Author Archives: Nicole Belolan

Inside the Decoy Shop: The Period Room at the Upper Bay Museum

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Standing inside the Decoy Shop at the Upper Bay Museum in North East, Maryland, in late January, I could not decide where to start our Museum Studies SWAT team Decoy Shop project.

Inside View Decoy Shop

Where should we begin?

Should we work from top to bottom, or should we tackle one corner at a time? At the suggestion of one of my colleagues, we carefully plucked a wooden duck decoy from a worktable and started with artifacts displayed on that surface. Our eight day project to inventory, clean, photograph, and catalogue the period room–or a museum exhibit room created to evoke a specific time and place–at the Upper Bay Museum had begun. (Other SWAT team members catalogued the other collections displayed throughout the Museum.)

What can we learn from the Upper Bay Museum Decoy Shop period room?

Kaey Grier examining duck decoy

University of Delaware Museum Studies Director Kasey Grier examines decoys at the Upper Bay Museum prior to the begin in of the SWAT project

The Decoy Shop at the Upper Bay Museum is an installation curated by Upper Chesapeake Bay residents who make decoys, or imitations of ducks or other animals hunters have used to lure their prey at least since 400 BC, and who hunt and fish in the region known as the Susquehanna Flats in the Upper Chesapeake Bay.

Decoy Shop in gallery area

The Decoy Shop at the Upper Bay Museum in North East, MD

Unlike many period rooms, though, the Shop interior was not copied directly from archival documentation or taken in its entirety from an original shop. Rather, the shop is a conglomeration of decoy-making related objects from several makers. Museum curators likely drew inspiration from a variety of sources, including twentieth-century interior photographs of other decoy shops in the region as well as the personal experiences Museum curators and local practitioners have had with decoy carving.

Steve and Lem Ward inside a decoy carving shop around 1918 (From Joe Engers, ed., The Great Book of Wildfowl Decoys, 2000

Steve and Lem Ward inside a decoy carving shop around 1918
(From Joe Engers, ed., The Great Book of Wildfowl Decoys, 2000)

Upper Bay Museum curators arranged the artifacts to evoke the interior of a working mid twentieth-century decoy maker’s shop on the Upper Chesapeake at the tale end the height of market duck hunting but during the continuation of sport duck hunting. This interpretive choice offers a different type of historical authenticity than do other methods of creating period rooms (no single method of which I find “right” or “wrong”–all are all fascinating and informative).

Tyler catalogues one of over 25 shotguns made and used between 1850 and 1950

Tyler catalogues one of over 25 shotguns made and used between 1850 and 1950

The Decoy Shop is unique in that it is one of only a handful of workshop period rooms in American museums. (In contrast, countless domestic period rooms–championed in the early twentieth century by institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York–fill museums throughout the country.) Others workshop period rooms include a Decoy Shop exhibit at the Havre de Grace Decoy Museum, the Dominy Shops (furniture and clockmaking) at the Winterthur Museum, and the Wright Cycle Shop at Greenfield Village. European examples include a recreation of a sixteenth-century jeweler’s workshop, based on a 1576 engraving, on display in the Museum of London’s show about the Cheapside Hoard.

The Museum of London Jeweler's Period, as reported by the Associated Press

The Museum of London Jeweler’s Period, as reported by the Associated Press

The Upper Bay Museum and its collections embody rich interpretative value relating to the interconnectedness of the region’s cultural and environmental history. To that end, the Museum’s Decoy Shop period room plays a unique didactic role that could not be achieved by a traditional gallery display featuring rows of workbenches and tools. Instead, by furnishing the Decoy Shop with a variety of objects associated with the craft and related industries, the period room display provides visitors with an opportunity to explore the relationships between decoy-making tools, decoy parts, the spaces and places where decoys were made, and the people who made them, as determined by Upper Chesapeake individuals with ties to the profession and hobby of decoy carving and duck hunting.

Cataloguing decoys at the Upper Bay Museum

Cataloguing decoys at the Upper Bay Museum

Visitors view the Shop interior from one vantage point behind a door or from behind the Shop’s two windows. There is plenty to see. The shop is filled with hundreds of objects associated with decoy carving as well as with hunting, fishing, and boating in the upper Chesapeake more generally. The objects are displayed on shelves, on the walls, and on the floor. Objects range from workbenches to piles of nails. Primary object groups include: large pieces of work furniture; containers filled with supplies and tools; hand tools such as files and spoke shaves; completed decoys as well as decoys in various states of completion; a few items associated with the H. L. Harvey Company (active from about 1880 to the mid twentieth century); and miscellaneous items associated with fishing and hunting such as a life preservers and boat parts. In addition, the Shop “complex” also includes two workbenches installed just outside the shop.

Museum Studies Staff Assistant Tracy Jentzsch vacuuming an early twentieth-century life vest at the Upper Bay Museum

Museum Studies Staff Assistant Tracy Jentzsch vacuuming an early twentieth-century life vest at the Upper Bay Museum

In the process or leading the group that documented and catalogued the shop contents, it occurred to me that, even though we carefully removed and replaced each artifact, the Shop looked slightly different–a bit more tidy and spruced-up–when we were through with our work (before photo at left; after photo at right). We did, after all, dust every object and display surface; vacuum using a HEPA vac; sweep; wash the windows; secure objects using cotton twill tape where there had been duct tape…and more (all of which will help ensure the longer-term preservation of the objects). Even these slight, non-interpretative changes made the shop look different. What are the effects of more evasive interpretation changes on period rooms? How does one strike an appropriate balance of preservation and work-room-like authenticity?

back right corner before

Back right corner BEFORE

Back right corner after

Back right corner AFTER

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the case of the Decoy Shop at the Upper Bay Museum, authenticity derives from workshop dirt, the objects’ provenance (or history of ownership and use), and the identities of those who put them there. The Shop contents were made and used by several Upper Bay decoy carvers, a layered history that highlights continuities and change over time as it relates to decoy carving in this region. Some upper Bay decoy carvers represented here include Standley Evans (1887-1979; active 1919-1933) (used the decoy horse inside the shop); Horace D. Graham (1893-1982; active 1955-1978) (used the auto-sander inside the shop and shaving bench outside the shop as well as the many miscellaneous workshop contents distributed throughout the shop), and Paul Gibson (1902-1985; active 1915-1985) (used the painting table and paint brushes on display).

Nicole Belolan cataloguing Paul Gibson's painting worktable inside the Decoy Shop

Nicole Belolan cataloguing Paul Gibson’s painting worktable inside the Decoy Shop

Despite the fact that hunting waterfowl in the Upper Chesapeake was limited to sport (rather than market hunting) after 1918, decoy carvers—such as those represented inside this Shop—continued to provide decoys for sportsmen into the mid-twentieth century. Some of the decoy carvers represented inside the Shop were hobbyists; others made decoys for a living. All of them used store-bought tools in combination with handmade tools made using a mix of reused and new materials, suggesting the fact that many decoy carvers engaged with (and continue to engage with) their craft as skilled do-it-yourself artisans or tinkerers. For example, the Horace Graham auto-sander was made with used wood and a washing machine motor:

Auto sander

Auto-sander

His shaving bench features repurposed moldings:

Shaving bench

Shaving bench

Many of the supply containers were made from recycled mid-twentieth-century food containers, examples of which can be seen lining the Shop shelves in the photograph below. Anyone who has ventured inside a contemporary workshop has probably seen similar examples of reuse.

Repurposed containers inside Shop

Repurposed containers inside Shop

And of course, there are the decoys. The unfinished duck decoy parts, some of which are displayed inside this basket, were made by the following individuals, several of whom are still living: Mike Laird, J.E. Gonce, Bill Streaker, Jeff Muller, Vernon S. Bryant, Joey Jacobs[?], James Frey, and Bobby Simons:

Decoy parts

Decoy parts

Hardly a static exhibit meant to evoke one time period, the Decoy Shop at the Upper Bay Museum embodies the continued local interest in and practice of the craft of decoy making.

What could be more authentic than that?

To learn more about how your museum can apply to the UD Museum Studies SWAT project, visit the Sustaining Places web site. This blog post has been cross-posted at the University of Delaware Museum Studies blog.

In preparing for my work at the Upper Bay Museum, I found that C. John Sullivan’s Waterfowling on the Chesapeake, 1819-1936 (2003) provides readers with the best historical context for duck decoy use. Those with a theoretical bent might enjoy Marjolein Efting Dijkstra’s The Animal Substitute: An Ethnological Perspective on the Origin of Image-Making and Art (2010).

About the author: Nicole Belolan is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of American Civilization program at the University of Delaware. She is also a graduate assistant for Sustaining Places, an IMLS-funded initiative that is dedicated to providing hands-on, practical resources for small museums.

From Half-eaten Cookies to RFID Labels: Reflections on the Association of Registrars and Collections Specialists Conference

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On the first weekend in November, I attended the first conference of the Association of Registrars and Collections Specialists (ARCS) in Chicago. I am grateful that the History Department provided professional development funding to help with the cost.

The ARCS conference included twenty-four sessions over three days, interspersed with lunches, coffee breaks, and evening receptions. Since more than 500 people attended the conference, these events acted as networking events. I tried to introduce myself to five new people every day, and in this way I met registrars and art handlers from museums across the country.

I enjoyed all the sessions I attended, because I felt like they would be professionally helpful for me at my future job or because they dealt with some aspect of the work I was not familiar with or wanted to know more about. For instance, registrars from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh talked about their integrated pest management program in terms of the discovery of a massive infestation discovered during their cataloguing process. This brought pest management, a general topic I feel fairly comfortable having a conversation about, into a new plane of consideration: how to deal with an infestation in an uncatalogued collection, how to address the infestation without disrupting the cataloguing process, and how to organize and implement a pest management system in the midst of a crisis. Plus, they showed slides of insects devouring non-traditional museum collection objects that The Warhol has, like dog biscuits or half-eaten cookies. These slides were revolting and informative.

I also attended a session on transporting works of art to Italy. While this is irrelevant to my current position, I hope I get to use this knowledge in the future, because it would mean I was working at a place that exchanged artworks with Italy. When that happens, I will know to write a clause into the insurance agreement that allows the artwork to be pulled behind a tractor or transported by gondola, methods that insurance agreements typically discourage.

The most useful session covered the uses of new technology like iPads for registrars. Besides introducing us to several helpful applications, the speakers described a beautifully brief process for taking condition reports that went from taking incoming photography to saving the final report on the computer without having to leave the object’s side. Other suggestions included attaching RFID labels to packing crates of traveling exhibitions that uploaded a video of handling or mounting procedures when scanned and using collaborative software to track workflow. I have already started using some of the ideas from this session in my work at Winterthur, where I have had a graduate assistantship in the Registrar’s Office since 2010.

ARCS has a student membership rate, and they host networking events in the area, too. Anyone who is interested in more information can visit their website, www.arcsinfo.org. The next conference will be in 2015.

About the author: Alyce Graham is the Student Assistant to the Registrar at the Winterthur Museum and a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate writing about hardship and suffering in nineteenth-century polar exploration.

 

Semester Roundup

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As usual, Am Civvies have been busy this semester publishing articles and giving talks. Here is just a sampling of some of the things they’ve written and the places they’ve gone:

Nicole Belolan

  • “Collecting Disability History,” UK Disability History Month 2013 series, Disability and Industrial Society: A Comparative Cultural History of British Coalfields 1780-1948, November 25, 2013.
  • “About Something of for Someone? Curatorial Ethics and Curatorial Debts,” roundtable participant, discussed early 20th-century art museum program for disable children, American Studies Association annual meeting, Washington, D.C. (November 22, 2013)
  • “Aunt Patty’s Furniture: Adult Cradles and the History of Physical Mobility Impairment in Early America,” New Thoughts on Old Things: Four Centuries of Furnishing the Northeast, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (October 4, 2013)

Lisa Minardi

  • “The Muhlenberg Family and the War for American Independence,” The Transatlantic World of Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg in the Eighteenth Century, eds. A. Gregg Roeber, Thomas Müller-Bahlke,and Hermann Wellenreuther (Halle, Germany: Franckesche Stiftungen, 2013).
  • “Palladian architecture, Germanic style: The Hiester House in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania,” The Magazine Antiques (September/October 2013): 140–147.

Nalleli Guillen

  • Book review of Rebecca Cawood McIntyre, Souvenirs of the Old South: Northern Tourism and Southern Mythology, Winterthur Portfolio 47, 4 (Winter 2013: 304-306.

Tyler Putman

  • “‘Every man turned out in the best he had’: Clothing and Buttons in the Historical and Archaeological Records of Johnson’s Island Prisoner-of-War Depot, 1862-1865,” Northeast Historical Archaeology 40 (2011, published 2013): 86-103.
  • Civil War-style military drill instructor (experiential history) for Prof. J. Ritchie Garrison’s innovative undergraduate history course “The Emancipation Project.”

Who is TED? A Crash Course in Articulating “Ideas Worth Spreading”

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As each of my fellow participants in the 2013 Delaware Public Humanities Institute (DelPHI) fellows program chose a folded slip of paper from the box passed around the table, my excitement mounted. Who would be my “pretend” audience for my upcoming five-minute presentation on my research? A group of kids? Retired professionals? Prospective museum donors? The possibilities were endless, but I was eager to accept the challenge. As the box of dwindling slips reached me, I dipped my hand into the pool, selected a strip of paper, and read it discreetly to myself.

“TED talk.”

ted talk screen shot

This is a screen shot of the Ted web site. I combed the site for inspiration in preparation for my mini-Ted talk debut.

Shoot, I thought.

I had been musing just days before about how I needed to do some research on this guy Ted and his talks. Well, now I had a few days to figure this out to avoid making a fool of myself.

Presiden Franklin Roosevelt was known for his ability to captivate Americans through his "Fireside Chats." Harris & Ewing, FDR Fireside Chat, September 6, 1936 (Library of Congress)

Presiden Franklin Roosevelt was known for his ability to captivate and reassure many Americans through his “Fireside Chats” delivered during times of national crisis. Great communicators are both born and made. DelPHI gave us the tools to work on the “making” part of that equation. Harris & Ewing, FDR Fireside Chat, September 6, 1936 (Library of Congress)

 

 

 

One of the goals of DelPHI is to give us, the humanities graduate student participants, tools for refining how we communicate our research to public audiences (from your grandmother at the retirement home to my little cousin at school) using outreach tools ranging from Twitter to public talks. The significance of our research (the material culture of disability in early America, in my case) often seems self-evident. We don’t need to remind ourselves of that significance on a daily basis. But when it comes to convincing other people of our research’s significance or its utility in everyday life…well, that’s another challenge all together. And while we know the answers to these questions in theory, articulating them is an art.

In the course of creating my “art,” I started with the horse’s mouth. I knew from hearing snippets of the “TED Radio Hour” on NPR that TED talks tend to be engaging and relevant to the average (NPR) listener. Indeed, according to the TED web site, “TED is a nonprofit devoted to ideas worth spreading.”

No pressure there.

TED, established in 1984, tends to feature speakers from the technology, entertainment, and design (hence, “TED”) communities, yet any survey of recent TED speakers shows that, as TED points out on its web site, its scope has broadened. TED hosts two conferences per year, and audience members who pay a few thousand dollars just to be there, listen to speakers who are expected, according to TED’s website, to “give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes or less).”

Ok. So, I had to “give the talk of my life,” and I only had five (rather than eighteen) minutes to accomplish that. Right.

I have given many talks in the past to a variety of audiences, but somehow this one seemed more daunting (not least of all because my fellow DelPHI-ers were great communicators!). Many of my colleagues pulled out slips of paper that dictated a specific audience; my slip of paper dictated a genre. It turns out that the genre, “ideas worth spreading,” might, at the end of the day, be a good mantra to keep in mind for any future talk, undergraduate lecture, or grant application, etc., no mater how long and for whom. Surely there are some good models out there. (If you’re starting to wonder whether there are any critics of TED talks, your instincts are correct. Google “Ted talk criticism” to see what people find unappealing about Ted).

So I did a little more digging and started watching some TED talks available online. First, I found a talk about giving good talks. Meta, I know, but what the heck. This was my only “homework” for two weeks, so I decided this was a better use of time than watching Here Comes Honey Boo Boo reruns.

First, I listened to Nancy Duarte, an expert presentation designer, who asserted that after studying talks such as MLK’s 1963 “I Have Dream Speech” and Steve Jobs’ 2007 iPhone unveiling, the structure of a good talk generally follows the same pattern: the speaker explains the status quo, or “what is,” and then explains “what could be.” This speaker repeated this several times before ending the speech with a description of the “new bliss” or “new norm.”

After fooling around with my subject matter for a while, I decided that Duarte’s blueprint, while useful for some contexts, would not suit my subject or my time frame of just five minutes.

By this point, I realized that, much like there is more than one way for historians to tell stories, there is also more than one way to tell a story using a TED talk.

Titian, The Bacchanal of the Andrians, oil on canvas, 1523-1526 (Muso Nacional de Prado)

Titian, The Bacchanal of the Andrians, oil on canvas, 1523-1526 (Muso Nacional de Prado) According to Thomas Campbell’s professor, today, using the word “orgy” to describe this scene helps contemporary minds “mak[e] a lost world relevant.”

So if I didn’t have to follow that model, I kept plumbing the depths of the TED web site for more inspiration and insight. I decided I should watch some TEDs given by individuals in my own field—history, material culture, and museums—for inspiration. It turns out there isn’t much out there. (Can we fix that? Actually, it seems that the Met is staging its own TED event.) So I started with Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas P. Campbell’s talk “Weaving Narratives in Museum Galleries.”To be honest, I just watched highlights to get the gist of it all. And I began to realize that everyone goes about this quite differently (reinforcing my epiphany about storytelling).

It was time to start working on the talk.

The one unifying theme I found with each good TED is that the speakers pontificate from the heart. Campbell really got me excited about tapestries and how museum-goers can have meaningful experiences with them. In short, he echoed my enthusiasm for what he described as “making a lost world relevant” for the public. I laughed out loud when he recounted his interaction with an art history professor who chastised Campbell for using the word “bacchanal” instead of the more down-to-earth “orgy” when it came to classifying the scene depicted in The Bacchanal of the Andrians by Titian. (Let’s stay jargon-free, here, folks!)

The good TED speakers exuded genuine passion for their subjects, and listeners benefitted from learning about the subject matter but also from being in the same room with an enthusiastic expert. (Enthusiasm energizes me, even when I don’t agree with what is being said.)

But how could I replicate this in a mini-TED? How could I impart a complete informative story as well as enthusiasm in just five minutes? I decided that my sparkle would be derived, in part, by my committing my mini-TED to memory. Now, I don’t mean rote memory, but rather I chose my images carefully so that they would prompt me to tell a story that would captivate my audience’s interest from the start to the end. And I practiced…a lot…something that had been drilled into me as a teenager pursuing music and theater. Being moderately impatient and most definitely perfectionist, I always wanted the sparkle to come NOW. Not much has changed, so this took some time. I achieved it by talking to myself a lot during evenings leading up to the mini-TED.

Here I am with a nineteenth-century crutch from my personal collection, about to start my mini Ted talk at the Delaware Public Humanities Institute. I even took the time to create my own "TED" sign.

Here I am with a nineteenth-century crutch from my personal collection, about to start my mini Ted talk at the Delaware Public Humanities Institute. I even took the time to create my own “TED” sign.

I had the meat of the talk down pretty early. I knew I would be featuring one of the individuals with a disability (and his stuff) whom I plan to include in my dissertation, but I struggled most with how to grab my audience’s attention from the start. My initial impulse was to walk into the auditorium on crutches. As one of my DelPHI instructors noted, “we’ve all been there, right?” Most definitely. But I thought that perhaps such a move might offend (for lack of a better word) some audiences, particularly since I am not an individual with a physical mobility (or any other) impairment. So I decided to play it safe and use, instead, a nineteenth-century crutch from my own collection as a prop. My hope was that this evocative object would get my audience to conjure up their own past experiences with or observations of people with physical mobility impairment and crutch use.

And then, I launched into my guy’s eighteenth-century story. But really, it was my story about how I came to identify him as a viable research avenue, why objects proved critical in interpreting his story, and how these objects changed the way his contemporaries thought about him and how we think about disability today. My research path, not really the research itself, provided the fuel for the enthusiasm I think I successfully conveyed in the course of the mini-TED. I realized that my talk followed the storytelling trajectory (likely familiar to many) we learned about from documentary filmmaker Michael Oats: familiarity, comfort; a challenge; a resolution. This personal research trajectory angle worked with my audience of peers, and I think it would work for the general public as well. Why not impart our knowledge of history through the demystification of what researching history involves? Perhaps this is one way historians and other public humanists can convey why the humanities matter. (There’s been a lot of debate about how to do this best in recent months.)

And so what did I take away from this experience? Was it worth it to spend all that time throwing a crutch around my apartment for a few nights, trying to find the sweet spot of my enthusiasm for my research? The process reinforced what I knew already—that good research takes time, that I love my research and sharing it with others, and that it takes time to craft a unique presentation for each unique audience. I owe it to myself, I owe it to my audience, and I owe it to the humanities.

Thanks, Ted!

About the author: When she is not antiquing, hanging out in a museum, or teaching, Nicole Belolan is studying material culture and disability in early America.This year, she is working as a graduate assistant for the Museum Studies Program’s Sustaining Places initiative. Read more about Nicole’s work at her web site, http://www.nicolebelolan.org, and follow her on Twitter @nicolebelolan.

Summer Projects in Material Culture

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From sewing tents to digging up sherds, Ph.D. students in the History of American Civilization program at the University of Delaware’s Department of History know how to keep themselves busy during the summer. Here is a sampling of what we’ll be doing over the next few months:

Nicole Belolan, Elizabeth Jones, and Anne Reilly will all participate as fellows in the University of Delaware’s Public Humanities Institute (DELPHI). DELPHI exposes graduate students studying material culture to a variety of tools for communicating their research to a broad audience. After two weeks of workshops in June, participants purse their research and work on public outreach projects. Nicole, Anne and Liz will all continue to pursue research they are conducting for their dissertations. You can read short descriptions of their research below. You can also learn more at the DELPHI web site.

  • Nicole is working on the material culture of physical mobility impairment in early America. She is investigating how early Americans used objects to manage their bodies and how those experiences shaped ideas and practices related to gender roles, citizenship, and identity.
  •  Liz’s research examines the role of women’s consumption in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century mid Atlantic, utilizing methodologies from both economic history and material culture studies.
  • Anne is working on twentieth-century public commemorations. This summer, Anne will continue her research on the 1907 Jamestown Tercentenary. She will begin in Richmond, supported by a research fellowship from the Virginia Historical Society.

Alison Kreitzer will be interning at the Hagley Museum and Library this summer. She is part of a team working to finish processing the Z. Taylor Vinson Transportation Collection. Researchers will gain access to the 700 cubic feet of transportation (mainly automobile) memorabilia in 2014. In the meantime, learn more about the Z. Taylor Vinson Transportation Collection by visiting Hagley’s blog.

Lisa Minardi is organizing the fifth annual archaeology field school at The Speaker’s House. The house was the home of Frederick Muhlenberg (1750-1801), the first Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Muhlenberg’s house is located in Montgomery County, PA. The dig runs June 4th through 22th. Visit www.speakershouse.org to learn more.

Tyler Putman sewing. His tailoring skills will come in handy this summer while working at Colonial Williamsburg.

Tyler Putman sewing. His tailoring skills will come in handy this summer while working at Colonial Williamsburg.

Tyler Putman will be dusting off his needles to help reproduce the field tent or marquee George Washington used during the American Revolution. The Museum of the American Revolution owns the original “First Oval Office,” which will serve as the project’s model. Several expert “tailor-historians” will sew the reproduction while interpreting the process at Colonial Williamsburg this summer. You can read more about the project here, and  you can “follow” the tent on its Facebook page here. In addition,check out the project’s progress throughout the summer via the web cam.

Be sure to check back during the summer to read some reports from the field!

Reflections on Presenting Material Culture Research to Public Audiences

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Over the past few years, History of American Civilization students have presented their research to the University of Delaware’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. Take a moment to read Nicole Belolan’s recent exchange with her colleague Alison Kreitzer below. Here, Alison, a fourth year Am Civ candidate, reflects on how sharing her research on African American men and automobile racing in the early twentieth century with the non-specialist Osher audience has enriched her academic work.

What was the nature of the research you presented to your Osher audience?

Alison: My Osher talk focused on the participation of African American men in automobile racing during the 1920s and early 1930s. African American men interested in automobiles and automotive technology began to compete in automobile races during this period to combat the social and spatial limitations that black Americans faced under Jim Crow. African Americans recognized that the automobile had specific cultural capital within American society as a symbol of white, middle class status. By showing that they could own, drive, and repair automobiles through organized speed contests, African Americans used this leisure activity as a platform to push for greater racial equality within the United States.

My research for this talk is primarily based on documentary evidence collected from African American newspapers. I am particularly interested in gaining a greater understanding of the types of automobiles that black racers competed in during this period. By comparing the driver and car information provided in contemporary newspapers with surviving racecars from this period located in automobile racing museums, I have significantly expanded my understanding of the types of racecars, financial costs, and the consumer networks black racecar drivers used to piece together their racing machines.

You participated in the University of Delaware’s Delaware Public Humanities Institute (DELPHI) during the summer of 2012. DELPHI is designed develop graduate students’ public humanities “toolkits” through a series of workshops. How did your participation in DELPHI help prepare you for the Osher audience?

Alison: My participation in DELPHI taught me important strategies to “package” my dissertation research in ways that are exciting and meaningful to a more general audience of history enthusiasts. Several members of the Osher audience had experience with racing or tinkering with automobiles, so they automatically connected to the more technical side of my talk, which discussed the types of racecars that participants competed in during the 1920s and 1930s. However, my talk also focused on larger historical issues and themes like segregated transportation and race relations. Audience members who did not have firsthand experience with automobile racing connected to personal experiences where they had witnessed cases of discrimination similar to those experienced by the black automobile racers that I described in my talk. The series of DELPHI workshops also helped me hone my public speaking and presentation skills, which allowed me to feel comfortable addressing the Osher audience.

How did your presentation preparation and style differ from how you might have prepared for a more “academic” venue such as a scholarly conference?

Alison: Unlike a scripted academic talk, the more informal nature of the Osher talk allowed me to discuss my research without reading my presentation to the audience. I used my power point slides which featured images of African American automobilists, racecar drivers, primary source documents, and surviving racecars to lead my discussion. Osher audience members felt comfortable with the informal nature of my presentation and asked questions throughout my talk, which allowed me to provide additional information about my research findings that targeted the specific interests of particular members of the audience.

The presentation technology has changed, but Alison's audience was likely as engaged as was the audience pictured here in 1944 at the United Nations Club in Washington, D.C. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

The presentation technology has changed, but we can be sure that Alison’s audience was as engaged with her talk on African American men and automobile racing  as was the audience pictured here in a 1944 photograph taken by J. Sherrel Lakey at the United Nations Club in Washington, D.C. (Library of Congress)

How did you get your listeners to relate to your work? What about material culture or your research in particular strikes a chord with the public?

Alison: The majority of the Osher audience members had no direct experience with automobile racing; however, all listeners had driven automobiles throughout their lifetimes. An important way to connect listeners to my topic is to directly compare the experience of driving a passenger automobile to the experience of driving a racecar. Discussing the limited safety equipment like helmets and goggles available to interwar racers also helps audience members to create a mental image of what automobile racing was like during this period. After introducing objects that help to contextualize the sport for listeners, I can discuss how larger historical themes like masculinity, American leisure, consumption, and race relations are important aspects of my work. Even if the audience is not particularly interested or knowledgeable about automobile racing, my discussion of the material culture and major themes pertinent to the history of dirt track racing strikes a chord with members of the public who have participated in America’s car culture and are interested in hobbies or sports.

How did presenting your work to this group change the way you think about your research?

Alison: The Osher participants provided several stories of their own personal experiences with automobile traveling and competitive racing that worked to verify the historical experiences and narrative that forms the heart of my research. Their questions encouraged me to dig deeper into the personal histories of individual drivers to develop a greater understanding of their educational and family backgrounds as well as the reasons that prevented them from continuing to participate in automobile races by the early 1940s.

In what ways do you think material culture scholars are particularly well situated to bridge what is sometimes perceived as a “gap” between the public and academia?

Alison: Material culture scholars are particularly well suited to bridge the gap between academic research and public humanities because people from all different personal and educational backgrounds interact with objects like passenger automobiles on a daily basis. By studying objects, material culture scholars develop additional questions to pursue throughout their research projects that they may have missed by only studying document records. Since automobile racing history is not a widely studied topic highlighted in museum collections or academia, my research goals include developing public humanities outreach programs like this talk for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute to educate people about dirt track automobile racing history.

On behalf of the Am Civ Blog, I extend special thanks to Alison for sharing her experiences with us today! We look forward to seeing her research progress. In the mean time, stay tuned this summer for more reflections on what Am Civvies are getting out of the Delaware Public Humanities Institute (DELPHI) fellowship training. 

“Just imported in the last ship from London”: Early America in the News

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Civil War-era newspaper vendor

These Civil War-era men bought their news from a peddler with a horse and cart. My students need not look further than their laptops for early America in the news. Alexander Gardner, Newspaper Vendor and Cart in Virginia Camp, 1863 (Library of Congress)

History is not dead. At least, that’s what I hope to impart to my students through a weekly exercise I call “early America in the news.” Each Thursday before my students’ early American history Friday discussion sections, I receive an email from those who have signed up for that day to summarize and comment on one recent news story that features any aspect of American history through 1865. After I screen the story they have emailed to make sure it is, in fact, about American history up through the Civil War (there was some coaching involved in training them how to google such stories), I let them know it’s a keeper. Then, I prepare a few things to say about the story for class. The next day, we commence our discussion sections with the news story. Voila! Instant educational (not to mention topical) ice breaker.

Thus far, in addition to giving me a way to structure the beginning of most discussions, the exercise has, I think, accomplished a number of objectives. First, the assignment contributes toward the students’ participation grade. Therefore, it’s a low stakes but fun task that gets them talking about something they find interesting. I think I have even noticed some eye-twinkling while one student confessed his love of baseball in the course of telling the class about a baseball one African American orderly picked up after the Battle at Shiloh, Tennessee, in 1862 (in this case, the students even found one of my favorite history blogs, The Vault). I used this particular story to talk a bit about the significance of nationalizing experiences such as the Civil War, the consumption of mass-produced goods, and participation in “national” leisure activities such as going to the movies. It’s OK to talk about “modern” American history topics, of course, as that discussion links topics covered in 1865-to-the-present surveys that students tend to be more familiar with in the first place.

Lest you think this is all fun and games, in another class, a student brought in a story about an exhibition at the History Colorado Center featuring the Jefferson Bible. Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), if you aren’t aware, cut and pasted together his version of The Bible that, in the words of Smithsonian curator Harry Rubenstein, excluded “anything [Jefferson] could not believe through the lens of reason.” When I asked the student why he found this particular story to be interesting, he said it shed light on Jefferson’s “private” side. He went on to explain that he didn’t feel that we necessarily get this perspective from the typical textbook or Friday discussion section. (For more nerdery, check out the slick web site the Smithsonian put together that all about TJ’s Bible.) And, hot dog, it was a great material culture embodiment of Jefferson’s Enlightenment perspective (however complicated TJ was in reality)! Since objects come up often in this assignment, it’s a good opportunity to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of various kinds of evidence, ranging from material culture to oral history to manuscript sources.

Other topics have ranged from editorials likening Alexander Hamilton et al.’s deft handling of the early Republic’s economic woes to the contemporary debate over America’s economic crisis to debates over whether the movie Lincoln did more to hurt or help history (I could have cited any number of essays here, as much ink has been spilled in the historical community on this topic!).

I could go on, but you have probably surmised the second objective by now: In addition to getting students excited about a specific aspect of history they find intriguing, the exercise reinforces history’s relevance to important contemporary political debates. Not only is history alive, but you can touch it, too.

I confess that this exercise is not a wholly original idea. I was inspired by the Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History’s weekly roundup of early America in the news blog postings (you can read the most recent one here), as well as Am Civ colleague Alison Kreitzer who assigned a similar task to her world history students last semester (thanks to both parties!). But if there are any other fledgeling educators out there looking for a simple class exercise that will get your students talking and thinking outside the survey box–and maybe even get them to a museum or to read the news more often–concocting your own version of this assignment might be a good start.

About the author: When she is not antiquing, hanging out in a museum, or teaching, Nicole Belolan is studying material culture and disability in early America. Read more about her work at her web site, http://www.nicolebelolan.org, and follow her on Twitter @nicolebelolan.