Category / American

by amandastiver

America: A Vision for the Present

Lately I’ve been reading David McCullough’s John Adams, upon which the recent HBO series was based. Although I won’t write a review yet (I haven’t quite finished it), some interesting observations can be drawn from this era of history.

As I read the comments in letters and writings of individuals like John Adams, Abigail Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Rush and others, I found myself reading sentiments of modern proportions.

Devaluation of money, excessive national debt, wartime alliances, and visions of America for centuries to come and not just as a mere 13 British colonies. After the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, men and women worried about America’s acceptance with the British, if we were to be continually their enemy or treat for total peace and recognition. Whether America would be a collection of very loosely confederated, nearly autonomous states, a pure, overwhelming national state with a central government, or united in balance under state and federal establishments.

Policies and Politics

Mud was slung between politicians and between factions. Republicans (at that early stage) stood for continuous revolutions and applauded the bloody, messy French Revolution, while Federalists looked to a strongly central government.

These positions would switch back and forth between liberal and conservative parties through the centuries. Today a less empowered federal government is the aim of conservatives while liberals yearn for a highly centralized, intensively regulated state.

Adams worried about America’s future with dire forebodings about the continual practice of slavery. Constant was his worry about how the new nation would be received in Europe and if it would or should get involved in the wars of that continent.

Past and Present

This is how history affects us. The same worries tie us to an era whose daily life is so very different from our own. The industrial revolution had not yet begun in earnest and everyday life was much as it had been for thousands of years.

You traveled by horse, your house was unplumbed, electricity was a gleam in Benjamin Franklin’s eye, and cooking was done over an open wood fire!

And yet, the human yearning for liberty is not sequestered by physical environment. Despite the differences of our dress, manner, speech, and abode, we all still cling to the hope of freedom – to live a free and virtuous life full of opportunity.

For more on this, please read The Declaration of Independence.

– Amanda Stiver

by amandastiver

The Teatime Experience

Branching out from my usual trend toward military or related history, I’ve been thinking about tea lately. I am off caffeine and therefore can’t have the lovely dark liquid for a while, so naturally I should choose to write about it.

Much is said about tea these days regarding its health qualities. And for the past few years the idea of an extravagant and elegant afternoon tea has enjoyed a revival of popularity in the U.S. Cute little tea houses have popped up in various places, often only to fold a few months later. It takes marketing genius or a known clientele to get Americans to shake their coffee loving habits.

Although colonial America owes many of its identifying traditions to British norms of the eighteenth century, we did shake loose a few things during the revolution. Tea was one. The Boston Tea Party incident sparked by increased taxes on this most essential of British liquids made a seminal statement. So much so that when you step into a diner the waitress will hand out menus and ask if you want a cup of coffee – you have to ask for tea!

Tea, once upon a time

Don’t get me wrong; I have nothing bad to say about traditional British teatime. It’s lovely and when I visited England I was determined to experience this glorious repast.

In the city of York there is a lovely place called Betty’s Café Tea Rooms. Here you will find the kind of tea service, sandwiches, sweet things, and goodies dreamed about by little girls in frilly dresses. They also serve a pretty swell coronation chicken if you hanker for something more substantial.

For the real deal, tea is prepared with loose leaves in a teapot and strained into your cup. Then a tower of delights arrives at the table. Three layers: warm scones and clotted cream (something I dream of, but rarely can afford stateside), then small open-faced sandwiches conspicuous by the absence of crust and the delicacy of cut, and, finally, a platter of small tarts, lemon curd and raspberry, and other little cakes.

Why is this historic?

Well, at one time people frequently indulged in this colossal teatime repast, but they don’t so much anymore, so participating in such a meal is akin to attending one of those medieval banquet performances, with jousting, and a goofy looking minstrel wandering around playing on a lute. You wouldn’t dine that way every night, but once in a while it gives you first hand experience of a different era of history. Living history.

So have a cup of tea, a scone, and some cake. Live a little… history.

by amandastiver

Living like it’s 1873

Not long ago I finished A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird. The book covers her remarkable travels as an Englishwoman in the nineteenth century American West.

Bird was subject to ill health and traveled, as many did at that time, to different climates to restore her strength. Among other places she also visited Hawaii as well as Canada, Japan and China. In this case Bird was on a trip to reach Estes Park, Colorado.

Her journey begins at Lake Tahoe and she travels east from there into Colorado. Given the strictures of the time she was unusual as an independent woman who traveled alone and un-chaperoned through vast prairies and mountainous regions. With the exception of a few close calls she remained quite safe. After her return she compiled letters written to family into a journal of her travels and published it for sale.

The narrative is full of action and moves quickly, so it is a worthy read if you are interested in doing a little time travel and getting some firsthand experience in the “old west.”

Word pictures

Two things stand out from the book. First, is Bird’s ability to use language to describe her surroundings. The book is un-illustrated, but I was surprised at how little I missed photographs or maps. Her descriptions are precise and show a facility of language usage that is completely lacking these days.

Here are a few samples:

“The stars were intensely bright, and a well-defined auroral arch, throwing off fantastic coruscations, lighted the whole northern sky. Yet I was only in the Foot Hills, and Long’s glorious Peak was not to be seen (p. 229, Comstock Editions, INC., 1987).”

Who uses the word “coruscations” these days? (It means “sparklings and glitterings,” by the way.)

“Long’s Peak, 14,700 feet high, blocks up one end of Estes Park, and dwarfs all the surrounding mountains. … By sunlight or moonlight its splintered grey crest is the one object which, in spite of wapiti and bighorn, skunk and grizzly, unfailingly arrests the eyes. From it come all storms of snow and wind, and the forked lightnings play round its head like a glory. It is one of the noblest of mountains, but in one’s imagination it grows to be much more than a mountain. It becomes invested with a personality (pp.78-79).”

I know that a picture can speak a thousand words, but words like these can speak a thousand pictures!

At your leisure…

Secondly, the descriptions of life at this time in American (and British) history fill a need-to-know of mine. When I sit down in the evening to watch a television show or movie I sometimes ponder at the passivity of my modern habits. It doesn’t take much intellectual stimulation to watch a video (which is sometimes the point after a busy day), but on the other hand, how much of the human brain do we leave inactive for the sake of “entertainment.”

The following quote from the book gives a hint at the kind of end-of-day events common in the early 1870’s:

“After that we all sit in the living room, and I settle down to write to you, or mend my clothes, which are dropping to pieces. Some sit round the table playing at eucre, the strange hunters and prospectors lie on the floor smoking, and rifles are cleaned, bullets cast, fishing flies made, fishing tackle repaired, boots are waterproofed, part-songs are sung, and about half-past eight I cross the crisp grass to my cabin, always expecting to find something in it [based on a previous encounter with a skunk] (pp. 108-109).”

Life was not a piece of cake and leisure time was at a minimum. If you wanted to hear music, you sang it. If you wanted amusement, you played cards. Otherwise you were busy repairing your equipment.

Travel by book – I highly recommend this volume as your personal tour guide into the past!

by amandastiver

The Great Depression and “Stuff”

A few months back I was blessed to be able to compile an article about survivors of the Great Depression. The article was an assignment for Vertical Thought magazine, which reaches out to a young adult and teen audience. My goal was to connect young people to the now elderly folks who lived through the Great Depression.

What was great about doing the article was that the subject fascinated me. Likewise, my interview material was everywhere! My relatives, older folks from the church congregation I attend, and from the community.

I think what has always amazed me about that era was that although so many people were barely scraping along; you will often hear them say that they didn’t know they were poor.

There was still an unspoken rule that if you had food to eat, a roof over your head, and a family with love – you were all right. Notice I didn’t say indoor plumbing, electricity, air conditioning, a new car, digital communication devices, digital music devices, etc. There are some basic things that all humans truly need. Then there are “necessities” that we are conditioned to “need.”

Binary Burden

To be fair, I, like the next person, use my fair share of these devices and benefit as a result, but I also find myself over-processed from them. In the same way that junk food is over-processed to the point that it doesn’t resemble its original components; I think over-digitalization is similar.

We lose ourselves in the crush of information, our ability to concentrate is tampered with, and we begin to feel like we can’t live without all the social networking, constant texting, and electronic gadgets. We’re addicted to a pile of things or worse, to the miles of information encoded in the vapor that is the web!

Tough as it is to imagine, we could all probably get along without the proliferation of leisure and time saving devices that drive store and Internet sales these days.

Maybe I’m a young curmudgeon in the making, but there is something to be said for daily physical activity that leaves you fatigued, but invigorated by the activity and accomplishment.

Walk the talk

My challenge to you – go find one of these elders and ask them about (if possible) their life before electricity. Ask them to tell you what it was like when each new device came into popular use. Ask them how they got along without all those things.

You will be intrigued by the answers, and more than that, you will have made a connection to their past, which is now part of yours. You will be an historian!

by amandastiver

Founding Parents: Advice for a Nation

Reading about colonial life in America got me thinking about the founding fathers (and mothers) of the revolutionary period. I thought it would be interesting to examine a piece of parenting advice from one of the many individuals who, essentially, parented this country.

John Adams served as both President and Vice President of America in the last decades of the 18th century and early 19th. He had been a member of the Continental Congress and helped to write the Declaration of Independence. He and his wife, Abigail, both of Massachusetts, spent time on diplomatic missions to France. One of their sons, John Quincy Adams, also served as President.

I turned to my copy of Our Sacred Honor: Words of Advice from the Founders in Stories, Letters, Poems, and Speeches compiled by William J. Bennett (Simon & Schuster, 1997). The following quote, in a letter from John to Abigail, explains the expectations they had for their children:

“Human nature with all its infirmities and depravation is still capable of great       things. It is capable of attaining to degrees of wisdom and of goodness, which, we have reason to believe, appear respectable in the estimation of superior intelligences. Education makes a greater difference between man and man, than nature has made between man and brute. The virtues and powers to which men may be trained, by early education and constant discipline, are truly sublime and astonishing.”

“It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.”

“But their bodies must be hardened, as well as their souls exalted. Without strength and activity and vigor of body, the brightest mental excellencies will be eclipsed and obscured.”

Discipline your mind, use your intellect, exercise your body, and above all, value virtue.

Good advice for a nation, too.

by amandastiver

Daily Life – Living in the Past

I just came across a magazine called Early American Life. It is a niche magazine dealing with Colonial life in America, both east and southwest. It has plenty of historical detail for re-enactors or history buffs like myself.

It is refreshing to see a magazine with quality reporting and well-crafted articles that are directed at a specific field of interest. General interest magazines are sadly, a dime a dozen, particularly as they move to the Internet. This needn’t be so, but it is the nature of a void like the Internet that demands to be filled with endless amounts of copy.

Most importantly I was excited to find a magazine that exemplifies an area of history study that has always fascinated me. The word quotidian expresses it best, those little things that add up to make what we know as everyday life. To simplify, I call it the history of daily life.

Time Travel

This was my favorite boredom fix as a kid. I would take whatever circumstance I was in and try to imagine it in a different era of history, a little time travel.

Say I was on a long drive home with my parents, no scenery to speak of, 12 years old, getting carsick, what to do? What if it wasn’t the present, but two hundred years earlier in colonial era America?

What would I wear? Well, not jeans and a t-shirt, but what was the equivalent for a middle class miss? What would I be riding in? A mini-van? No. Well then, maybe a carriage, but what kind? How many horses, or would I be on horseback?

Where would I be traveling? What kind of house would I live in? What would I eat? What amenities would exist? Electricity? Certainly not. Plumbing? Not really – just a chamber pot (imagine that the next time you stumble to the bathroom early in the morning!). What would I do all day? Sewing? School? Music? The list can go on and on.

Try a little time travel yourself – where would you go? How would you have been living?

by amandastiver

In Memoriam

Today is Memorial Day in the United States. The origins vary, but days of memorial to fallen soldiers of the American Civil War were observed shortly after the end of that conflict in the late 1860’s.

After World War I Memorial Day acknowledged not just the war dead of the Civil War, but of all conflicts in which America was or became involved. For most Americans this day is just one of a three day weekend, time for a family barbeque or other late spring outdoor activities. We tend to reserve our patriotism (or what there is left of it) for Independence Day on the 4th of July.

Memorial Day used to be a far more formal occasion with parades and solemn observes during which families would decorate the graves of loved ones who had served in the military. This is a day of mourning and I think we’ve lost that distinction.

To that end, let me explain why we mourn by providing you with a list of America’s war dead:

Revolutionary War-             4,435 American dead

War of 1812-                          2,260 American dead

Mexican War-                       13,283 American dead

Civil War-                               364,511 Union dead

289,000 Confederate dead

Spanish-American War-    2,446 American dead

World War I-                          116,516 American dead

World War II-                        405,399 American dead

Korean War-                           36,574 American dead

Vietnam War-                         58,220 American dead

Persian Gulf War-                  383 American dead

Since 1980 until 2008

and including the Persian Gulf War-

45,706 American dead

Total–                                         1,338,350 American dead

These Americans died in dispute or defense of our right to exist as a nation and uphold the daily freedoms upon which we rely.

(Sources: “American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics,” http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf, and “Civil War Statistics,” http://www.phil.muni.cz/~vndrzl/amstudies/civilwar_stats.htm, any mistakes in sums or typography are my own.)

Whether or not we have family who served or whether we believe in bearing arms or not, our gratitude is still required to acknowledge the debt we owe those who willingly gave their lives for a purpose greater than themselves.

Human history is a series of conflicts punctuated by occasional bursts of peace and cooperation, or at least grudging armistice. We are not, by nature, a peaceful species. Peace requires reaching outside ourselves for the good of others. Ironically, war produces in those who serve the altruism to sacrifice for others around them in battle or for the ideal of a peaceful and prosperous homeland.

There are other reasons people go to war, but when you try to understand history the exceptions generally prove the rule. Look at the broad view, history is holistic and requires stepping back from the minutiae in order to understand historical trends and see the larger picture in full.

Please think on these things as you mourn today.

by amandastiver

Play Me A Dirge, Matey…

A few years ago my folks were out on a garage sale tour and they came across an estate sale with a significant collection of books. Garage sales are fun on their own, but with the added incentive of books they are irresistible, to me at least. So I went along.

The collection was breaking up at a rapid pace, but before they disappeared I located part of a series of Time-Life books called The Seafarers. I ended up with eight volumes out of a set of 22.

Ever since high school when I read C.S. Forrester’s Captain Hornblower I have been curious about naval history. I’ve not sailed, but have had the chance to tour a replica of Captain Cook’s HM Bark Endeavour and my haul at the estate sale came as a boost to my curiosity.

Would you be interested in buying…

I remember commercials for Time-Life books when I was a kid, but I didn’t realize, until I got my hands on the nautical volumes, how detailed and fascinating they were. The illustrations are spectacular and the writing very approachable.

Collections of books like the ones sold by Time-Life take me back to the days of encyclopedia sets as well. My mom tells me childhood stories of curling up with a crunchy apple or wedge of cabbage and reading through a volume of the encyclopedia. I remember going through our own set and being fascinating by the pictures and the concise descriptions or explanations of various entries – mostly scientific.

The history of science

It wasn’t until my parents did some research that we learned the rocky relationship encyclopedias have had with history. Early on in the 18th century these compendiums of knowledge contained history as well as the burgeoning study of science and the natural world. This trend continued until the early 20th century, around WWI. At this point the history got dropped in favor of the multitude of scientific discoveries that were coming along at a rapid pace.

Our modern default setting is for science and scientific proof to back up even historical discoveries. Sometimes this “proof” is debatable, science itself not being a science, but an art and subject to interpretation. Human witness can get relegated to second place behind scientific substantiation in anthropological and archeological pursuits. Perhaps not always without cause, humans can be liars.

Meanwhile, I will continue to enjoy the pages of well-reasoned, carefully researched history and see if someday I can track down a few more volumes of The Seafarers.

by amandastiver

Reminiscing

I’ve written about using documentaries, historical journals, museums, and re-enactments to explore history, but I can’t go on without praising one of my favorite publications. It is a magazine that brings primary source history to my fingertips and reminds me of the struggles and challenges my parents and grandparents faced.

Don’t jump to conclusions! I’m not talking about WWII history magazines, archeological reviews, etc. I like those too, but they’re for another day.

I’m talking about entry-level history where even the most disinterested beginner can take a bit out of time and enjoy it.  A visual layout with great, short, first person reports on the historical past of the 20th century is the fundamental strength of Reminisce magazine published by Reiman Media Group which is a subsidiary of The Reader’s Digest Association, INC.

Tales of the past

This is the kind of history that you might hear your grandparents or great-grandparents tell if you are lucky enough to have these resources still alive. It isn’t ground breaking, never-before-seen historical research, but it is just as important. Knowing the daily details of the past and the experiences of our elders help us to live a fuller life, to respect them more, emulate the great things they did, and, one hopes, not make the same mistakes.

Magazines like this are a great teaching tool for kids and teens and a way to get them interested in history. Reminisce in particular has a surfeit of photographs, illustrations, and reprints of old cartoons and advertisements. Every issue is colorful, like having your own personal museum to page through whenever you need to fill a few minutes.

Did people really act like that?

After flipping through the past, it might surprise you to realize how degraded our current society has become. Wholesomeness is not something marketers feature much anymore. We are so used to the world in which we live that sometimes it takes a virtual journey back in time to realize how sordid it has become.

Scanning the advertisements of years past is an education in what people valued. The advertising professionals of the era designed their material to appeal to those values: wholesomeness, dignity, respect, faith, hard work, thrift, good clean fun, cleanliness, good cheer, family, marriage, the innocence of romance. From our 21st century cynical viewpoint we often see this material and think it looks hokey or syrupy. Kind of sad that good clean fun isn’t considered fun anymore.

There is one requirement when delving into this kind of historical record (or any part of the past, actually): check your modern sensibilities and put them aside, don’t reason from our contemporary perspective. Trade cynicism for a lighter approach to life in order to appreciate an era, only a few decades old, which had a greater sweetness and innocence than what we suffer through today.

by amandastiver

Read Me A Little History…

Read aloud. Or better yet, listen to someone else read aloud. Really, try it!

Sound a little too dramatic? Seems kind of weird, maybe, because we don’t do that kind of think anymore. Or do we?

Have you ever watched a news anchor talk at you? They aren’t gabbing from memory – they’re reading aloud! Yep, from that teleprompter screen right next to the camera!

Guess who else reads aloud? Right – politicians. Teleprompters being the modern default, but some still use good old note cards.

Whatever the case, they are all reading aloud. We do a lot of reading these days, the Internet has made that a necessity, and so we don’t often take the time to read out loud from a book. However, back before moving pictures, radio, television, and Internet folks regularly read to each other.

Tell me a story, read me a book

On a cold winter evening around the fireplace of a rough log cabin, by the light of homemade candles, settlers would read out loud from the Bible, maybe Plutarch’s Lives (thank you Seven Brides for Seven Brothers), or perhaps a collection of Shakespeare. They didn’t have many books, but what they had, they read.

It was entertainment and education. Poetry was read aloud (sometimes from memory) as were plays, works of fiction, works of history, and religious works. It was a shared experience.

If you read aloud often enough, you begin to understand written works in a different way. Try reading the Bible silently – zoom through a few verses in the historical books of Chronicles or Kings – kind of dull, you say?

Okay, change tack, read aloud as if you are narrating a Cecil B. DeMille production of epic biblical proportions! Make sure that your audience, real or imagined, can understand each word and that the transitions from action to description are clear. Suddenly it isn’t so dull! Try the same thing with Jane Austen – you’ll be amazed at how her works come to life!

Reading aloud is an art form and a connection to the historic past. Back in the days of limited literacy those who could read aloud did so that others would have a chance to hear whatever it was they were reading. It was the default mode of literacy for many centuries until fairly recently.

Try it and you’ll find that a simple activity like this is a fun trip to the historical past.