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Old Photos and Mandolins: Sources of Inspiration

Editor — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 12:00:22 +0000

By Ann Weisgarber

It started with a 1902 photograph of businessmen and cowboys, college students and cattle ranchers. Their suit jackets were buttoned, their white collars were starched, and each man had parted his hair in the center. They were The Bozeman Mandolin and Guitar Club, and when Dennis White saw the photo, he was inspired. Determined to revive the tradition, he helped form The Montana Mandolin Society in 1999. Today, it tours the country playing in concert halls and at festivals.

Inspiration struck me, too. I loved the music, but it was the story about the photograph that captured my imagination. I was writing a novel that took place in 1917 in the South Dakota Badlands. Like the Montana Mandolin Society, my novel was based on an old photo I had seen. The connection felt like fate, and I was determined to include a mandolin player in the book.

I listened to the CD, and the image of a young woman sitting in a wagon at a blacksmith’s came to me. She was in the Badlands, her horse had thrown a shoe, and she was a long way from her home in Montana. Yet, she sat on the buckboard and played her mandolin. In my mind’s eye, Rachel and Isaac, my main characters, were so caught up in the music that they danced. Years later, the memory of the dance gave Rachel the courage to make a difficult decision.

I wrote the chapter and entitled it “The Mandolin Player,” my nod to a 1902 photograph.

About the author: Ann Weisgarber was born and raised in Kettering, Ohio. She was a social worker before earning a master’s degree in sociology at the University of Houston and becoming a teacher. She divides her time between Sugar Land and Galveston, Texas.

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Image Credit: Christine Meeker

Jewish Confederate Saved by Talking Parrot

Editor — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:31:49 +0000

By Dara Horn

The old American South ranks high on the historical list of institutionally bigoted societies – which is why most people are surprised to learn that the Confederacy’s Secretary of State, whose face was even featured on the Confederate two-dollar bill, was a Jewish man named Judah Benjamin. But what is even more astonishing than a Jewish man’s prominence in Confederate politics was his outlandish escape from the Confederacy at the war’s end. It’s a story that makes 19th-century dime novels seem realistic.

Judah Benjamin was one of those rare people who are described, depending on the speaker’s beliefs, as either ambitious, brilliant, craven, lucky, or blessed. Born in 1811 in the Caribbean to impoverished Jewish parents whose ancestors had been expelled from Spain in 1492, Benjamin moved with his family to the Carolinas at the age of two.
A child prodigy, he was admitted to Yale Law School at the age of 14—and if you’re wondering how on earth anyone could be admitted to Yale Law School at the age of 14, well, the people at Yale must have been wondering too, because he was expelled from Yale Law School at the age of 16. His lack of a law degree, and the persistent public anti-semitism that dogged him all his life, did not stop him from becoming a successful attorney in New Orleans, or from being elected to the United States Senate, where he represented Louisiana, or from becoming a contender for a seat on the United States Supreme Court just before Louisiana’s secession from the Union. Within the Confederacy, he had a similarly meteoric career, becoming the Confederate president’s most trusted adviser and spymaster while simultaneously serving as Secretary of State.

Yet with the Confederacy’s collapse, his indestructibility rose from mere persistence into the realm of the supernatural. As the Southern capital burned and the Confederate cabinet fled their Yankee pursuers, Benjamin recited poetry and philosophy to cheer his despairing colleagues. When Lincoln was assassinated and Northerners began to call for Confederate leaders’ executions, the cabinet refugees split up—and Benjamin’s miraculous odyssey began.

While his fellow leaders were quickly captured and imprisoned, Benjamin disguised himself as a Frenchman, wearing spectacles and speaking only French, and convincing a Jewish Confederate secret agent to pose as his “interpreter” as he traversed war-torn Georgia. When his “interpreter” abandoned him in Florida, he continued his journey alone. By then the Northern press was accusing him of involvement in Lincoln’s assassination, and there was already a price on his head.

He slept in forests and swamps by day and traveled only at night. One day as he rested in a swamp, he heard a parrot in a tree above him saying, “Hi, for Jeff! Hi, for Jeff!” At that time there was only one “Jeff” in the South: Confederate president Jefferson Davis, with whom Benjamin had spent fourteen hours a day for most of the previous four years. Reasoning that someone who had taught a parrot how to say “Hi, for Jeff!” might be sympathetic to his plight, he threw a rock at the parrot to get it out of its tree and then followed it to the home of a farmer, who indeed knew who he was, agreed to hide him for a few days, and then helped him to travel by boat along the Florida coast. Federal agents soon boarded the boat, searching for Benjamin. On his host’s suggestion, Benjamin implausibly yet successfully disguised himself, in skullcap, apron, and soot-smeared face, as the crew’s Jewish cook, and escaped capture again.

From the Florida Keys, acts of God further intervened. Benjamin boarded a small boat with two guides for the Caribbean island of Bimini, and soon found himself caught in a “waterspout” storm that the vessel barely survived. Shaken by this brush with death, he boarded another boat bound for the Bahamas. Unfortunately this boat was loaded with a cargo of sponges. The sponges gradually expanded until the boat burst at sea. Benjamin survived the wreckage in a small lifeboat that was quickly submerged within inches of sinking.

With a single oar, Benjamin and three African-American passengers on the lifeboat managed to steer their way toward the Bahamas, where Benjamin must have felt great relief to board an actual ship departing for England. By this point in the story, it is perhaps not even surprising to learn that this ship caught fire within hours of Benjamin’s boarding it – and that even though the fire raged for three days and was not even extinguished by the time the ship returned to sea from an emergency docking in St. Thomas, Benjamin nonetheless reached England unharmed. But like many ambitious or brilliant or craven or lucky or blessed people, Benjamin was not satisfied with mere survival. Instead, he embarked on an entirely new career in which he passed the British bar, became a British barrister, rose to the level of Queen’s Counsel, and wrote a textbook used in British law schools to this day.

How did this much-hated man pass through every obstacle and come out thriving on the other side? Was it ambition? Brilliance? Cravenness? Luck? Blessing?

On the Confederate two-dollar bill, Judah Benjamin is smiling. In that smile, some might wish to see a documentary-worthy sentiment like determination or courage. But I look at it and see a mask. To me, the grinning face on that two-dollar bill is the price a person once paid to thrive in a time and place where talent was not nearly enough.

Sources:
Eli Evans, Judah P. Benjamin, the Jewish Confederate
Robert N. Rosen, The Jewish Confederates

Dara Horn’s third novel, All Other Nights (Norton), about Jewish spies during the Civil War, is out this week in paperback. The first chapter and other information – including on Civil War ciphers and codes – are posted at www.darahorn.com

IMAGE: the Confederate two (2) dollar bill

Easier not to know?

Editor — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 17:02:18 +0000

By C. S. Manegold

ALMOST HALF a century ago, Martin Luther King Jr. captured a problem that still plagues us today. Cautioning his flock against the complacent embrace of incomplete knowledge, he warned: “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.’’

I have thought of those words often in the last few years as I worked to unearth the history of a century and a half of slavery on a Massachusetts farm first owned by the famous Puritan, Governor John Winthrop, whose “Model of Christian Charity’’ is often quoted even now.

In the several times I have presented these unpleasant truths in talks at major universities, I have inquired afterwards – who knew this history of slavery in the North? Usually only about three hands go up of 30. And most of these people are professors. Among non-professors the void is even deeper. Students, stumbling on this news, tend to ask with some aggression: “Why didn’t they teach us this?’’ Why didn’t I know?

I am older, and I grew up in a different time, but I said these words myself not long ago. Now that I know better, I realize there are many answers to the question. But the best perhaps are these: Easier not to. More comfortable not to.

Yet as King suggested, responsible dialogue can not move forward with half-truths and willful ignorance. In this regard, the North has work to do. It lags behind the South in stepping up to ugly truths.

C. S. Manegold, author of Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North, was a reporter for The New York Times, Newsweek and the Philadelphia Inquirer before turning her attention to longer works. For more information about slavery in the North visit tenhillsfarm.com. See also Manegold’s Boston Globe piece: New England’s scarlet “S” for Slavery.

IMAGE: The Royall House and slave quarters

How do you Explain the Seemingly Unexplainable?

Editor — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 23:35:00 +0000

By Susan M. Reverby

The word “Tuskegee” in relationship to health care reminds Americans of the “infamous syphilis study” and that horrific medical experiments took place here, and not just in Nazi Germany. Between 1932 and 1972, the United States Public Health Service followed, but did not treat, hundreds of African American men in Alabama who already had late stage syphilis. The men never knew they were being watched as aspirins, iron tonics, and diagnostic spinal taps were explained as “treatment” and scores of them sickened and died.

In my most recent book, I had to explain: why did the doctors do it? Sometimes it is easy to answer this: all the men were black and poor, and almost all the doctors were white. Was this racism pure and simple? Or is this just scientific and governmental bureaucracy run amuck where having the power to do this just lets it go on and on?

Yes, of course, to these answers and then no. No because these public health physicians thought they were answering crucial questions: does race affect disease and do those with late latent syphilis need treatment? Many honestly believed their faulty data that assumed racial differences and ignored contrary evidence. They thought they proved “syphilis wasn’t such a bad disease” and then found that those who had survived into the antibiotic era (when penicillin could have made a difference) often got to other doctors for these drugs despite the study. The doctors allowed medical uncertainty about how to treat syphilis to be explained by racial assumptions and to see individuals as a population.

“Tuskegee” will probably continue to haunt our civic imaginations as a metaphor for malfeasance and hubris in research. The study should remind us both of the dangers of racism and the common practice of wrongly reading race into scientific data.

Susan M. Reverby is the McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of the UNC Press released Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy and editor of Tuskegee’s Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. To read the UNC Press Blog, click here.

Grave site of Tuskegee participant, Lucious C. Pollard (from the author’s personal collection and book.)

Hendrik Cesars and the Tragedies of Race in South Africa

HT — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:32:00 +0000

By Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully

When we began researching our biography of Sara Baartman we thought we knew what we would find. Two white men brought Sara Baartman to 19th-century London, where she was put on show in Piccadilly. Every study, every bit of popular knowledge representing Sara Baartman’s life as the “Hottentot Venus,” had said so.

Newspapers in London at the time described Hendrik Cesars as a colonist. The extraordinary efforts to return Baartman’s remains, beginning soon after South Africa’s first democratic elections and ending in her state funeral in 2002, had represented her life as that of a black woman taken advantage of by white men. President Thabo Mbeki has said as much in his eulogy, extending his comments to a denunciation of Western science, indeed the entire Enlightenment.

We would discover, however, that Cesars was, in the racial categorization of the Cape, a “free black.” His descendants were slaves, brought forcibly to South Africa to work on the farms and in the city. Cesars’s wife also descended from slaves. The couples’ life in a poor section of Cape Town remained indelibly marked by slavery. Laws prohibited them from wearing fancy clothes. They had to apply for permission to leave the area. And they were barred from many of the economic opportunities “free burghers” enjoyed. One of the men responsible for Sara Baartman’s exploitation was, himself, subjected to prejudice.

South Africans, and indeed most of the modern world, can only see others for the color of their skin. Modern racism and its many legacies seems to have forever shaped how one speak of others, our very apprehensions of past and present. This is not how the world always was. Hendrik Cesars’s complexion was “white”, even as he was known by others in the Cape as “free black.” This is why when Cesars traveled
to England Londoners saw him as a white man, a colonial settler, a mean, violent master. They could not see him for what he was, could not understand his humanity even as they criticized his actions, the decisions he made. And this is how it remains, regrettably, today.

Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully are authors of Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography.

Wonders and Marvels

The Color of Pirating

HT — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 06:38:00 +0000

By Peter T. Leeson

Eighteenth-century pirate features, from skull-emblazed flags to wooden legs, pervade popular culture. One important pirate feature that doesn’t appear in most pop-culture treatments, however, is the fact that upward of a quarter of the average early 18^th-century pirate crew was black.

Historical evidence on the free vs. slave status of black pirates is conflicting. Because of this it’s tempting to conclude that pirates, who were no more racially enlightened than their legitimate contemporaries, typically treated blacks as their legitimate contemporaries did: they enslaved them.

But as I argue in my new book, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, this conclusion may be mistaken. Although some black pirates were slaves, it’s probable that many, and perhaps even most, black pirates were not. To be sure, pirates were as prejudiced as their legitimate contemporaries. But unlike in legitimate society, in pirate society, prejudiced thinking didn’t necessarily mean prejudiced policy.

The reason for this is straightforward: pirates were profit seekers. They cared more about gold and silver than they cared about black and white. And granting blacks their freedom was often more profitable than enslaving them.

A pirate crew’s benefit of enslaving a sailor was the additional booty the slave’s wage-less labor brought it. But the crew’s cost of enslaving a sailor could be much higher. If the slave escaped and informed the authorities on his pirate captors, or together with other conscripts succeeded in overthrowing his enslavers and delivered them to the law, the pirates faced the unpleasant prospect of hanging and thus the end of their roguish lives. Since the cost of enslaving a sailor often exceeded the benefit, in many cases, granting black sailors their freedom was simply good business.

Pirate profit seeking, not progressivism, prodded some sea scoundrels to practice racial tolerance. But this doesn’t diminish the tolerance they showed. In their pursuit of self-interest these pirates were led, as if by an “invisible hook,” in some ways reminiscent of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” to treat black sailors as equals.

Peter T. Leeson is author of The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton University Press). Image courtesy of the author.

Wonders and Marvels

Historical Footprints

HT — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 08:51:00 +0000

by Martha A. Sandweiss

In Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, I unravel the hidden life of Clarence King, the celebrated western American explorer, who crossed the color line from white to black to marry the woman he loved. For thirteen years, from his marriage in 1888 until his death in 1901, King lived a secret double life as a black Pullman porter named James Todd. His prominent white friends never knew that King had an African-American wife and five mixed-race children. And Ada Copeland, the woman he married, had no idea of her husband’s true identity. Not until King lay dying in 1901, did he disclose his true identity to his wife.

King sought to ensure that no paper trail of his secret life would exist. But most families in late nineteenth-century America left behind some trace in the historical records, and this one was no exception.

The federal census records proved essential to my search. Historians of a certain age will recall the tedium of scrolling through endless microfilm reels of census data. Now the data is digitized and searchable. One can track characters across time. Minor characters spring instantly to life. Broad hypotheses are easily checked. I could quickly calculate, for example, how many Georgia-born African Americans lived in Manhattan in 1880. Not very many. I could then infer that Copeland had exercised a rare sort of ambition in moving north from her native state.

My students initially find census records uninteresting. But they soon see their potential. They can figure out who lived in a particular neighborhood, imagine the languages that would be heard on the street or think about the work places where people spent their days. They can ask hard questions about family structure, gender, and literacy. In short, they can make these historical records speak to individual life stories as well as to larger themes of American history.

Years ago, I approached an academic library to request that they subscribe to Ancestry.com, the best and most easily navigated of the proprietary digitized census sites. We don’t buy resources for genealogists, they said. I quickly showed them what academic historians might do with these resources and won them over. Now the librarians are among the database’s biggest fans, and I incorporate census research assignments into many of my undergraduate courses. Students initially get hooked by finding the trace of a grandparent. But they quickly discover that they can become real historical sleuths, as well, able to recover forgotten bits of the past.

Image: Wallace King, Ada and Clarence’s son (right) in the family’s home, 1950s. Courtesy of Patricia Chacon.

Wonders and Marvels

PASSING STRANGE

HT — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 01:21:00 +0000

By Holly Tucker

Wonders & Marvels most often profiles history and historical fiction on pre-1800 topics. But Martha A. Sandweiss’ Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line is just too good to pass up. And it’s always a treat to help spread the word about well-written books by fellow academics. (Sandweiss is a Professor of History at Princeton.)

Passing Strange tells the story of Clarence King who is best known for his work as a geologist and writer. But King had a secret–a big one. In order to marry the woman he loved, he lived a double life as a black man. Sandweiss’ book presents King’s work, love, and life, in the context of racial politics from the late 19th century into the 1960s. An extraordinary story told by a writer with a keen historical eye and deep respect for her subjects.

The New York Times ran not just one, but two reviews of the book. And if you’re still not convinced, you might take a peek at a third in the Washington Post, by Annette-Gordon Reed. If the reviewer’s name sounds familiar, it is. Reed is author of The Hemingses of Monticello.

Image: Clarence King, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Department of the Interior

Wonders and Marvels

Book of the Week: City of God

HT — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 21:00:00 +0000

Up this week: Beverly Swerling’s City of God: A Novel of Passion and Wonder in Old New York.

Beverly’s novels are spell-binding journeys into an era rich in history and intrigue. For a flavor of her work, take a peek at her latest book trailer. (Yes, there are such things as book trailers now!) This novel, in particular, caught my eye because of its many references to medical life in the 19th century. My guess that many Marvels & Tales readers will enjoy it!

Wonders and Marvels

Wonders & MarvelsRace and Identity | Wonders & Marvels

Old Photos and Mandolins: Sources of Inspiration

By Ann Weisgarber

I wrote the chapter and entitled it “The Mandolin Player,” my nod to a 1902 photograph.

About the author: Ann Weisgarber was born and raised in Kettering, Ohio. She was a social worker before earning a master’s degree in sociology at the University of Houston and becoming a teacher. She divides her time between Sugar Land and Galveston, Texas.

Giveaway is closed.

Would you like an email notification of other drawings? Sign up for our giveaway email list by clicking here.

Image Credit: Christine Meeker

Jewish Confederate Saved by Talking Parrot

By Dara Horn

How did this much-hated man pass through every obstacle and come out thriving on the other side? Was it ambition? Brilliance? Cravenness? Luck? Blessing?

Sources: Eli Evans, Judah P. Benjamin, the Jewish Confederate Robert N. Rosen, The Jewish Confederates

Dara Horn’s third novel, All Other Nights (Norton), about Jewish spies during the Civil War, is out this week in paperback. The first chapter and other information – including on Civil War ciphers and codes – are posted at www.darahorn.com

IMAGE: the Confederate two (2) dollar bill

Easier not to know?

By C. S. Manegold

ALMOST HALF a century ago, Martin Luther King Jr. captured a problem that still plagues us today. Cautioning his flock against the complacent embrace of incomplete knowledge, he warned: “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.’’

I have thought of those words often in the last few years as I worked to unearth the history of a century and a half of slavery on a Massachusetts farm first owned by the famous Puritan, Governor John Winthrop, whose “Model of Christian Charity’’ is often quoted even now.

I am older, and I grew up in a different time, but I said these words myself not long ago. Now that I know better, I realize there are many answers to the question. But the best perhaps are these: Easier not to. More comfortable not to.

Yet as King suggested, responsible dialogue can not move forward with half-truths and willful ignorance. In this regard, the North has work to do. It lags behind the South in stepping up to ugly truths.

IMAGE: The Royall House and slave quarters

How do you Explain the Seemingly Unexplainable?

By Susan M. Reverby

“Tuskegee” will probably continue to haunt our civic imaginations as a metaphor for malfeasance and hubris in research. The study should remind us both of the dangers of racism and the common practice of wrongly reading race into scientific data.

Grave site of Tuskegee participant, Lucious C. Pollard (from the author’s personal collection and book.)

Hendrik Cesars and the Tragedies of Race in South Africa

The Color of Pirating

Historical Footprints

PASSING STRANGE

Book of the Week: City of God

Sources:
Eli Evans, Judah P. Benjamin, the Jewish Confederate
Robert N. Rosen, The Jewish Confederates