This is an area of study I had no idea existed, wanted to pursue, and was then told there would be no jobs all in about 3 months time. Of course, the job field isn’t exactly a tyranny of choice these days for anything else either.
The background subsections are here to give me false hope about productivity and quick blog posts. The bulk of this section was collections, anthologies, and companions. In that sense they aren’t much for the reviewing process as they outline the state of the field and then offer the best (in their opinion) sources to understand why the field is in that shape it’s in. American Exceptionalism works to deconstruct the phrase in order to understand what it meant to those in the past and less about what it means to us. If there is anything that I have learned, either through study or life, it is that it doesn’t necessarily matter if something is true, what matters is how people react to the idea that it is (the corollary of this is also true).
That being said all the relevant chapters include books that are on the list and will be included in future posts as well as books I am familiar with from my time as a graduate student is just “History.” Specifically mentioned were books The Shopkeeper’s Millennium and Wages of Whiteness both of which were part of an “Age of Jackson.” Other essays were written by authors that constituted most of my readings from Art History.
What do they say about American Studies? Some that it was inevitable others that is might by unfocused. “Practical dilettantes” I think was my favorite phrase. I still can not figure out why working across disciplines is either novel or revolutionary. How can you piece together any historical event without understand the people, places, and things involved in its construction. It goes far beyond who was president and has much to do with what the public was reading, watching, gossiping, and more often then not, concern for their (and other’s) salvation.
You can study American History, American Literature, Religion, Women and Gender, etc and you can become an expert on describing whatever part of the elephant you’ve chosen (been assigned). It isn’t even as if we have institutions in place to allow these people to talk to each other in order to provide a broader context. No. We allow them to talk amongst themselves at conferences setup for their specific work. From what I see and understand American Studies was the first semi-successful attempt to fight this mutual admiration society plague. It is also something that I have been employing in my own work as well. It doesn’t hurt that one of my professors is an American Studies PhD.
To visualize this process think of a round room with windows looking out into every conceivable direction. Each window has a shade (or a venetian blind, if that’s your thing). Going through straight history you have a chosen window to look through. If you work on fringe areas or across set “times” you may get to peak out either of the adjacent windows. History of Science folks get opposing windows (think of it like a color wheel) and might accidentally get to see out someone else’s window. American Studies folks get to move around the room in its entirety looking through any window they wish with the great privilege of enjoying the view or closing the blinds again. The more ambitious might set up mirrors in the room so they can look out their window and the one behind them at the same time. I seem to have fallen into the arc of studying American Cultural History of Science. This means I have entered the room, ripped all the blinds down, left the door open, and raised all the windows so I can yell to other towers.
I wrote a paper on the American Circus once, it was brilliant but I almost failed because it was cultural history and not a Historiography (which I loathe)
That Age of Jackson course I mentioned was one of the better courses I took in college. The arguments about what to call the period, while not entirely irrelevant, tend to miss the point about the importance of the “Era of Good Feeling.” Jackson was the president of the common man. This means the common white man. There is absolutely zero ambiguity here. The problem seems to stem with the “marketing” of that period now to historians who aren’t white men.
Some of the complaints I found about David Reynolds’ Waking Giant was that it simply retold everything that had been done to date by Schlesinger, Sellers (Charles, not Peter), and Watson, and he does, but it needs to remain part of the conversation. I don’t think any historian writing today believes the “Age of Jackson” as benign. But just because the period was more nuanced doesn’t mean you let the classic narrative stale while the rest of the facets get brought into more recent scholarship. You are swinging the pendulum to far in the other direction, and if it isn’t fair to ignore all the outliers then how can you structure a narrative without the major movers an shakers.
I still have the readings from that old Age of Jackson class and between reading this and What Hath God Wrought I pulled many of them out. I liked them specifically because they were assigned primary sources and we worked through what they meant, we didn’t argue about what other people thought they meant. This should *not* be a novel way to teach history. I distinctly remember reading through my binders during lunch at work when someone asked what I was reading. I showed them half of the paper and said ” These are documents sent to the American Government by Indians saying they have the right to exist, and these (showing the other half) are from Andrew Jackson and his representatives saying that they don’t.” Reynolds’ approach to his antebellum history follows the same lines with updated scholarship and it was fortuitous that I read it first to review what I understood about the period.
It wasn’t actually fortuitous it was practical because Waking Giant is half the size of What Hath God Wrought. As I said this was a one or the other setup but since I was ahead of schedule on my readings and that invariable sets off my self-sabotage systems I wanted to tackle them both. And why not? This is one of the most interesting periods in American History.
David Howe’s What Hath God Wrought is summarily a bible for antebellum history. It, as we will come to see, is the epitome of American Studies crossing discilpine boundaries to look at culture, literature, art, politics, socio-economic, and more than a bit of biography. That being said it is a huge pro-whig book. This is why it serves to “balance” the standard Age of Jackson discussion by imbalancing in the opposite directions. I honestly think he wanted to write a biography of John Quincy Adams, but as a genre biography is frowned upon by the establishment, so he went with this behemouth. He spent a good deal of time talking about the Amistad case as well which seems like a good time to share this again.
The great strengths of the book are the arguments against the ideas of market or even solely technological revolution. Throughout he takes great pains to deconstruct ye olde theories and reveals that the market was constantly changing before the expansion and while railroads could count as either one of the above revolutions they were part of a larger whole. Think of it as “if everything was a revolution then nothing was.” Except Howe’s concluding chapter dealing with the women’s rights revolution being the most important of 1848.
Know that if you read either just Reynolds or Howe you will almost literally get half the story behind the massive amounts of change as American influence (and land ownership) stretch from Appalachia all the way to the Pacific. As someone who grew up in Tyler County, Texas that is next to Polk County, the chapters on Texas Annexation and expansionism were the most interesting. For a wide ranging book Howe was able to go surprisingly deep into the altercations in the Southwest that led to varying outcomes and war with Mexico. Seeing his comparison between a US Map of 1848 and a Map of the US “as Polk would have have it” was an incredible piece of visual aid. Additionally, many of the images chosen for the book (that weren’t political yearbook-esque) were paintings that I have blogged about from my art history courses.
This is the background for the next few weeks of reading and some of my favorite books and authors will be discussed. More literature than I have taken in a while and it will be interesting to see how some of these works tie together across the disciplines and across the dates they were published.
The final section of the first portion of comps prep has the longest title, and the longest entry. These books are mainly a cross section of methodologies used in framing historical accounts of Natural History in America. The best part about looking at these different approaches is that the content was generally useful as well. They also criss cross the same time periods, geographies and often the same people.
This history of Natural History in the Unites States starts with botany. In fact, most histories of Natural History start with Botany. Irmsher’s The Poetics of Natural History opens with two Quaker botanista, or rather plant enthusiasts, and their lasting exchanges of letters and botanical specimens. Moving chronologically Irmscher turns then to the museum collections of both Charles Wilson Peale and P.T. Barnum (some specimens being the same ones as Barnum purchased the last remnants of Peale’s museum to create his own).
Rattlesnakes and woodpeckers fill the ways, but it is descriptions obtained from the field and from people in the field. Of Course Audubon’s work is described as the “pinnacle of the poetics of natural history ” with his expert renderings of birds in something of a suggested habitat. That is not to saw that everything was 100% correct and this is where Irmscher offers another method of gleaning truth from facts.
What Irmscher’s work does it provide an avenue for information to disperse that does not necessarily require structured education, although it does require literacy, at least for the descriptions of Audubon’s birds of Holbrook’s snakes (North American Herpetology). It is the sources of information and not the information itself that is important to Irmscher’s analysis. The work goes well into his chosen project to expand the importance of storytelling and collecting beyond the “belles lettres” and to its beginnings in concrete experience.
A word about the rattlesnakes. Recently our natural history museum hosted an Audubon exhibit filled with his amazing artwork, some sketches, and more ephemera. Of all the works and labels the one with the eagle and the rattlesnake stand out the most because the text belabored the fact that Audubon had gotten the snake wrong. This is what Irmscher and some of the following authors are working on: the idea that facts aren’t necessarily the only place to find truth. That is to say, that just representing the facts is something the least useful way to relate, or even understand history. This is also symptomatic of having the fully scientific collection curators serve as the exhibit curators. Nine and a half times of of 10 this comes off as condescending and doesn’t provide the visitor–reader or museum patron–with anything illuminating that they can take away and keep or use in their lives. Turns out historians, museum curators, and people in general could learn a lot from filmmakers in this sense:
Since we are not being pedantic as Werner Herzog advised above, looking at The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes may be one of the best examples of the academic establishment cutting off its nose to spite its face. Again we are looking at sources, and where knowledge is created and how it is traded. The greatest geological event in North American recorded history is forgotten to history and is only reintroduced as seismic scientists attempt to reconstruct the earthquakes to answer questions unrelated to settlement of the Mississippi River Valley in the early 19th century.
Conevery Valencius’s research runs the gamut of personal letters and as many newspaper reports as she could kick up in the archives. The biggest revelation is that the earthquakes were part of everyday life and for a while were on everyone’s lips and at the end of everyone’s pens. The synthesis of these common sources provide a glimpse into the largest issue of the professionalization of the sciences in the late 19th century–that is, not trusting anyone outside of the profession.
By the time civilization had roared past New Madrid, the impact of the once ubiquitous earthquakes had been relegated to the annals of tall tales of westward expansion and were taken with the same mount of salt as stories of blue oxen and giant lumberjacks. As it happens, I first read about the earthquakes in high school in a Wild West Magazine article that retold the tale of a murder uncovered by the earthquakes. Valencius mentions the same story briefly as the remains of a murdered slave were uncovered after a chimney collapse.
Coming from a geologic background into the History of Science this has been one of my favorite books from the readings. Not just because of the history, but because Valencius easily justifies the use of “vernacular” science in the case of the earthquakes and provides an excellent precedent for doing the same thing with other historical events. To go further on this point of vernacular, the tide is now turning towards utilizing the stories of indigenous peoples (where they can be found) in relation to larger European and American historical events The most recent being the discovery of the HMS Terror in areas that match up to Inuit tales, tales which also include incidents of cannibalism among desperate seamen. Valencius’ work also means that now those in between indigenous knowledge and learned professionals can also have a voice in the history of American science. Especially revealing is the fact that this isn’t just an exchange of information, it is the creation of knowledge.
That aptly named Humboldt Current (which ironically has been renamed the Peru Current) attempts to reframe some American exploration in the light of Humbolt’s “ecological” pursuits. Many well-known names in America were students (in the philosophical sense) of Humbolt’s work to provide evidence of an intricately connected world. J.N. Reynolds, Clarence King, George Melville, and John Muir are all connected mainly through their adoption of Humboltian idea(l)s.
Whether or not the book succeeds in convincing any of the deeply rooted professionals that some exploration is not imperialistically motivated (several reviews indicate it wasn’t) is immaterial. The book provides another angle to look at not only exploration, but ironically, empire, ecology, environmentalism, and nature. That some expeditions were undertaken for explorations sake, or to prove some pet theory (in the case of Symmes’ Hollow Earth) seems to be beyond belief for more than a few historians. Many of these people also have a problem differentiating between exploration and exploitation (and that says nothing of using the word “exploitation” as a neutral descriptor for environment use a la anthropological theory).
Some of those environments can become cultural even though they have zero survival/subsistence value. The case of the Grand Canyon is one such event. How the Canyon Became Grand is strikingly similar to The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes in that it charts a discovery, forgetting, and rediscovery of something. Anyone on a road trip to visit the Grand Canyon should read this book. Not only to understand how the canyon became grand, but because it is kind of a meta trip as in visiting you are becoming part of that story and its reasoning.
For me, the most interesting parts of the book looks at the first Europeans to see the canyon in 1540. The Spanish were far from embracing Enlightenment thinking in Europe and they were in no way going to waste important colonial time on anything as novel and romantic as a giant hole in the ground.
Fluvialism in the mid 19th century and the geological surveys a few decades later provide adventure and natural spectacle that was part of the great American West. For the exact same reasons the early Spaniards ignored the canyon, 19th century Americans made it Grand. Pyne’s analysis and charts that record the mentions, descriptions, and other engagements with the Grand Canyon foreshadow many of the projects going on in Digital Humanities today. Pyne’s idea that the Grand Canyon became an important American icon because a select group of educated elite gave it meaning can serve as avatar for any number of American Icons. After all, visits to the canyon or for that purpose. Since you really have to be going there to get there (as it isn’t conveniently on the way to anywhere) it seems that not only is Pyne right about the Canyon, but his results can be applied to nearly anything that educated elite decided to “give meaning.”
American Curiosity is a lot like the ecological exchange book in the previous post–i.e. that knowledge wasn’t a unidirectional commodity no more than pigs or plants were. Parrish’s work situations the colonial Americans, in the earliest years including women, Native Americans, and slaves, not in reference to London, but in concert with the capital. Think of these “white men in London” in the 1790s as the educated elite of Pyne’s Grand Canyon Analysis. Any and all information was useful during the colonial period. This seems to be the case in any colonial possession of Great Britain, but Parrish stays focused on the American holdings.
Parrish’s work reveals the adversarial nature of colonization was a driving force in the early diversity of natural history “knowledge makers.” This also explains why, as Great Britain came to dominate the continent all enterprises became less diverse. This coincides with the treatment of the Native Americans as well, following the end of the French and Indian Wars, many Native people were on the losing end of decisions that left them with no one to offset British power. This more or less was the case for natural history providers as well.
Correspondence from women were important in practice but failed to be printed in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. One of the issues to remember from this process is that it repeats itself after the American Revolution and as America discovers itself. There is almost a frontier theory of scientific correspondence and authority. Once a center is solidified (London, or in the US Philadelphia for science and Washington D.C. for politics) the periphery becomes less important as voices of authority in most matters not least natural history collecting, naming, trading. There is much to glean from the analysis if you can get through Parrish’s her smug (90s) theoretical vocabulary regarding race and gender. In my case, it is best used as a resource to utilize the same various source material that Valencius uses tracking down accounts of forgotten earthquakes.
It also another facet reading of Moby Dick as the only people who could understand what it meant to be a whale was the whalers and more broadly why the cetacean chapter or the book is in the middle of the crew waxing on Shakespeare. If she had stopped there it would have been an excellent analysis, but, as with many of the great points she continues to show what “Melville failed to realize,” etc. Although not part of the reading in this case, this book will work exceptionally well paired with Kariann Yokota’s Unbecoming British.
The Passage to Cosmos is the second Humboldt book in the section, and it is useful to see them together. Walls works in the same manner as Sachs in resituating Humboldt’s expeditions. In Sachs case it was to make it less imperialistic, and to Walls it meant fighting the dismissal that Humboldt’s work was overly romantic. More importantly, Walls delves into the loss of Humboldt in American History shortly after his death and huge continent-wide celebrations for his centennial.
As much as Humboldt tried to find the common thread throughout nature, the differences in his disciples (chosen and unchosen) unravelled it as quickly as he could make ends meet. Materialist, atheist, scientist, “ecologist”, man of letters, romantic, Prussian, Humboldt was all these things and just as individuals can attach themselves to parts of nature and ignore others, the same can be seen in those early adopters of Humboldt’s ideas. In the end it was the professionalization of science, arguments of social darwinism, and (above all) wars with Germany that ground Humboldt’s name out of the annals of (north) American history.
If Passage does nothing else, it should serve as a call to action among historians of science, especially cultural historians of science, to work more unravel the mysteries Walls presents. That Humboldt is still a national hero in many Latin American countries is not just a quaint aside, it is vastly important to the development of natural history and relationships with nature south of the United States border. That most of the english editions of Humboldt works and biographies are severely dated would be an easy place to start. It might also help if the Academy would ever get over its own importance as a memory institution and let Spanish count as a “academic” language. ( I had to petition to get Spanish to count, it was approved, but that I had to petition at all speaks volumes).
It might also be useful to note that Walls is not a historian of science, she is a specialist in English Literature (currently at Notre Dame). I mention this because the bulk of Passage is devoted to the American Transcendentalist authors and poets that were the earliest adopters of Humboldtian idea(ls). These authors, and the movement will come in another post as I work through the American Studies portion of my readings. Incidentally most of these readings were from original dissertations in American Civilizations or similar disciplines.
Nature’s Ghosts follows the idea of extinction from “the age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology.” It is right there in the subtitle. Content wise it doesn’t add much to the plethora of there books that deal with American Natural History at any or all points in time mentioned. What Barrow’s work does, however, is important. It traces the history of an idea from the very idea that it went against nature to the modern attempts to document it as it wipes out specie after specie.
By following the idea through time Barrow allows us to move through the development of natural history through its splintering into countless professions, the battle for the acceptance of evolution and what it meant for species extinction in regards to natural occurrences, all the way to modern efforts to keep things from going extinct. This is as much a history of conservation as it is any history of ideas. He compares the historical accounts of saving the alligator and the bison to losing the Passenger Pigeon and the Heath Hen. These stories set up the final instances of the California Condor and the whooping crane that even non history inclined individuals will be familiar with.
The strength of the book for my purposes lie in its scope and its relevance to the existing modern period. Something that most people get bent out of shape about when histories start trying to explain how things work today. They hurl Whiggish history around like it is an insult that you want to understand how we got where e are today. This is why the most useful books, and ones that reach the most people are printed by Viking or St. Martin’s Press, and not University presses. Barrow’s work is another in this series that serves as a guide of how to write good, useful, and readable history by including sources that are “outside the box” for most modern American historians.
The Book of Nature shrinks Barrows scope to a mere 50 years. It also takes Valencius’ approach and sources out to the popular books of natural history. By looking at what the average (literate) Americans had in hand, Welch follows the development of the educated hobbyist for generations on either side of the Civil War. This crosses much of the same territory as some of the earlier works and deals with some of the familiar authors as well (Thoreau, for example). The biggest boon to these early nature studies was the explosion of printing, text and more importantly images during the 19th century.
Welch’s study also follows along the development of the American Transcendentalist movement regarding self reflection, with biographies and autobiographies helping author’s work out their, and by extension humankind’s place in nature. Welch’s study ends just as the professionalization of scientific disciplines start taking authority out of the hand of learned citizenry as well as the earliest rumbles of the American Renaissance. It is an excellent book to show the obverse side to Barrow’s Nature’s Ghost providing a more in depth look at a few sources and historical actors instead of the survey spanning two centuries.
The final book in this section, and this portion of comps study has to be one of the strangest books I have ever read. On the surface it seems straightforward enough to be an environmental history about the destruction of the bison. I mean, it is titled The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History. I literally have no idea what the purpose of this book is. I think, in the end Isenberg wanted to point out how complex the near extinction of the American Bison was.
Explaining that something is complex and making it complicated are two entirely different things. This book is heavy on the latter. Isenberg states that several chapters of this short book appeared in print as various articles prior to publishing in 2001. This (I hope) is why the book is so schizophrenic. On the other hand it isn’t just choppy between chapters.
Within the chapters Isenberg goes from setting up the history of Native Americans turn to nomadism after the introduction of the horse, back to the vocabulary for the plains Indians more broadly to bits and pieces of Chaos theory. To sum it all up: Isenberg implicates climate, Indians, and the Plains themselves as accomplices to the Buffalo hunters in the demise of the numbers.
Several key, and reiterated, points include that fact that Native Americans were not harmonious with nature in some Edenic way, they were not stewards of wildlife, and they were sometimes wasteful in the utilization of the bison carcass. He also shows the market pressures for the Indians to become hunters and providers of hides for the robe market as well. All this historical intraculturalism could serve to provide a more holistic picture of the plight of the buffalo, but then he evokes modern ecological studies (which, for the record I think is actual Whiggish history in the sense that people sneer at it).
To help prove that nature is in no way stable, Isenberg follows a handful of biologist that follow chaos theory. Think Ian Malcolm in Buffalo Park. The absolute worst for me is the use of a modern population study to back up claims that Bison populations experience drastic fluctuations in number. The study in question involved the reindeer on St. Matthews Island.
This is one of the (literal) textbook studies of population as the 29 original reindeer swell to 6000 in almost 20 years only to crash back to 60. The problems with this analogy are: 1) An island is a closed ecosystem in no way similar to the vast expanse of the Great Plains and B) Reindeer were introduced to the island whereas bison evolved over 30+ million years on the great plains. To this end I wonder if Isenberg has ever taken an ecology course or seen a buffalo or the Great Plains.
I will end the discussion on Isenberg’s book with a wonder at just how much he wanted chaos theory to work here. There is already a smoking gun in the plight of the bison and it belongs to the American hunter. Isenberg tries to put other instigators up on the grassy knoll but spends so much time setting up the position he does not establish and accountability for each in relation to each other before applying them all to the larger problem at hand.
He introduces an idea and then either neutralizes it or proffers a counter almost immediately. If this was supposed to help in the explanation of a complex system it failed. My favorite line in the book falls near the end when he is (again) approaching chaos theory and describes the standard butterfly in Africa causing havoc elsewhere: “no butterfly ever shouldered a .50 caliber rifle on the hide hunters’ range” (196). He also starts tangents about bison preserves serving to domesticate the bison in regards to the drive of civilization. This book would far better serve as a collection of essays centered around a relative theme, as a single, drive, work though, it serves as an example of what not to do. By trying to be history and ecology research it fails to do justice to either.
One if by land, two if by sea! This section looks at fieldwork in guise of expeditionary forces from Captain Cook to American Army explorers in the American West. Exploration and fieldwork have been the two longest lasting interests since I started working with history professionally. To see how some of these books fit together was more useful than anything that they may have actually argued.
Nature’s Government has been reviewed on its own here, so I won’t retread on travelled ground and will focus more on how this books more or less arranges the others in the reading. In simplest terms Drayton’s “World History [from the British Perspective]” proposes that the impact of British dominance of the world was not a unidirectional project. That is to say that it was more than raw material that made its way back to England after colonization. Even in instances where one product was sent directly to another landholding (specifically breadfruit to feed slaves in the sugar plantations), British culture was shaped by the nature that was traded.
The biggest use of this book is a methodology of looking at trade as a complex with many movie parts and influences traveling in several directions as once. Similar to Iron Cages Drayton looks at several of the colonial parties together instead of looking at Britain Imperialism in bits and pieces.
Drayton also influenced D. Graham Burnett’s work in South America from a dissertation to publication as Masters of All they Surveyed. I first read this book in 2008 while doing field work in Belize. As an after workday read it isn’t one to keep on the bedside table. After reading Drayton now I see a little more at what Burnett was teasing out with the surveyors work. Working in the field as a surveyor meant literally scouting out the lines that were to go on a map. In the case Robert Hermann Schomburgk he tries to reveal the lasting legacy of the survey in imperial studies as more than just “map scouts.”
A broader theme in Burnett’s book tackles the very idea of border studies and mapmaking. By using Schomburgk’s survey of Guiana as a case study he opens the discussion for the geopolitics involved in mapmaking. This includes the thousands of deaths over imaginary lines argued over in drawing rooms. Many times the elite, armed with reports such as Schomburgk’s argued for the “naturalness” of such boundaries as folling certain rivers, or from the surveying tradition “landmarks” which are fixed and, if possible, enormous.
To compound the issue earlier surveyors were intent on finding the lost lands of El Dorado or other mythical regions that only existed on maps and in the minds of men. Mapmaking and naming in these instances almost have the biblical power of knowing someone’s true name. After all, if it is on all the maps, it must be true, just think of the Central American paradise known as Poyais. There is land speculation and then there is land speculation. Schomburgk was following in the footsteps of the explorer-hero Raleigh, and it isn’t the only time this kind of admiration led to explorations around the world.
Longitude and Empire is almost a misnomer for this particular book. Other than the fact that Cook was able to retrace and check the lines of longitude it more concerns itself with the impact of Cook’s island discoveries on the Enlightenment. The most obvious for my purposes is that the islanders in the South Pacific. The islands and their inhabitants represented “stages” of civilization in direct opposition to the (then) modern notion of the dichotomy of Civilization and Savagery. More broadly the systems of governance set up between islands strengthened British understandings of a nation-state.
One of the things that all the Cook books have in common, but never actually trace any deeper is the idea that these small islands dotting the Pacific were not tiny pieces of land across vast expanses of nothingness, the ocean that existed between islands were just as much part of the nation as the terrestrial counterparts. Some argue that Cook was a man of his time and an extremely lucky Enlightenment man of science, but the fact remains that islands that he visited, mapped, and named were generally never the same after his departure. Many had been visited before, but it was the regimented service of the British Navy that opened them up farther, and more deeply, than shipwrecks or whalers.
Frank McLynn’s book calls Cook the Master of the Seas. This is a good place to start if your knowledge of Cook is superficial. McLynn has several other good land explorer (Stanley and Burton) under his belt and attempts to look at the personal records of Cook in order to get inside his head. This leaves much to be desired for the context that may have shaped some of Cook’s decisions as well as his ideology for the missions. The man who could not be comfortable in his own retirement had need to undertake a third voyage to find the Northwest passage from the back door. It was the third voyage that sent Cook to the top of heroic martyrdom, a fate I am not 100% sure wasn’t his end goal with that third voyage anyway. By the time the remainder of that mission limped into port under a great cloud of misfortunate, news of Cook’s death was months old and most of the garments had been rent so the reception for the remaining crew was as warm as the weather.
The first two voyages however prove a more fertile ground for environmental historians to work. Trading Nature is one such outcome. In comparison to Drayton’s big picture work, Jennifer Newell takes a case study approach in order to get into the heart of the island of Tahiti and ecological exchange. The argument is as obvious as Drayton’s for anyone that is paying attention: every instance of trade in the case of something living (including seeds) is ecological exchange and it has an impact on both parties involved in the trade.
These more modern takes do much to dull the “fatal impact” theory. Newell’s search for “indigenous agency” will probably meet with some resistance if not merely controversy. Without a full record of the relationships we are at a constant disadvantage of painting these portraits from one side. It is likely that for whatever the Europeans believed they were duping the islanders, the islanders thought they were getting the best of the Europeans. Human nature. We see Cook and explorer’s attempts to set up filling stations on the islands to aid in sea travel, with unintended consequences on the native geopolitics. But, just as Drayton suggests in Nature’s Government, there were just as many unintended consequences back in Europe, they just didn’t necessarily involve complete upheaval of standard organization of power–unless you count something like the Great Reform Act. I am not saying that it is a direct result of Cook’s voyages or even trade, I am suggesting that many of the changes in British and European culture began with the wealth generated by trade. To tie this one back to Burnett’s book: “culture doesn’t live in maps.”
It wasn’t just Britain that was trading across the globe. There are two types of “imperialism.” The standard we must have more landholdings than x and the economic imperialism, which is what everyone generally thinks about when they hear the word. They are intricately related, but there are different aspects of each and we would do well to think about that as a complex just as these trade systems.
On the other team in this instance there was France. They are England’s main adversary at sea especially after the sinking of the Spanish Armada. They had extensive landholdings and trade networks as well. They also had a huge royal garden and an all encompassing revolution. As with Drayton, Emma Spary’s Utopia’s Garden was part of a singular discussion chronicled here. It serves as in interesting study in how “natural history” and more broadly “nature” handles the huge shift from monarchy to republic. The process was far more than just changing the name of the gardens and museum or putting out the sign that said “under new management.”
The fact that most of the staff working in the King’s garden weathered the revolution with appointments at the museum is a testament to their ability to work within changing socio-economic politics. In short, the move from idiosyncratic royal/aristocratic patronage to idiosyncratic governmental patronage. The fact that the garden was used by many of the revolutionaries as a way to not only justify the revolution but as a means of structuring the resulting government as well. It also reveals that the revolution was mainly a means for the upper middle class to take power from the elite of the elite and most of the poor working French were left with little more than they started with.
The other portion of this section opened up the exploration of the American West. The Goetzmann pieces are dated in ways (Mainly in 1957 and 1966 terminology) but in others remain an excellent starting place to understand what was going on in the west. The whole idea of rugged individualism is a myth. Everything the cowboy owned came from the east. Even the mountain men–who were apparently experiencing a Renaissance of sorts in the late 50s and early 60s, much to the chagrin of William Goetzmann–were beholden to the trading stations where the fruits of their labors were part of an international trade network of their own. Think of the fashion in Paris driving the need for beaver from the Canadian/US borderland wilderness.
In the same manner the opening up of the west was the undertaking of those in the East. They either lived there, worked there, or where educated there before moving past the Cumberland Gap, then the Mississippi River, and then later the Great American Desert. Army Exploration and the American West was Goetzmann’s American Studies Dissertation at Yale. Exploration and Empire was the result of a late reading of the dissertation by a publisher who offered Goetzmann a deal for a follow up book. One of the gleanings from both works is that we have to look at the American West in regards to the east. That is we have to see the uncharted west the same way we look at the ocean connections of the South Pacific Islands.
We also look at the West as laboratory, just as the ocean was for Cook. It is also another representation of the work that Schomburgk was doing in South America following the lead of Raleigh. It was a distinctly American process though, as it also mirrors some of that governmental patronage from the new Jardin in Spary’s Utopia. This is especially true of the post civil war period and the development of the topographical engineers as a separate entity. Many things impacted the American government’s involvement in the west, the shift from sea exploration (the U.S. Ex Ex has ended), the end of privately funded collecting trips of the 1830s and 40s gentlemen geologists, the develop of American Universities, and even the shift of the “Indian Question” from the War Dept to the Dept of the Interior.
In the end, though, and one of the things I hope to explore in my dissertation is that each of those aspects were part of a larger complex of issues that were structured with old systems in mind. Most especially when comparing the overland expeditions to their watery counterparts. This is particularly important in our case as out military models come from different countries. We get our Army from the French, so the exploration of the American West is akin to Napoleon in Egypt and out navy is modeled on that of the British, which leaves the US. Ex. Ex. similar in scope and model to the voyages of Cook and Darwin. Wilkes actually wanted to become the American Cook. There was also the huge push into hydrography and magnetic studies on the east coast. I think, as it has turned out it was the huge overland military assisted/led/involved that led to West Point eclipsing Annapolis in American consciousness for the place to go for a workable, military education.
As far as “Americanization” goes, the starkest example of that comes through James Haley’s Captive Paradise: The Unites States and Hawai’i. The greatest part of this books comes in Haley’s explanation of why he wrote it (and by extension why it is St. Martin’s Press and not an University Press, but that discussion will come at the end of this journey after I have finally answered my questions).
Haley’s work is revisionist, but not in the manner that the modern academy is expecting or producing. His arguments come from extension work within the Hawaiian archives themselves as well as the islands history before American contact. The standard narrative is the usurpation of the independent country, annexation and eventual statehood of the indigenous people at the hand of the more powerful Euro-Americans in the hardest, clearest picture of American Imperialism (as if we don’t have Panama for this).
Haley argues that long before it was a protectorate or territory under American conquest, Hawaii was aware of its power for trade and navigation. Going back to the Cook books and Trading Nature the arguments are there as well. The islanders were working a system that was working them. Haley’s lynchpin is that Hawaii was Americanizing long before it became part of America. This is that dual system of imperialism I mentioned earlier. For most other holdings, they were part of land grabbing imperialism first and economic imperialism after. In the case of mainland America and Hawaii that process seems to be reversed.
With the boundary surveys on land separating the American Northwest wilderness from the British Canadian wilderness as part of American expansion, Manifest Destiny, sea to shining sea, etc When the missionaries move in (major players in Empire building according to Haley) the Sandwich Islands no longer bore the name of Cook’s last benefactor. In the Shadow of Iron Cages one can ask how the Hawaiians were viewed in light of their new American citizenship as territory and statehood in 1959, and what comparison and contrasts can be drawn from the native Alaskans which were less traveled trade stops in the Pacific. For whatever else Hawai’i may be, it is an excellent example of economic imperialism, it also doesn’t hurt the irony of World History that the island where Britain’s golden sea captain is killed becomes an American State.
–~Epilogue~–
Exploring the West is a Smithsonian publishing popular coffee table book from 1987. The introduction was written by William Goetzmann. By most accounts such popular books do not warrant scholarly investment. If you have made it this far into this mess of a page you have realized that I am (by far) not most accounts. One of the things I work with is visual analysis and visual culture. This book is loaded with the latter. Books like these have become of great use to me in recent years as I have tempered my historical training with advanced work in art history. This isn’t all about the history of art. This is where you can learn to “read” photographs, ask questions about a publication’s audience based on what is included visually as well as (and especially) by what is being advertised in the finished products. Museum exhibit books will play a larger part in the end of this road as I work with the collection of essays surrounding artists and movements to understand them within their historical context.
A for instance, and in closing, I will share an image from Exploring the West that demonstrates an interesting turn for someone that studies the history of collecting, collection, and display. As part of this Smithsonian exhibit Titan Peale’s collecting gun is part of the display with odds and ends from his time with the US. Ex. Ex. This firearm has transcended life as a “scientific instrument” and even a tool od expansion as it was used in hostilities twice (see the silver name plate) to an artifact that is part of the same collection as the war clubs and shields that the US. Ex. Ex collected during their sea voyage. I will have more to say about the US Ex Ex and the Sea of Glory book that I didn’t included here. The Lost World of James Smithson did not add any more to the American story that wasn’t mentioned previously, but I do suggest you read it if you are interested in learning more about the beginnings of the Institution and early Washington DC.
As I continue to look at the professionalization of disciplines in the later 19th century I believe I am beginning to see the historic thread that connects these things starting to match the thread of my personal interests in their modern incarnations. The greatest thing about these readings (and the few before in the last post) is that I have been part of their modern machinations. Aside from working in the Vertebrate Paleo lab (such as it is) at Lamar for most of my undergrad, I spend a summer field season in Belize with the University of Texas following the Maya. Not only did it help me see I was more interested in the history of archaeology as a direction of inquiry (I still follow the latest Central–and some southern-American discoveries) than actually making a career working with those personalities, it has provided me with an already primed canvas to start smearing my own theories onto.
Let’s start, conveniently at the beginning. I read Moser’s work back when I was working on a display and reconstruction chapter in my Piltdown thesis. The beauty of this book is the unrolling of a large scroll of images of the past–both physical images, of which there are a handful; and subconscious images of which there are almost innumerable sort, but, like human ancestry can be traced back to their source, if you know where to look.
Stone Age artists at work by Charles Knight
The idea of cavemen with clubs and skins are the very essence of understanding humanity’s past. Kids drawings contain this although they can’t always tell you why. The most matter of fact ones will say “because that is the way they were.” They don’t know that, and we don’t know that. If we know anything it is that is wasn’t that way. The first neanderthals were brutes, partly due to the misidentification of pathological disease on the first skeleton, but in reality all led by a host of ideas about the “other.” That is going to come up again and again in this post and hopefully it will makes sense to us both by the time I get to the end.
The caveman situation is not the beginning of that iconography. It isn’t even the middle. Wildmen, hairy and misshapen, come to us from some of the earliest sources translated. Marco Polo’s travel reports gave us the odd communities of mono-pods and the torso-faced. These were other. They weren’t Greeks, they weren’t Roman, and they certainly weren’t civilized. These sorts of otherness qualities run hairily though the Renaissance as well. Even the Bible recorded instances of either people reverting to wild men living off grass, etc. while others as hosts to demons live outside the city away from civilization. Just like the biblical imagery in Rudwick’s analysis of paleontological scenes, these march badly forward through time not necessarily within the waking consciousness of man, but most definitely part of the grey matter. The “modern stone age family” isn’t as much of a caricature as you might think.
The past is a foreign country and the first visitors there fell into the same category as other foreigners. The pasts borders were filled with people so unlike modern humanity that they defied regular classification. Even as those classifications arose in the 20th and more recently the 21st century, the iconography of their existence and lives have remained relatively unchanged, although with the finds of the last few years, Arthur Keith’s necklace-wearing caveman has been vindicated.
There is no better way to tie these two books together than this Far Side cartoon
The discoveries that led to the eventual depictions of neanderthal were part of a larger collecting effort. In order to understand the fullest picture of life on earth in the past paleontologist were scouring the entire habitable planet to find specimens of the long dead. That methodology crossed over into other new branches of science. Material culture was one thing, bowls, pots, weapons, could all be employed in arguments of a technologically driven process of evolution, but the questions that needed to be answered was that of race. Namely was man a single specie–not so much as in the variation of mockingbirds or tortoises, but questions of racial hierarchy and classification had to be answered.
Anyone who works with statistics will implore you to increase you n. The large the sample size the more your analysis can smooth out or accommodate oddities. Such was Samuel Morton’s drive in his collection of human skulls. Definitely macabre by any standards and offensive to a great number of tastes people are still arguing over the ideology of Morton and others of his day who went about dealing in body parts of others while never thinking to have their family members boiled, de-fleshed and numbered.
Aside from the count, Morton’s collection stands as a testament to early American scientific methods. Morton’s collection grew as people from across the globe sent him skulls. A trade network of what Fabian calls the “unburied dead” existed for most of the century. In its earliest guise it was grave robbers selling corpses to medical schools, but as the recent turn in tastes was anthropology, that was where the enterprise lay. Since most “civilized” people could afford burial in a protected area, Morton’s collection skews heavily towards the poor and minority groups. This says as much as anything and if you are into that kind of study, definitely add Fabian’s book to your library, it is one of the best on the subject. For my purposes those it reveals the power of specimen-ization. The clips below show nearly the same thing. Darwin in South American bartering for a skull specimen and an outlaw in the American Southwest doing the same. The differences to our eyes are one was a living breathing prehistoric beast and the other was a living breathing human. The hardest point to get through here, beyond the whys and wherewithalls is to many people, especially the collectors and early anthropologists, this distinction simply did not exist.
For Morton, and those who collected for him, the pieces of what once made up individuals became important pieces of a larger puzzle, nameless, if not faceless, data points used to try and answer the same questions about man that were being addressed involving say, the evolution of the horse. For many of Morton’s collectors, and maybe Morton himself, the remains were no more or less than that of horses. They would see “primitive” burial practices as quaint, and wait for the ceremony to be over before swiping the skull and mailing it back to Pennsylvania. There was always someone willing to help. Even John James Audubon of bird and quadruped fame shipped Morton skulls from the battlefield of San Jacinto in Texas. Spanish-Indian he surmised.
With the oddities pouring in, and more than a few bags of skulls coming in from the Pacific Northwest and California it would sound like Morton had many experimental measurements but nothing so much as a standard or a control. The American Civil War provided an abundant opportunity for the skulls of white men to be added to Morton’s collection. In fact this time of windfall was exactly what one of Morton’s collectors pegged as the best opportunity for collecting–death on such a scale that the living have no time, energy, or ability to buried their dead. Embalming and funerary history aside, this is one of the races for the new middle class to have their family members embalmed and returned to the cities. Many of them knew the fate of the unburied dead.
In Morton’s lifetime he saw the end to this type of scientific collecting as the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnography began undertaking government-sponsored large scale collecting expeditions and gone were the days that individuals without government authority would collect skulls. Decades later the move to repatriate remains reduced the collection but because not all of the skulls had claimants it wasn’t completely dismantled. In fact, this further skews the original Morton collection towards the poorest class as many of the native american remains have been claimed and repatriated while skulls of those from tenements and asylums are still part of the collection at UPENN. Most recently (2013/14) the exhibit Year of Proof: Making and Unmaking Race, displayed some of the remaining skulls inside the craniometers that Morton used to measure the skulls in minute detail. As you can surmise many people were put off by the display.
After the war, the USGS was still helping America push West along newly united transcontinental railways. Veterans of the war with more skill or cunning or, (more likely) connections made their way into advanced posts in government positions. John Wesley Powell creates the Bureau of American Ethnology in order to preserve the material culture of the vanishing race of American Indians as well as throw his hat into the debates of race, evolution, progress, and what it means for culture. The Smithsonian’s relationship with its own past is somewhat of an inconvenience these days. The fact that they are attuned to it is promising as you can see the difference in this version of the book in 1994 after being originally released in 1981 under a quite different title:
It wasn’t necessarily a question of de-humanizing the American Indian in the case of the bureau. The Indian had been a vanishing race since before George Catlin and others went west to preserve what they could of the culture with their art. In the post Civil War West the “vanishing” was less than romantic. Nearly to a man all comers to the “Indian question” offered the same two options (a very victorian matter of fact either/or conundrum) the native people must either assimilate or be exterminated. Either choice meant an end to Indian culture as it was practiced in the 1870s through. This was a blanket justification for the bureau. Here, again, we see the other as specimen. Their culture (and their bodies) were things to be collected, studied, catalogued, and explained. (That explanation will come near the end with the last book I will talk about in this post Iron Cages). Incidentally it was the bureau’s work–methodology, scale, and financing–that kept others from amassing collections like Morton. In this sense, anthrology was pulling from the playbook of geology. In fact, Frederick Max Müller called the Bureau of American Ethnography “intellectual geology.”
From the perspective of the anthropologists, why not? They were not only riding the tide of understanding the earth, in deep time and for them more recent, and for linguist, perhaps even real time. The Indians were either developing modern Republican sensibilities or were being killed. Either way the race, culture, and civilization of the American Indian in all its guises was vanishing or had vanished. Egyptomania was gripping the American East coast even as modern civilization’s wonderful things were headed west. A vanished civilization with high art and an only recently deciphered language (Champollion cracked the Rosetta Stone in 1822). Native American Indian Culture was as ripe for the picking as anything buried in Egyptian sands. There were also mummy unwrapping parties, after all why just dehumanize indigenous remains?
To further accelerate American archaeology you have John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood exploring the lost cities of the Maya. In 1841 they published the first book of American archeology: Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán. To tie the two together Stephens had explored Egypt, and The Holy Land (with a book published in 1837), Greece, Turkey (published in 1838) and other places before setting out for Central American jungles in 1839 the same year that Morton published his Crania Americana. In 1844 Morton published Crania Aegyptiaca; or, Observations on Egyptian ethnography, derived from anatomy, history, and the monuments.
Egyptian Obelisk in New York’s Central Park. Installed February 22, 1881
That following year Edger Allan Poe published a satirical short story “Some Words with a Mummy” in the American Review: a Whig Journal. Poe had attended a mummy unwrapping ceremony whose star had, through ever increasing exaggeration by the press, been billed an “Egyptian Princess.” As the unwrapping concluded with evidence that she was intact not a real princess, but not even a real she, Poe introduced the world, through one Doctor Ponnonner, to Allamistakeo. I think this might set precedent for all the amazingly bad puns for things like this. There is even an episode of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon that introduces the ancient Amun Turt-El in 1991. We will spend much more time with Poe later.
To tie almost all of this together in a less than neat bow is Takaki’s revised edition of Iron Cages. Here Takaki takes all the individual looks at American white attitudes towards different minorities and plays them out in context of each other, as they happened, in real time, from the Revolution to the Spanish -American War in the text and then as far as Post civil rights in the Epilogue. This is not an exercise to again arrange according to race who was treated the worst by the European Americans. One of the things I notice about that term is that is hardly ever includes the Spanish, Portuguese, or the Italians. The Scots are sometimes differentiated from the English and the Irish are right out. In effect it just works that the British, French, and (broadly) German.
Following the settlement of the continent Takaki’s whites are pressed to incorporate themselves into staunch republicanism and non Britishness while they also deal with the millstone of slavery and continuing, often hostile contact with Native Americans. For the time period covered the book is relatively short (only 303 pages not including notes and an annotated bibliography) so it jettisons through emancipation, the newly freed black industrial “body” of the new south working for the increasing middle class white “mind.” They south is still separated form the north in terms of working class. The new industrial push sees labor in the north consolidating and unionizing to the dismay of the industrialists. While the argument that the newly freed workforce of the south is still as content in labor to make a dollar as they had been under the yoke of slavery.
The drive west brings more “other.” As the east is cleared by indian removal, and the north east especially has generations removed from Indian contact, new methods of describing the increased threat to modern Republicanism as it unfurled on the American West. With expansion comes new Americans. That is to say Mexicans living in lands that belonged to Mexico until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Now these people were Americans and they had the equivalence of five minutes to start acting like industrial, protestant infused working Republicans. Many ended up working in the copper mines to (as Takaki oft repeats) provide the raw material for the wires that brought electricity to the east. To make matters worse the treaty had only been worked out with the Mexican government and no thought was given to the indigenous tribes whose lands straddled the new borders. This should come as no surprise and in fact is repeated to the world’s great detriment after the end of the Great War as the European powers drew lines across the map and divided the spoils effectively planting the seeds of World War II. That is getting ahead of the story, and we must remember that this is a decent approximation of New York City in the 1840s:
Even jumping around the problems in the Southwest and British Northwest (present day Oregon) there were addition racial tensions as far west as the land went. California had seen an influx of Chinese immigrants arrive with the gold rush. They were classified of themselves and in relation to those existing others in North America. To paraphrase some of Takaki’s sources, the Chinese weren’t as brutish as the blacks, nor as lazy as the Indians. Takaki works in the alignment the Japanese had with Mexican workers in order to strike for better wages, only to not be able to register their union because the state wanted them to agree to a No Japanese membership (presumable knowing that on their own they would have less bargaining power).
Eventually the Chinese make it to the East Coast, to some shock and horror as they are brought in to break strikes, just as the “blacks of the New South” had been after the war. I can’t confirm it with hard dates, but one gets the idea that around this time is when C.H. Woolston wrote the words to Jesus Loves the Little Children as it, in its original incantation includes “red and yellow, black and white” children. Woolston was born in 1856 and lived exclusively in New Jersey and Philadelphia after 1880 (if hymnary.org is to be believed).
The book would be great use in any course on American History in the 19th century for no other reason than the great breadth of scholarship that it contains. For me, the most interesting parts is the inclusion of contemporary literature. Takaki utilizes contemporary literary sources for enormous impact by bringing books like Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court out of their quaint classic-ness and into the realm of political and social commentary that it was written as. This example in particular showing the Yankee’s classification of the medieval British as “indian-like” “barbarous” and “savage.” And that is ignoring all the violence.
The ending, I think, is the best part of the book. Not for how it ties in Takaki’s thesis on race in American in the longue durée, but for how he uses Melville’s work as a mirror to modern society. I have been a fan of Melville’s works for years. Not just Moby Dick, but the more obscure Bartleby, the Scrivener, and Redburn. These all show up in Takaki’s conclusion, which should be no surprise given the number of times Takaki uses the word “monomaniac,” it is second only to the phrase “iron cages.” Melville, like Poe and Twain, was well aware of the position of American republicanism, industrial might, and moral ambiguity. To see the Pequod as metaphor for an industrial complex, with her crew a numb mindles body, even aware of perpetuating their own demise they don’t overthrow the captain. Ahab, the embodiment of all the industrial might, civilization, and even technology–one forgets his wish to be a remade–manufactured–man, as his wooden leg serves him better than flesh. Ahab also studies all the maps, currents, tides, winds &c in order to utilize any and all scientific means available in order to destroy the whale.
By the time they catch up to the whale they are in Japanese waters and Fedallah is “Ahab’s shadow”
I think, for me, the power in those last pieces of comparative literature comes from work I did over 14 years ago. In my Comp II course I wrote a comparative literature paper comparing Moby Dick to the Bible. It is one of the few things I no longer have a copy of, and it pains me sorely as I was proud of the paper for not only the exemplary grade, but for what I learned while writing it. Holding on to that sense that Moby Dick was metaphor for the Bible and now (Takaki’s first edition was published in 1979) seeing that it can also serve as metaphor for the captains (ahem) of industry and what Catlin called the “splendid juggernaut of civilization” leads me to take another step back and, like Euclid (and later Lincoln) note that things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. In this sense removing Moby Dick the Bible becomes a metaphor for American Production (and vice versa). This is the entire tenant that deist, like Jefferson, and Freemasons, like Washington, are working with by working biblically, but not religiously. The Bible for them, was treated any other way an ancient text was, this is why Jefferson had no qualms about cutting it to pieces and reordering it in his own fashion for his own purposes.
If you have been following along you will notice paths are starting to cross and the centrifugal force is increasing as it was the Bureau, and The U.S. Ex. Ex (Wilkes Expedition) that brought ends to Morton’s style of collecting, that is ye olde gentleman drawing room scientists that I sent out of vogue with my Piltdown work. Egypt influences American practices in the fields out west, Poe, Twain, and Melville provide harsh realities and Whitman a foil to modern problems with optimism, especially where race is concerned. There will be more about them in future posts but for now, what is the entire take home for all the readings of other? Why is the “other” so important with regards to American Republicanism? It will sound like an oversimplification, but in the case of the evidence above, the entire idea of what is is to be American is defined by what it is not. That is to say, it is not red, yellow, black or brown. In some senses, it is not merely white, as it is not British or French. Without the others Americans, as they exist in the 19th century could not be. The fact that there are many others, and a drive for recognition on the scientific stage set mainly in Europe, required cataloging and maintaining a hierarchy of others, races, and progress. That they were able to align each of them so readily, so quickly, and so firmly as for them to outlast that need requires further study from a multitude of fields. But first, it requires facing many inconvenient truths.
Midweek post, but I think I have a schedule and routine that will facilitate more efficient information acquisition and postings. This is a subset under the 19th century natural history block, the next few are particular to that as well. It will be a big deal when I get to the next “question” area of study.
In the pop culture multiverse, Darwin had another Bulldog. If you make it to the end you can watch the entire episode of X-men The Animated Series.
I have also realized that most of what I write here will make little to no sense to anyone who isn’t familiar to Darwin (or any other portion of this) in the same manner that I am, but if you are along for the ride, it is worth the price of admission.
From my visit to Down House in 2009
Let’s talk about Darwin. One of the two possible images that come to mind might be the portrait of the young man in relation to his famous voyage on the Beagle. The other, more likely image is an old bearded man in with a white beard peaking our from a black coat and hat.
So much ink has been spilled with regards to Darwin that it may seem insurmountable to get your bearings within a larger context of who Darwin was in relation to other 19th century naturalists vs the modern context of who Darwin is in relation to modern biology.
Even the Ghost of Dr. Hyde had a copy of Origin
Working backwards it is best to start with when the Darwinian Revolution became a thing. It wasn’t in 1859, or 1871, or even later with the worms. It wasn’t really even in the 19th century. One of those modern social construct type arguments. On that point it is poignant to ask “Was Darwin and a Darwinian?”
Was it revolutionary?, (not really) Was Darwin a Darwinian? (not in the modern sense) Does it all matter? (greatly)
I’d say to a certain extent he was. But not in the case of being a Charles Darwinian. He was an Erasmus Darwinian. Charles’ grandfather and I share a birthday (and the more I read about him, it seems a few more sensibilities). His influence on young Charles is almost always understated in such a manner as “he grandfather’s book was on their shelves…” But the elder Darwin was far more influential in Charles’ politics and freethinking than that book, or his poetry really suggest. The connections can be drawn by anyone who looks at their work as comparative literature.
I first met Darwin through his geology, and to my mind he is a geologist that made great inroads and has sense been shanghaied by biology. This, most likely, is why Sandra Herbert’s Charles Darwin, Geologist is my favorite Darwin book. Re-reading it now, with a greater understanding of British politics made it even more enlightening.
This is the one I would recommend above most others
Paired with the first volume of a large biography (Voyaging) by Janet Browne reinforces the thought-path that has put me in this predicament: field work. The voyage and its meaning on Darwin and biology are still argued, lauded, cussed, and discussed but the simple matter of fact that is as important in this case as the American cases that I will cover in my dissertation is that field work is incredibly important for shaping scientific enterprise.
Knowing geologist Darwin makes Herbert’s argument incredibly obvious: Darwin travelled as a geologist so of course his discoveries should not be surprising in relation to geological thought in the 1830s/40s. What is brilliant is reading this and then reading one of, if not the newest Darwin text to hit the press Political Descent by Piers Hale. For full disclosure at this point, Dr. Hale is on my committee and was the original point of contact when I discovered the HSCI program at OU. After visiting, meeting, and finally getting accepted into the program I moved into the American side of things from the Victorian, but he still plays a major role in the comparison work that I am doing.
That being said, Political Descent is a beast. To say it is a Darwin book is like saying The Bridges of Madison County is a Clint Eastwood film. This book is an amazing history of British socialism with Darwin in it. And why not? With all that has been done with Darwin he gives a good meter-stick to follow on either side. What is brilliant about it is that the argument is almost the same as Herbert’s replacing “geologist” with “radical whig.” More is said about Erasmus’ influence here as well.
Go for the Darwin, stay for the Kropotkin. The cover here is a prominent image in Herbert’s book too as it isn’t just about inheritance, or biology. (it is also about time and geology)
The best parts of the book, for me at any rate, was the reconsideration of Herbert Spencer, bringing Huxley down a peg, and my introduction to Peter Kropotkin. I was absolutely glued to the Kropotkin account from beginning to end. Mainly because it is another example of how Darwinian natural selection wasn’t the obvious choice chosen by all except the church after 1859. One of the biggest things about Kropotkin was the impact that FIELD WORK had on his anti-malthusian version of descent with modification. Hale also brings in work on H.G. Wells and how evolutionary politics and political evolution not only show up in his works, but in most cases is the pulse of his works. Having studied under Huxley as a student, it only makes sense. The little coursework in Victorian history at Lamar turned out to be a boon to understanding the background politics in Political Descent too, and that is always a good feeling. Reading more about Gladstone and his government as Darwin (and his family) saw it, was like running into an old friend at the coffee shop, or tea house as this case might be.
Many people describe Desmond and Moore’s Darwin biography as the Darwin biography. It is exhaustive, and it is enormous, but I don’t know that there can be a the book in the collection of Darwinalia. It’s as close as any I suppose. This is not to say I didn’t enjoy it, or think it is a great insight into Darwin’s life, it is just a bit much and adds fuel to the whole Darwinian importance that is pretty much all time since the 1920s. Thinking about it while reading Ruse’ philosophy of science (ick) book on the Darwinian revolution really throws into focus that you can fully remove Darwin from the entire equation of descent with modification. Other people could have discovered it, in fact other people did (you know, Wallace?). It is the very reasons that Herbert pointed out about the geology network and the same reasons that Hale pointed out about political networks that keep Darwin on people’s lips until his theories reached critical mass by being validated (more or less) by genetics and modern biology.
Desmond and Moore, you don’t get through any sort of anything that even tangentially hits 19th century natural history without reading at least part of this thing
Even as people are adopting the term “Darwinian” in the late 19th century they are not all using it in the same way. Kropoptkin was very adamant about this case in regards to Huxley. I mentioned earlier about Huxley being dropped a peg, I suppose I mean humanized. Don’t get me wrong, I love Huxley and he is eminently quotable as so many of the good British speakers tend to be, but any time someone of such historical stature can be plinked, I am always for the plinking (this is probably why I read CRACKED and MAD magazine). Huxley’s work with the newly franchised working and middle classes through his public lectures have always been of interest, and his ability to use them to his own ends is remarkable. This also goes back to Lightman’s popularizers accounts (many of which were not publishing on Darwin’s particular version of natural selection during the period) when Huxley wanted to put that responsibility in the hands of the men of science themselves–especially himself. Much to his consternation he was unable to find success until he employed the same methods that he actively bitched about. To his credit he did employ those methods to great success in the end. Much could be done comparing Huxley and Darwin’s reactions after the passing of their children. It comes up in random places, but I am not aware of a side by side comparison that shows how existing personalities were solidified and enhanced in the years that followed.
Huxley portait with skull, and young Huxley with ape skull drawingNo secret I love H.G. Wells. Here, during his term under Huxley he poses for a take on some of his professor’s iconic images. Wells failed his exams and turned to literature. (Source: Sherborne and Priest, H.G. Wells, Another Kind of Life, 2012)
What does it mean in the end? Darwin is still the greatest meter stick of natural history, politics, and even upper class education in the mid 19th century. He fits firmly into his family’s whig politics while also utilizing more than a few things he inherited *ahem* from his grandfather. He is a perfect storm of gentlemen naturalist, radical whig freethinker, and (for a time) active traveller. Many of Darwins contemporaries possessed some combination of these but few could claim all three. That is why, in the end, on the occasion of his interment at Westminster Abby the Times could, with absolute justification, quip “the abby needed Darwin more than he needed the Abby.”
There are frillions of documentaries and some films about Darwin’s life, but of all the ones I have seen (most of them) the best for my money is is first part of PBS’s 7 episode series Evolution. That episode (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea–of which (the clip above is from)is notable because the first time I saw it I thought Charles and Erasmus Darwin were played by Nathan Lane and Hank Azaria, respectively. After discovering that wasn’t they case, I still wish to make it so.
Popular Culture has taken up much of the torches that carry Darwin on as hero among heroes with no equal. One of the more ridiculous is in a series I am collecting for another project. I have mentioned Beakman’s World in a few other places regarding representation of science and–with his smokey door of history–history of science. This is one of the most unique portrayals of Darwin for at leat two reasons: 1) It is a young Darwin, and B) he has a speech impediment, now who, in all the hagiography that is Darwin Studies would stand for that? Well, “You Dar-win some and you Dar-lose Some”
Another, more recent incarnation shows the ye olde bearded Darwin taking on a David Bowie Classic Changes in Horrible Histories. This really works well to reveal just how much, and what of, Darwin has become part of popular consciousness.
Something that makes complete sense until you think about it is having Charles Darwin show up in a franchise that revolves around mutations. I don’t think that he has made an appearance in any version of the comics, but he does show up in X-men The Animated Series. Obvious tropes aside I think it is one of the better episodes as it reveals the backstory to Sinister (who, I hear will be in the newest whatever after Apocalypse X-men we get, it theoretically *should* take place in the 90s, but I digress). It’s called, what else, Descent. Charles Xavier’s grandfather-James-was a contemporary of Charles Darwin, while Essex was working on a serum to save his wife–the daughter of Lord Grey, among some mutant experiments, most of which are pulled off the streets in London running from mobs calling them demons. The Irish surnames add another layer to it all.
This section’s core texts:
Browne, Janet. Charles Darwin: Voyaging Jonathan Cape, 1995
Desmond, Adrian and James Moore. Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, W. W. Norton & Company, 1996
Hale, Piers J. Political Descent: Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution in VictorianEngland, University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Herbert, Sandra. Charles Darwin: Geologist. Cornell University Press, 2005.
Ruse, Michael. The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw. U of Chicago Pr, 1999.
That is the subheading for this seemingly insurmountable portion of the foothills of the mountain that is comps prep. Nothing about this is going to happen in even a remotely timely manner. In fact, you never know just how many things can happen to get in the way of actually finishing a book. This can range from the mundane–neighbor’s son’s dogs jumping the fence and wanting to hang out in our yard–to the earth shaking–literally a 5.6 earthquake at 7 a.m. so you can spend the morning looking for cracks in your drywall and mortar.
In and around that you have a stack of four or five books that average 400 pages and a couple of articles that you read online first to make it feel like you are making headway. This is the comps equivalent of putting “make a to-do list” on your to-do list so you can cross it off. You will grow to love articles mostly because they are (for the most part) succinct pieces of text that aren’t buried in statistical analysis of organizational member numbers and/or reinforced again and and again every time someone’s name is mentioned.
Background sources are just that. Everything in the background. Think of it as the base neutral painting on a canvass so your detailed painting doesn’t get absorbed. You may also think of it as being blown back out of the whirlpool that was your master’s work. The most established metaphor for graduate school is “drinking from a fire hose.” One of my mentor professors pitched it as parachuting into a sea of information and you swim around in as much general knowledge as you can as you head towards something more directed. To add to this, as you are swimming you end up in the Straits of Messina staring in the face of Charybdis.
At the point you finish your thesis you are swallowed, only to have Chary spit you back out into the great sea of all the things you didn’t know. It is the intellectual equivalent of running “horses” at basketball practice. To get through it, you have to get to it. Sort of like the ending of the original Magnificent Seven or, to keep with our ocean theme, this:
You’ll see this sections readings at the end of this post, but for now I am going to wax nostalgic on their collective points. I originally intended to work through each work systematically, but this isn’t going to be a collection of reviews (you can get plenty of those on JSTOR) or a set of notes for a reading comprehension exam. This, I think, is the largest hangup for many of us: the name. Comprehensive exams aren’t comprehensive in the fact that you are going to test your reading comprehension in the tradition sense of recounting what schools someone attended in Germany before trying to build the Dudley observatory, or the grandeur of the academic genealogy that has some how passed down with more than a slight attachment to politics. There is no way that you can remember details, notes or otherwise, in any useful manner from tens of thousands of pages of text, so you have to go with what you know, trust that your committee is preparing you well, and start packing new and useful things around those that you already know.
For the background stuff, that is fairly easy. There were only two things in this section that I was unfamiliar with. One being Robert Burce’s Pulitzer prize winning 1988 work on The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846-1876, and the most recent (2016) Bolton et al. “Science in Early America: Print Culture and the Sciences of Territoriality.”
This is pretty much how comps works: names, dates, nonsense about publishing, black magic, cults, yeah, I feel ya, Donnie.
The easiest way to explain the nature of background reading is driving out to meet a new friend only to find that several other people you know live on their street. Bruce should be the handbook for anyone studying American History of Science in the 19th century. It can also serve as a playbook for anyone wanting to understand scientific enterprise in the 20th and 21st centuries. There are many instances that modern scientific organizations are repeating many of the errors that plagued our Early Republic and Jacksonian brothers.
It all boils down to the European model. What can be gleaned from the organization and approach to science from the schools of Europe, and Europe in this sense means Germany, France, and the UK. America students made up for the lack of graduate training by studying with some of the most famous names in the History of Science before returning to the U.S. to set up smaller versions of the laboratories where they worked in Berlin, Paris, and Edinburgh. Scientific correspondence takes off during this period and many American scientists earn their clout from their relationships with those famous Europeans.
Printing releases a flood of information, misinformation, religious fervor, and new nationalism throughout all literate society. Pamphlets, proceedings from scientific societies, handbills, and books circulated more widely than ever before and offered a glimpse into the structure of science. This is especially true for the newspapers in the United States. Even the popularizers and New Audiences in and around London were no match for the volume and distribution of the science of the press in American in the 1830s/40s. Many prominent British travelers remarked on the amount of newspapers being read across the Atlantic, even working class men were seen to have newspapers.
Such information required vetting from those in the know according to people like Thomas Huxley who fought against non scientists writing about science. Many today fall under this Huxley flock to the detriment of their own scientific communication efforts. In the end Huxley adopted the very methods, modes, and vocabularies of those he derided. The public wanted to know science, but they wanted it delivered in a way that wasn’t dry, trite, or boring. This also leads to come of the great “classics” in the History of Science coming out with staying power: things like Lyell’s Principles of Geology and the (then) anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.
Vestiges is brilliant. Not so much for what it says, but for the fact that it was anonymous. If no one wrote it then anyone could have. It turned into a sort of Dread Pirate Roberts. Depending on the audience, the author could have been a middle class partisan, or a mechanic distrustful of the new systems of industry. Because no one knew who wrote it, it was not immediately evident who the book was for. This is it’s greatest legacy, and it would be a thing to see if people weren’t allowed to know who wrote something until after they had read it. Works would have to be weighed on merit, logic, and evidence instead of dismissed (or lauded) out of hand because of its author.
This period, moreso than others I think, really set the stage for “modern” thinking. In more than just name, as Bruce highlights ad nauseum, but because these are the roots of the legacy of universities like Yale, Harvard, UPENN, and a few others. The essays in Cultures of Natural History reveal how the relationship with natural history shaped the way we think about things today. This isn’t necessarily the royal we, as someone coming from a scientific background in geology and paleontology I have really seen several unbroken legacies in both Cultures of Natural History and The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846-1876.
Do I know any more about the background of 19th Century Natural History than I did when I started? I could pinpoint one or two “facts” that I didn’t know, like where Joseph Henry worked in Michigan, or who were members of the Lazzaroni and when. One of the things about a year of preparation for multi-hour tests is that won’t be the question. The questions (I think) will be arranged to expose the holes that I will likely still have after finishing 123 books on a list. Hopefully it bodes well that a lot of the larger themes in these books–amateurism, professionalism, development of disciplines, scientific societies and organizations, new American exploration expeditions with scientists on board, are all things that I have written about before.
I think the best thing that comes out of the background reading (aside from Bruce’s work most likely being my bible for dissertation work–less his copious statistical analysis of the Dictionary of AmericanBiography) is that James Secord really sums up preparation for comps when talking about the reading of Vestiges:
“Every act of reading is an act of forgetting: the experience
of reading is a palimpsest, in which each text partially covers
those that came before” (515)
Readings for this section (articles linked where available)
Bruce, Robert. The Launching of American Science, 1846-1876 (Cornell U Pr, 1988)
Jardine, N., et al Cultures of Natural History
Lightman, Bernard. Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Secord, James. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.
They exist, and the one I am going to tell you about here is positively amazing on both counts.
If you have been following along with my arc into the madness that is doctoral work you will remember me being greatly aided in sanity by getting back into comic books. Like all things I have tried to absorb everything that is going on in the world thereof and have started following many comic book artist and writers on twitter (Fun fact: many of them are super interactive on social media). They share rants and works in progress (WIP), sketches, updates, previews, and a host of other things.
Twitter is how I found out about the Science comics series. I can’t remember who retweeted some of the art from it (I tried finding it, but my twitter feed is almost as bad as my Facebook overload) and I started tracking it down.
I am trained in paleontology (Eocene, not dinosaurs specifically) and have since moved into the History of Science to study the history of field explorations centered around paleontological madness. I do this on several public fronts which means I get a lot if dinosaur stuff sent my way. I try to keep up with the news and share it through the Paleo Porch Facebook page as well.
I also run a traveling museum of sorts filled with replica dinosaur claws, mammoth teeth, scale skulls, etc. so I am constantly looking for ways to share this stuff with others. This is one of the first reasons I fell in I’ve with :01 First Second’s Dinosaurs Fossils and Feathers.
I ordered it as soon as I could, and since it is for repeated scientific research, sprang for the hardcover. When I started reading it, it got even better. Not only was the comics explaining dinosaurs it was explaining how we came to understand earth’s distant geological past. When I got to the folklore explanations I was settled on sharing it with everyone I knew that had kids. For adult versions see Adrienne Mayor’s Fossil Legends of the First Americans and The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times
Then, it got even better. For anyone with more than a passing interesting in the people that shaped what we have come to know as geology there are recognizable names: Smith, Buckland, Mantell, Owen, Cope, Marsh, etc. that form the mental Mount Rushmore of early Paleontology. Or at the very least the most famous (or infamous) accounts in the Bone Wars. They are all here, and they are all described and drawn beautifully.
Following the standards was great and it was looking good enough to suggest to some close colleagues as well, I was just waiting to see if the author (MK Reed) was going to fall prey to the age old Owen complex problem. I cannot tell you how delighted I was (and am) to say that she absolutely did not. In fact Reed blasts Owen for the self-absorbed force of will that he was. If I had to pick a single panel in this entire graphic novel to sum up how accurate the history of science is it would be this one:
because in reality Richard Owen was a butthead of the first order.
The writing is superb and clever and Joe Flood‘s art flows with it unimaginably well. Dinosaurs Fossils and Feather is filled with not only science but that science’s history as well, and not just the well known history either. Of course the double page spreads of Mary Anning in the Field, of the Crystal Palace, and Roy Chapman Andrews are all prints I wish I had in my office but they include an enormous swath of paleontologist rarely discussed outside hard science circles. Seriously, how many of you know the story about the Transylvanian paleobiologist Franz Nopcsa? Really, see? There you go, he is in this book, in comic form, which hides his tragic ending, but highlights his contributions to geology.
Alfred Wegener is here too! They could have chosen to talk about how he was mostly correct eventually and now we know how brilliant he was, but there is another personal favorite panel of mine included that shows why he was dismissed.
Really, how could a meteorologist (scientific, not TV forecaster by the way) dare think about the continents. Incidentally there is a much anticipated (by me and more than a few other historians of earth science) book about Wegener that is out this year too called Alfred Wegner: Science, Exploration and the Theory of Continental Drift that will be as close to a complete look at Wegener as we will likely ever see.
Get this book. Get it for yourself, get it for your kids, get it for your friends’ kids. The writing is brilliant, the art is stunning, the science is excellent, and the history is fantastic (not just for graphic novel standards but for history standards). If only it were at all possible to have full biographies of each of their included players done in this same tone and style.
I have highlighted only a few great things about this little book. There are many, many more. If I must be hard pressed to find something to complain about, or to point out as a shortcoming, I should choose to saw that I wish this book was a larger format so the pages and art would be larger.
I will end with a final snapshot merely because I have portraits of E.D. Cope and O.C. Marsh hanging in my study at home which would benefit from these more stately bone crests.
Actually it was the reply to a tweet. The one below in fact. Suddenly, going through twitter in the morning before getting out of bed changed the trajectory of the entire summer and, in all honesty, may have helped my reconnect with a very long forgotten piece of myself. I’ve used the analogy before, but in this case I very much feel like Columbus who has discovered something that thousands of people already knew about. The Ghostbusters cartoon, that is The Real Ghostbusters, had a comic.
Nessie is a ghostNo, really.
So it goes, that April 19th began a tireless internet search for any format of any of these comics I could find. I lived for the ghostbusters cartoon when I was a kid. I saw the series before the movie and was always a bit bummed that Egon did not look the same in the movie. If I ever had a television hero or role model as such, it was Egon. Cartoon Egon. I can’t tell you how hard I tried to get my hair to roll like that. Incidentally it was the late 80s and early 90s and I did have the rat-tail too.
Personal collection of animation cells
Not a single person I knew was into comic books when I was a kid. To be fair I grew up mostly around adults, but still I don’t remember classmates bringing any to school or whatever. The first one I bought was an Uncanny X-men that was in the magazine section of the grocery store (Brookshire Brothers is its name), because I had been watching the animated series on Fox Kids on Saturday mornings.
I kept up with the story arc until at some point in Jr. High school, I was made to get rid of my collection of two large Nocona boot boxes full of comics, by this time X-men, Ninja Turtles, and Wolverine because they were “a fire hazard.” I gave them to the one person I knew had comics and as far as I know he still has them all to this day.
When I tried to get back into them later when I had my own place that I wasn’t concerned with pyromaniac comics burning down, I found that the single story lines I had followed had been split into seemingly limitless different arcs and I absolutely hated it. I didn’t pick up a comic again until this year.
The original run, drawn and written true to the cartoon are a thing of beauty. Not far into the run, there is Egon pointing out the debates on the warm-bloodedness of dinosaurs. That was neat enough, but when I got to the issue that had the reference to Symmes Hollow Earth theory I was hook. I am a historian of science (specifically earth and field sciences, geology, paleontology, and archaeology) so it was fascinating to see that obscure reference in a comic from 1988 aimed at kids. I now have an enlargement of that panel on my office wall.
Discussing the finer details about dinosaurian blood temperatureThe Hollow Earth Theory
In addition for finally rounding up all the original US comics and digitizing them, I lucked on to a fellow from the UK selling the first 100+ of the UK Mag comics. I have about 15 of them digitized, but they are coming along. That aside, something interesting started showing up in the google searches for Ghostbusters comics–(and here we have the second voyage of Columbus) there were new ones.
They were new, but they weren’t new. They are brilliant. They are absolutely everything that a fan could possibly want in a 21st century rendition of the franchise. I hate to admit just how long it took me to get used to the newly drawn characters specifically because I love all the artwork and the artist Dan Schoening (@Dapperpomade) is such a great guy and a must follow on Twitter if not for interaction then for his sneak peak/previews (including some really neat post-it art).
That is the “Rookie” from the video game. (all images are copyright of IDW Publishing and are used here to highlight and review the work where they are originally located. no infringement is intended and they are used for educational purposes (secondary to praise))The Twinkie
There could be a full manual written on just the easter eggs and sly references to other incarnations of the Ghostbusters that he includes in the series. When I started reading the series (that is now more than a couple years old) the appearance of Belushi as Ray’s Dreamworld Virgil pretty much squashed any doubts I had about where this was going. The writing, masterfully executed by Erik Burnham (@Erikburnham) brings everything together in a way that make every single issue enjoyable every single time you read one.
It’s the end of the world as we know itand I feel…
What I think I love the most amongst all this stuff that many of you have been enjoying for years is the fact that it does the very opposite of the thing that turned me away from comics all those years ago. Instead of splitting stories into backstories and alternate universes and riding relative dimensions to some weird end, the IDW publishing series is tying in everything. That is everything. The cartoons–yes, plural, even that weird one made for teens is represented, the movies, the video games, it is all coming together and that, for me, is a nice bit of Ray Stantz cosmological symmetry.
So much goodness
They, along with Tom Waltz (@TomWaltz) produced the crossover to rule them all: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Ghostbusters. (I don’t want to leave the colorist Luis Antonio Delgado out either, the stuff pops on the page and looks amazing on a retina display iPad, Luis doesn’t have a twitter that I am aware). God, how I wish this would have been done when I was a kid, because the very UN-esque agreement that my mother made me submit to in order to get Ninja Turtle toys was to make room for them by getting rid of my ghostbusters toys. That this even exists is a tribute to humanity’s greatness. I am telling you, t is golden record in space worthy.
Even when interests mesh, it isn’t a perfect 1:1 and that makes it perfectMikey asks the important questions
Every page has comes with something like this. Which, of course, has led to backtracking to Tom Waltz recent runs with Ninja Turtles proper and it doesn’t disappoint either, but that is a thought for another time.
Currently they are running a 4 part Ghostbusters Get Real, wherein the cartoon ghobstbusters have crossed over into the new/real/comic universe. Never before have I wanted to hit up a Comic Con and get anything signed before, but this series has me looking at future locations.
Get Real #’s 1 & 2
The third one is out in a couple weeks and will feature Egon on the cover, so I am more than a little excited for that. The story is running true to all forms too. The best news comes that they are also working on a Ghostbusters Annual for the end of this year and a full new series (this will be Vol. 3) for 2016 along with a full published Tobin’s Spirit guide. There is really much, much more to say about just how wonderful all of this is and most especially for me as it recaptures a lot of what I was before life really got in the way. It also doesn’t hurt that I am finding it as I am working on my PhD research. A quick read through of one or two issues is a welcome break and recharge from digitizing thousands of WPA letters and funding, locality, worker records, and bureaucratic paperwork. I will, with all sincerity but these guys in my acknowledgements when the dissertation is finished.
What a way to end a season’s foray into the world of historic networks, correspondence, and collecting. After finishing Fan’s book, I did not image that there could be one with even more methodological examples of what I want to do. Samuel Alberti’s Nature an Culture is that book. It is exactly what I want to do in my own research only aimed at museums in the United States.
Original Manchester Museum. Field Museum looks similar.
This book should be on every modern natural historians shelf, and the paperback is cheap enough on Amazon that it is an easy addition. This book is an institutional history of the Manchester museum, but is it also a biography of the objects inside the museum. Further still, it is a cultural history of the nature of collecting for museums. It is not hyperbole to say that this short book has something for nearly everyone.
The very first connection (and reaffirmation that I am traveling in the right circles for my project) came on page three where Alberti quotes Simon Knell: “Natural scientists, archaeologists, and art historians, in some respects, share a similar engagement with objects: they build whole subjects from material things” (3). If you have noticed there are many art related posts here, and it wasn’t until I came to the University of Oklahoma that I became more active in art history research. Having trained as a paleontologist and archaeologist prior to coming to Norman I was 2/3 whole so to speak. The work I have done in Art History here has seemed a natural extension of the work that I had done previously, and Alberti citing Knell may serve as an official (and independent) seal on my decision to have my outside dissertation committee member (and 1/3 of my graded comprehensive exams) filled by a prominent historian of Art and the American West.
Alberti is able to trace out nearly a century of change within one institution. Nothing related to the museum escapes his analysis–from the famous artifacts like the mummies down to the collections that never went on display. He also does not ignore the individuals who worked in and with the museum from the director down to the charwomen. This is the holistic approach that must be made in order to fully understand the world of museum histories and their place within the politics of a university, city, or nation.
The book is more a collection of essays than a standard narrative. The thread that weaves the entire collection together is the museum itself. The best way to describe it is to use the movie time-lapse example. In many movies, usually near the end, there is a dramatic time-lapse that brings the historical point of reference up to the modern. Usually this is a landscape shot which shows the varying skylines of a city. In the case of Nature and Culture it is almost the opposite. If we could create this effect we would see a hundred years of change within the building itself with its architecture maintaining our frame of reference.
The second instance of immediate endearment of this work came on page 5. “This way of studying the history of museums firmly links them to other spaces for collecting an display including zoos and menageries, even when curators were seeking to distinguish museums from such tawdry places” (5–emphasis mine). My first masters thesis, The People’s Zoo: William M. Mann, The National Zoo, and the Birth of American Wildlife Conservation, 1889-1960(linked to proquest PDF), covered William Mann’s collecting for the National Zoo. I cannot describe the feeling you get when your past work comes back around to provide solid foundation for things that you have yet done. An added bonus was the records of the National Zoo. Since the zoo comes under the Smithsonian umbrella, much of the zoo’s official accounts and reports were recorded in yearly federal reports. The years of work within the federal records has also set me up nicely to work with the WPA records that will form the end of my dissertation on collecting.
The analysis of objects in this text pulls in my work on my second thesis The Gilded Skull in England’s Closet: Displaying Human Evolution at the American Museum of Natural History (which has yet to even make it to proquest or the library despite being deposited almost a year ago–it really is amazing that Lamar University has a more streamlined thesis process and binding options than the University of Oklahoma, but that is another issue) which covered the Piltdown Skull as an object with its own history and own biography. In this handy little book I have an incredible connection between my work done at Lamar University in Texas and the more recent years I have spent here. That fact alone serves to raise this book on my favorites list.
Alberti’s brief nod at the hunters as collectors rounds out the trilogy of points I would like to make. Those that were doing the collecting are generally left out of the equation that begins with the preparation of specimens. While Manchester had less active patron-hunters than either the American Museum of Natural History or the Smithsonian, that Alberti mentions their importance reveals much. To be fair, one of the most famous/infamous of the hunters for the American Museum and Smithsonian was none other than Theodore Roosevelt. There are examples of the friction between hunters and scientists in Britain however, most notably in the recent book Between Man and Beast (Doubleday, 2013). Monte Reel follows the story of Paul Du Chaillu, his gorilla hunting, and Richard Owen needing the specimen to make his point.
Museum history is one of those topics that require a more diverse “toolkit” to adequately understand. Alberti’s work should be part of any course that looks at museums, collecting, or objects. I would say that includes the early speaking tours that had specimens in tow. It should also be required text for almost any Museum Studies course. That it is a single museum that Alberti covers, is not as much of a weakness as one would think. It serves as an almost perfect case study to replicate with any other similar institution–and most of them are much more similar than they are different. Even with its peculiarity of being a British establishment, it will serve as a model for the museums here in the states. What makes it more difficult is, like baseball, the big museums in the US are separated by league–the American Museum of Natural History and the (National League) Smithsonian. There are many-many-more that will follow an almost identical curve of existence (adjusted only slightly for chronology) as the Manchester Museum, and Alberti has provided us all with the most efficient way to understand them in their entirety, as much as that is possible.
Can a book only 11 years old be a classic? If any work can claim to be such it is surely Fa-ti Fan’s British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter. This is a huge geographic and political shift from the previous books that have dealt with India and British India. I make that point because it is important to remember that the earliest relationships with China were undertaken pretty much under Chinese terms. Even following the end of the Opium Wars and the forceful opening of trading ports China was never a colony under the British Crown.
That is something that is easy to overlook within all the accounts of British fieldwork is lumped together into the standard imperial-vernacular polemic. Maybe polemic is too strong a word. Either way it is the standard narrative of the boundary lands–theoretical as well as physical. In less than 200 pages Fan is able to reveal that is much more than what meets the scholars eye, and that much more is needed to understand the nuance, and highly independent (and interdependent) relationship between those that knew the raw material and those that wished to classify it.
Fan’s methodological approach to including the knowledge of the Chinese everyman into the larger scope of Imperial Botany and the powers at Kew should provide anyone researching fieldwork in any region with a more than adequate framework with which to present a fully nuanced and historical account.
He deftly begins with the standard setup presented in historical sources of how Britain was setup in Canton in a line of warehouses and were forbidden to enter the city proper. It is when he looks deeper into the relationship between diplomat and merchant, trade consul-man and informant, outsider and local, that his research provides both a broad view of natural knowledge and a focus on the actual objects and information being traded.
One of the joys of the book is the attention that Fan pays to the folklore and literary influence that existed during the early 19th century Chinese natural history. Throughout the book he shows just how intertwined natural history and sinology was during the period. One had to understand the nature of the Chinese culture before they could understand the nature of China.
One of the largest differences that face the standard explorative travel adventures was that China was no “Dark Continent,” or unexplored rainforest. China had an infrastructure that lent itself to travel in ways Dr. Livingstone could only have dreamed about. Once Kew (and other collectors) had established their network in Canton, and eventually other locations, those naturalists on the ground set up networks of their own. Sometimes they had to create a network from scratch, but this was rare due to the expansive success of the French missionaries that had been in China for much longer than British naturalists.
Many of the Chinese natives that provided local knowledge, translations, and information to the naturalists were Catholic converts. The “imperial model,” while still employed by many of the British travelers in China, carried much less authority. In fact, outside of British controlled trade ports it carried nothing. Armed with their own superiority, many found themselves relying on the Chinese more than they cared to admit. It is also a delight to see just how much the naturalists relied on the knowledge and skill in collecting among the rural Chinese farmers and hunters in order to fulfill their orders and fill their collections.
My favorite story within the book is actually a really good case study into the operations of British natural history in China, and it was undertaken by a Frenchman. Albert A. Fauvel was a member of the Chinese Customs and as such worked closely with the British. In charge of the Natural History Museum in Shanghai Fauvel’s interest in the natural history of China was far more than a hobby. It was Fauvel who first published description of alligators in China.
The Land Dragon (also known as Tuo.
Fan’s analysis of Fauvel’s article is the perfect way to understand how necessary it was for naturalists in China to also be involved in the study of China itself. Fauvel traced the descriptions of the Chinese character tuo to disprove it referenced either an iguana or a lizard. Following descriptions of tuo wherever he could, he surmised that the land dragon with medicinal meat and skin good for drums was indeed an alligator, not unlike those described by John James Audubon and others working in Mississippi and Guyana.
What set Fauvel apart was not his mere description of the Alligator sinensis. Fauvel took the time to understand where the alligator fit into Chinese mythology, legends, and folklore. In China, Fauvel worked from Chinese text to understand the alligator in theory, but was unable to establish it as a new species without specimens. From the specimens in China he was able to work backwards–comparing the Chinese specimens to images in taxonomic reference books. Here we see an almost perfect mirroring of practice in the field involving both text and object.
For my own interests into account, even those beyond the study of field work, is the early discussions of paleontology with China. Early geology in China was limited even more than the other field sciences. One of the brief asides (which will lead me in search of the reference) was the mention of William Frederick Mayers working with Chinese text (in the same manner as Fauvel) to understand China’s prehistoric life. Without any physical remains or specimens to collect, Mayers was forced to work exclusively with Chinese literature, folklore and myth to find “descriptions and drawings of a huge, hairy, rat-like creature living underground, which he believed to be a mammoth” (118).
Modern paleontology is making up for lost time on the China front. Just during the few days I was reading this book, dinosaur eggs found by workers building a road and the discovery of a bizarre leathery winged dinosaur were announced. Some things have not changed however, as any spectacular, too-good-to-be-true discovery is announced, it is received with some skepticism. This isn’t exactly the same mistrust that 18th century naturalist had of unobservant Chinese, or those who did not bother to separate fact from fable. There have been some high quality fakes coming out on the black market of China, and in the case of fossils in the 21st century just as many are made in China as found in China.
It was described in vivid detail
I try to always balance out everything I read with something that I wish had been included or different about the book. With this book it was more difficult for content, but easy to be petty. It is an oft repeated lament of mine about color images and illustrations. There are a host of reasons that black and white and greyscale are the case–ultimately I would say would be the cost of the final result being restrictive to its intended audience. However in this case the beautiful description of the illustration of the betel palm that included fruit that is in varying stages of ripeness along with the cross sections of the fruit, a full leaf and the entire tree would have been nice to see in the detail with which Fan describes it.
Anyone who works with statistics will implore you to increase you n. The large the sample size the more your analysis can smooth out or accommodate oddities. Such was Samuel Morton’s drive in his collection of human skulls. Definitely macabre by any standards and offensive to a great number of tastes people are still arguing over the ideology of Morton and others of his day who went about dealing in body parts of others while never thinking to have their family members boiled, de-fleshed and numbered.
Can a book only 11 years old be a classic? If any work can claim to be such it is surely Fa-ti Fan’s British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire, and Cultural Encounter. This is a huge geographic and political shift from the previous books that have dealt with India and British India. I make that point because it is important to remember that the earliest relationships with China were undertaken pretty much under Chinese terms. Even following the end of the Opium Wars and the forceful opening of trading ports China was never a colony under the British Crown. 
