18 Thursday Jun 2020
Posted in Media and Web 2.0, Rufus King
≈ Comments Off on Speaking of Rufus King
Richard King estate, Scarborough, Maine
This past weekend the editors at the Journal of the American Revolution uploaded this podcast we recorded in early May. This was so much fun to do and I appreciate the opportunity to tell the fascinating story of the King family.
(image/The Maine Historical and Genealogical Recorder)
10 Wednesday Jun 2020
Posted in American Revolutionary War, Media and Web 2.0
Once a month the editors of the Journal of the American Revolution ask contributors a different question related to some aspect of the era. This month’s question is about resources available online that scholars can thus use for their research even during the pandemic shutdown. Research has become much easier in recent years with the growing availability of material that can be found online. Still, doing research in this moment is difficult. Some colleagues and I are grappling with this very issue on a project unrelated to the period. For anyone interested in researching the Colonial and Early American period even in this moment when libraries, archives, and other repositories are still closed, this list is a good place to begin.
(image/Yale University Art Gallery)
07 Sunday Jun 2020
Posted in Media and Web 2.0
≈ Comments Off on Appreciating Al Jaffee
circa 1910 postcard that inspired the later creation of Alfred E. Neuman
I have not read Mad magazine for many years–decades–now, but read with great interest this Washington Post article about the impending retirement of Al Jaffee. For those who may not know, Jaffee was one of the early pioneers of Mad. In his 60+ years with the magazine he wrote and drew over five hundred of the fold-ins, which were something of a spoof of the Playboy centerfold in which one saw a question and accompanying drawing that, when folded it together, satirized some political figure or topic of the day. Jaffee was also a key figure in writing Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, which my brother, sister, and I avidly read aloud in book form in the 1970s. Jaffee is 99 years old and–in the end of an era–next week’s tribute issue will be Mad’s final edition of new material.
Jaffee was born in Savannah, Georgia just after the end of the Great War but moved back and forth from the United States to Lithuania with his parents. I have always found it fascinating how immigrants created so much of the high, middle, and low American culture that we take for granted. We breathe it in like oxygen without even thinking about it. Vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, Hollywood, and even Christmas carols are just a few examples. I imagine this insider-outsider identity gave Jaffee his unique perspective and ability to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, all while maintaining his sense of humor, intellectual curiosity, and generosity of spirit.
Popular culture can be a tricky thing. Done well, as it was for decades in Mad and is today in The Onion, it can inspire and educate. Done poorly or consumed in excess, it enervates one’s faculties. I was telling someone just last week that I can no longer watch the late night television shows because Neil Postman’s 1980s warning of the dangers of amusing ourselves to death has become reality. Our obsession with entertainment is the reason why actors and reality television personalities have in recent years become able to enter the public sphere in the manner that they have. If you are satirizing this or that figure in a late night sketch but then hanging out with that same figure at some after party two weeks later, what does your satire actually mean? These were hazards to which Jaffee and his Mad colleagues never succumbed.
17 Tuesday Sep 2019
Posted in Historiography, Interpretation, Media and Web 2.0, Memory, New York City
≈ Comments Off on Talking Hart Island podcast
I received an email recently from author and podcaster Michael T. Keene, who introduced himself and told me of his exciting new project: the Talking Hart Island podcast. For those who may not know, Hart Island is located in Long Island Sound near the Bronx and since 1869 has served as New York City’s potters field. It is the largest public burial ground in the United States. Approximately one million souls rest there today. Hart Island is still very much a working cemetery; officials estimate it has about another decade to go before reaching full capacity. One hundred and fifty years of burials dating back the days of Tammany offer many exciting interpretive possibilities for a podcast.
Today is an exciting time in the long history of Hart Island. Currently run by the NYC Department of Correction and tended by inmates from Rikers, Hart Island may soon open as a public park if the city council votes to change the island’s jurisdiction to the Parks Department. DNA is now making it possible to identify some of the unknown. These are the stories Mike Keene and his team are telling. Today I listened to the segment one featuring Russell Shorto, To start at the very beginning was a great move. Too often when the public thinks of the history of New York they think it begins with the British. In reality it was the Dutch who set the tone and character of what they called New Netherland. Much of that Dutch ethos remains with us today.
There are already three episodes of Talking Hart Island available for listening, with a new episode coming weekly. Give it a listen by clicking on the image above.
01 Saturday Sep 2018
Posted in Film, Sound, & Photography, Media and Web 2.0, New York City, Philately
≈ Comments Off on The Atlantic Telegraph Jubilee, September 1, 1858
In the mid 1980s your humble writer, fresh out of high school, had a job for a year or so working in a survey crew in West Texas laying out the routes for fiber optic cable lines through the desert. Running parallel to these new lines were old ones consisting of copper coaxial cables, some of which remained and some of which got extricated to make make for the new digital. This all came back to me when reading the other day of the Atlantic Telegraph Jubilee of September 1, 1858. One hundred and sixty years ago today New Yorkers turned out by the thousands to celebrate the laying of the first cable crossing that ocean span. The work was that of Cyrus W. Field, owner of the Atlantic Telegraph Company. The first official transatlantic communication (after a test run to make certain things were in working order) had been sent two weeks earlier, when on August 16 Queen Victoria in London messaged President Buchanan, the former U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, in Washington. There had been several attempts in the days before this that had failed for technical reasons.
A somewhat forgotten event today, the Atlantic Telegraph Jubilee was held in New York City on September 1, 1858. Transatlantic telegraphy did not come into its own until after the American Civil War and would be part of daily life well into the twentieth century.
Everyone understood the significance of the transatlantic cable. York City, for one, had only had running water for sixteen years at this point and was not unique in its lack of infrastructure and public utilities. Letters still took weeks to cross the ocean. The initial rate in August and early September 1858 to send a transatlantic message was $5 per word. By comparison: the average working man earned between $1-$2 per day. It took seventeen hours to transmit Queen Victoria’s fourteen-word message to Buchanan. Thousands turned out for the Atlantic Telegraph Jubilee but the event seems to have been largely forgotten over the ensuing decades and up to the present time. That is probably because the cable broke with a few short weeks and was essentially inoperable by early fall. Such failures are not unusual in these types of projects. Transatlantic communication did not come to full fruition until after the American Civil War. In 1866 Field managed to build the first true, permanent cable. By then, message time was down to about eight to fifteen words per minute.
The United States Post Office held the First Day Cover ceremony for the transatlantic cable centenary stamp at the Farley Post Office in Manhattan on Friday August 15, 1958. George Giusti, an Italian who fleed Europe in 1939 during the Second World War, was the designer.
The transatlantic cable was hugely important well into the twentieth century. By 1908, fifty years after the first cable massage, there were at least six companies and over a dozen lines crossing the ocean. Rates were down to four cents per word. Even with that there was much public talk about high rates and unfair trade practices. One way was to make it cheaper to send messages at night, just like cell phone companies encourage us today to use our phones on evenings and weekends by making calls less expensive. Consolidation soon followed. Transatlantic communication was hugely important during the Great War. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, and indeed there was some telephone communication in the First World War, but like the airplane it was still in its infancy. Thus telegraphy’s continued significance.
Albeit anomalously, cable messaging continued even into the twenty-first century. It was not until February 2006 that Western Union sent its last telegram. I remember saying that to a class of technology students the day after that happened and the students responding with virtually no reaction.
(images/top, NYPL; bottom, U.S. Post Office)
31 Monday Jul 2017
Posted in Governors Island, Great War centennial, Media and Web 2.0, Memory
I mentioned in a post the other day that American surgeon Dr. Robert D. Schrock worked for several weeks in the hospitals during the Battle of Passchendaele, or Third Ypres. Schrock and his colleagues were still at Governors Island at this point 100 years ago, but the Battle of Passchendaele began on 31 July 1917. It lasted well into November. It may be difficult for Americans to grasp the significance that the battles in Flanders have for the people of Great Britain, along with the Canadians, Aussies, and others who fought alongside them. It is analogous to Antietam and Gettysburg for Americans. I was watching some of the footage over the weekend and saw that Prince William and his wife attended the ceremonies in Flanders; today his father Prince Charles will be present. My brother took me to Belgian about ten years ago. We went to Cloth Hall and stayed not far from the Menin Gate. Britain’s Ministry of Defence made this short video to mark the 100th anniversary of the battle.
05 Sunday Feb 2017
Posted in Media and Web 2.0, Writing
≈ Comments Off on Thinking of Mr. Donini in a post-fact world
Harlem newsstand, 1939
Sometimes a teacher says something that he forgets before lunchtime but that stays with a student for a lifetime. This can be true even if the impressionable young person does not understand the gravitas of the statement for years. Three plus decades ago my best friend and I were sitting in our 11th grade English class when our instructor, Mr. Donini, said in passing that when we the class reached full-blown middle age newspapers as we know them would be obsolete. He was referring to the move from print to digital, and it was an extraordinarily prescient comment for a person to make in the early 1980s.
Changing the subject a little, I will point out that much of the content here on this blog comes from historical newspapers, themselves originally in print but now digitized and available online. One newspaper upon which I rely heavily is the original Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which happened to have been across the street from where I work today in Downtown Brooklyn. It was one of the great American dailies from the mid-nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. Last semester my colleague and I took our class on a tour of the Brooklyn Public Library, where among other things our guide took us down to see the BDE morgue, the rows and rows of file cabinets filled with yellowing clips of stories organized and classified with great attention to detail.
The reason I say all this is because in the post-truth world we live in today facts and details matter. It seems that supporting the first draft of history is more important than ever. Otherwise how will the people of the late-twenty-first and early-twenty-second centuries–our children and grandchildren–make sense of our own life and times after we are gone? How will we make sense of it? For that reason I subscribed this morning to the digital version of the Washington Post. My primary reason is to keep up more closely with current affairs, but it’s not all for that. I love DC–my grandparents lived there for a decade during the Depression and WW2, and my mother was born there–and so I registered for the National Digital + DC Edition. In this way I can keep up with the goings-on at the various museums as well as Washington Nationals baseball. Spring training does start in just a few weeks. That said, my real reasons are to better understand our current moment and to support the expensive and hard work that journalism entails.
We have become accustomed over the past 10-15 years to receiving our music, our journalism and our podcasts for free. This complacency is dangerous. I am hardly the first one to be saying this in these times, but we need to reexamine our assumptions and think harder about supporting those things that keep us plugged into our world.
(image/New York Public Library)
07 Monday Nov 2016
Posted in Great War centennial, Media and Web 2.0
≈ Comments Off on The Unknown Soldier
Here is a little something to get your week off to a good start, especially with it now getting dark so early. The other day I received a group email from the folks at the World War One Centennial Commission with a brief preview of a film coming out this Friday, Veterans Day. The film was produced by the WW!CC in cooperation with C-SPAN 3. The film premiers at 10:00 am and airs again at 10:00 pm Eastern Time that night before showing a few times over the weekend.
17 Friday Apr 2015
Posted in Interviews, Libraries, Media and Web 2.0
Here is the second and concluding part of the Rex Passion interview. Yesterday’s installment brought Edward Shenton up to the Armistice.
The 28th Division remained in France for six months and as the weeks passed, there was less and less for the soldiers to do and more and more time for Ed to draw. He was in the villages of Vignuelles, Uruffe, Colombey-les-Belles and Le Mans sketching everything he saw before he finally boarded the ship for home.
On April 20, 1919 the engineers of Company B boarded the SS Finland and sailed back home They marched in a parade down the streets of Philadelphia and celebrated a job well done.
The Strawfoot: What were the conditions under which he made the sketches?
Rex Passion: Before he left for training camp, Ed bought several canvas-bound sketchbooks from Wanamaker’s department store in Philadelphia, along with pencils, graphite sticks and a water color set. In both Camp Meade and Camp Hancock evenings and Sundays were his own and he had a good deal of time to draw. He was able to store his art supplies in a foot locker so he could use the larger (9” x 10 ¾”) sketchbooks and he could also paint with watercolors. All this changed when he shipped overseas.
Once he landed in Calais, he was ordered to store his personal effects and limit his kit to what he could carry on his back. One of the things Ed did was to cut his 6” x 9” sketchbooks in half. I suspect this was to be able to keep them inside his helmet where they would be protected from the weather and especially the mud. The first two drawings in this sketchbook were cut when the book was cut, the others were drawn to fit the smaller pages.
Some of Ed’s wartime sketchbooks were mailed home to his father in Philadelphia and have his address on the cover. Some of the drawings in these books have place names obscured by the sensor
Many of the images from Ed’s time in combat are drawn on larger sheets of loose paper (13 ½” x 9 ¼”). The captions are carefully drawn in ink, but the drawings are done in pencil. There are a couple of instances where sketches in a cut-down sketchbook are very similar to those on a larger sheet. It appears that the sketchbook images were re-drawn at a later date on larger sheets. Perhaps this was even done once Ed was back home.
There are, however, many images on larger sheets for which there is not a corresponding one in a canvas-bound sketchbook. Also, there are no drawings from his trip from the US to France in 1918; all the sea drawings were done on the return trip. Ed would have had a great deal of time to draw on the boat trip over, and many new things to see. Are these sketchbooks still missing? Continue reading
16 Thursday Apr 2015
Posted in Interviews, Libraries, Media and Web 2.0
≈ Comments Off on The Lost Sketchbooks interview, part 1
Recently I posted about Rex Passion’s new book The Lost Sketchbooks: A Young Artist in the Great War. Rex has performed a labor of love in preserving the voluminous corpus of work Shenton left behind. A few weeks back I sent Rex the link to an article about The Sketchbook Project, a Brooklyn-based library of 33,000+ sketchbooks from around the world. I believe Rex sent them a copy of his new book for their collection. The visual history of the Civil War–Winslow Homer, Alfred Waud, and their contemporaries–has been so well documented. It seems we don’t fully appreciate the visual culture of the First World War to anywhere near the same degree. I am hoping that changes during the Great War Centennial. The public needs to know of the work of such solider/artists as Ed Shenton, John W. Thomason and their counterparts from across the globe who lived and fought in the trenches of 1914-18.
The Strawfoot: Tell us about Edward Shenton and his experience in the First World War.
Rex Passion: At the time the U.S. declared war on Germany, Edward Shenton was in his second year as a full-time art student at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia. He had just gotten through a very trying and depressing winter and the decision to join the army seems to have cleared away some of the dark clouds.
Ed and fifteen of his high-school friends joined the Pennsylvania National Guard at the armory in Philadelphia and Ed was assigned to Company apt, 103rd Engineers, which was later attached to the 28 Division. After several weeks of drill and training at the armory, Company B moved to Camp Meade between Baltimore and Washington. The land for the camp had been purchased by the government only weeks before so Ed was present with his sketchbooks as the camp was being built. He kept up his art school habit of drawing what he saw every day.
The new recruits spent the spring at Camp Meade then moved to Camp Hancock near Augusta, Georgia where their training intensified. They learned the building and demolition techniques of a combat engineer, but also the craft of an infantry soldier.
In addition to the soldiers’ training the men of Company B had various camp chores but still found time for a bit of rest and recreation.
Finally, after nearly a year of training, Ed Shenton and his friends embarked for France and the war.
On the first of June they arrived in Calais and after an additional three weeks of training moved toward the front.
The engineers’ first taste of combat was near the town of Charly-sur-Marne. They lived at a chateau near the river and marched to and from a place called la Canarderie (the duck farm) amid cannon fire and aerial combat. During this period Ed was building trenches all day and only had time to draw after a long days’ work.
On July 14, the engineers were hastily withdrawn from Charly-sur-Marne and redeployed to the east near the town of Condé-en-Brie. On the night of the 15th they marched to a hillside above the town of St. Agnan and the next morning relieved the 109th Infantry, which had been decimated by the advancing Prussian Guard.
About noon the advancing Germans started shooting at the Americans and the engineers returned their fire. An hour or two later the Germans started shelling the shallow trench where Ed and his fellows were crouched. Many were wounded and some killed and Ed Shenton had his baptism of fire. Continue reading
