Category Archives: Writing

Twain, Stowe, & Hawley

22 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by in Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Interpretation, Joseph Roswell Hawley, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President), Writing

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Mark Twain house, Hartford

I hope everyone had a good weekend. I’m sorry about the lack of posts recently but with the semester in full swing things have been busy. This past Saturday I was up and out of the house at 6:00 am to meet a friend at Grand Central, from where we took the train to Hartford. There we were met by a friend who was our guide for the day. We visited the Mark Twain house and adjacent Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. Literally they are right next each other. Both tours were distinctly different but uniformly excellent. I love to watch interpreters perform their craft. Twain’s house was obviously an anchor for a man who traveled so extensively, both as a younger man finding his way and later as a famous writer supplementing his income on the lecture circuit. Twain often lived out of a suitcase and the house there in Hartford was the place to which he and his family, who often accompanied him abroad, could return. He did most of his writing on the third floor. While up there I mentioned his publishing Ulysses S. Grant’s Memoirs. The guide turned to his immediate left and pointed out a beautiful bust of Grant on the mantel. I so wanted to take a picture but photography was not permitted in the house.

I had never been to either site before. The one that seems to have undergone the most change in recent years has been the Stowe Center. They used to give a more conventional overview of the house itself and Stowe’s time there later in her life. This is what friends of mine and I call a “furniture tour,” in which a guide focuses more on the make and model of a home’s accoutrements instead of the historical figures who lived there. The Stowe Center, thankfully, has changed its interpretive model to discuss not only Stowe’s life and times but the social and cultural issues that faced our nation then and now. We were even told beforehand when buying out tickets that it would be such. Apparently people have gotten angry during tours in the past.

Joseph Roswell Hawley headstone, Cedar Hill Cemetery

Our guide was so generous. I had mentioned a few days earlier that perhaps we might go to Cedar Hill Cemetery, to which none of us had ever been before. It is one of the old garden cemeteries and among other Connecticut luminaries is the final resting place of Joseph Roswell Hawley. We got there late in the day, as dusk was about to settle in. We had a great time driving and taking in the scenery. We had some difficulty finding Hawley however but as you can see here we eventually found him. With the Roosevelt Sr. manuscript complete I intend to spend the rest of this year and probably all of 2019 engaged in the Joseph Hawley project. It was so great to see his headstone and gives me the impetus to return to this fascinating topic.

I had not been to Hartford in several decades, when I was a very young child and my father would occasionally take us in on a Saturday to see the phone company building with its big computers and switchboards where he worked. Being there this Saturday was almost like coming home in a way. Here is to good friends who through their kindness and generosity help make our lives more meaningful.

Geoffrey C. Ward: “The fun is in the chase.”

28 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jazz, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President), Writing

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I was bemoaning the recent fallowness of the blog to a friend earlier this week. With the semester in full swing I haven’t had the time over the past ten days or so. Last night however a friend and I ventured up to the CUNY Graduate Center to watch Geoffrey C. Ward give the annual keynote for the Leon Levy Center for Biography. The Levy Center was founded by David Nasaw in 2007. While attending the Graduate Center in 2005 I took a class on the Gilded Age with Professor Nasaw in which I learned a great deal. At the time he was just about to release his biography of Andrew Carnegie. I can’t say I really know Professor Nasaw and I doubt he would remember me–I haven’t spoken with him in thirteen years for one thing–but as I understand it he founded the Levy Center because he believed that academics were not receiving professional credit for writing biographies. If that is indeed the case, and I suspect it is, I imagine it’s because tenure and promotion boards see biography as esoteric, which is misguided and unfortunate.

Geoffrey C. Ward, September 2018

Ward is the author or co-author of sixteen books but focused his keynote on his two-volume biography of FDR and his exposé of his great-grandfather Ferdinand Ward. This was of course the swindler who cheated Ulysses S. Grant and so many others in the ponzi scheme that took down Grant & Ward in 1884. Geoffrey Ward told the audience that while working on the book he concluded that his ancestor literally had no conscience and was probably a sociopath. Franklin Roosevelt however proved more inscrutable. Ward explained that when he began researching Roosevelt he wanted to know if the polio that touched Ward’s own life had taken away any of FDR’s optimism or indomitable spirit. Ward never found the answer during his research and writing but the answer may have appeared, he explained, in the diaries and letters of Margaret Suckley that turned up after her death in 1991 at the age of 99. In those pages Roosevelt confessed to his friend and confidante the depression and frustration to which he occasionally succumbed due to his physical impairment.

Ward gave a thoughtful presentation and had the audience’s attention. On the way out of the auditorium we ran into a mutual friend and the three of us talked on the Fifth Avenue sidewalk about the talk. I mentioned FDR’s public persona and compared it to the presentation of self of none other than Duke Ellington My friend look quizzical and so I repeated it. Strange as the comparison may seem, Roosevelt and Ellington in their individual ways presented impenetrable public versions of themselves. Of course everyone does this, especially public figures, but few are able to hold the visage together as tightly and for as long as Roosevelt and Ellington. Many people in their inner circles thought they understood the two men, when in reality the president and jazzman rarely gave all of themselves to any one individual. They both were, and to an extent still are, enigmas wrapped in puzzles. Geoffrey Ward collaborated with Ken Burns on the Jazz documentary twenty years ago and spoke of Ellington’s public countenance. This is entirely speculation on my part but I strongly suspect that when Ward was discussing Ellington he was comparing him to Franklin Roosevelt.

The Adventures of Albert Smith Bickmore

26 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by in Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Theodore Roosevelt Sr (Father), William E. Dodge Jr., Writing

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Last night I completed what are for now the final edits on the manuscript for the book project whose working title is “Incorporating New York: Gotham’s Civil War Generation and the Creation of the Modern City.” I say “for now” because if and when it gets picked up by a publisher it will need a reading from a professional proofreader in addition to a final review by myself to spot any errors that certainly are there in the weeds. Two readers have read and commented earlier in the spring and I have spent much of the summer making their suggested revisions and corrections. Last night I also spent a considerable chunk of time (while listening to the Astros game and watching the rain) adding the references into Zotero. That is where the citations stand as of now. I have not incorporated them into the text because I do not know what format a prospective publisher might want and so am not going to create potential double work for myself.

Albert Smith Bickmore as depicted in the 1869 American edition of Travels in the East Indian Archipelago

I thought I would share the above image that comes from the 1869 American edition of Albert Smith Bickmore’s Travels in the East Indian Archipelago. The book was originally published in London the year before. As a student at Harvard just prior to the war Bickmore worked in Louis Agassiz’s Zoological Museum before joining the Forty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteers after Fort Sumter. When the regiment was discharged in 1863 he studied in Europe, and after Appomattox returned to the United States briefly before taking this scientific voyage. When he returned from that, he came to Manhattan and spoke to people like William E. Dodge Jr. and Theodore Roosevelt Sr. about creating a natural history museum for New York City. By April 1869 it was done, with the charter ratified in the Roosevelt home on East 20th Street.

The Military Service Institution of the United States

24 Thursday May 2018

Posted by in Governors Island, Ulysses S. Grant (General and President), Writing

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I had a curious incident happen over the past week, one that ended with some good news. Late last week I was compiling my paperwork for my annual self evaluation and noted a “work in progress” that had been laying there dormant for some time. I emailed the editor to inquire if there was any news, and his response was “Oh, I never told you? We published that last year.” When I answered in the negative he told me to email the address and that he’d drop a few copies in the mail. The other day when I opened the box, there they were. The piece is about The Military Service Institution of the United States, a museum and professional organization founded by Winfield Scott Hancock on Governors Island in 1878. Leonard Wood ran the Military Service Institution when he himself commanded on the island just before and during the Great War.

The Journal of America’s Military Past was the ideal vehicle for an article about the Military Service Institution and it meant a lot to me to write the piece. Hancock, Wood, Mark Twain, William Tecumseh Sherman, Dan Sickles, Frederick Dent Grant. These are just a few people who regularly attended events there. Twain of course had published Ulysses S. Grant’s Memoirs in 1886 and in these decades he was a regular on the Civil War reunion circuit. He was a renowned raconteur and ideal after dinner speaker. He once read early chapters of the yet-to-be-published A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to a gathering of officers in the MSI library. The MSI was such an important part of American Army life for decades and has been virtually forgotten since it closed for good in the early 1920s after the First World War. Most the materials held within, including Phil Sheridan’s horse Winchester, went to the Smithsonian in Washington.

Thinking of Phillis Wheatley during National Poetry Month

11 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by in Those we remember, Writing

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Dr. David Waldstreicher opened discussing the Phillis Wheatley statue that stands on Beacon Street in Boston.

About 10-12 years ago I was having coffee with someone from work when we somehow got on the topic of Classic Studies. I mentioned that in today’s world the study of Classical Antiquity and Literature has been de-emphasized, to our detriment. I included myself in the category of those whose knowledge about these fields is woefully inadequate. That now-long-ago conversation came back to me last night when a friend and I went to the CUNY Graduate Center to hear historian David Waldstreicher discuss the progress of his current project, a biography of African-American poet Phillis Wheatley. Dr. Waldstreicher specifically mentioned our current generation’s lack of Classical Education. That so few people–again, myself included–have read the works of Virgil, Herodotus and others prevents contemporary readers from fully understanding the works of poets such a Ms. Wheatley, who incorporated themes from ancient texts into her own work.

Dr. David Waldstreicher shows the audience an image of Wheatley’s writing with Thomas Jefferson’s hand-written notes on the bottom.

Dr. Waldstreicher said during his talk that for his biography of Wheatley he has had to educate himself in two areas about which he previously knew little, the Greek and Roman Classics & West African History. Wheatley herself had come from West Africa and later self-educated herself in the Classics. These experiences were pillars in her writing. It was impressive the way Professor Waldstreicher pulled all these threads together during his talk. In passing, he mentioned Jonathan Williams, Benjamin Franklin’s grand-nephew who was the first superintendent of West Point and who shortly after that worked on the forts at Governors Island. I spoke to Dr. Waldstreicher after his talk and mentioned these Williams’s connections. He seemed duly impressed.

Waldstreicher is a Distinguished Professor of History in the Graduate Center and an authority on slavery in the early years of the Republic. He did an extraordinary job explaining the fluidity of slavery in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century American society and how it differed from bondsmanship in the Caribbean and Brazil, and later in the United States. Apparently that his talk fell during National Poetry Month was a coincidence. If it was, it proved to be a fortunate one. The lecture gave the audience a great deal to think about, which was obvious in the number of questions asked during the Q&A period, which ran long. That’s the true sign that a speaker has engaged his audience well.

Hitting a benchmark

07 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by in Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), New York City, Writing

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William Cullen Bryant, Grolier Club

Occasionally during a semester we in my department take annual leave days to research and write. Today was one such day for myself. I was fortunate because the rain and snow came in buckets. I can hear people shoveling outside as I write this. I did not leave the house today. I did two loads of laundry downstairs and otherwise stayed in. It turned out to be an important day because I managed to finish the draft of Incorporating New York. The manuscript landed at almost exactly 75,000 words. Of course there is still a great deal of work to be done. I’ll be spending the next several weeks editing and fact checking. After that, I’m going to organize the references. These are not small things. Still, today has proven to be an an important benchmark in the project. The structure of my text is now set and these is no more primary research to be done. The task is more clerical now. I cannot tell you what a burden this lifts from me. I am going to keep grinding in the coming days and weeks to make the narrative as tight as I can make. I’m really happy with how things have turned out.

I had a small serendipitous moment last night. A friend and I attended a science fiction talk and reception last night at the Grolier Club on East 60th Street. When I was leaving I noticed the painting you see above. I did not know who it was at first but it turned out to be William Cullen Bryant, a member of the club and a good friend of, among others, Frederick Law Olmsted. Bryant is a minor character in my book. I love visiting places like the Union League and Grolier Clubs and never pass up a chance to visit when invited. I think that institutions like these provide continuity, which is no small thing in a place that changes as quickly as New York City does. This was in evidence last night; they’re constructing a modern building right next to the Grolier Club. Change is one of the themes of my book. I couldn’t help but take a quick snap of the painting before heading out last night to beat the snow home.

 

Monday morning coffee

26 Monday Feb 2018

Posted by in Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Writing

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Editing the manuscript yesterday

It rained all day yesterday and I took advantage of the inclement weather to stay in and edit my manuscript. It is amazing how the more you revise the more you find. I sent the draft to a friend last night for him to read. I probably have another 1500 words to reach the finish line. After that, it will be mainly be the clerical work of further editing and the data entry of adding the citations into Zotero. After this week as I wrap up the draft, blogging will pick up again as well.

Enjoy your day and your week.

Sunday evening coffee

11 Sunday Feb 2018

Posted by in Incorporating New York (book manuscript project), Writing

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I hope everyone’s weekend has been good. It has been a rainy one here in Brooklyn. I seized the opportunity the inclement weather has provided to write. I crossed the 70,000 word barrier today on the draft of my book about Civil War Era New York. The word count for the draft itself will land somewhere in the 72,500 range. The editing, honing, and fact checking over the rest of the winter might add another 2000 or so after that. I am off tomorrow for Lincoln’s Birthday. I’ll also be waiting for a repairman to come and fix something in the house. I wrote 1000 words yesterday and gain today. If I can do that a third day in a row, I’ll be in great shape. I even told a friend I would send him the draft to read one week from today. They say that one should write the book one wants to read, and I have done that.

Someone asked me today if I feel myself winding down. I did not until today. For the past several weeks I was worrying as I neared the finish line. The tendency for intellectual drift and self-sabotage only became more marked as I neared the end of this stage. I’m past that now. The trick has been to force myself from becoming impatient and to let the process take care of itself. Of course the book is a long way from release, if it ever is indeed published. I don’t want to give away too much just yet, but I have been developing what I think might be some good public history opportunities related to the Incorporating New York for this spring and summer. First things first, though: finishing the draft over the next seven days.

(image/NYPL)

Sunday morning coffee

17 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by in Theodore Roosevelt Sr (Father), Writing

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Men like Theodore Roosevelt Sr. sponsored Left-Handed Penmanship contests after the Civil War to help those wounded in the conflict move on with their lives.

I’m sorry for the lack of posts lately. I have been working hard on my Civil War Era book, the working title of which is Incorporating New York. I picked the manuscript up again the day after Thanksgiving and have put my head down and worked steadily since then. Between that and the wind down to the semester there has not been much time for writing here. It’s funny but as I have told some friends, if I can sit down and write just 50-75 words I can write 500-1000 for the day. It’s all about starting. I have another 4000-5000 words to go in the draft. I was listening to a podcast recently in which a just-published author recalled that when he told writing friends he was 90% done they replied: “Congratulations, you’re 50% done.”

My goal is complete the draft by January 26 at the latest, which is looking increasingly likely. That is a Friday and the day before the start of the spring semester. I’m trying not to lose focus or cut corners as I near the finish line. Incorporating New York is not so much a history of the Civil War per se, but an interpretation of how the city evolved from the 1840s-1870s. I’m in the postwar period now. It ends in 1878 with the death of Theodore Roosevelt Sr. and Frederick Law Olmsted’s move from New York City to Boston. The poster above is for the first of Left-Handed Penmanship contests put on from 1865-67 to help men who lost an arm in the war.

Yesterday I sat down and, to the musical accompaniment of the White Album, wrote out a list of topics I will be focusing on here over the course of 2018. That included searching historical newspapers online, finding, and saving some articles. This upcoming year marks the 100th anniversary of most of the American Expeditionary Forces’s involvement in the Great War. With this year winding down I am looking ahead to 2018. I also emailed someone I know at a cultural institution here in New York City with an idea for a small potential project for winter 2018. I don;t want to say to much right now. If/when I hear more, I will share it here. This would be a worthwhile and yet manageable endeavor. I really hope it comes to pass.

(image/New-York Historical Society)

“The universe is built not of atoms but of stories.”

07 Thursday Dec 2017

Posted by in Writing

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Samuel R. Delany speaks at New York City College of Technology (CUNY) in December 2017

It was a special day at City Tech yesterday when Science Fiction writer Samuel R. Delany gave the keynote address at the college’s second annual Science Fiction symposium. The quote above in the title came from his talk. He told the audience that he had seen the line on a sidewalk poster in New York City about a decade ago and that it has stayed with him since.