Tag Archives: books

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.

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

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!

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

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.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in Culture

January 22, 2024

Salem 1799

By daseger

I always tell my students forget dates, you can always look them up, dates are a terrible way to learn history, but sometimes dates just stand out: 1348, 1517, 1776, 1789, 1914. The other day I was engaged in some endnote-editing and somehow, the date 1799 just started jumping out at me: it suddently seemed like the most important date in Salem’s history! Why? A lot of building mostly: of two of the most spectacular Derby houses and Salem’s first federal frigate, the Essex. But there were other notable things that happened in that year too: the foundation of the East India Marine Society for one, and the renaming of Salem’s long-ignored seventeenth-century fortification, Fort Pickering, for another. 1799 was a big year for Salem, then the eighth largest “city” in the United States with a population of over 9000. Its commercial vitality was already well-established, but it aquired a new civic reputation with the construction-by-subscription of the Frigate Essex for the federal government. The most wonderful book sheds light on the whole commission/subscription/construction process: Philip Chadwick Foster Smith’s The frigate Essex papers : building the Salem frigate, 1798-1799 (1974): I wouldn’t presume to add to it! I will, however, include a couple of its maps. Salem had terrible flooding last weekend and I think we need to remember that we live in an infilled-city, and that a river runs through it.

The US Frigate Essex, built in Salem by Salem residents.

Joseph Howard, watercolor of the Essex, after 1799, Peabody Essex Museum.

Maps from Philip Chadwick Foster Smith’s The Frigate Essex Papers.

 

Not one but TWO Derby houses built in 1799, with Bulfinch & McIntire designs.

The Ezekiel Hersey Derby House and the Elias Hasket Derby Mansion, one which existed long enough to be “denatured” into a commercial building and the other very short-lived, as its commissioner, the wealthy merchant Elias Hasket Derby, died in the same year that it was built: 1799. Think about the Salem in which these two structures were raised: talk about McMansions! These were conspicuous structures: Chestnut Street was at least five years into the future.

These were houses of a son and father of Salem’s first family. I’m not sure how long Ezekiel, the fifth child of Elias Hasket Derby, lived in his elegant house, one of just a few in Salem to be designed by Charles Bulfinch (with interior architectural details by Samuel McIntire). He was more focused on agricultural pursuits and the development of south Salem, where he had a sprawling farm. His town house stood long enough to be stripped, as happened to so many notable houses, and architectural historian Fiske Kimball established a Derby Room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art with its architectural features.

Plans and photos of the Ezekiel Hersey Derby House, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum; the Derby Room at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Elias’s mansion did not stand long enough to be “denatured” (which certainly would have happened in its central location, maybe its short life was a blessing) or photographed, but there are sketches and plans in the PEM’s Phillips Library. It gave way to the present-day Derby Square.

 

Captain Devereux opens up trade with Japan!

It is decidedly NOT true that Commodore Perry opened up trade with Japan in 1853; rather, Captain John Devereux of Salem and the Boston ship Franklin did so in 1799. The Dutch had had a monopoly on western trade with Japan since the early 17th century, primarily because they did not proselytize like their European counterparts during the Reformation. Two centuries later, they licensed American ships to go to their trading post on Deshima Island just off the port of Nagasaki, including the Franklin in 1799 and the Salem ship Margaret in 1801. Devereux brought Japanese goods back to Salem, and so did the captain of the Margaret, Samuel Derby. The former’s account book in the Phillips Library lists “128 raincoats” purchased there, as well as several items of “lacked” (lacquered) furniture: the Peabody Essex Museum has a Hepplewhite-style knife box, several card and tip-top tables, and a large server/oval waiter in its collection from this cargo, the focus of an article in the July, 1954 Magazine Antiques below. Of course, the Reverend Bentley ran right over to see Captain Devereux’s hall at his house on the Common as soon as he returned, as recorded in his famous Diary.

 

The Foundation of the East India Marine Society!

The Peabody Essex Museum’s foundation date of 1799 and claim to be the oldest (maritime) museum in the United States is based on the establishment of the East India Marine Society in that year. I love the description of the society included in the American Neptune of 1944, in an article marking the completion of the restoration of the the Society’s East India Marine Hall: In the autumn of 1799 a group of thirty Salem shipmasters met to found a society so exclusive that only those who had sailed around Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope as masters or supercargos would be eligible for membership. As the first New England vessel had reached China only thirteen years before, this requirement made the society comparable, for its time, to a modern aviation club, for which only pilots who had successfully crossed the Atlantic or Pacific could qualify. Its members were equipped with notebooks so they might advance navigational and geographical knowledge, and like Captain Devereux, they brought home things to embellish their Society’s “cabinet”. There are quite a few old histories of the Society (like the 1920 text below) which reprint the foundation documents and highlight all sorts of little details, but there’s also George Schwartz’s recent history, Collecting the Globe, which presents a more comprehensive context for its foundation year, 1799.

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

January 17, 2024

Good Queen Bess

By daseger

It’s the first week of a new semester, and I’m still working on my Salem book for imminent submission, so I have to admit that I don’t have much time or energy to post here. But it’s also coronation week for Queen Elizabeth I (in 1559) and I’ve come across a lovely children’s book which has captured my teaching imagination—why these scenes? why these stories? Sometimes the blog is a nice break from pressing responsibilities, and that is the case here. Good Queen Bess (1907) is a quarto containing 23 illustrations by the artist John Hassall and text in red by Miss Brenda Girvin. The visuals are striking in their color and context, with some editorial choices immediately apparent (of course we need to see Sir Walter Ralegh’s puddle-covering cloak) while others are a bit more elusive, but all portray the iconic queen as a person first and foremost, beginning with her childhood.

It’s a children’s book, so it might be a bit jarring to depict the young princess alone, as the orphan she was. Instead, she’s with her longtime companion Kat Ashley, cuddling by a fire with dog and toys nearby. Years later, her situation more precarious during her sister Mary’s reign, she is “imprisoned” at Woodstock, with Ashley and more dogs nearby. Not too scary, but still an experience that will shape the young Elizabeth. Somehow her character got her out of that situation, and she is next pictured accompanying Queen Mary at her entrance into London, echoing another entrance image in Parliament. Hassall misses a great opportunity to show the poignancy of the moment in which Elizabeth is informed of her sister’s death and her own ascendance at Hatfield, depicting her in a crowd rather than alone under the venerable oak tree of legend. At this moment, and again at her coronation, Elizabeth’s profile is that of the majestic mature Queen in white (with “wings”) rather than the young woman that she actually was, with her hair down. As Queen, she has to have that majestic look, whether she is stepping on Ralegh’s cloak, dancing (as she loved to do), receiving the famous authors of her reign (Shakespeare and Bacon), refusing the crown/title offered by Dutch emissaries at war with Spain (an odd choice for a children’s book) or addressing her troops at Tilbury with her “heart and stomach of a king” speech.

Elizabeth is defined by her own personal characteristics and experiences but she also represents a “Golden” Age so we must see some scenes without her: a man in stocks represents her policy towards “tramps” (better known as “masterless men” in her own era), reluctant Elizabethans cultivate the potato (perfect, this is my favorite illustration, although cultivation began long after introduction), and then of course we must see the glorious defeat of the Spanish Armada, a fitting finale.

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

November 8, 2023

Salem’s Bêche-de-mer Boom

By daseger

Back in Salem until I take off for Scotland at the end of next week. I’ve got lots of teaching, writing, and organizing to do, but I ignored all of my obligations last weekend and read a fascinating book about early American trade in the South Pacific: Nancy Shoemaker’s Pursuing Respect in the Cannibal Isles. I couldn’t put it down! It gave me all sorts of insights into a very particular and profitable trade dominated by Salem merchants and sea captains in the 1830s and 1840s: in bêche–de–mer or sea cucumbers, highly sought after in China for medicinal and culinary uses. Trepang (the primary eastern term) were and are sea cucumbers (often called sea slugs in the 19th century) which were processed in a special way, still in use today: boiled in sea water, placed in baskets and washed again, then dried in smokehouses. A Pacific example of the importance of dried seafood in world history, the bêche-de-mer trade was characterized by boom and bust phases over its long history due to overfishing in response to the sustained demand, but in the 1830s and 1840s Salem traders were very dominant. Shoemaker provides her readers with an appendix of Salem ships engaged in the trade, from ship Clay in 1827 to bark Dragon in 1857, with all sorts of familiar Salem names on board. William Driver, of Old Glory fame, then second mate on the Clay, claimed that he was the first “white man” (not westerner, or American, or Salemite) to execute the bêche-drying process sucessfully, thanks to the instruction of a band of pirates from Manilla. This trade has it all, believe me: daring captains working for equally-daring shipowners engaged in a risky trade that was potentially lucrative but also completely dependent on native “cooperation,” profit-seeking pirates and bureaucrats, a range of nineteenth-century ethnographic attitudes, tales of cannibalism and violence, big money.

Still very much in demand: bêche-de-mer at a Hong Kong market, photo by G. Clayden

My colleague Dane Morrison works in the field, and I can understand why he finds it so enticing: the stories and the sources are amazing, lending great narratives to important historical analyses of trade, imperialism, and cross-cultural influences and interaction. Using a micro-historical approach, Shoemaker explores American-Fijian encounters through the lives of three people: David Whippy, a Nantucket whaler who remained in Fiji and became an extremely important intermediary, Mary D. Wallis, the wife of Salem sea captain Bejamin Wallis who accompanied her husbanad to Fiji in the 1840s and later wrote about her experiences (as an anonymous “Lady”) there in Life in Feegee. Five Years Among the Cannibals (1851), and John B. Williams, son of a prominent Salem commercial family who tried to make his own fortune in the islands through a more bureaucratic route. So we have quite a Salem focus here: it’s another reminder that the historical Salem experience is played out in Salem and abroad. Williams in particular offers a very interesting perspective: born into money and raised on Chestnut Street (at #19) he was desperate to make his own fortune, beause “to go home poor its a curse in Salem.” These stories of Massachusetts men (and one woman) abroad illustrate how the entire bêche-de-mer trade was dependent on Fijian labor, coerced by native elites with whom the Salem traders negotiated and paid off. So many interesting anecdotes emerge from Shoemaker’s analysis of the exploitative yet intimate relationships tied to this trade: a powerful chieftain named Cokanauto whom Salem captain John Eagleston nicknamed Phillips after his employer Stephen C. Phillips back home (apparently it stuck), a young native woman named Phebe who became the servant (slave???) of Mrs. Wallis, a “Feegee dwarf, about four feet in height, —- said to have been a man of some distinction at home,” transported to Salem on the ship Eliza. (Shoemaker tells us that he made it back home). Captain Eagleston, who made four voyages to Fiji (on the Peru, Emerald, Mermaid, and Leonidas) from 1831-1841, called “his” bêche-de-mer operations “our little city.”

Cokanauto in Charles Wilkes’ United States Exploring Expedition (1845): 3:122.

The Zotoff (1922 lithograph) and  Emerald returning to Salem, (c. 1950 postcard issued by the Salem Chamber of Commerce).

Shoemaker’s focus is appropriately on Fiji, but it would be nice to explore the impact of this trade on Salem: the sources are numerous as many participants, Eagleston among them, memorialized their particpation in logs, journals, and reminiscences. I’m always looking for narratives to counter Salem’s storied post-1820 decline, as it seems to imply that merchants and seafarers just sat on their hands looking at empty wharves like Nathaniel Hawthorne. I’m not digging into the economics here, but Shoemaker does, and the fortunes that could be made from this trade were astounding! We can see the material legacy of the trade among the Oceanic collections at the Peabody Essex Museum here in Salem, as all of the bêche-le-mer traders were members of the East India Marine Society and thus brought stuff home, but I want to know more.

Bure Kalou (Spirit House), Fiji. Peabody Essex Museum. Gift of Joseph Winn Jr., 1835. 

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

August 28, 2023

Treasure House

By daseger

Treasure House. That’s how the guide introduced the Codman Estate in Lincoln, Massachusetts, long known as “The Grange,” at the beginning of her tour the other day. It’s a term which has a specific meaning for Historic New England, which has been the owner and steward of the house since 1968: not only the house itself, but all of the treasures therein, encompassing the possessions and papers of the Codman family of Boston. The Grange was their summer house, expanded and decorated in successive eras by family members/design luminaries John Hubbard Sturgis and Ogden Codman Jr. My ears pricked up when I heard that term, because it’s how Salem was often described in the early and mid-twentieth century, as a treasure house of American material culture. That’s certainly not how Salem is thought of now, but in that heyday, proponents of the Colonial Revival like Ogden Codman Jr. thought and referred to it as such. When I was writing my chapter on Colonial Revival Salem for our forthcoming book this summer, I read quite widely (trying to make up for a disciplinary deficit) and reread Edith Wharton’s and Codman’s classic collaboration, The Decoration of Houses (1897). This book is so crystal clear in its articulation and presentation of interior design as a branch of architecture rather than “dressmaking” that I became more interested in Codman, who was both an architect and interior designer. I went off on a tangent, learning some very interesting design theories and practices as well as trivial details like the fact that he called Wharton (who was his client before his collaborator) “Pussy” and she called him “Coddy.”  And then it only seemed right to revisit the Grange, as the last time I went there, when I was in my 20s, I didn’t have a clue. I seem to remember being impressed with its Federal forthrightness, but not its interior, which I found “shabby.”

Well, its origins are not Federal: the models above show how the original Georgian house was transformed into the Federal Grange over the next century or so. But, it still strikes me as shabby, in an authentic rather than “chic” way: very layered and very waspy. This was really his father’s house, and there were things that Ogden Codman Jr. could change and things he could or would not. You can see his attempts to lighten things up, in his characteristic French-Colonial Revival fusion style, but the heavier hand of his uncle, John Hubbard Sturgis, is still much in evidence. So it’s quite a melange! Toile and Chintz in the sitting rooms and Tudor Revival in the dining room. I think I liked chintz back then, not a fan now, but will always love toile.

The very different stamps of Sturgis and Codman Jr. make for an interesting house. The Elizabethan dining room must have driven the latter crazy, but I love it. We went into only the front bedrooms, which seemed very Ogdenesque.

The other layering effect in the house is a result of the sheer number of Codman possessions therein: photographs, paintings, books, assorted personal items. There’s a time-capsule feeling, as if the family just went out the door, quite a while ago. That feeling is really resonant in the back of the house, where the servants lived and worked. I don’t remember seeing these spaces before: such a succession of rooms and staircases! How many staircases are there in this house? An impressive double staircase in front, and two or three in back? I lost track. Sturgis designed the rear addition, but I’m sure that neither he nor Codman ventured out back, so in a way (and except for the appliances and utilitarian elements) these ways feel even more timeless.

All the staircases and the way out back, eventually into the Italian Garden, which was being set up for a wedding on a VERY humid afternoon. I hope everything went well!

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Architecture, Houses

August 14, 2023

Twilight Time

By daseger

Pardon me, I’ve got to engage in some historiography. The history of historical interpretation can be a deadly topic in the context of precise historical events or periods, but is nevertheless essential engagement for comprehensive historical understanding. I feel like I’ve been swimming on the surface with all the Salem stuff this summer, so took advantage of a rainy cleaning-out-my-study afternoon to re-engage with two classic books that have been part of my life and work since graduate school, if not before: Johan Huizing’s Waning of the Middle Ages (1919) Otto Friedrich’s Before the Deluge (1972). I remember my first reading of both books very vividly: their ability to capture a mood and a time using a variety of sources and expressions and to illustrate the peak of their respective eras and civilizations in such captivating ways that you could feel the decline that followed. Both are “decline and fall” books that focus on the before, thus articulating the transition to after in such a way that you really don’t want to get there but you certainly appreciate the change. I think both books really set the standard for cultural history, and also for a succession of histories that focus on the late summer/autumn of civilizations, the waning, the twilight.

Late Summer and the onset of harvesting invokes feelings of seasonal change in general, but this particular summer has seemed almost apocalyptic to me in an environmental sense, so these books seemed to call to me when I was culling my library the other day—they will always be on my bookshelf but I don’t look at them every year. Huizinga’s period is my period so he’s always relevant for me, but even Before the Deluge felt timely when I opened it up the other day. The title is metaphorical, but it can apply literally now. Après moi le déluge, the famous phrase attributed alternatively to either Louis XV or his favorite, Madame de Pompadour, had a more specific meaning when it was uttered in the mid-18th century, but the overwhelming tide of change brought about by the French Revolution transformed it into both a prescient and universal statement by Marx in the 19th century and Great War survivors of the twentieth. I think both Huizinga and Friedrich have had a global impact in terms of imitators and successors, but I’m only familiar with European historiography so that’s going to be my focus in this post. The majority of “waning” books seem to dwell on the same eras as Huizinga and Friedrich, as well as that of the Revolution: they are seeking to explain and illustrate the great transitions from medieval to early modern and from modern to contemporary in classic European chronology. Not all are successful, as you will see from my comments below! 

Bouwsma’s book is inspired by two classical late medieval historiographical trends, that of Huizinga and his predecessor Jacob Burckhardt, whose Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy articulated a definitive Renaissance break and the beginnings of modernity. Unlike Burkhardt, Bouwsma sees the Renaissance as ending, and not just evolving into the early modern era. I really like this book, but it’s narrower in focus than most books focusing on transitions, maybe because it’s not. Norman Cantor was a great medieval historian, but in his later years I think he veered away from his expertise a bit too much: I really did not like In the Wake of the Plague, and I wanted to like The Last Knight, but I think many of his assertions about John of Gaunt were speculative: but just look at the subtitle!

This book by the intellectual historian Michael Sonenscher comes closest to my original understanding of the Après moi quote, and really conveys social perceptions of the coming financial deluge in the later 18th century. It’s more about the “coming” than the “waning” but still belongs in my subgenre. The medieval and early modern “twilight texts” are definitely academic and thus hard going in places, but the interpretations become a bit more accessible with the Friedrich-inspired texts below.

Before the Deluge is about the 1920s and there are several books about the Weimar Republic which mirror its approach in places (I like Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy by Eric Weitz) but books which attempt to recreate the pre-World War I mentality seem to me a bit more Friedrich-inspired. Frederic Morton and Juliet Nicolson both have family history to draw on for their social histories of Venice and England before the Great War, and while their works don’t quite approach the dazzling depths of Friedrich’s book, they are both very readable and often poignant. Nicolson’s book is very atmospheric: as I’m not really a fiction reader, for me, The Perfect Summer is the perfect summer read.

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

May 19, 2023

Some Salem News and Views

By daseger

A whirlwind of a week! Or should I say a rollercoaster, from my personal perspective. Against the backdrop of finishing the semester, grading and graduation was Salem’s special mayoral election, as our previous Mayor ascended (?) to the office of Lieutenant Governor in last fall’s election. The first new Mayor in 17 years: an exciting and momentous occasion, especially given all that’s happened over those years, particularly the intensification of both development and Haunted Happenings. I was with the candidate who expressed some concerns about both trends, and he lost to the candidate who served as our former mayor’s right-hand man, so I assume that both trends will continue unabated. A disappointing outcome for me, but not nearly as disappointing as the turnout: a miserable 28% of the electorate. Both candidates were out there, there was was spirited debate, and signs everywhere, but as they say, signs don’t vote, and neither did the vast majority of Salem people. So I had a day to process that disheartening development, and then the clouds cleared when my co-editor and I received word that Temple University Press was extending a contract to us for our proposed book on Salem history tentatively titled Salem’s Centuries: New Perspectives on the History of an Old American City, 1626-2026! This is a project we put together for Salem’s coming 400th anniversary in 2026, and I couldn’t be more pleased and excited that it will materialize.

As soon as you know you’re going to get a book published, you think about the cover! Or at least I do. One of the major reasons I started blogging is my interest in historical imagery: I’m always matching words and pictures in my head. I’ve always liked past and present blended photographs, so I made one for our big announcement, but my co-editor and colleague Brad Austin chose a crop of Salem artist George Ropes’ Salem Common on Training Day (Peabody Essex Museum) for our proposal image. I love this painting too, but I think it’s been used too much over the last decade so I’d like to find something else for our cover: I have a digital file of all my favorite Salem images and I’m sure I’ll be creating various compilations, collages and compositions over the next year or so, particularly when I’m struggling to write! I also welcome all suggestions. Whatever we choose will need to feature Salem people, as our book is first and foremost a social history of Salem: early Salem settlers and those who lived on the land before it became Salem, traders, farmers, and the accused and the enslaved, soldiers from Salem who served in the Revolutionary, Civil, and World Wars, entrepreneurs and privateers, Salem expats in the East, Salem families, Salem African-Americans, Irish-Americans, Polish-Americans, Italian-Americans, French Canadian-Americans and Hispanic-Americans, Salem antiquarians and reformers, Salem students, Salem men and Salem women, as individuals and as members of the community, the parish, and the neighborhood. Another photograph which we featured in our proposal was of the dedication ceremony for the “Mourning Victory” statue erected in Lafayette Square in 1947 to honor the men and women of St. Joseph’s Parish who served in both World War I and World War II. Contrast this with a more recent photograph of the crowd at the dedication (I think that’s the wrong word)/ revealing of the Bewitched statue in June of 2005: what a difference! Unity and division, service and entertainment, but both Salem.

The dedication of “Mourning Victory” in September 1947; the unveiling of the Bewitched statue in Town House Square, photograph from the June 16, 2005 edition of the Lynn Daily Item.

I plan to write the concluding chapter of Salem’s Centuries on the evolution of the square in which Samantha stands, formally known as Town House Square as this is where Salem’s first meeting house was built as well as the site of other notable buildings, from the seventeenth century to the present. I’m also writing several other chapters, as well as the introduction with my colleague and co-editor Brad Austin, but the remaining chapters will be written by our colleagues at Salem State (and also several of our grad students who have gone on to Ph.D. programs) according to their fields and expertise. We have an amazing department: we’ve been together for a while and we have a very united front when it comes to teaching and our role in the university, but we also have very different research fields so this project represents a unique opportunity to work together. This makes me very happy, and you should be happy too, dear readers, especially those of you who have been following along for a while, because the strident, snippy and snarky writer of recent years, clearly and consistently frustrated by the state of historical affairs in Salem, will retreat! The reason that I have been so frustrated with Salem’s arbitrary heritage initiatives is their inability to engage: both the past in meaningful ways, and the public in representative ways. Select committees of “stakeholders” (one of our former Mayor’s favorite words, along with “hip”) responded to the Peabody Essex Museum’s removal of Salem primary historical resource and repository, the Phillips Library, oversaw a plan (with some very expensive consultants) to move Salem’s Colonial Revival Pioneer Village, beloved by many people in our city) to Salem Willows, plotted out Salem’s “new” Heritage Trail, and are currently planning Salem’s 400th anniversary celebrations. I have learned that there’s no way to penetrate the structure of these select stakeholder committees, so I’m delighted that I will be engaged in a more constructive activity from now on. I do wonder if this restricted access to civic heritage, along with its commodification, has had some impact on declining civic engagement in Salem? I think that question is beyond the bounds of our book, but it’s something to consider.

I tried! It’s great that we have Remond Park, but there’s no association of place and the sign is incorrect: a “large population of African Americans” did not live in the vicinity; I can’t find one African-American resident of this neighborhood. I presented my evidence to the powers that be years ago: no response– the inclusive moment had passed. There ARE two Salem neighborhoods which were quite cohesive in terms of African-American communities at different times in the nineteenth century: neither are recognized by the City, and one is in imminent danger of being overshadowed and overwhelmed by a proposed over-sized development. We will have several chapters on Salem’s African-American history in the Salem’s Centuries and some smaller pieces too: we’ve got an interesting format which will feature longer academic chapters and shorter topical “interludes” which we hope will attract a range of readers.

8 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in books, History, Salem

May 10, 2023

A Visual History of Home

By daseger

My mind is whirling these days: we’re at the end of the semester, and a teaching-free summer lies ahead of me, but so do three writing projects, maybe more. I’m always thinking, but I’m also really tired, so it’s not all constructive. Thankfully gardening season has begun, but I did not feel particularly re-energized after my first foray out back last weekend—just sore! Then I remembered this book that I picked up down in Connecticut during our stay at the Griswold Inn a few weeks ago. The Griswold has no televisions in their rooms, which pleased me, but not my husband, so I suggested we go to a rather elegant used bookstore next door. We browsed, he more intently than I, but I came across a beautiful book that I thought I could add to my bedside stack of books I never read because I seem to only read for information, and all my informational books are in my study. I bought it, threw it in my suitcase, brought it home and forgot all about it until this past Sunday, when I poured myself a glass of wine and opened it up………….and immediately began to relax, in the best possible, almost entranced way. This book is entitled At Home. The American Family 1750-1870, and it was written by Elisabeth Donaghy Garrett (now Widmer), then (1990) a vice-president at Sotheby’s, and author of several books on historic interiors. Apparently Ms. Garrett had published a series of articles on “the American Home” in The Magazine Antiques in 1983 that was so well-received that it prompted the publication of this book and boy, I can understand why. Peter Thornton, whose book Authentic Decor: the Domestic Interior 1620-1920 I am familiar with, notes in his Forward that the “outstanding quality” of At Home is “the sheer weight of evidence that has been marshaled and the manner in which it has all been presented.” I agree, but I think the manner is more important, at least for my personal purposes: I seldom read for pleasure, and this book offered both pure pleasure and tons of information, in well-crafted text and well-curated pictures. It really took me away, and that never happens.

I really wanted this book to be a picture book, a coffee table book, which I could just breeze through from time to time. And I suppose it is that, if you want it to be. The illustrations are amazing, representing a full-spectrum of deep-hued oils from well-known American artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to seldom-seen (at least by me) watercolors of domestic scenes sourced from local historical societies. But once I started reading, I couldn’t stop: Garrett is a wonderful writer who favors narrative and literary sources, so her text is quite lively, and as Thornton observed, she manages to integrate a lot of information in a very accessible manner. I could take a lesson from her, but I’d rather just enjoy her book. The chapters begin with individual rooms in the house (their uses and all about their furnishings, in great detail) and then proceed to the myriad elements and tasks that go into making a home, all year round, and in the city and the country. So we have: parlors, the dining room, the kitchen, the bedchambers, lighting, “the daily dog-trot routine of domestic duties,” “the quest for comfort,” (probably my favorite chapter–a lot of heating and cooling advice, and bugs!), the tribulations of the early American housewife, and husband and wife as consumers. Here are some of my favorite images, and a few notes about how Garrett used them: I tend toward the vernacular, because so many of the paintings and prints in this book were new to me, but there are plenty of formal interior scenes as well. Since we’re in the beautiful month of May, I’m also going to focus primarily on summer homes: cozy parlors can come later.

The Children of Nathan Comfort Starr, Middletown, CT by Ambrose Andrews, 1855, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Garrett notes the elevation of the house, designed to promote healthy air inside. This looks like a happy scene of children playing shuttlecock, but Garrett believes that it is a memorial painting of the youngest son (in the dress, of course) who died when he was just over a year old.

York, Pennsylvania Family, 1828, anonymous artist, St. Louis Museum of Art. At Home is just as much about households as houses, including servants. Garrett discusses servants but she does not discuss race. This is a book of its time (1990), which is before the renewed historiographical focus on the roles of African-Americans in the northern US. She includes three images of African-Americans in the corners or the margins, but she does not digress on their identity or position beyond that of “trusted servants.” At Home is a study in material culture, not a social history, and so this painting is used to describe the vivid wallpaper and carpet (boy does this book have a lot to say about carpets!) contrasted with the simple painted furniture.

Rhode Island Interior by an anonymous artist, 1800-1810, collection of Fenton Brown. It’s really all about the carpets! They demanded so much time, and money. Women (or their servants) pulled them up in the spring, nailed them down in the fall, and spent a lot time worrying about moths. Garrett uses this particular image to present a European gaze on American interiors, which she does often throughout her book. An Italian observer noted that Americans “displayed few pictures, statues, or ornamented furniture, preferring instead mahogany furniture and fine carpets.”

Two paintings by Massachusetts artist Ellla Emory of Peter Cushing House in Hingham, MA: East Chamber and Old Laundry, c. 1878, both Private Collection. I love this artist! Back to the floors: this sisal-like straw matting was very popular in the summer for centuries—one of my favorite paintings of the Elizabethan court shows the same covering! Floors could be bare in the back of the house, and in hallways as well, and beach sand was spread around.

Garrett includes quite a few watercolors by new-to-me New Bedford artist Joseph Shoemaker Russell (1795–1860), all of which I found absolutely charming. Russell painted New England interiors, but spent some time in Philadelphia too, where he captured all the rooms of his boarding house: above are Mrs. A.W. Smith’s Parlor and Mrs. J.S. Russell’s Room at Mrs. A.W. Smith’s, both 1853 and in private collections. These are summer views, and present opportunities for Garrett to discuss shutters in detail, as well as the necessity of closing up the fireplace with fireboards or flowers during the warm months. The parlor view shows a gas-fed lamp of the 1850s, and also the American custom (noted by all of Garrett’s European sources) of placing all the furniture along the walls of the room. Silhouettes are everywhere in this book!

More summer images (and challenges): View from the House of Henry Briscoe Thomas, Baltimore, by an anomynous artist, c. 1841, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Tea, Alexandria by William Marshall Merrick, 1860, New York Public Library. Come Spring, the lady of the house (or her servants) had to change not only the carpet, but also the draperies. If she didn’t have shutters, she had to pull down the heavy drapes and replace with sheers. She (or her servants) also had to drag all the furniture outside for an airing: Spring cleaning was a really big deal. The battle against bugs intensified with the warm weather, but it was really fought all year long, the principal enemies being flies, mosquitoes, moths and bedbugs.

Ice Cart by Nicolino Calyo, c. 1840-44, New-York Historical Society. The provisioning of the household also varies with the seasons, and “the ice-cart was an integral part of the iconography of summer in the city” from May until October. The New England re-export ice trade was an Atlantic affair, and Garrett’s European observers frequently commented on the abundance of ice in American households.

Now refreshed: I can attack the (digital) pile of final papers and examinations before me!

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in books, Culture, Design, Home