led quite engaging adult lives.. Elizabeth was an early childhood education pioneer and Transcendentalist, Mary was also very focused on educational reform, and wrote several books, though she is perhaps best known as the second wife of the “father of public education” Horace Mann. Sophia was an artist before her marriage to her fellow Salemite Nathaniel Hawthorne. (Sophia always seemed like the least interesting of the three sisters to me, but as she was married to Hawthorne she gets more attention). A more scholarly book on the Peabody sisters was published by Megan Marshall in 2005, but my heart belongs to the Tharp book, which I read and reread as a teenager. I was captivated by her ability to capture the sisters’ world (s), and I’ve always had a rather undistinguished copy in my bedside bookshelf. But last month, I came across a special sleeved 1980 Book of the Month Club/The American Past edition online, and promptly purchased it (books in sleeves are always a treat). When it arrived, I was thrilled to see its beautiful Salem-silhouette cover, but inside, a big surprise: endpaper silhouettes of the entire Peabody family! Apparently these are from a selection of  “Dr. Nathaniel Peabody & Family. Profiles drawn from life Nov. 8, 1835” in the collection of the former Essex Institute/current Peabody Essex Museum. I just love them: a special summer surprise.

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

June 24, 2024

Reverential Restoration

By daseger

I was browsing through the Flickr photographs of the Salem State Archives and Special Collections the other day, when I came across several photographs of crowds in and around the Gardner-Pingree House on Essex Street. This is one of the Peabody Essex Museum’s houses, and it is seldom open, so these crowds caught my eye. It’s also one of my very favorite houses in Salem, so every time I see it, in reality or in print, I stop and look. The photographs were from the Salem Evening News, which is my new favorite collection at Salem State, and they were part of the coverage of the reopening of the Gardner-Pingree after a substantive, source-based restoration in 1989. I didn’t live in Salem then, but I moved here not too long after, and one of the first things I did was go into this recently-restored house which I had heard, and read, so much about. It was absolutely stunning to me; I can still remember being shocked by the colors and patterns and detail. At that point in my life I was finishing my dissertation, then starting my teaching career, but at the same time I was increasingly obsessed with historic interiors. I had all the magazines and books, and they were like carrots that got me through all the work I had to do. My obsession is part of the reason I moved to Salem, and seeing this house just reinforced my instinct that it was the right place for me. After my first tour I bought a poster in the gift shop of the Essex Institute, and it still hangs on the wall: in my first Salem house it had pride of place, and now it dwells in a third-floor bathroom, but I still gaze upon it from time to time. I remember thinking when I bought it: this will be the inspiration for my own decoration–high standards indeed!

Unattainable standards obviously. If the colors above look blueish, be asssured they are not; there are layers of the most beautiful greens in that photograph. There must be 100 different shades of green in that house! I was impressed immediately, and my first instinct thereafter has always been to paint a room green. Our present house is north-facing, and green is not really the best choice, so I’ve used what I always think of as “Gardner-Pingree yellow” in several rooms. I tried to use what I think of as “Gardner-Pingree pink” in the double parlor but my husband objected so we have a compromise peachy salmon pink (although he would object to the label “pink”.)  It wasn’t only the colors–it was the slipcovers, the cream painted “fancy chairs,” the Brussels carpets, the fire buckets in the back hall: I could go on and on and I’m kind of ashamed to admit that whenever I’ve been in this house I notice the decoration more than McIntire’s woodwork. And I’m not the only one: this restoration certainly received acclaim from curatorial and preservation professionals but it was also featured in a cascade of shelter magazines and decorating books. Chalk paint pioneer Annie Sloan focused intently on one Gardner-Pingree green and that perfect pink, which is in the kitchen.

Just a few books which feature the Gardner-Pingree House.

It was a very important and influential restoration, and not just from my personal perspective. In several articles discussing its process and inspiration, then Essex Institute Research Curator and Project Director Dean Lahikainen (who later wrote the definitive book on Samuel McIntire, Carving an American Style) always seems slightly (though politely) appalled by the preceding restoration of the 1930s in which all the woodwork was painted white according to the dictates  of the Colonial Revival style which was so prevalent at the time. Fifty years later, Lahikainen and his team took their cues from historical sources rather than contemporary preferences, creating an interior that seemed both “refreshed” and restored. The house was  reopened this very week after a five-year restoration, and all the recorded visitors’ reactions run along these lines.

Stories from Lynn Daily Item and Boston Globe, June 1989 and 1990; photographs from the Salem Evening News, June 1989, Salem State Archives and Special Collections. The “formal English garden” photograph is of my garden! (Now not quite so formal) The last photograph above is of the small exhibit on the house which was in its carriage house, I believe.

You can see my photographs of the house from the last time I was inside, in 2017, in this post, and also here. Below are a few more, but I really don’t have very many good ones: every time I’m in this house I’m kind of overwhelmed and aware that I have this rare opportunity and I don’t focus on what I want to capture. On my past two spring break road trips, I thought that the Read House in New Castle, Delaware, and then Kenmore in Fredericksburg, Virginia might have supplanted the Gardner-Pingree as my very favorite house, but looking at these pictures again, I think not.

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

May 6, 2024

Salem History: my Reading List

By daseger

We got word last week that our book Salem’s Centuries. New Perspectives on the History of an Old American City, 1626-2026 cleared its final rounds of review and approval and will be published by Temple University Press in the fall of 2025, just in time for Salem’s Quadricentennial in 2026. This project has been challenging in many ways but I think our book will expand Salem’s written history rather dramatically: there are four pieces on African-American history alone, chapters on Salem’s experience of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and lots of twentieth-century history that has never been written, and much more. I felt vulnerable throughout the whole process: I had never edited a volume before, and I am not trained in American or modern history but here I was writing chapters not only on the seventeenth century, but also the nineteenth and twentieth. The whole project would not have been possible without my colleague and co-editor Brad Austin, who is both an experienced editor and a modern American historian. I also relied on Salem historians past and present, as I felt I had a detailed grasp on the topics I was writing about from a local perspective, but no general, much less comprehensive, context in which to place my Salem narratives. So the whole experience was like a deep dive into historiography for me, and I learned a lot. As a tribute of sorts, I thought I’d post my Salem bibliography, in chronological order of publication. These are the sources, primary and secondary, from which I learned the most. I’m going for breadth over depth here so I’m not going to annotate each and every title, but if you have questions ask away!

A couple of caveats: my chapters are on Hugh Peter, John Remond, the suffrage and Colonial Revival movements, and urban renewal in the twentieth century, so my reading list is going to reflect those eras and topics. This particular bibliography is not comprehensive in regard to the Witch Trials as our book is about new perspectives. I’ve got my colleague Tad Baker’s Storm of Witchcraft on here and a couple of classics, but that’s it.

  1. Francis Higginson, Nevv-Englands plantation. Or, A short and true description of the commodities and discommodities of that countrey. Written by Mr. Higgeson, a reuerend diuine now there resident. Whereunto is added a letter, sent by Mr. Graues an enginere, out of New-England (1630). First impressions and physical descriptions, plus Reverend Higginson was like a bridge for me, as he’s from my period.
  2. John Smith, Advertisements for the unexperienced Planters of New-England, or any where. Or, the Path-way to erect a Plantation…by John Smith, sometimes Governour of Virginia, and Admirall of New-England. (1631). 
  3. Lewis Roberts, The merchants map of commerce wherein the universal manner and matter relating to trade and merchandize are fully treated of, the standard and current coins of most princes and republicks observ’d, the real and imaginary coins of accounts and exchanges express’d, the natural products and artificial commodities and manufactures for transportation declar’d, the weights and measures of all eminent cities and towns of traffick in the universe, collected one into another, and all reduc’d to the meridian of commerce practis’d in the famous city of London (1700).
  4. Samuel Sewell, The Selling of Joseph. A memorial (1700).
  5. Joseph Barlow Felt, The Annals of Salem, from its first Settlement (1827). This is my favorite of the antiquarian histories–full of details!
  6. Charles Moses Endicot, Account of Leslie’s retreat at the North Bridge in Salem, on Sunday Feb’y 26, 1775 (1856).
  7. Harriet Sylvester Tapley, Salem imprints, 1768-1825 : a history of the first fifty years of printing in Salem, Massachusetts, with some account of the bookshops, booksellers, bookbinders and the private libraries (1870). More than printing here!
  8. Thomas J. Hutchinson, Patriots of Salem. Honor Roll of Officers and Enlisted Men in the late Civil War (1877).
  9. Samuel Sewall, Diary of Samuel Sewall. 1674–1729. Massachusetts Historical Society, 1878-1882.
  10. Marianne Cabot Devereux Silsbee, A Half Century in Salem (1887). There are quite a few memoirs by Salem women; this is my favorite.
  11. William Pynchon and F.E. Oliver, editor, The diary of William Pynchon of Salem. A picture of Salem life, social and political, a century ago (1890). There are several Salem Tory diaries; most left, Pynchon remained.
  12. Lyman P. Powell, ed., Historic Towns of New England (1898).
  13. Essex Institute (William Bentley), The diary of William Bentley, D. D.,Pastor of the East Church, Salem, Massachusetts (1905-1914). The ultimate detailed diary: new annotated edition coming soon, I believe!
  14. Arthur Barnett Jones, The Salem Fire (1914).
  15. Mary Harrod Northend, Memories of Old Salem (1917).
  16. Frank Cousins, The Colonial Architecture of Salem (1919).
  17. Clifford L. Lord, ed., Keepers of the Past (1965). Really good chapter on George Francis Dow.
  18. Richard P. Gildrie, Salem, Massachusetts, 1626-1683: A Covenant Community (1975). A really important book, key to understanding the religious structure and mindset of Salem’s religous foundation.
  19. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed. The Social Origins of Witchcraft (1976).
  20. Essex Institute, Dr. Bentley’s Salem: Portrait of a Town. A Special Exhibition (1977).
  21. Elizabeth Stillinger, The antiquers : the lives and careers, the deals, the finds, the collections of the men and women who were responsible for the changing taste in American antiques, 1850-1930 (1980). So many seekers of Salem stuff!
  22. Charles B. Hosmer, Preservation Comes of Age, 1926-49: from Williamsburg to the National Trust (1981). Salem is key in a national historic preservation movement.
  23. John Demos, Entertaining Satan. Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (1982).
  24. Bryant and Carolyn Tolles, Architecture in Salem: an Illustrated Guide (1983, 2003, 2023).
  25. Michael Middleton, Man Made the Town (1987). Urban renewal.
  26. Julie Roy Jeffrey, The great silent army of abolitionism : ordinary women in the antislavery movement (1998).
  27. Daniel Vickers, Young Men and the Sea. Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (2005). OMG what a tour de force!
  28. Dane Morrison and Nancy Schultz, eds., Salem: Place, Myth and Memory (2005). This is our exemplar, and we tried to make our book complementary.
  29. Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters. Three Women who ignited American Romanticism (2006).
  30. Avi Chomsky, Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the making of  a Global Working Class (2008). My colleague and a contributor to our volume: Salem needs more labor history!
  31. James R. Ruffin, A paradise of reason : William Bentley and Enlightenment Christianity in the Early Republic (2008).
  32. Gretchen A. Adams, The Specter of Salem. The Witch Trials in Nineteenth-Century America (2008). A big theme in our last century: the overwhelming impact of the trials.
  33. Georgia Barnhill and Martha McNamara, eds., New views of New England : studies in material and visual culture, 1680–1830 (2012).
  34. Susan Hardman Moore, Abandoning America. Life Stories from early New England (2013).
  35. Emerson W. Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft. The Salem Witch Trials and the American Experience (2014).
  36. Martha Hodes, Mourning Lincoln (2015). Descriptions of Salem in mourning from Sarah Browne’s diary.
  37. Jacob Remes, Disaster Citizenship: Survivors, Solidarity, and Power in the Progressive Era (2015).
  38. Kabria Baumgartner, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Optimism in Antebellum America (2019). Essential for school desegregation in Salem.
  39. Nancy Shoemaker, Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles: Americans in Nineteenth-Century Fiji (2019).
  40. James Lindgren, Preserving Maritime America. A Cultural History of the Nation’s Great Maritime Museums (2020).

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April 3, 2024

Spring 2024 Reading List

By daseger

I have been reading! I intend to read more! So much writing and so much teaching over the past few years, I’ve had very little time for general reading, as opposed to targeted reading, trying to find the answer to some very specific question in as little time as possible. That’s not really reading, so I’m trying to get back into the “practice”.  We have our Salem’s Centuries manuscript in now, and the semester is winding down, so I’ve ordered up a stack of books and am digging in. If you’re familiar with my reading lists you know there’s never a lot of fiction: novels cannot retain my attention unless I’m on a plane. Otherwise, I put them back in the stack and generally forget about them. I do have one novel on this list, Richard Harris’s Act of Oblivion, which is about the manhunt for two regicides in seventeenth-century New England, a topic I can’t resist. I haven’t started it yet, and I’ll be thrilled if I finish it. I like the idea of reading novels and I hope to return to fiction at some point, but that time is not now; I’m just too hungry for information, even when reading for pleasure. Most of these books are adjacent to some of my scholarly interests, but not spot-on, although I could have written this first one and wish I did!

This first batch of books (above) could be generally classified as early modern cultural history and I’m kidding, I certainly could not have written Jill Burke’s great book about beauty culture in Renaissance Italy. I included a few recipes for cosmetics in my book, The Practical Renaissance, and made both a mental and actual note (in one of my writing notebooks) to dig a little deeper into that realm but then forgot all about it. Burke’s book is both scholarly and accessible and if you’re interested in learning more about her topic check out the Wellcome Collection’s “Cult of Beauty” exhibit. Ulinka Rublack is another early modern historian whom I admire and her latest work is on the shifting patronage environment in that era, through the perspective of Albrecht Durer’s career. Like Burke, Rublack really opens what has been/could be a much more contained “world”.  Marcy Norton’s The Tame and the Wild. People and Animals after 1492 is also global in its orientation and focused on a topic which I explore in several of my courses (now that I think about it, ALL of my courses): how Europeans viewed the New World/ how the New World impacted the Old. In this case, all about animals. Spycraft is not quite out yet, but soon, and I really want to read it so I put it on this list. I just finished The Wisest Fool, a very engaging biography of King James I and VI, as I wanted to be all ready for the debut of Mary & George this week! Victoria Finlay’s Fabric: the Hidden History of the Material World, is one of those sweeping “commodity histories” which are always on my lists—I haven’t read this yet, but I enjoyed her last book on color.

The last three books are a bit more local: as noted above, Act of Oblivion is historical fiction, largely set in New England, Flee North is about the African-American shoemaker//abolitionist/author/ liberator Thomas Smallwood, and A House Restored is about the restoration of a Massachusetts house.  Flee North is the only book on this list with any sort of Salem connection: Smallwood worked with Charles Torrey, former minister at the Howard Street Church in Salem, to organze escapes of enslaved men and women from the Washington-Baltimore region. I believe that Lee McColgan, whose restoration of the first-period Loring House in Pembroke, Massachusetts is detailed in A House Restored, is going to be one of the speakers at Historic Salem’s annual meeting next month, so I will be reading his soon-to-be released book in advance.

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March 5, 2024

Dorothy Talby

By daseger

I’m starting out Women’s History Month with a Salem tragedy of the seventeenth century, and gratitude that this story popped into my mind at this time, better late than never. I wrote about Hugh Peter, the fourth pastor of Salem’s First Church and later Oliver Cromwell’s chaplain and thus a doomed regicide in England, for our forthcoming book and I tried to give him a comprehensive, current, and critical treatment even though my piece is one of our shorter “interludes.” I included his slave-holding, documented in Harvard’s recent Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery report, and did a deep dive into the recent historiography of the English Revolution. I thought I had Peter all buttoned up, but then I woke up in the middle of the night last week and thought “Dorothy Talby!” Dorothy became the first entry of a social media series on lesser-known women in Salem’s history on this past Friday and I researched her all weekend, so I could tell her story here and in my revised piece on Peter, once it comes back from peer review.

I don’t know what Dorothy Talby looked like: I’m making “silhouettes” from contemporary sources to depict the women I’m featuring on social media this month and I’m sure several will end up here. There’s a real picture problem with pre-modern women: either they are not pictured at all or they are pictured by romanticized images from the last century or so. I used one of Wenceslaus Hollar’s wonderful images from the collection at the University of Toronto for Dorothy’s “silhouette”.

Like everyone in Salem in the 1630s, Dorothy Talby was an emigré. She and her family arrived from Puritan-centric Lincolnshire in 1635, apparently following the popular pastor John Cotton. The Talbys (spelled Taulbee earlier and in variations in Massachusetts), including Dorothy, her husband John, and their five children, arrived in Salem at a rather anxious time, as several settlers—mostly women—were quite vocal in their support of the expelled Roger Williams and and critical of his replacement by Peter. And down in Boston, there was another woman stirring up schism: Anne Hutchinson and her Antimonian challenge. There’s a happy reference to Dorothy in October of 1636 when her sixth child, a daughter named Difficulty, was baptized, but after that it’s all trouble. She fell in and out of troublesome states when she was violent towards her husband, for which she received public admonishments, whipping, and eventually a sentence of being bound and tied to a stake on one of Salem’s main streets. Judge William Hathorne’s summary order used language a bit less condemning than that in his judgements against Salem’s Quakers several decades later:

Whereas Dorethy the wyfe of John Talbie not only broak that peach & love wch ought to have beene both betwixt them, but also hath violentlie broke the kings peace, by frequent Laying hands upon hir husband to the danger of his Life, & Contemned Authority, not coming before them upon command, It is therefore ordered that for her misdemeaner passed & for prvention of future evills that are feared wilbe committed by hir if shee be Lefte att hir Libertie. That she shall be bound & chained to some post where shee shall be restrained of hir libertye to goe abroad or comminge to hir husband till shee manefest some change of hir course….Only it is pmitted that she shall come to the place of gods worshipp, to enjoy his ordenances.

Dorothy’s course stilled for a spell or two, but it did not change: she strayed intently towards “future evils” as she seeemed to believe that it was her duty to remove her entire family from their earthly misery. In December of 1638, she strangled her youngest child, Difficulty, and confessed to the crime after being threatened with peine forte et dure. She was executed days later in Boston, requesting beheading but denied, stuffing the mask given to her into her collar, swinging her legs towards the ladder until she died. We don’t hear the word “revelation” from Dorothy herself, but we do from John Winthrop’s journel entry (a “revelation from heaven”) as well as from Peter, her pastor, who cautioned the attendees of her execution not to lean into “imaginery revelations”. Both men seem to be throwing Dorothy in with Anne Hutchinson and her immediate revelations, then threatening their church. Winthrop does use the m[elancholy] word; Peter does not. Melencholy was an ancient term, experiencing a revival in early modern health manuals and most especially Robert Burton’s popular Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), yet there was little effort to apply any of its old/new theories to Dorothy Talby; she was in the hands of God only in New England.

A more radical intervention of the age: itinerant surgeon extracting stones from a woman’s head; symbolising the removal of her ‘folly’ (insanity). Line engraving after N. Weydtmans after himself, 17th century. Wellcome Collection.

Centuries later, Dorothy Talby was a useful anecdote for those who wanted to shade the Puritan past, or recount “cruel and unusual punishments of bygone days.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, always ready to mine his family’s past for his own benefit, pictured Dorothy in his Main-Street:”chained to a post at the corner of Prison Lane, with the hot sun blazing on her matronly face, and all for no other offence than lifting her hand against her husband, while Oliver Wendell Holmes judged her “mad as Ophelia.” It’s so easy to diagnose the dead!

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February 26, 2024

“In my joy I was as a bouncing sparrow”

By daseger

We are in the last week of February and I have yet to produce a post for Black History Month, so here it is!  I like to engage with historical markers and months; it keeps history “current” for me. I’ve known about two formerly enslaved men with connections to Salem for a while, but have never wrote about either Jacob Stroyer or John Andrew Jackson. Both came from South Carolina and both wrote narratives of their lives in the South. Stroyer’s My life in the South (1879)is the better-known book, and he lived in Salem for a much longer time, arriving in 1876 as a newly-ordinated Methodist Episcopal pastor and establishing a chapel for Salem’s small African American community on Lafayette Street shortly thereafter, a mission which he oversaw for the rest of his life. Jackson’s time in Salem was relatively short, and his memoir less well-known, but he’s my focus today. I first learned about him a decade or so ago when I came across an advertising piece for a talk he gave on a ship in Salem Harbor, the SS Alliance, in 1867: a fundraiser for a school he hoped to open in his native state in particular, and for the Freedmen’s Bureau in general. It was just about this time that the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society was shifting its focus to the Bureau, so I imagine Jackson’s talk was well-attended.

American Antiquarian Society

As you can see, the event flyer featured the same “flyer” as the title page of Jackson’s book from five years before: this was definitely Jackson’s calling card, and it evokes the personality on display in his book. Stroyer was emancipated, but Jackson escaped, and the details of his adventurous journeys balance those of his more harrowing experience of enslavement (somewhat–not really). First he fled to Charleston during the Christmas celebrations of 1846, and then he was New England-bound on a ship whose captain vowed to put him off on the first southbound vessel they met. Fortunately for Jackson, they met none, and  he made it to Boston where he felt his first sense of freedom on  February 10, 1847:  I had escaped from hell to heaven, for I felt as I had never felt before — that is, master of myself \ and in my joy I was as a bouncing sparrow.

Jackson worked in Boston briefly but then made his way to Salem, where he worked in tanneries during the day and a sawmill at night: he was desperate to raise enough money to purchase his family members and his inquiries toward that aim eventually endangered his position in Massachusetts, especially after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. Just as I was beginning to be settled at Salem, he writes, that most atrocious of all laws….was passed, and I was compelled to flee in disguise from a comfortable home (on Pratt Street), a comfortable situation, and good wages, to take refuge in Canada. Jackson made his way north along the Underground Railroad, staying at none other than Harriet Beecher Stowe’s house in Brunswick, Maine en route. She listened to his story and even examined the scars on his back, one year before beginning to work on what would become Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Jackson’s journey(s) continued from New Brunswick to Great Britain, where he lectured on the Anti-Slavery circuit: I keep wondering if he crossed paths with Sarah Remond Parker there, but I think I can’t find any documentation (yet).

Maine and New Hampshire: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s House in Brunswick, now owned by Bowdoin College, and the African-American Burial Ground in Portsmouth, NH: the statue on the right made me think of Jackson yesterday morning. 

After the war and his return to America, Jackson became an agent for the Freedmen’s Bureau and lived in the Connecticut River Valley, taking frequent trips back to South Carolina and returning to Salem at least once, to lecture at the Salem Lyceum in 1872. He had missions: of finding family members, building schools in the South, even buying the plantation on which he was enslaved to provide work opportunities for the his fellow formerly-enslaved brethren. He didn’t accomplish any of those goals, but he told his story, really well and to as many people as possible,  in both print and person, demolishing the folklore of that most “peculiar institution.”

Salem Register, March 13, 1871

New York Library Digital Collections

A new collection of 19th century speeches by African Americans in Britain and Ireland from Edinburgh University Press will be published next month—including speeches by the Remonds—not sure about Jackson. The connections—-metaphorical, literary, artistic—between birds and slavery are many of course, and the National Audobon Society has been under intense pressure over the past few years to change its name as its namesake was a slaveowner: see statement here.

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