Henrietta Lacks. Her cells were massively important in the development of twentieth century medicine. You should read Skloot's book about her.

Almost without conscious thought, I have read three books in the last six months on medical history, all three enthralling, and with stunning casts of characters–doctors, researchers, patients, government and elected officials, journalists, insurance companies. We sit on the other end of the story, knowing what “happens” at the end of the sagas and what has evolved in the field of medicine and disease control, and this gives us an advantage on the people whose lives, discoveries, and decisions play out for us on the pages of history. We know which procedures will end badly, or which will prove miraculous cures, or which doctors and politicians will later be discredited or heralded as heroes.

It is almost the same way we look at medical practices now, imagining ourselves on the very cusp, the cutting edge of innovation, or medical breakthroughs, of cures and solutions without error. But we are humans, created procedures on solid research data, but apt to err all the same.  Shannon Brownlee, author of Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, gets to just that point in how we view the medical field, some impenetrable, foolproof tower, and tribute to human medical achievement:

… We live in the age of science, after all. We think the difference between experimental and standard care is well-defined; that doctors adopt new medical advances on the basis of valid evidence; that new treatments represent improvement over the old. We look back at the history of medicine and its litter of discarded treatments with a sense of superiority, smug in our belief that superstition and ignorance have been banished from medicine. Until only a few generations ago, disease was thought to arise out of either an imbalance among the four humors or a contagion in the blood. Treatments were based on this faulty paradigm, and thus it seemed to follow, for example, that cutting a vein and letting the blood run out would rid the body of what ailed it and restore balance. Patients often did feel better after a bloodletting, or at least different, while the doctor could feel the satisfaction of having done what was right according to the prevailing conceptions of disease. We now know that bloodletting at best did nothing and at worst hastened death.

It is important, essential, to remember that we also lie within the timeline of medical history, as it unfolds and we learn more about disease, viruses, and the human body, and seek new methods of treating all three. The stories behind how we’ve gotten where we are now humble me, remind me of our fragility, our hubris, our good intentions–and not in an all-bad or all-good way. Modern medicine has improved our lives, given us the tools we need to protect ourselves from the things we can, saved the life of at least one person you know, and probably more than one.

Alleged "Patient Zero" Canada Air flight attendant Gaëtan Dugas, who is a complex and defiant character in Shilts's book.

Our medical past certainly belies the mistakes and hardships that can occur no matter how “developed” and wealthy a society may be. And it is good to be aware of our humanity, and our mistakes, so that we don’t go thinking too much of ourselves. We’re far from the end of the tale of human medical science and discovery.

Reading list:

Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Randy Shilts, And The Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer

Also, read a blog post about so-called “Patient Zero” of AIDS, Gaetan Dugas: “We all know the plague is coming”

In this first piece, “You Say You Want a Devolution,” the main crux is that in the last twenty years, we have remained in a stagnant state of cultural development. “In the arts and entertainment and style realms, this bizarre Groundhog Day stasis of the last 20 years or so feels like an end of cultural history.” Kurt Andersen points to our nostalgic gaze towards the past, and the way our architecture and automobiles have remained looking mostly the same since 1991. We also dress nearly the same. Hip-hop, the last genuinely new form of music, makes an unapologetic use of old music through sampling. Fine art, which recognizably depicted people for every century before the 20th, is back to respectably representing human forms again. “It’s the rare ‘new’ cultural artifact that dosen’t seem a lot like a cover version of something we’ve seen or heard before. Which means the very idea of datedness has lost the power it possessed during most of our lifetimes,” he writes. “In our Ben There Done That Mashup Age, nothing is obsolete, and nothing is really new; it’s all good.” There are two major reasons, he argues, for this stagnated cultural state:

Why is this happening? In some large measure, I think it’s an unconscious collective reaction to all the profound nonstop newness we’re experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts. People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we’re maxed out.

…The other part of the explanation is economic: like any lucrative capitalist sector, our massively scaled-up new style industry naturally seeks stability and predictability. Rapid and radical shifts in taste make it more expensive to do and can even threaten the existence of an enterprise. One reason automobile styling has changed so little these last two decades is because the industry has been struggling to survive, which made the perpetual big annual styling changes of the Golden Age a reducible business expense. Today, Starbucks doesn’t want to renovate its thousands of stores every few years. It blue jeans become unfashionable tomorrow, Old Navy would be in trouble. And so on. Capitalism may depend on perpetual creative destruction, but the last thing wants is their business to be the one creatively destroyed. Now that multi-billion-dollar enterprises have become style businesses and style businesses have become multi-billion-dollar enterprises, a massive damper has been placed on the general impetus for innovation and change.

He goes on to ponder what this cultural moment–frozen mostly for the last 20 years–means for western civilizations as a whole, for their existence and sustainability in the future. I am not convinced it spells anything like the end for the West. But, he has a compelling overall theory, and when you consider the photographs and comparisons through the years of our cultural changes–buildings, clothing, cars–you see he is absolutely spot-on.

Illustration by James Taylor, accompanying the piece in Vanity Fair

I ear-marked the article and set the magazine in my current pile, and excitedly picked up Time magazine’s Person of the Year issue, which features, for 2011, The Protestor as the Person of the Year. Absolutely the right call–that’s the only “Person” we could choose to represent this amazing, tumultuous year.

And wouldn’t you know, the lead article begins its discussion, its explanation of this 2011, with the exact same Fukuyama theory, explained in The End of History, this “end” theoretically beginning around 1990. Then, only as I went to write about both of these articles and t he impact they’ve had on me as I reflect back over this year and its events, did I realize both are written by the same man, Kurt Andersen. Of course, that explains the similar thought process, and the similar sources of influence as Andersen himself was reflecting back over the year 2011.

The Time article has a more optimistic overture, even while explaining that there is no saying where the future will lead, after this year of tumult and protesting, and voices exploding over the things wrong with the world, all over the world. He points out several things that never occurred to me, things that make 2011 distinct from any other year in the last twenty, since the theoretical “end of history,” and that make it distinct from any other year since 1968, and–he argues–even farther back in history.

Once upon a time, when major news events were chronicled strcitly by professionals and printed on paper or transmitted through the air by the few for the masses, protestors were prime makers of history. Back then, when citizen multitudes took to the streets without weapons to declare themselves opposed, it was the very definition of news.–vivid, important, often consequential. In the 1960s in America, they marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War; in the ’70s, they rose up in Iran and Portugal; in the ’80s, they spoke out against nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Europe, against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, against communist tyranny in Tiananmen Square and Eastern Europe. Protest was the natural continuation of politics by other means.

Then came the End of History, summed up by Francis Fukuyama’s influential 1989 essay… The two decades beginning in 1991 witnessed the greatest rise in living standards that the world has ever known. Credit was easy, complacency and apathy were rife, and street protests looked like pointless emotional sideshows–obsolete, quaint, the equivalent of calvary to mid-20th-century war. The rare large demonstrations in the rich world seemed ineffectual and irrelevant. (See the Battle of Seattle, 1999.)

It is stunning that I had never thought of this before, because in my history classes and even in simple living in this world, I have often thought of the protests of old as exactly that, as relics of eras gone past, a people, a group, a generation more connected, more concerned, and more committed to bringing change and making a difference than anything my generation could or would ever see. It seemed complacency had replaced this spirit of fighting, caring, standing up against The Man.

And then 2011 came out of nowhere. Spontaneous protests, beginning with a fruit vendor in Tunisia last December, and his death on January 4, 2011, snowballed around the globe, North Africa and the Middle East, in Europe, Asia, North America. But, historically, it was right on time:

In short, 2011 was unlike any year since 1989–but more extraordinary, more global, more democratic, since in ’89 the regime disintegrations were all the result of a single disintegration at headquarters, one big switch pulled in Moscow that cut off the power throughout the system. So 2011 was unlike any year since 1968–but more consequential because more protestors have more skin in the game. Their protests weren’t part of a counterculture pageant, as in ’68, and rapidly morphed into full-fledged rebellions, bringing down regimes and immediately changing the course of history. It was, in other words, unlike anything in any of our lifetimes, probably unlike any year since 1848, when one street protest in Paris blossomed into a three-day revolution that turned a monarchy into a republican democracy and then–within weeks, thanks in part to new technologies (telegraphy, railroads, rotary printing presses)–inspired an unstoppable cascade of protest and insurrection in Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Venice, and dozens of other places across Europe, as well as huge peaceful demonstrations of democratic solidarity in New York that marched down Broadway and occupied a public park a few blocks north of Wall Street. How perfect that the German word Zeitgeist was transplanted into English in the unprecedented, uncanny year of insurrection.

That’s an extraordinary paragraph to consider. How 2011 is unlike anything we’ve seen in many, many dozens of years–arguably since 1848! Also, I finally had to look up the root of the word zeitgeist, as too many intellectuals and writers have been brandishing that thing around, and it means, “the spirit of the day.” In fact, 2011 has a very distinct spirit, changing the course of what all the years to follow might hold.

Mannoubia Bouazizi, the mother of Mohamed, the street vendor who set fire to himself after being fed up with corruption among city officials, last December, in Tunisia

I think what Andersen has done best, with both of these pieces in separate magazines, has been to show how we are simultaneously experiencing everything the same and nothing the same. And for some reason, this contradiction makes perfect sense. Reading these two articles almost back-to-back (absolutely unintentionally), one reads as a cautionary tale of a western culture gone a bit stale, the other as a means by which to rediscover ourselves, our values, and what is important in this life. And this year has been the perfect one in which to discover both these truths about ourselves, and to seek to bring them together harmoniously, using them for renewal, reaction, redemption, reward in years to come.

It is a marvelous fact about human history that, in fact, most of what we leave behind for others to study us by are the things we don’t think much about–the simplest, everyday items. It’s no haphazard thing that much of pre-history is studied through those ubiquitous pottery shards archeologists seem always to be brandishing around (figuratively, and in their arguments; they would never actually brandish them around, old and historically valuable as they surely are). I find archeology to be exceedingly not interesting. However, I can appreciate–and I do–the value of tracing the lifestyles, customs, patterns, and culture through what little remains of earlier humankind, and give great credit to the patient practitioner who can see small and sweeping patterns in the study of layers of dirt, types of pottery, locations of the trash receptacles on the sites of previous civilizations.

Those are valuable patterns to see. It’s like in high school when the teacher asks you to analyze this piece of a Shakespeare play for homework, and you go home and toil and come in the next day to find not only did you not get out of it what the teacher did, but all your classmates seem to be the same page as well (and not your same page). This is how I felt throughout the whole year of British lit, which meant so many Shakespearean plays to analyze, and this is how I felt when reading James Deetz and Henry Glassie, scholars of early material culture, in my own material culture class this year. The professor had us drawing conclusions, and there were patterns I simply did not see, while others in the class were far better at drawing them out of the readings.

(I am OK with being unable to do these types of analyses. I have always felt that I work hard, which makes up for a natural lack of inherent understanding of things, or a natural skill for learning. I don’t hear something once and always remember it [in fact I rarely do remember it]. I am particularly bad at naturally knowing how words are pronounced. I can use them in writing, understand perfectly what they mean, and God help me, hope that I don’t have to say them out loud. But, I digress.)

Illustrations of headstones by James Deetz, from his book

The thing about reading Deetz’s book, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archeology of Early American Life, is that you come to realize that the strongest arguments for drawing historical conclusions, and for seeing patterns, lies in the very things we do not think matter in this life. Including, yes, the very things we deem the least important: the things we throw away. Early Americans are largely judged–centuries later–on those things they hoped would go away, the very things they chose not to keep. Writes Deetz:

The disposal of refuse is one of our most unconscious acts: while we might expect some hidden motive in the way a court clerk recorded the disposition of a case or a diarist described his neighbors, it is most unlikely that in removing food remains, broken dishes, and other debris from a household, people were making any conscious statement about themselves or others. Yet, in the changing nature of trash disposal since the seventeenth century, our ancestors have once again informed us of the way in which their view of the world was changing. (171-172)

He goes on to explain that from the seventeenth century until around 1750, refuse appears in irregular, shallow pits sprinkled in a circle around the basic structure that would have been the homestead itself. After 1750, in place of these shallow pits, would appear one deep pit. Two things can be concluded from this change; one, that this shift correlates with changing population increase and concentration–meaning trash all around would be more of a nuisance. And two, that “such precise and neat handling of one of life’s less useful and valuable things suggests almost a compulsion to order.” After all, the eighteenth was the era of order and reform in many areas of life.

I love these mussel "drags," in the Shaping Traditions folk culture exhibit at the Atlanta History Center, that show how those tiny little buttons, important pieces of our lives that float around often without our notice, are made.

This exhibit is so exciting, because those items are being featured exactly where they belong, among innovations that hav made our lives easier, given us vast improvements and allowed for the conveniences we live with each day. This would have been an incredible exhibit to help curate, and I wonder how each thing made the final list over other things. Each object appears alongside original sketches and drawings by their inventors, patent specifications, and original advertisements for the items. The full list of items in the exhibit is worth pondering. Think about how each of these things affects your life, some more than others:

I love picturing each of these things, one at a time, and their places in my life. The little things have a far greater impact on the study of material culture, on the makeup of civilizations, than the big-ticket items we covet, keep, and cherish.

The full story–audio and transcript–including some background of the items chosen, is on NPR/PRI’s The World site. Also check out a video and more information on the Hidden Heroes exhibit from the London Science Museum.

1954 sampling of Christmas decorations, which were one way that people made use of electricity in the Tennessee Valley, and the reason someone was paid by the TVA to document and photograph these things.

One day last week, I spent the morning compiling and digitizing documents to go in an exhibit case we have in the lobby of the Archives, and the goal was to fill it with Christmas-y documents that we have there at the Archives. Hard when you’re a non-religious institution that does not keep records of… I don’t know, religious events? So I found some WWI draft cards with names like “Dasher” and “Reindeer” and “Santy Claus” (A REAL PERSON!) and the rest of the reindeer. I also pulled a man named Partridge and a man named Peartree, my favorite pairing.

Another view of those wise men creeping towards that branch thing.

But we used some TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) photos from the 1950s, where someone had gone around and documented what people did with electricity. (It is wonderfully fantastic that someone has this job. I imagine an amateur photographer trying to expand his novice abilities.) One of those uses for electricity was Christmas decoration, in the home and outside the home. It is a fantastic collections of photos, and I was ogling over them, studying every bit of each photo–having just ended an entire semester in material culture class where we studied kitsch, consumerism, and what people buy, make, and keep in their lives. So this set of photos was an absolute treat to pour over, one at a time. I want to digitize some for myself, they are so special. So far I have digitized three of them, the one above, and two that I will be printing and framing for my mom.

They are accidentally artistic. I think whoever was taking the photos was trying to make them look classy and professional, setting up backdrops, and placing each item in a vignette. But the background walls, floors, electricity outlets, and other elements belie all that, making them ironic, stark and cold, and all the more fascinating. The photographer obviously had the rights kinds of professional equipment. Someday, I would love to write some sort of scholarly piece on the kitsch of Christmas decor in the 1950s, using this goldmine of photos.

Snowman couple, with illuminated "snow" behind them

Each one was more mistakenly charming than the last. I was examining the light fixtures, the wall colors, the window blinds, the chairs, the floor tiles, the table designs, and the use of shadows–all elements surrounding the actual focal points. I also found each item to grandly reflect the same kind of kitschy things we have continued to use over the years, and that take on more memory and sentimental meaning for us as the years go by. We realize over time the things we loved as children or adults may have been a bit tacky, or cheap, or downright weird, but this often endears holiday decorations to us more. We keep plenty of things we’ve collected for the holidays that we might not otherwise keep, because of the way we feel around this season, the memories we keep of family members being around us, or of the effort they may have put into making an item. Also, since we don’t have to look at them all year, and they are packed away all that time, they are welcomed back into our vistas each year more cheerfully than if we had had to look at the holly creation atop a dresser all year round.

We didn’t talk extensively about holiday fare in my class, but we talked about style, kitsch, memory items, family heirlooms, items associated with loss, love, memorial, and all of these things influence our relationship to and meaning applied to the holiday season, and Christmas.

A tad scary-looking tree taking over this door

I know there are particular things I will never forget in homes that have been the backdrop to Christmas memories: I have vey specific memories of my Auntie Nessa’s house from the early and mid ’90s, plush carpets, low lights, Amy Grant playing, a very tall Christmas tree, and villages set up with snow and a pathway across one of her long tables. (This is a strange memory to keep, since we have not been to that house since this era, she no longer owns it, nor hosts Christmas events.) My grandma and grandpa’s houses, both the Maple Street and Birch Street locations, in Kingsford, harbor Christmas Eve memories too, warm lighting and protection from the outside cold, so many cookies–the best gingerbread–I could never begin to eat them all, or fathom recreating the amount. Loving family around me, socked feet, Christmas clothing, taking pictures. Grandma’s tree with the ornaments we’d all made for her decades ago by now. And my parents’ homes through the years, always filled with happy decorations, numerous themed trees gracing corners and cozy spots throughout. My mom often did up a few together, a little Christmas tree forest, including the Happy Meal toy tree that took us upwards of 15 years to collect toys for, and took a few years in construction itself as well–this tree continues to make children happy and joyful, even as my Mom’s own children have grown and moved out of the house. I always loved how very tall and thin it is, taking on a caricature nature that reflects all the playful toys that grace its branches; some of those ditties are from the late 1980s, my earliest days of youth. Vintage!

I have wonderful memories of Christmas holidays across many homes, northern and southern locales. Some have been frozen and snowy, others bright and downright sunny, and they all mean something to me, combining to create my own meaning of the season, and adding to how I create my own space in my adult homes each year.

Anyway, these historical images got my rejoicing about Christmas decorating of days gone by, when my Dad was a small boy and my Mom was not yet born. I don’t know how prevalent these pieces were back then, in 1954, but it’s worth investigating, in a future project, and definitely worth having kept, for the moment.

Super-shine reflects back in this first in a series of table-toppers on a bookcase/side table combo piece.

The shadows, the plug, fantastic unintentional artistry.

Another tabletopper

At some point I'm not even sure these use electricity. Or if they do, it's less clear how. TVA documentation getting a bit arty?

A cozy corner, with illuminated tabletop branches and vintage home decor magazine.

Candle pieces, wreath, framing '50s long table and blinds and curtains

The back-end of a reindeer hangs in the middle of the door's wreath...

And the front-end of the same reindeer, on the other side of the door.

I hope everyone is enjoying their holiday season, spending time with family and good friends, recalling years past, and making new memories. This includes creating your own craft, art, and yes, kitsch, to add cheer and spirit to this lovely time of year.

The photographer took several shots of this quirky, mod-style Mary and Baby Jesus scene. Rightly so, it's quite fantastic.

“There’s always been a tendency to see a place like China in very political terms. I think this is partly because it’s a communist country, it’s run by the Communist Party. And from my perspective, living in China, starting especially the way that I started, as a Peace Corps volunteer, in a small community, teaching in a small college, it gave me a very different starting point. And I really wanted to write about ordinary people in China. I didn’t want to start with an issue, or start with a political idea, I wanted to start with an individual, start with a community.”

Peter Hessler on the job as a journalist in China

Hessler is a journalist, that is an important distinction; but he writes based in a historical context, referencing the past at each step, and this is also valuable. (I will fight with people who dismiss great books written by journalists.)

Bahadur Shah Zafar, the titular "last emperor," in a complicated era in Indian and British history

I am always reminded of British writer and historian William Dalrymple’s  fantastic skill for emphasizing the individual’s experience of history, as he does in The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857,  which keeps the reader vividly engaged by showing us the Indian Rebellion of 1857 through the eyes of several key player on the ground. I have never read a book of history in which I felt so deeply connected to the characters of the era, and when they all begin falling at the hands of their enemies, I had a true emotional reaction to the destruction of this city and these lives. I’ve heard he does the same thing in one of his other works, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth Century India.  An inspiring example–though not without his critiques–of this kind of engaging historical writing.

I went to the Atlanta History Center for the sole purpose of visiting their many exhibits–for the first time in my life. This is really sad, considering I have a degree in history, I’m earning a master’s student studying museums, and I’ve lived in Atlanta for more than five years. In my defense, I’ve been there once to see one specific exhibit, and we also got a tour of the innards of the place, including their giant holdings areas down below where they keep the collection pieces that are not on display in exhibits. I have also been to their Kenan Research Center on several occasions for research purposes. But this was my first time going to meander my way through their permanent and temporary exhibitions.

Folk art meets daily life necessity: rice hulling mortar and pestels, circa 1800s (used into the 1900s). This is the most enormous mortar and pestel I've ever seen.

I knew I needed to pick one to highlight for yet another assigned exhibit review for a class (this makes about the fifth review I’ve done), but I didn’t really go in thinking of any one in particular–especially not, for some reason, the folk art exhibit, which I’d heard one or a few classmates discuss before but never given much thought. But this semester, I’m taking a class on Material Culture, on the things we adorn with a human touch, and make with a purpose, be it necessity, pleasure, tool, comfort or any other reason we have to create something. In the wake of this summer’s interior design class, I already feel that I am more aware of the conscious designs and historical components surrounding aesthetic, style, and the use of the things around us.

The first two weeks of class already have me thinking even harder about the things we design, make, buy, use, sell, throw away, repurpose. It was truly serendipitous that after a few other galleries, I wandered over to the Shaping Traditions: Folk Art in a Changing South gallery while deciding where next to spend my time. I had been planning to review a different exhibit, for a different class than Material Culture, but here it was in front of me, and there on the introductory panel was John Burrison, a professor at my school and friend of many of my professors, in a photograph with some of the pieces in the collection. I had a memory flashback and realized that I remembered learning that most of this collection–thousands of items–was his–he had been collecting southern folk art since the 1970s, and turned his collection and his lifetime of knowledge on folklife into an exhibit–a stunning and approachable work in itself.

From this leftover bit of mussel shell, you can see how they made buttons out of them. Incredible!

There on the same panel was a name that suddenly meant a lot to me: Henry Glassie. I had only just finished reading one of his books for my class, his 1968 classic within the folklife field, Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States. I got really excited, and from there, it was several hours later before I noticed how much time I had been spending at each panel, examining each piece of folk craft, studying the selection of photos that accompanied throughout.

My favorite part, obviously really, was the section devoted entirely to southern textiles, quilts, motifs, and influential styles. The designers came up with a truly ingenious method to display and preserve the six quilts within the exhibit: each one rolled out on its own giant display board, once prompted by a visitor who pushes a button–which sits below a description of the type, material, quilter, and estimated year of creation. I must have pushed those buttons more than a dozen times, engrossed in their pattern and fabric choices, old as they were. Each was so beautiful, and they combined to tell a distinctly diverse story of the variety of quilting styles and influences that play into southern quilting.

The clever system within the exhibit that only exposes the quilts to light when visitors choose to roll them out--it's also fun to use!

The textile section had an essential "touch me" section, for those of us who were dying to feel the quilts and had to contain ourselves.

"Barn Rising" variation of a Log Cabin quilt, early 1900s

"Eight Point Star" variation with strips, by Estella Daniel, Emerson County, Georgia, 1930s

"Whig's Defeat," by Susan Loyd, Rome, Georgia, 1856

"Brick Work" and strip pattern, Annie Howard, Madison, Georgia, 1957

(Read on for a bit more about the themes of the exhibit; it’s worth a few minutes!)

The exhibit was consciously created to revolve around its stunning artifacts, to tell the larger story of the relationship between folk craft and folk art in past and present southern life. The overarching thesis the exhibit aims to impress upon visitors is that there has been both continuity and change in southern folk art, and that the relationship within it—southerners and their handmade products—is an important component in the history of the South.

Craftsmen-made ladderback chairs

The exhibit has an incredible collection of folk furniture, with all the requisite textiles, potter-made earthenware, and other pieces that defined home life in preindustrial Georgia.

Modern-day artists and immigrant groups who have added their cultural traditions to the South in the last half century are featured near the end of the exhibit space, proving that folk art in the region, while no longer necessary for our work or daily life essentials, is still an important part of our cultural lives; we are surrounded by the artistry and traditional techniques of those who continue to practice and pass on our folk arts. Shaping Traditions tells this story through the objects that define the subject.

Go see it.

Ben stopped by to say hi to my camera

Ben's note in the guest book. Haha. True statement.

This is what pure giddiness looks like.

Also: Nose-picking in the Metropolitan Frontiers exhibit

In public history classes, though, it is a simple truth that the regular person goes to museums not to read lots of label text and long passages that, though their stories may be astonishing, do involve more words. No, they most often go to see the things that make history come to life for them. Artifacts, small and large, can often be so powerful, say so much with no words. And this is where my classes are taking me. The emphasis in Material Culture is obvious: the objects, created or altered somehow by man, that offer insight into customs, social patterns, lifestyles, foodways, and larger culture of the people of our past.

So too do I find this in Oral History, the other aforementioned class, where our discussions, readings, and projects revolve around the spoken word, in a historical context, and using a proper methodology that puts it far beyond casual conversation. In conducting oral histories, we are formally and methodically documenting the past, in ways that effect immensely both the narrator (the subject) and the interviewer (me).

On a class tour, we looked at some of the other art exhibits that they have at the airport, to get a feel for their whole program, Airport Art.

I find both of these mediums so powerful. I conducted two oral histories earlier this year, after a one-class-period crash course in one of my other classes, and while they were on two very different topics, I discovered the many nuances that oral historians have been raving about since the 1960s; one of the most significant to me was the unexpected paths the interview can take, and also the candidness of my narrators. By asking very simple questions and then shutting my damn mouth, it was astonishing what stories they would tell me, without my ever having to ask them something provocative or controversial. Not that the primary goal is provocative information, not at all. But, for example, I was interviewing a couple in the late forties who have a young daughter they adopted from Guatemala, and there were a lot of delicate and sensitive subjects I wanted to broach with them, like whether or not they would someday tell her about her half-siblings that they knew she had back in Guatemala, or whether they would help her in finding her biological roots, if she ever wanted to know more about them. These were things I didn’t think I would have the guts to ask. But I never needed to: the family was so welcoming and so willing to explore their complicated emotions on those subjects, via other more basic questions I had asked within the larger subject of their family and their relationship to Guatemala right now. I know this won’t always be the case, and this is a topic I am continuing to work with, but it was an extraordinary first dive into the process, and into the revelations of what oral histories are, and what they do for larger historical projects you are producing.

The exhibit currently on display is a series of dresses and women's fashion, all made with recycled materials--trash, essentially.

Museum staffs, and so, museum exhibits, have as their goal the interpretation of the past, in a way that makes people look at their own lives and relate the past to them, to where they live, to those around them. This can be done very well with historical documents, presented in a cohesive manner, that tell a wonderful story. But, as soon as you add the human voice, and the objects created by men and women in that same story, you have brought the exhibit to life. You have succeeded in a more successful, effective way, in relating the story to your audience, and they will leave remembering it more clearly, and hopefully in a way that connects them to the past, to its utter humanity and enormity.

Henry Glassie, in his book Material Culture, describes our relationship to things in our everyday life, and inspires us to think about them in more significant ways, as pieces that connect us to the larger humanity of the world. After all, if it as not us personally, someone created every single thing in our lives. That is a powerful thought. I leave you with the passion of his words, so inspiring and clearly telling, as he has spent his life studying the Things of People.

Among the new things, the most important, I believe, is the collection: the assembly of gifts, souvenirs, and commodities into a home–the domestic environment in contradistinction to the house. The collection represents a victory over disorder in industrial times, when the flood of goods threatens to sweep us to madness in a rising tide of irrelevant trash, just as the house of stone represented a victory over disorder in the days when people lived close to nature, when the lean wolves came down from the heath and the night winds wailed. But we should not be confused. Today, while we create things out of things made by other people, all across the globe, people in no way less real or alive are going up into the woods and down to the riverside. They are chopping out chunks of nature and fashioning artifacts that display their spirit and serve the serious needs of their neighbors.

Art commissioned by UGA on animals, big and small. I'm very excited about the exhibit we are doing for them.

I decided that if I were to produce a pair of jeans, start to finish, I would charge the prospective buyer $2,000, at least. Obviously, I should not go into the jean-making-or-selling business. But it was a stark reminder that there are plenty of women–and also men and children–whose days are defined by pumping out pair after pair to sell to hungry consumers around the world for amazingly low prices, considering the labor. I cannot tell you how many times, during my years in mall retail sales associateship, I heard parents complain about the cost of jeans. They were especially mad when the jeans  were bleach-washed and “destroyed” (lots of holes and patches, in other words), as they could not believe they were paying more money for something that has been ripped up. As someone who has sat at home and pulled denim threads out of jeans until my fingers bled to get the same look in DIY form, I often held back from pointing out the obvious to them: someone has put many hours of their life into creating this pair of runway-ready jeans for you or your teenager. If you want, buy the regular pair for a whole $20 less, and take them home and try to do it yourself.

There are no new revelations to be had in what I am saying. Sweatshops and the low wages of garment industry workers have been well-publicized over the last twenty years or so, and I do not pretend to have some answer. As long as people need clothes to wear, there will be this problem in the world. But the important thing to remember is that it was not so long ago when the women of the United States were the ones subjected to the long hours, low pay, and back-breaking conditions. It is part of the phenomena of developing nations, that a generation will work very hard in factories to provide better lives for their children, the whole theory being that they can eventually move up a notch in the world. One of the most important lessons about places like Lowell, Massachusetts, which was defined by its industrial factories and garment producers in the nineteenth century, is that those conditions, the ones we thank our grandparents for improving for us–have not disappeared. They have simply relocated. Another group of people carries the burden today, producing clothing for the masses.

Earlier this semester, we read The Lowell Experiment in one of my classes, in which ethnographer Cathy Stanton examines the relationship between historians, a post-industrial city, and the National Park that the city is today. Lowell is still a real, inhabited city, but it is also a historical subject, and a place in the American industrial past that serves as a ground for social scientists to really examine many aspects of the course of American history over the last couple hundred years. What Stanton does the best is remind us that historians do not exist in a vacuum, but are, just by going to a place and trying to learn about it, affecting the results they will find. The relationship a historian has to her subject cannot be entirely removed from the results she will present to her peers and community.

And the other key thing Stanton brings home is that Lowell’s history cannot exist one its own, either. People who visit the city-slash-national-park have to be confronted with the notion that these factories, just because they are no longer booming here, does not mean they are gone, that we have cured the world of the plight of the factory worker. She points out one poignant moment on a tour she was on, when the tour guide strayed from his script for a moment and did what Stanton had concluded had not been happening in this place: he connected past and present. His statement:

I want to say, this machine isn’t just history. When we built this historical park we had to travel around the world to buy looms. Looms like this are operating as we speak somewhere around the world. It’s kind of neat to think about that. And there’s no right or wrong answer, there’s no easy answer to it, but we can go to Wal-Mart or A.J. Wright or any store, really, and buy really cheap clothing. And what’s the alternative? Paying a lot for your clothes? We all work, we all try and and pay the best we can for our cloth. But the reason we can get cheap cloth is because someone around the world is working on these looms, and looms not unlike what we have today. A few years ago, Kathy Lee Gifford was in trouble for using child labor on machines just like this. So it’s just something to think about.

One other thing I like to sort of think about is the word “labor.” It means “to suffer” in Latin. And when you think about the suffering that goes into making cloth, back in history and even to the present day, it’s just something to think about. We wear the clothes, sometimes we don’t think especially how hard the person who built or made the clothes worked to produce that. And all that labor, all the suffering that went into building this city, and the results, both good and bad. Just think about that a little bit. And I’ll be talking about more of the positive consequences on the way back. But on a hot, sticky day, with this loud machine and the lint flying in the air, it’s pretty easy to picture how miserable it would be to work there. (p. 61)

Stanton says it was a stunning moment, where suddenly each person on the tour was confronted with “the phantom figure of the Malaysian or Pakistani mill girl who was laboring–suffering–so that we could buy a t-shirt for a small fraction of what it would have cost to produce in a developed country.”

The tour guide was obviously taking a risk, and chose his words wisely, speaking softly around the issue but offering no illusions about what he was referencing. And, the author reported, the other people on the tour, while a bit shaken, seemed to be able to handle it. “This is precisely the goal of progressive public history,” she says, “to seize such small opportunities and compound them into larger visions of the process we are all a part of.”

My own sewing quarters, where I am allowed the gift of being able to create what I want, as a hobby rather than a laborious job. I am truly grateful.

I was reminded of all of this not because I hemmed a pair of jeans–although that brought the message of labor and frustration home personally–I was reminded, really, by the remembrance, recently, of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City, which 100 years ago went up in flames on a Saturday morning in March, killing more than 100 workers, mostly women and children, due to a shoddy fire escape and other unsafe conditions for its workers. Supervisors would lock their workers into the factory’s floors, on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the ten-story building, and so when the fire erupted, many people were left to jump out the windows–usually to their death. In 1911, in an industry of extremes that was subject to the whims of the fashion trends, work of this nature was often relegated to new immigrants seeking to improve their lives. Their average work weeks were 84 hours. These were the victims of the fire, one of the worst workplace disasters in American history. The tragedy of that day, which you can explore in a podcast and recreation of the morning here, reminds us again that such circumstances have not gone away–they have only gone beyond our national borders. It is a kind of labor many of us can only imagine.

It has not entirely left the United States, nor Lowell. Immigrants still hold those jobs, today.

The World’s Jason Margolis did a news story on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and its galvanization of the garment industry. (I heard it on Jeb Sharp’s How We Got Here history podcast.) He reports exactly the thing that the Lowell tour guide was imparting on his listening visitors, but in more specific way, and with direct connection to the conditions that existed in the Shirtwaist Factory in 1911.

“Effectively what we have done is exported our sweatshops and exported our factory fires,” said Robert Ross at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. And it’s as if the 1911 conditions had been lifted up by an evil hand and dropped into Bangladesh.”

According to the Bangladeshi government’s Fire Service and Civil Defense Department, 414 garment workers were killed in at least 213 factory fires between the years 2006 and 2009. Last year, 191 people were killed in Bangladesh in a reported 20 incidents, according to Ross’ research. Last December, a fire killed at least 25 people in a garment factory there.

“And the pattern is disturbingly uniform,” said Ross. “The shops are often in high rise buildings, just like the Triangle. The pattern is that an electrical fire starts, and then without adequate, or any fire escapes, without sprinkler systems, the workers surge to get out. And in factory after factory, the newspapers report locked gates and locked doors. It’s a horrific duplication of what we earlier experienced.”

Even while we may not have answers about these issues, it is important that we be aware, as we put on our clothes each morning, that simply because the factory is farther away does not mean the work has improved any in the last one hundred years. After my frustrating night last night, my hat goes off to all of them, in every factory corner of the world. I hope we can begin to change out outlooks and our consumer mindsets, or at least improve our awareness as a whole, so that we can move towards improvements in the lives of all garment industry workers, not just the ones in the United States.

It was unnecessary worrying. I’ve spent awhile on this paper, had the luxury of more time with it than other busy historians and professors have with newer ideas and less structured research topics, so I need not have worried over any hypothetical holes. That is not to say my work on Allen is done–it probably never will be. And my fellow panelists had several very interesting thoughts on avenues to pursue to further develop my paper and argument about the life and times of the Methodist educator. My voice never quavered, and I went away feeling satisfied and more confident. I sometimes have inklings that perhaps I am a fraud, undeserved to have my name down next to PhDs and seasoned professors and professional historians. I feel a little less so each day, and this was a big step in the right direction.

Being in a spot that holds historical meaning can be overwhelming, standing and contemplating the people who have come before you, as I did here in Luoyuang, China, where religious men carved literally hundreds of thousands of Buddhas into the stone. This is part of the emotion that the authors of a new world history textbook aim to share with survey-class students, who may never have felt the complexity and power of the past.

My panel fell in the last session out of five over the weekend. I attended a couple of the ones before it, the highlight being a panel of authors and editors of an upcoming history text for the survey-level world history course at the college level. The collaborators are all professors at University of West Georgia, and what they are creating is inspiring: a textbook, in two volumes, that tells the larger themes and histories of the world using place as the vehicle. Following a roughly chronological order, the author of each chapter takes the history of a specific city in the world that has larger significance in the scope of world history, and, because that author has been selected for their own connection to and expertise on the city, they can convey some of that personal connection to the student. If the work is as successful as the three chapters that were presented, world history will come across in a more personal way than any survey class textbook or method or pedagogy that I ever had–in high school or college.

Old meets new in Luoyuang, 2007.

I have personal beef with world history classes, as I always feel they have failed me. Somehow getting to all the political, social, cultural, linguistic, religious, technological, and other aspects of the human past across in any sort of order is our goal, and I’ve never felt I got all I could have from them. I get mixed up, twisted around, many important parts fall by the wayside in an effort to cram the “important” stuff. Ironic that I really do enjoy history, but have never done well in my own world history classes–literally I have poor grades to show for them.

My master’s program so far has facilitated an ongoing conversation (with myself, but also with professors and classmates) about place, about what it means to residents and foreigners and immigrants and displaced people. About what it means to have a place or to be without one, about the literal and also figurative meaning and position of place in American history and world history, in family history, and local and regional history. Hearing that there will soon be a survey class textbook based on place, that conveys the complexity and drama of our global past via Xian, Crete, Mecca, Samarkand, Cape Town, Paris, Berlin, Dubai–it truly gives me hope for a course that I have had a lot of issues with in my own experience.

(The person who conceived the concept for this book is Elaine MacKinnon, who chaired the panel I attended. The book’s working title is Places of Encounter: Time, Place and Connectivity in World History, slated to be published by CQ Press. Couldn’t find much on this book online yet, but let’s hope it gets more exposure soon.)

Historian Alison Isenberg’s 2004 book Downtown America: A history of the place and the people who made it is in fact a testament to the people, more than anything, who are responsible for the good and bad and the complicated personality of U.S. cities today. Oftentimes the city holds a nostalgic identity for people, a loss of something bygone, a sort of deflated self that holds some sort of hard-to-define sadness. Isenberg reminds us however, that in considering our efforts today at defining our downtown economic areas and “Main Streets,” we must recognize that “the democratic, melting-pot downtown has been an evolving ideal, not a past accomplished reality from which Americans have strayed.” Certainly there was never a democratic reality in the segregated shopping districts of the early and mid twentieth century, yet it is oftentimes portrayed or revered in memoriam as having been a free-wheeling, glorious environment. That may have been so, but for a very selective group of individuals; for everyone else, it has a much more complex definition, a much less rosy spot in memory.

A view of Peachtree Street in a much older Atlanta. Things were often removed in these artists' renditions of a city downtown, in order to project an image of the place it could be, an ideal. Isenberg's book is full of amazing images and comparison shots on this and other subjects regarding the American city.

This is not a criticism of either the 1920s-50s, nor of the most recent efforts, either by Isenberg or myself. Rather it is part of her argument that it has been and will continue to be the people who construct the cityscape, both literally in physical development, and ideally in how they invision their city and its image.

It got me thinking of another study on the American city, or one in particular–the public history project that has resulted Lowell, Massachusetts as the subject of an entire National Park, and the recent book on its history. One of the questions at the core of Cathy Stanton’s whole study of the city is whether or not economic development and interest is compatible with public historians’ goals of preserving and interpreting a city’s past and its meaning in American history. Both sides can be argued, I am not here to answer this, but this same thought came back many times while I read about the larger developments of the economy of “downtown America” over the years, and the many vested interests that laid at the heart of each decision within a city’s planning. Most often, it was businessmen, investors, retailers, and real estate appraisers who were making the biggest decisions, but in the wake of urban renewal projects and other controversial methods of “cleaning up the downtown,” historians and preservationists had their say as well, spanning much of the city’s recent past (1980s to the present).

Most compelling to me is the way in which every vested party uses the past to their own ends, and how many of the symbols of the past appear very differently depending on who is looking at them. This was most explicit in Isenberg’s description of the 1997-98 exhibit “Main Street Five-and-Dimes,” which was on display in Washington, D.C. at the National Building Museum. The exhibit’s interpretation says nothing about the enormous effects of integration of the downtown, and how many of the department stores had not been serving African American urban citizens. She uses the comment book to show just how much people really did want to talk about the effects of a separated society on the downtown, even if the curators only wanted to show nostalgic “thingamabobs” and enlist positive images of the way things used to be.

Some of those are truly thought-provoking, so much so that I will post the entire excerpt a little later on. But it reminded me again of how much specific images and symbols from the past are used to many different ends. To investors and retailers, symbols of the past utilize memories, or perceived memories, to add significance to their project. To some white citizens, like this guestbook commentators, it was a vision of a “happier, kinder world,” while to other less-than-subtle commentators, it was a positive memory of “‘whites only’ drinking fountains–the way it should be.” To black visitors, it was that “some change is good,” and that these old department store must be considered in the wider context of the times they were in, including the fact that while they no longer exist, life itself has in fact gotten better for many people who live around the same places the stores were located. One guest book writer agreed that yes, it was a look back on a simpler time. “Simpler perhaps but was it better?” Indeed, a more complex interpretation that gives us more to consider.

Surely I have gone past making a concise point. But my intention was just to unite the discussion in the Lowell Experiment about what history means to certain people while having wholly different definitions to others, and trying to reconcile every group and perspective when your goal is to consider the larger narrative of an entire community, or city, or even a larger metro area. In Lowell as well, part of the complicated story was often the notion of history on an upward ride, that we have surely improved our lives from those of our grandparents, that we no longer suffer in factories. And in the case of Lowell, residents could tout its more recent past as having also given this same improvement to new immigrant groups. One of the corkscrews thrown into its cohesive interpretive plan has been that complicated truth that this reality has really only moved to another part of the world, and that there are people in other countries who would like this to someday be their story too. That is something that Lowell has recently included in their story, making it altogether more complicated and global, but also reflecting much more accurately the world we live in, as one that is connected to the past, rather than separate and removed from it.

This trajectory is indeed a labyrinth of complicated stories, controversies, diverse groups with specific vested interests both in their past and present lives or portrayals, and when it comes down to it, questionable whether it truly is an upward climb of improvement at all points in time. Almost certainly it is not.

But that doesn’t get Isenberg down. “It remains to be seen which constellation of values and participants will chart the course of downtown real estate and urban commerce in the twenty-first century,” she says, bringing it back around to her book’s economic focus. But, during the twentieth century, “Main Street [was] a place to teach, debate, exclude, fantasize, argue,  include, make new dreams, and visit old ones.” Maybe we start there to find the best way to write inclusive, thoughtful histories of our city spaces, and of the communities that live in them. Lowell is certainly one prickly example of this, are there will surely be more.

(The colorful quotation that is the title of this post is by Isenberg, found on page 313 of her book.)