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Networked NY Q&A: Ed Whitley

April 17, 2012 in Networked New York, Resources by Annie | Permalink

For the next few weeks, Jane and I will be posting Q&A’s with our Networked New York conference panelists. We’ll start with Edward Whitley, Professor of English and American Studies at Lehigh University.

1. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between digital representations of 19th- and 21st-century social and professional networks? How do sites like Facebook and LinkedIn serve as foils or complements to The Vault at Pfaff’s and The Crowded Page? Are there other sites that inform your team’s work?

Sociologists and historians have been thinking about social networks for decades, and they’ve produced a complex body of scholarship about how to define and interpret them. In recent years, however, as sites like Facebook and Twitter have become part of our everyday lives, the concept of social networking has become both more expansive and more narrow than this scholarship had previously allowed for: expansive in that those of us who participate in these website are more keenly aware than ever of how we fit into our personal and professional networks; and narrow in that what social networks are and how we image they behave have come increasingly to be defined by the look and feel of these massive websites. I cringe when people describe The Vault at Pfaff’s and The Crowded Page as “nineteenth-century Facebook,” because I don’t want our ability to imagine what these projects could become to be overdetermined by sites like Facebook and Twitter. I’ve learned a lot about how to think outside the Facebook box from Micki McGee, a sociologist-turned-digital humanist and the director of the Yaddo Circles project, and Jean Bauer, the creator of Project Quincy and the director of  The Early American Foreign Service Database. These scholars have a keen eye for design and a strong sense of how the data sets they are working with are unique products of their particular historical moments. If we want to create digital visualizations of the complex workings of literary communities from the past, we need to be able to do what McGee and Bauer are doing: which is to say that we need to understand how these communities are not like Facebook and Twitter, despite the surface similarities–the Pfaff’s community, for example, barely even had the telegraph to keep them connected, let alone high-speed wi-fi–and we need to work with talented graphic designers who take seriously the idea that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social networks behave differently than their twenty-first-century counterparts.

2. In American Bards (2010), you seek to “correct the critical myopia that has cast Whitman as the ‘solitary singer’ of American poetry.” Is this a goal motivating your work on The Vault at Pfaff’s as well?

In American Bards I had a lot of fun pairing Whitman with poets he never met but with whom he nevertheless shared a project to assume the title of national poet from the margins of national society. My goal was to see Whitman—and, by extension, antebellum poetry—in new and exciting ways through these unexpected comparisons. The Vault at Pfaff’s also has a similar goal of resituating Whitman in his culture, but I’m not trying to produce the same kind of unexpected contrasts that I was aiming for in American Bards when I put Whitman into conversation with an African American abolitionist (James M. Whitfield), a Mormon pioneer (Eliza R. Snow), and a Cherokee journalist (John Rollin Ridge). To be honest, when I started The Vault at Pfaff’s in 2004 I didn’t know what would come from situating Whitman among the antebellum bohemians, and that was (and continues to be) part of the fun. I didn’t know if Whitman would fade into the background as just one more counter-culture writer from the 1850s or if he would emerge even more powerfully as the definitive voice of the antebellum New York underground. I hand-picked the poets for American Bards to generate a very specific effect; for The Vault at Pfaff’s I’ve deliberately kept things open-ended. A scholarly monograph needs to have an argument (“Whitman is not x; rather, he is y”), but a digital archive isn’t obliged to direct its materials in defense of a specific thesis statement. Instead, an archive such as The Vault at Pfaff’s can make its contribution by raising questions–“How would it change our view of Whitman to consider his life and work from within the community of x and y?”–rather than arguing for certain answers.  

3. What are your hopes for The Vault at Pfaff’s? Do you anticipate the archive begetting traditional scholarship? Given the site’s accessibility, who do you imagine to be its future users?

Since its initial public launch in 2006, The Vault at Pfaff’s has helped to bring together a community of scholars who are working to recover the lives and careers of the antebellum bohemians. Some of these scholars learned about the bohemians in large part through the materials available on The Vault at Pfaff’s; some of them had been researching the bohemians prior to 2006, but the presence of The Vault at Pfaff’s has since helped to coalesce the identity of this scholarly community. Members of this community of scholars have presented research together on panels at the conferences of the American Literature Association and Modern Language Association, and we are currently working on a collection of essays titled Whitman among the Bohemians (under contract with the University of Iowa Press), which I am editing with Joanna Levin. I’m hopeful that The Vault at Pfaff’s will continue to support scholarly productivity. I also look forward to continuing to receive emails from genealogist, journalists, writers of historical fiction, and New York history buffs who visit the site and thank us for what we’ve done to make information about the antebellum bohemians more accessible than it’s ever been.

Twitter: @edwardwhitley

For further reading, check out another blog post about Whitley’s take on digital humanities for the University of Michigan Press.

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Klinkowstrom’s New York

October 24, 2011 in Writing New York by Cyrus | Permalink

For a number of years, we offered this extra-credit question on the Writing New York final examination: “Who was Baron Axel von Klinkowstrom and what is his significance to our course?”

To answer this question, you would have to have read the draft of my essay “Whitman’s and Melville’s New York, 1819–1855,” assigned as secondary reading on our syllabus. There you would have discovered a discussion of Klinkowstrom (1775-1837), a Swedish naval officer, who visited the United States in 1818 and lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn from 1819–20. Klinkowstrom was a precursor of such distinguished European commentators on American affairs as Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Dickens, James Bryce, and (more recently) Bernard-Henri Levy

The primary purpose of Klinkowstrom’s visit to New York was to report on a new invention: the steamboat. He wrote a series of letters to the Swedish government in which he described not only the American development of steamboat technology, but also the state of American life, especially life in and around New York City.

“I was not prepared to find such a large and populous city on a coast where two hundred years ago there was only an insignificant village,” Klinkowstrom wrote on his first arrival in 1818. He added that “from the sea the city is not handsome, as the houses are not stuccoed, and the view is obstructed by the many ships whose tackle hugs the bridges in a double row, and whose masts form a forest.” He was immediately impressed by the city’s commercial spirit: “Although I have only hurriedly seen New York as yet,” Klinkowstrom wrote in 1818, “I do believe there is a livelier spirit of speculation there and that people are eager to become rich quickly through many enterprises.”

The following year, after he had taken up residence in Manhattan, Klinkowstrom commented on the city’s architecture and streets. Noting that “the houses in New York are usually painted in the English fashion, that is to say with a dark brick color and white trimming between the stones,” Klinkowstrom suggested that

the city would be rather gloomy if the streets were not wide and cheerful. Here and there trees are planted along the streets. The streets all have sidewalks which make walking very easy. In the newer part of the city, the streets are straight; but they seldom cross each other at right angles, and in the entire city there is not one handsome square.

Klinkowstrom praised Broadway and drew a watercolor of the intersection of Broadway and Fulton Street, facing City Hall, and he called this part of New York “really quite beautiful.” Klinkowstrom, however, wryly included a pig rooting about in the street on the right-hand side of the picture, and in his letters he noted the “harmful and unpleasant” custom of “allowing the swine to wander about freely on the streets. . . . These pigs have often caused ridiculous situations. Once during the fashionable promenade hour on Broadway I saw some of these animals rush on the sidewalk, making a sharp contrast with the elegant clothes, and one filthy pig bumped into a well-dressed woman. Often they trip people who are not sufficiently observant.”

New York, he concluded, “is not as clean as cities of the same size and population in Europe.”

[The picture, "Broadway-street and the City Hall in New York" (1824) is engraving by Carl Fredrik Akrell (Swedish, 1779–1868), after Klinkowstrom's watercolor. It is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Read more about it here.]

 

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The Civil War Begins

April 13, 2011 in History by Cyrus | Permalink

One hundred fifty years ago today, the United States was at war — with itself.  On the morning of April 12, 1861, the first shots were fired on the Union’s Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina beginning the war that still leads the list of U.S. wartime deaths. For comparison’s sake, there were 623,026 Civil War deaths, compared to 407,316 in World War II, 116,708 in World War I, and 58,169 in Vietnam.

Melissa Block of NPR’s All Things Considered did an interesting interview yesterday, to mark the anniversary of the beginning of the war, with Civil War historian Harold Holzer, who has published widely on the Civil War and is the editor of The New York Times Complete Civil War. The two talked about the “eerie calm” pervading U.S. newspapers on the day the war began. They began with The New York Times:

BLOCK: Let’s start with The New York Times on that day leading up to the first shots being fired on Fort Sumter. The New York Times had a brief item from Charleston, talking about intense excitement in the city and that it has a map, actually, of the forts in Charleston Harbor; lots of anticipation leading up to that day.

Mr. HOLZER: Absolutely. And a map itself was a rarity. It was a declaration by the publisher that something special was afoot, indeed, because the newspapers were very gray in those days, bereft of illustration, unless they were the picture weeklies. So The Times is heralding the kind of breathless anticipation that’s gripping the whole country.

You can view the first page of the Times from that day here and read the transcript of the NPR interview (or listen to it) here.

The Times has a superb collection of materials about the war on their Disunion blog, which follows the progress of the war. Among the materials is a reproduction of the note that actually began the war and a vivid account by Adam Goodheart of the circumstances surrounding its delivery.

One piece that should be of interest to our students in Writing New York describes how Walt Whitman spent the evening of April 12:

On the evening of April 12, 1861, Walt Whitman attended a performance of Fromental Halévy’s opera “The Jewess” at the Academy of Music, on 14th Street and Irving Place in Manhattan. Just before midnight he was walking down the west side of Broadway, toward the Fulton Ferry to return to his home, in Brooklyn. Suddenly, he later recalled, he “heard in the distance the loud cries of the newsboys, who came presently tearing and yelling up the street, rushing from side to side more furiously than usual.”

Tom Chaffin’s piece, “How Manhattan Drum-Taps Led,” describes the way in which Whitman would come to leave New York for Washington, D.C. where he ministered to wounded soldiers.

The site also features a virtual reproduction of the notebook that Whitman carried during the war. Students of Whitman — and of U.S. literature more generally — will find it fascinating.

[Photo from the Times blog: Adam Goodheart's piece, "The Defenders."]

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Limitless Walt

July 1, 2010 in Events by Cyrus | Permalink

Tonight, as part of their Centennial Celebration, The Brooklyn Heights Association (BHA) will collaborate with ISSUE Project Room for a special outdoor performance, “I Do Not Doubt I Am Limitless: Walt Whitman’s Brooklyn.”

The event is free and begins at 5:00 p.m. at the Pier 1 Harbor View Lawn of the new Brooklyn Bridge Park and lasts until midnight. According to the organizers, the event is meant “to channel the psychedelic spirit of poet, journalist, humanist and Brooklynite, Walt Whitman.”

The outdoor concert, closing with a late night program of acoustic music after 10 pm, is part of Celebrating a Century, an exciting year-long series of events highlighting Brooklyn Heights history, famous residents, and the BHA’s past & future. Musicians and bands including the Wingdale Community Singers, Christy and Emily, Prince Rama, and others will perform original work along with new pieces set to a marathon reading of “Leaves of Grass,” recited by some of the nation’s most intriguing poets. Performers Include:

CSC Funk Band

Rick Moody and Hannah Marcus of the Wingdale Community Singers

Loren Connors and Suzanne Langille

Jonathan Kane’s February

Prince Rama of Ayodhya

Henry Grimes

Christy and Emily

Shannon Fields

Sexual Energies School: Quebec City

Steve Dalashinsky

Bruce Andrews & Sally Silvers

Lilah Freedland

Holly Anderson

Alyssa Taylor Wendt

Nicole Peyrafitte, Pierre Joris, Brendan Lorber, Yuko Otomo,Tsaurah Litsky, Linda Lerner, and more.

For directions to the park, CLICK HERE.

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Adah Isaacs Mencken

March 29, 2010 in People by Bryan | Permalink

In this morning’s lecture on early-20c Greenwich Village bohemianism, I mentioned an even earlier bohemian literary enclave organized around a bar called Pfaff’s, at Broadway and Bleecker. Its habitues included Walt Whitman and his friend, the scandalous actress Adah Isaacs Menken — sometimes known simply as “The Naked Lady” — pictured above.

Digging around Google for an image of Menken to drop into my slideshow, I was delighted to discover a blog I’d never seen before, The Great Bare, dedicated to Menken. It’s maintained by the writers Michael and Barbara Foster, who are collaborating on a Menken bio. You can also learn more about Menken at The Vault at Pfaff’s, which I mentioned in a post last year around this time. The complicated racial dimensions of Menken’s life and performance are engagingly treated by our friend Daphne Brooks in her book Bodies in Dissent.

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Get your flash on

February 17, 2010 in History, Writing New York by Bryan | Permalink

The aim of this morning’s lecture in Writing New York was to situate Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass within the nineteenth-century city’s worlds of print, from the highbrow publishing industry to cheap print, penny presses, flash weeklies, and urban pornography. Depending on which Whitman critics you read, he hews closer to high or low. I suggested he wanted to have it both ways: ever a joiner, he wanted to bring together the best of both worlds.

At one point, while talking about the so-called “Flash press,” I did geek out considerably, telling the story of how a bundle of these rare “sporting” men’s periodicals, mildly pornographic and thoroughly anti-authoritarian, made their way from an early-20c sportswriter’s private collection into the American Antiquarian Society. For the last dozen years or so, cultural historians have been poring over them aiming to understand more about 19c New York subcultures of style, sexuality, and reading. Other rare examples of these magazines have turned up in the city’s municipal archives, where they were long ago submitted as evidence in a rash of obscene libel trials in the 1840s, right about the time Whitman was editing his nativist newspaper, The Aurora. I mentioned Donna Dennis’s account of this legal history last week; you can also read key samples of this material in an anthology published a few years ago by some urban historian whose work I admire quite a bit.

If you want to understand why I would geek out about the preservation of this sort of ephemera, let me just offer one example of the fascinating work these materials have allowed cultural historians to undertake. In the on-line quarterly Common-place a few years back, James Cook — a cultural biographer of P. T. Barnum and editor of a thoroughly engrossing Barnum reader — drew on some material from flash weeklies to tease out some new understanding of the mixed-race origins of American popular culture. He starts his piece by recalling Charles Dickens’ famous account of the a dance hall in the Five Points, which featured a black performer who later became famous as “Master Juba.” Later in his essay Cook points out that most people have assumed Dickens catapulted Juba to stardom, but some new evidence from flash weeklies helps us flesh out the story: “We now know a good deal more” about Juba than ever before, Cook writes. We know

that his real name was William Henry Lane, although he generally performed as Juba or Master Juba; that he was born in Providence, Rhode Island, during the late 1820s, part of the first generation of African Americans to come of age following emancipation; that soon after Dickens’s visit he became the first black man to break the color line in the minstrel industry; that he participated in a series of “match dances” against Master John Diamond, the leading Irish American minstrel dancer of the day; and that he used his growing fame to forge a more lasting and successful career in Britain, where he eventually performed for Queen Victoria.Most scholars have assumed that American Notes represented the starting point for Lane’s public career. But an anonymous letter to one of the flash papers offers a more complex history. An up-and-coming showman by the name of P.T. Barnum, it turns out, had recently managed a young black dancer known as Juba at New York’s Vauxhall Gardens. The letter also suggests that Barnum deceived the sporting fraternity in two ways. In 1840, he presented Lane as part of a conventional minstrel show, without informing his patrons that the man behind the burnt cork was black. In 1841, he took the deceit a step further, promoting the young African American virtuoso as John Diamond. Barnum even staged bogus “trials of skill” as part of the act, with wagers on Lane-as-Diamond to win!

For evidence of the hopelessly mixed racial origins of U.S. popular culture, this is about as good as it gets.

For cultural historians of 19c NYC, that’s about as good as it gets too. I recommend the rest of Cook’s fascinating essay, which includes topics that have turned up elsewhere in our course, from Five Points and Bowery B’hoys, to city mystery novels (including those by Ned Buntline, a guy I didn’t get a chance to mention, but who, in addition to writing racy novels was a ringleader in the Astor Place riots), to blackface and the Bowery Theatre. It’s a perfect slice of the Bowery world Whitman sometimes wandered into, eager to take his readers with him.

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Bohemian Beginnings

March 30, 2009 in Neighborhood Scenes, Resources, Writing New York by Bryan | 1 comment

bleeckerbroadway.jpgMost of lecture today was devoted to the idea of Greenwich Village in the early twentieth century — and to the group of people the historian Christine Stansell has termed “American Moderns.”

I did mention during lecture some earlier stirrings of New York’s bohemian subculture, strong enough that they received commentary from outsiders. W.D. Howells pokes fun at middle-class slumming — young writers and artists who want to make a romantic escape from their parents’ stifling genteel culture — in The Coast of Bohemia (1893). In the 1870s the journalist James D. McCabe, in Lights and Shadows of New York Life, has this portrait of “Bleecker Street”:

In many respects Bleecker Street is more characteristic of Paris than of New York. It reminds one strongly of the Latin Quarter. … It is one of the headquarters of Bohemianism, and Mrs. Grundy [a code word for the epitome of genteel propriety] now shivers with holy horror when she thinks it was once her home. The street has not entirely lost its reputation. No one is prepared to say it is a vile neighborhood; no one would care to class it with Houston, Mercer, Greene, or Water Streets; but people shake their heads, look mysterious, and sigh ominously when you ask them about it. It is a suspicious neighborhood, to say the least, and he who frequents it must be prepared for the gossip and surmises of his friends. … Walk down it at almost any hour of the day or night, and you will see many things that are new to you. Strange characters meet you at every step; even the shops have a Bohemian aspect, for trade is nowhere so much the victim of chance as here.

Who are these strange characters? He goes on to say they’re quite a different crowd than you’ll find walking on Broadway, so close by:

That long-haired, queerly dressed young man, with a parcel under his arm, who passed you just then, is an artist, and his home is in the attic of that tall house from which you saw him pass out.  … If you look up to the second floor, you may see a pretty, but not over fresh looking young woman [an actress], gazing down into the street. … She is used to looking at men, and to having them look at her, and she is not averse to their admiration. On the floor above her dwells Betty Mulligan, a pretty little butterfly well known to the lovers of the ballet as Mademoiselle Alexandrine. No one pretends to know her history. In the same house is a fine-looking woman, not young, but not old. Her ‘husband’ has taken lodgings here for her, but he comes to see her only at intervals. … Women come here to meet other men besides their husbands, and men bring women here who are not their wives. Bleecker Street asks no questions, but it has come to suspect the men and women who are seen in it. [Excerpted in Sawyers, ed., The Greenwich Village Reader]

whitman_pfaffs.jpgThe intersection of Broadway and Bleecker had, even earlier, been home to a bohemian literary scene that met at a cellar pub called Pfaff’s. The characters affiliated with the Pfaff’s scene fit some of McCabe’s character types: artists, actresses, dancers, writers, the most famous of whom was Walt Whitman. (He took a visiting Emerson to Pfaff’s for dinner.) A terrific website hosted by Lehigh University and created by Ed Whitley and Rob Weidman offers biographies of over 150 key figures who made their way through Pfaff’s, including Howells, Horatio Alger, the famous actress Adah Isaacs Menken, and the actor Joseph Jefferson. The site, The Vault at Pfaff’s, also contains searchable digital reproductions of The Saturday Press, the short-lived newspaper edited by Henry Clapp, Jr., a key publication for the Pfaff’s crowd. There’s enough there to lose yourself in for several hours, to be sure.

[Whitman at Pfaff's, image taken from The Vault at Pfaff's]

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The Wordness of the Whale and the Waltness of the Whitman

July 9, 2008 in Odds and Ends by Bryan | Permalink

Or, if anyone wants to take this back to ’94, maybe that should be the Wackness of the Whale?

Caleb Crain had the great idea to cut and paste the entire text of Moby-Dick into the online  tag-cloud widget Worldle, which he asked to search for the top 365 words. Here’s what resulted:

whale.png

And yes, by popular demand he set up a Cafe Press page so you can order it as a T-shirt. What about the mugs?

I thought about this image yesterday when my kids and I climbed on board the schooner Pioneer and, following the safety speech, the captain said out loud, to no one and everyone, in spite of the beautiful July skies: “Whenever it is a damp, drizzly, November in my soul …” And then we went sailing.

In other NYC literary reference matters …

Readers familiar with my left shoulder will know I wear my Whitmania on my sleeve, as it were. So I’m always tickled to find new Walt goodies on the Web. Until recently I’d never stumbled across the page Whitman’s Brooklyn, which I highly recommend, especially to those who feel like the fellow sold out when he designated himself a son of Manhattan. Seriously, though, can you imagine it if the line went: “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Brooklyn the son”?

Finally, I should note that I found Whitman’s Brooklyn via a comment on Edge of the American West, one of our favorite blogs. On a few occasions we’ve shamelessly borrowed the format for their regular “This Day in History” feature, and I’m sure we’ll do so again. It’s too good an idea not to steal. (Though I think Cyrus beat them to finding a relevant date for memorializing a Stones album.) On the 5th of July their newest contributor, SEK, a PhD candidate out on that side of the continent, put up some of Whitman’s anonymous self-promotional meta-poetry to honor the anniversary of shamelessly promoting Leaves. (The anniversary for Leaves itself was, of course, on the 4th.) It’s worth checking out if you’ve never seen it, but don’t let it stand for returning to the original.

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