By David S. Reynolds

In writing my book Mightier than the Sword, which shows how Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery best-seller Uncle Tom’s Cabin fueled the passions behind the Civil War, I realized just how important cultural history is.

Lincoln brought attention to the power of culture when he declared, “Public sentiment is everything…He who moulds public sentiment is greater than he who makes statutes.” He was recognizing something that is all too often forgotten by today’s historians, for whom culture often plays a distant second-fiddle to politics. We can read book after book on Lincoln the politician, his team of rivals, and the era’s political parties – or on Civil War battles or generals or soldiers. Actually, though, throughout history, cultural outliers have usually led the way, and politics and wars have followed in their wake.

Sometimes the cultural outliers are forces for destruction – the prime recent example is Al Qaeda, a tiny cultural splinter group that has controlled much of Western politics for the last decade. But sometimes, cultural outliers have identifiably good results – one thinks, for example, of Gandhi or Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King or others like them who have led directly to political change that can be called positive.

On the positive side, few cultural phenomena have swayed public opinion as powerfully as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was central to making America a more egalitarian nation by exposing the horrors of slavery with such vividness that Stowe became, as Lincoln reportedly said, “the little lady who made this great war.”

About the author: David S. Reynolds is a Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His works include the award-winning Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson, Walt Whitman’s America, and John Brown, Abolitionist. He lives on Long Island.

By Brooke L. Blower

After World War I, Americans gravitated to the bustling, traffic-snarled Opera district. The busy American Express, topped by a gigantic electric sign, appears on the far right. Mario von Bucovich, Paris. New York: Random House, 1930.

Paris certainly was a destination for American lovers in the 1920s – not least for those who wanted to break up. Each year hundreds of “wedlock-worn folks” with the money and inclination set sail for the capital to end their marriages, where divorce laws were more liberal than those of most American states. Never mind that U.S. courts warned that such decrees might not be recognized stateside, that competing statutes meant that a man might be considered divorced in Paris but still married under New York State law, or that, if he subsequently remarried, he might even be regarded as a bigamist in Connecticut. The “mismated” continued their pilgrimages anyway, and the capital’s “divorce mill” ran “full tilt.” French newspapers did not air society couples’ dirty laundry as the tabloids did in Manhattan or Chicago, and the Paris courts offered quick and discreet proceedings, expedited by American lawyer middlemen who made a fine living helping their compatriots “lift the matrimonial shackles.”

American magazines made light of this fad for divorce à la française, painting it as a story about modern-day female emancipation, since wives filed the majority of petitions. Paris appeared as a “happy hunting-ground” for soon-to-be-divorcées dreaming of the alimony they’d have to burn. The city’s ready pool of gigolos, its celebrated opportunities for retail therapy, promised to take the sting out of a failed love affair.

Yet there was something very sad about couples embarking across the ocean and setting up new residences in the world’s most romantic city, a Catholic city, and a city with more than its fair share of war widows and young women who would never have the chance to marry, all to dismantle the life they had built together. Maybe not in the late-night café haze, but in the sharp light of morning – sitting on a park bench, watching the lovers, the families shepherding their small children past – those waiting for their divorces to come through must have felt that sense of loneliness, which often clouds a stay in a foreign place.

About the author: Brooke L. Blower is assistant professor of history at Boston University and the author of Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars (Oxford, 2011).

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By Ellen Horan

My novel, 31 Bond Street, explores the fate of a well-do widow with two teenage daughters, Emma Cunningham (still considered youthful and attractive in her 30′s), during a sensational trial for murder. By reading the newspapers of 1857 to research the actual case that it is based upon, I was thrust back into that era. When I immersed myself, I found that ‘day to day’ existence was rarely explained in the newspaper – as so much about contemporary life was taken for granted. One of my biggest curiosities was ‘how did women ever manage to wear hoop skirts?’

First of all, 1857 was the year flexible metal hoop was patented and came to market and it created a huge sensation. It was made of foldable loops of steel, and could collapse for storage, and then pop open with the touch of a spring. Women had been burdened with heavy skirts that were kept fashionably full with wooden hoops and layer upon layer of crinolines or horsehair, so the new hoop skirt was a modern revelation. It was a huge hit because it lightened the load. We think, from a feminist perspective, that such items were ‘suffered’ by women, burdening them and slowing them down, but hoops were hugely popular among women. They were relieved of the weight of multiple layers of petticoats and heavy crinolines and bone or wooden stays in their skirts. The metal ‘cage’ hoop seemed light and liberating by comparison. Movement became easier. Wearing a metal hoop skirt was often compared to ‘sailing’ since there was nothing underneath, and your skirt fabric was stretched around a brace, much like a sail.

Women wore hoop dresses to fancy events and parties, but also under a daytime dress known as ‘the promenade dress’ for shopping and other activities. An evening promenade was something all New Yorkers turned out for in the days before the Civil War. After work, all classes loved to link arms and walk up and down the avenues, with women showing off their hoops. During 1857, the larger the hoop, the more fashionable, the skirts became wildly elaborate and covered with follies like beading and fringe and ruffles. New synthetic dyes had recently been invented creating vivid clashing colors like purple and orange. Skirts would grow to wider and wider circumferences, often taking up 20 yards of fabric, stretched out like gigantic lampshades. Women were crazy for these latest fashion fads, and metal hoops were in huge demand, with women outside the cities anxiously awaiting new shipments.

The hoop skirt was as lampooned by men as it was embraced by women. Satiric poems and cartoons appeared in the daily newspapers, describing the danger of being toppled by a gust of wind. So how did women wear hoops? Apparently, to sit down, you needed a lot of practice – you tipped the hoop under your rear end up a bit, and sat, which gave you the right balance to perch on the edge of a chair. If you sat without doing that first, the front ballooned upwards, exposing the room to your crotch-less pantaloons. To relieve yourself, which I assume you never wanted to do in a public place, you would gather the metal hoops upwards, and strategically place yourself over a stool which held a chamber pot.

After Emma Cunningham was indicted for murder, she was no longer wearing hoops, but skirts that hung limply as she waited in jail for her trial. I believe she would have traded the bars of prison for the ‘cage’ of hoops any day. But that is another question I explored in 31 Bond Street – how did women survive the courts and prisons in 1857?

About the author: Ellen Horan was raised in Philadelphia and New York. After graduating from college, where she studied painting and history, she lived in France for a year while working as an au pair and studying studio art. She remained abroad for a second year and was offered a grant to live and paint in the South of France. She returned to New York City and worked for many years with photographers and photo agencies. She maintained an art studio and worked as a freelance photo editor for magazines and books. She turned her attention to writing after becoming intrigued by the Bond Street murder case. She lives in downtown Manhattan, the setting of her first novel, 31 Bond Street.

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By Sue Macy

Elsa von Blumen poses for a picture on her bicycle. During a race in 1889, the Pittsburg Dispatch reported, "Miss von Blumen's style is to a great extent very laborious, but when she leans forward for a spurt her bicycle seems to fly around the track." (p. 60)

In April 2010 I found myself at an auction house that was packed with old bicycles. There were Schwinns from the 1950s and 60s, but they were in the minority, and they were the new kids on the block. More numerous were the really old models, the high-wheelers from the 1880s and the even older velocipedes, built in the 1860s before bicycles had pedals. I watched in awe as collectors and aficionados bid one, two, even three thousand dollars for the chance to take home one of these antique gems.

I was there for the small-ticket items, the photographs, postcards, and pins and medals I needed to supplement the images and ephemera that I already had found for my book, Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom (With a Few Flat Tires Along the Way). Though I never had bid at an auction before, I quickly caught the competitive spirit and came away with seven prized lots, including a century medal (awarded for riding 100 miles in one outing) and two photographs that made it into the book. I also came away convinced that my book, which focuses on the bicycle craze of the 1880s and 1890s, is particularly relevant today. The ancient bicycles at the auction were the physical manifestation of a time when cycling came to be valued as a healthy, enjoyable, and efficient way to get where you were going. Modern technology has enabled us to produce lighter, faster bikes, but like the models of old, they have the potential to liberate us from the costs, both financial and ecological, of our era’s more dominant modes of transportation. While the auction attendees clamored to own a piece of the past, they were also making a statement about the living legacy of one of the most reliable and enduring inventions of the industrial age.

About the author: Sue Macy majored in history at Princeton University and spent 23 years as an editor and editorial director of children’s magazines before leaving to write nonfiction books on sports and women’s history. She lives in Englewood, New Jersey, just a few hours drive from the site of the Copake Auction, described above. This year’s bicycle auction is scheduled for April 16.

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IMAGES ARE FOR YOUR ONE-TIME EXCLUSIVE USE ONLY AS A TIE-IN WITH THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC BOOK “WHEELS OF CHANGE.” NO SALES, NO TRANSFERS.

Cover: ©National Geographic
Photo: Collection of the Author

By Matthew Dennison

Mythology engulfs Livia. Elevated to the rank of goddess within a generation of her death, this woman once accounted a paragon among Roman wives has been more effectively fictionalized that the pagan gods whose pantheon she joined. Her name is no longer a byword for wifely piety. Today she is a schemer…a villianness…a murderess. She has no defense. Her crime is ambition.

Ironically Livia owes her dehumanization to motherhood. Ancient Rome adopted a throwaway approach to single women. Devoted wives and mothers were the pride of the Roman Republic, their self-abnegation their only crown. In Rome, virtuous mothers transmitted a blueprint of good behaviour to successive generations of virtuous men. They conceived desires of their own at their peril.

So what of Livia? Why must the wife of Rome’s greatest emperor, Augustus, suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? The answer, of course, lies in part with her son.

Few rulers have done less to curry favour with the masses than the Emperor Tiberius. Two thousand years ago, as today, unhappy multitudes demanded a scapegoat for their suffering. Augustus could not have cursed Rome with so joyless a ruler of his own volition. Surely, for her own ends, Tiberius’s mother brokered the deal which forced a generation of Romans into tyrannous misery?

To Rome’s mostly male readership, it was a plausible argument. Today we can look afresh at a woman whose reputation was tarnished not by her own hand but those of later commentators sick with fear at that most exciting prospect – a powerful woman.

About the author: Matthew Dennison is the author of The Last Princess. A journalist, he contributes to The Times, The Daily Telegraph, Country Life, and The Spectator. He is married and lives in London and North Wales.

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Image Credit: ancienthistory.about.com