Category Archives: American Studies

by | May 24, 2013 · 8:30 am

New in Anabaptist Studies

SmuckerHEADING

The AmishThe Amish—the companion book to the American Experience documentary on PBS—takes an in-depth look into Amish life in America.

Publisher’s Weekly says of The Amish: “The authors successfully address the seeming exoticism of the Amish without sensationalism . . . The scholarship is enlivened with quotes and personal anecdotes, and the final section on the future of the Amish raises fascinating questions, even for casual readers.”

Hopkins Digital Shorts,
Chapter Excerpts from The Amish

From Rumspringa to Marriage In this digital short, the authors consider the nuances of this important rite of passage into Amish adulthood.

The Amish and Technology This digital short explores the complicated relationship between the Amish and technology today.

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More Titles in Anabaptist Studies

An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe Provides a scholarly investigation of a movement that changed the history of Protestantism.

Amish Quilts: Crafting an American Icon  The definitive study on the history, meaning, art, and commerce of Amish quilts. Forthcoming in Fall 2013.

Pacifists in Chains: The Persecution of Hutterites during the Great War  Documents the disturbing history of four pacifists imprisoned for their refusal to serve during World War I. Forthcoming in Fall 2013.

Rise of the Bonnet Ripper

weaver-zercher rev comp.inddIn her article in the Los Angeles Review of Books,  Valerie Weaver-Zercher, author of Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels, educates readers on the phenomenon of the bonnet ripper.

“The promise of the cover is borne out by the content: an engaging analysis of ‘bonnet rippers’ and their audience.”—Shelf Awareness

Amish Conference at the Young Center

Elizabethtown College’s Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies will host Amish America: Plain Technology in a Cyber World , a conference highlighting the challenges and impact of new technology on manufacturing, family life, consumption, medicine, and leisure for Amish and other plain communities in North America, June 6-8, 2013.

 

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Filed under American History, American Studies, Amish, Anabaptist & Pietist Studies, Coming Soon, Conferences, Current Affairs, Digital Content, E-Books, For Everyone, History, Literature, Popular Culture, Publishing News, Reviews, War and Conflict

by | May 3, 2013 · 12:11 pm

Catching up with Project MUSE, May 2013

By Tashina Gunning

2012 was an exciting year for Project MUSE, and one that expanded our collection of scholarship dramatically. With the addition of books to our platform, the amount of content on MUSE more than doubled. Not to be outdone by its predecessor, 2013 is proving to be every bit as eventful!

project-muse_final-logoIn response to many requests from academic institutions, we’re offering a wider variety of book collections and purchase options this year to accommodate the often dramatically different research and budget needs of our library customers.

Building on our journal collection’s strength as a go-to resource for Area Studies content, MUSE now offers seven new Area Studies collections: African Studies, American Studies, Asian and Pacific Studies, Jewish Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and Russian and East European Studies. These interdisciplinary collections bring together books that facilitate an in-depth examination of the historical, cultural, political, and social forces shaping various world regions. We’ve also added Ecology and Evolution, which contains a range of natural history, environmental history, natural resource management, and human ecology titles.

Out of more than 23,000 books on MUSE, over 14,000 are now available for single title purchase through our partnership with YBP Library Services. More than three-quarters of our 83 participating UPCC publishers have signed on to this optional program. Announced in November 2012, the partnership between MUSE and YBP officially launched in March of this year.

Currently, 19 countries access books on MUSE, with the majority of usage coming from North America (60% in the United States and 12% in Canada). Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore round out the top five. Scholars in Norway, the United Kingdom, Korea, and Hong Kong are also accessing books, as well as a significant number in Bangladesh and El Salvador, as part of our developing country initiative.

This year, MUSE welcomed seventeen new book publishers, including the Louisiana State University Press, University of North Carolina Press, MIT Press, Presses de l’Université du Québec, Central European University Press, and University Press of Florida. These additions bring the total number of book publishers to 83.

Although much of the news coming out of MUSE in the past year has been about books, our journals program continues to thrive. Thirty-one new journals joined MUSE for 2013, from both new and current partners. The journal publishers themselves reflect the diversity of the platform’s content. Of the new journal publishers, three hail from the United Kingdom (Association for Scottish Literary Studies, Lawrence & Wishart, and the Society for Theatre Research) and two from Asia (the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies and the Chinese University Press in Hong Kong).

Our industry faces many economic challenges; and each year MUSE seemingly inevitably loses journals that move to a for-profit business model. Happily, we saw the reverse of this trend in several instances in 2013. Five of our new journals are part of a series previously published by a commercial outfit, including Steinbeck Review, which we’re welcoming back to the MUSE platform after a several-year absence.

While the trend of journals leaving not-for-profit publishers for commercial publishers is highly unlikely to cease completely, these journal acquisitions give us hope that more journals will follow in the steps of these titles.

And with our recently inked partnership with HighWire and plans to maximize the discoverability of content on our platform, the rest of 2013 at MUSE is shaping up to be as busy as its first few months!

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Filed under African American Studies, American Studies, Caribbean Studies, Digital Content, E-Books, Journals, Latin American Studies, Libraries, MUSE, Publishing News, Uncategorized, Women's History

by | April 17, 2013 · 8:30 am

Expectations, surprises, and creative liberation

Guest post by Daniel Kilbride

I suppose that every historian approaches a research subject, even a new one about which he or she might know very little, with certain expectations. Some of us do much more: several years ago, a young historian shocked me with his very ambitious itinerary for research, writing, and publication. When I asked him how he expected to conduct his research so quickly, he replied that he knew what he wanted to find; not worried about finding contrary evidence that would contradict his preconceptions, he would simply record what he needed to confirm his thesis and move on to the next collection, the next library. Few historians, one hopes, are so mercenary (or, as my students like to put on their resumes, “goal-oriented”), but certainly it is the rare researcher who approaches a new project with no preconceptions.

I had some of my own assumptions when I began work on Being American in Europe. I feared that I might be very bored. More than one person has asked me if reading the letters, diaries, and travelogues of early Americans isn’t unlike watching the interminable slide show of your niece’s Disney vacation. Thematically, I knew that the spread-eagled nationalism of the pre-Civil War era makes our era’s sometimes cringe-worthy patriotism seem mild by comparison. I thought the paradoxical combination of excessive self-regard and sense of inferiority vis-à-vis the Old World would produce among Americans abroad a positively belligerent attitude toward Europe.  Sometimes I was right on both counts. In my worst moments with the sources, I pined for something as banal as an album of photos with Mickey, Minnie, and the Princesses. There is nothing that makes an afternoon seem quite so endless as a folder full of dull travel letters. I also came across quite a few figures that in a later era would be described as “ugly Americans.” Being American in Europe opens and closes with such a figure, Philadelphian Harry McCall, who sat in cafés across Britain and the Continent, writing letters that shot venom at the men and women who passed by his table.

More often, though, I was wrong (and was delighted to find myself mistaken). Many of my sources were not only vividly descriptive of European scenes, but marvelously opinionated—and opinions are a cultural historian’s bread and butter. Additionally, apropos of my second fear, these opinions were also surprisingly self-critical. Travelers, it turned out, did not solely venture abroad on a mission to vindicate the United States against the corrupt Old World. They were certainly anxious to justify their young republic, but they were eager to do so on Europe’s terms: they wanted not to separate themselves from western civilization, but to situate themselves within it.  The central theme of Being American in Europe is how travelers navigated the tension between the nationalist impulse to define a distinctive American identity against the secular and religious despotisms of the Old World and the post-colonial wish to orient the United States within western civilization.

This brings me back to the question of expectation. The discovery that Americans were not implacably hostile to Europe set me free. It forced me to abandon the hypothesis that had governed my early research. It compelled me to allow the sources to determine my thesis—a commonsensical orientation, I know, but one (see the anecdote above) that historians oftentimes resist, to their peril. Admittedly, I should have known better. I came to the topic of travel by way of my first book, An American Aristocracy, in which I studied southern travelers to Philadelphia in the era of the sectional conflict. Then, following the scholarship, I expected to find planter women and men interpreting Philadelphia through a haze of prejudices culled from proslavery literature. Instead, I found cosmopolitan people who thrived amidst the energy of America’s second-largest city. I suppose that experience should have cautioned me against putting too much stock in preconceptions. But, when preconceptions fall, they fall hard—and the result can force a writer to let the sources speak candidly to him or her. As a result, I was able to see that the task of being American in Europe was a lot more complicated than I had imagined it to be.

kilbrideDaniel Kilbride is an associate professor of history at John Carroll University in Ohio. He is the author of An American Aristocracy: Southern Planters in Antebellum Philadelphia.

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by | April 1, 2013 · 10:00 am

Baseball and agrarianism

Guest post by David Vaught

On Opening Day, many a broadcaster waxed poetic over the green grass, blue sky, fresh air, and carefree atmosphere of the downtown oasis of a professional ballpark. But ponder this: Baseball captures the essence of the American rural experience. Whether they know it or not, Americans think of baseball in agrarian terms—from Abner Doubleday and Cooperstown to Kevin Costner and Field of Dreams. We associate the game with nostalgia, romantic imagery, and pastoral flights of fancy. Even in today’s predominantly non-rural culture, rural culture continues to be expressed through baseball. Where else other than a major league ballpark does someone sitting in the middle of a row of thirty seats pass a $20 bill down through the many different hands—black, white, brown, male, female, gay, straight—to the hotdog man with the complete and total expectation that they will get back not only the hotdog but every last penny of change? That innate trust and sense of cooperation is rooted in our agrarian heritage, dating back to the days before the market complicated farmers’ lives. It epitomizes what Thomas Jefferson thought a nation of farmers would become.

Vaught Figure 3

A game of baseball at a farming community in Fayette County, ca. 1900. Fayette Heritage Museum and Archives, La Grange, Texas.

Baseball has also been immensely popular among rural people themselves since the days of Thomas Jefferson. Yet, few farmers and townspeople embraced the game so passionately and with such commitment for its abstract qualities—agrarian, nostalgic, romantic, or otherwise. For them, baseball’s appeal rested on real, tangible attributes. On one level, they simply enjoyed the excitement and camaraderie of the game. Baseball offered recreation, a distraction from their arduous daily routines, and an opportunity for hard-working farm families to gather together for a pleasant Sunday afternoon. The widespread, sustained passion for baseball among farm people over the decades, however, indicates that the game had a deeper, more complex cultural meaning than such an explanation suggests. Far from just a simple pastime, baseball became an expression, indeed a symbol, of the way farmers perceived day-to-day reality. With the emergence of market-oriented agriculture in the early nineteenth century, that reality became increasingly defined by skill, competitiveness, and chance: skill, with regard to their ability to produce high-quality crops in prodigious amounts; competitiveness, in terms of their insatiable appetite for achievement in a world of change and unpredictability; and chance, in that for all their skill and competitiveness, a spell of bad weather or a run of bad luck in the marketplace could bring failure, misery, and frustration. Given that perspective on life, farmers and townspeople preferred games that demanded skill, competitiveness, and chance—and baseball, with its intricate set of rules and rituals, action and suspense, and winner-take-all mentality offered them everything they wanted and needed and more.

Rural baseball now exists primarily in memories and on vintage fields—not because the game has lost popularity but because there are just barely enough farmers left to field a team. For much of American history, however, baseball served as the farmers’ game.

The Farmers' GameDavid Vaught is department head and professor of history at Texas A&M University and author of the recently published book The Farmers’ Game: Baseball in Rural America, available from JHU Press.

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by | March 26, 2013 · 9:00 am

When a Mennonite reads Amish fiction

Guest post by Valerie Weaver-Zercher

Academic research of readers and writers and books can take one to far-flung places: musty archives in Turkey, literacy circles in São Paulo, collections of incunabula in Mainz. But research for my book Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels propelled me toward rather than away from my own history, genealogy, and identity. By investigating this blockbuster genre of inspirational fiction, which calved a new novel every four days during 2012 and which has garnered wide attention in the media for its commercial success, I ended up inching closer and closer to the people and places that formed me.

As a Mennonite who shares ecclesial and theological roots with the Amish, and as a friend to several people who love Amish romance novels, I found myself unable to employ the distanced gaze of the traditional researcher who stands at a safe remove from her subjects. Rather than erasing myself from the analysis or pretending I had nothing invested in my data, I decided to do what literary theorist Scott Slovic calls “narrative scholarship,” in which writers do not strive to absent themselves from the text. Ian Marshall, expanding on this idea, suggests that an awareness “of our role not just as an observer but as a participant, as part and parcel of the world” is critical to explorations of literature.

So one June day, when I found myself driving the back roads of Holmes County, Ohio, on a research trip to discover whether Amish readers are reading Amish fiction, I chose to view the trip itself, not just the transcriptions of interviews, as data. I was traveling roads near where my Amish grandfather had been born and that my mother remembers from her childhood, when she would go with her father to attend family funerals and other functions. Rather than pretend that my research commenced when I pulled out my notebook or turned on my digital voice recorder, I wrote the journey into the book.

Interviewing loyal readers of Amish novels meant chatting with my uncle, who likes reading the books, at a family reunion, and listening in on conversations among women at church, who check out the novels from our church library. Researching the history of Amish fiction meant interviewing a former supervisor from a Mennonite publishing house where I worked in the 1990s, when Amish-themed novels made up a significant part of our publishing program. And simply reading Amish romance novels, which are often set in Lancaster County, took me to the landscape of my childhood, where my forebears settled in the 1700s and where I grew up.

There is risk involved in doing narrative scholarship: one’s prose can scooch almost imperceptibly toward self-absorption, or the flavor of personal investment can overpower the broth of data and analysis. But there’s danger in ignoring one’s personal location in one’s research, too, as feigned objectivity can result in a critical posture skewed by subconscious bias or unacknowledged proximity to the issues at hand. When one’s research agenda overlaps with personal life, I’ve found it better to name one’s location and loyalties on the playing field than to pretend one has no skin in the game.

Academic discourse is much more hospitable to the “I” of the researcher than it was in previous eras, and I’m glad that I didn’t have to write myself into invisibility when I wrote Thrill of the Chaste. Researching Amish fiction, and bringing to bear on it the illuminating powers of literary theory and cultural criticism, was a fascinating intellectual sojourn for me. It was also a visit home.

weaver-zercher rev comp.inddValerie Weaver-Zercher has written about Christianity and culture, Anabaptism, the environment, and parenting for a wide variety of outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Christian Science Monitor. The Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels is her first full-length book. Head over to our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter for your chance to win one of three copies of the book.

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Filed under American Studies, Amish, Anabaptist & Pietist Studies, Cultural Studies, For Everyone

by | December 7, 2012 · 9:26 am

The identity of a servant to a Union officer comes to light

Guest post by Ronald S. Coddington

There is perhaps no bigger thrill than being contacted by a reader with new information about one of the men profiled in my series of Faces books. I recently experienced the excitement after the unnamed individual in the frontispiece photograph of my latest volume, African American Faces of the Civil War: An Album, was identified by an unexpected source.

The identification came from a contributor to the book, photo collector and dealer Thomas Harris of New York City. I first met Harris years ago at the D.C. Antique Photo & Postcard Show, which is held annually in Arlington, Virginia. We struck up a conversation at one of the first events that I attended, and nowadays no visit to the show is complete until I have stopped by his table to chat for a few minutes. Harris has a fine eye for historic photography. I have always admired and appreciated the images he has offered for sale, and have made several purchases from his table over the years.

In 2009, when I started the search for African American photographs for the book, Harris was one of the first dealers that I contacted. He told me that he had a few images that might fit my criteria, and generously shared two portraits that appear in the book: Nicholas Biddle (pp. 11-15), who served a Pennsylvania infantry captain and suffered a wound when he was struck by a chunk of brick thrown by a rioter on the streets of Baltimore on April 18, 1861, and navy seaman Alfred Bailey (pp. 253-256), who served on the twin-turret ironclad USS Monadnock.

Meanwhile, I continued my search for images. One of the dealers I met along the way, Sam Small, of The Horse Soldier Fine Military Antiques in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, is the great-great grandson of William Henry Small, a corporal in the Fifteenth Pennsylvania Infantry. Small provided two wonderful images for the book: John Hines (pp. 72-75), an under cook in the Fifteenth who suffered an injury at the Battle of Chickamauga, and an unidentified man wearing a uniform coat and a civilian hat.

I decided to feature the latter portrait as the frontispiece. The purpose of this photo is to show an image at actual size. The other two books in the series also have frontispiece photos. In each case I had selected an unidentified individual, and so followed suit in the African American volume.

When African American Faces became available in a couple months ago, Harris received a complimentary copy for his contribution. On October 24, I received an email from him thanking me for the book, which I had inscribed and signed. He added, “Upon opening the book I recognized the strong portrait on the frontispiece.” Harris, as it turns out, has an original print of the same image. He included scans of the print’s front and back. The scan of the back includes the identification: “Our boy ‘Tom’ (Henderson) the faithful Servant of C.B.L. Chattanooga Tenn May 1/64.”

lamborn-henderson

Lt. Col. Charles B. Lamborn and Tom Henderson
Credit: Scan by Google Books from The Genealogy of the Lamborn Family; Collection of Sam Small

“C.B.L.” is Charles Burleigh Lamborn (1837-1902) of Chester County, Pennsylvania. An 1859 graduate of the University of Michigan and a Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity brother, he began his military service in June 1861 as an infantry lieutenant. Before the end of the year he joined the staff of Gen. John F. Reynolds, one of the most respected officers in the Army of the Potomac. In February 1863, Lamborn left Reynolds to accept a commission as lieutenant colonel of the Fifteenth Pennsylvania Cavalry. Five months later, Gen. Reynolds was killed during the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg. Lamborn and the Fifteenth spent the rest of the war in Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. He went on to a distinguished career in the railroad industry.

Details of the life and times of Tom Henderson are scant. Preliminary research has yielded no information beyond the few words inscribed on the back of his portrait photograph. In coming months, I plan to dedicate time to learning more about Henderson. My working theory is that Henderson might have been a slave on a Tennessee farm in 1863, at which time Lamborn and the Fifteenth were active in state. It is conceivable that he fled the farm about this time and became a servant to Lamborn.

In the meantime, I’ve sent a revised version of the frontispiece caption with the information provided by Harris to the Johns Hopkins University Press. The new caption will be added in a future printing.

I am indebted to Harris and other collectors and dealers of Civil War photography. Their passion and depth of knowledge about the subject, and their experience in handling these precious relics, is invaluable to scholars and other researchers. The example of Tom Henderson speaks volumes to their efforts: The face of this forgotten young man who went to war with a Union officer has been reunited with his name.

Ronald S. Coddington has written three books based on his pioneering work uncovering the lives of the people featured in Civil War era cartes de visite, ambrotypes, and tintypes,coddington_african_american_faces Faces of the Civil War, Faces of the Confederacy, and, most recently, African American Faces of the Civil War. He is assistant managing editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education, a contributing writer to the New York Times Disunion series, and a columnist for Civil War News.

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by | August 17, 2012 · 9:44 am

August Buzz at JHU Press

New to Hit the Shelves


Parrots: The Animal Answer Guide : Have you ever wondered what parrots eat in the wild? Or why so many species live in the Amazon? Glorious photographs and accurate answers to every question about parrots make this a must-have for any bird lover.

Vaccine: The Debate in Modern America : Mark A. Largent explains the history of the debate surrounding vaccines and identifies issues that parents, pediatricians, politicians, and public health officials must address.

My Lai: An American Atrocity in the Vietnam War : On March 16, 1968, American soldiers killed as many as five hundred Vietnamese men, women, and children in a village near the South China Sea. William Thomas Allison tells the story of this terrible moment in American history and explores how to deal with the aftermath.

Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us about Popular Culture : Using the psychological concept called theory of mind, Lisa Zunshine explores the appeal of movies, novels, paintings, musicals, and reality television.

Getting to Graduation: The Completion Agenda in Higher Education: The United States, long considered to have the best higher education in the world, now ranks eleventh in the proportion of 25- to 34-year-olds with a college degree. Getting to Graduation explores the reforms that we must pursue to recover a position of international leadership in higher education as well as the obstacles to those reforms.

Depression and Anxiety in Later Life: What Everyone Needs to Know : Drs. Mark D. Miller and Charles F. Reynolds III explore how depression and anxiety can be avoided or minimized by adapting to changing circumstances while controlling risk factors and getting help when it’s needed.

News, Notes, and Reviews

Steven Gimbel’s Einstein’s Jewish Science has recently grabbed the attention of the New York Times Sunday Book Review, which called Gimbel “an engaging writer” in its front page review!

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Filed under American History, American Studies, Animals, Behind the Scenes, Coming Soon, Consumer Health, Current Affairs, For Everyone, Health and Medicine, Higher Education, History, Journals, Literature, Math, Pediatrics, Physics, Reviews

by | July 18, 2012 · 10:06 am

JHU Press July news

JHU Press Welcomes Three New Journals

The Journals Division will add three new journals to its collection later this year, announced Journals Publisher Bill Breichner. This brings the total number of journals published by the JHU Press to 78.

The three new titles will be The CEA Critic: An Official Journal of the College English Association; Classical World: A Quarterly Journal on Antiquity; and Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies.

All three journals come to the JHU Press with an established history. Leviathan is the youngest of the three, entering its 15th volume. The CEA Critic will publish its 74th volume next year while Classical World is finishing its 105th year of publishing before joining our list.

Published three times a year, The CEA Critic is edited by Molly Desjardins, Jeri Kraver, and Michael Mills, all from the University of Northern Colorado. Matthew S. Santirocco from New York University serves as the editor of the quarterly Classical World. Leviathan is published three times a year with John Bryant from Hofstra University as editor and Samuel Otter from the University of California, Berkeley, as associate editor.

Hot off the Press

In Full Glory Reflected: Discovering the War of 1812 in the Chesapeake:  Ralph E. Eshelman and Burton K. Kummerow extend an enchanting invitation to travel the Star-Spangled Banner National Historic Trail and discover the amazing world of our ancestors.

The Case of the Green Turtle: An Uncensored History of a Conservation Icon: Alison Rieser provides an unparalleled look into the way science and conservation interact by focusing on the most controversial aspect of green turtle conservation—farming. While proponents argued that farming green sea turtles would help save them, opponents countered that it encouraged a taste for turtle flesh that would lead to the slaughter of wild stocks. The clash of these viewpoints once riveted the world.

The Science of Navigation: From Dead Reckoning to GPS: In today’s world of online maps and travel directions delivered wirelessly to hand-held devices, getting from place to place requires little thought from most of us—which is a good thing, since accurate navigation can be tricky. Get your bearings with Mark Denny—an expert at explaining scientific concepts in non-technical language—in this all-encompassing look at the history and science of navigation.

Plants of the Chesapeake: A Guide to Wildflowers, Grasses, Aquatic Vegetation, Trees, Shrubs, and Other Flora: Written by Lytton John Musselman and David A. Knepper, wetland scientists with decades of experience in the Bay’s waterways, this guide includes detailed descriptions and beautiful photographs of the plants most commonly found in the Chesapeake Bay.

Math Goes to the Movies:  Burkard Polster and Marty Ross pored through the cinematic calculus to create this thorough and entertaining survey of the quirky, fun, and beautiful mathematics to be found on the big screen.

Outlier States: American Strategies to Change, Contain, or Engage Regimes: Robert S. Litwak examines the role of the United States as an enforcer against the development of nuclear weapons in the international community.

News, Notes, and Reviews

Even in the heat of summer, Polar Bears: A Complete Guide to Their Biology and Behavior continues to receive high praise. “This magnificent species has got the book it deserves,” says Jeff Wilson of BBC Wildlife.

Wondering what’s coming out in the months ahead?  Take a look through our Fall 2012 catalog? It’s chock full of all the JHU Press goodness you’ve come to know and expect, now in a new size and format. Feedback is welcome!

Project MUSE has a new logo: In June, the staff of Project MUSE introduced their new logo to the public at the American Library Association. While we’ll all miss Calliope, we do like to think that this new, modern design is eye-catching.

The God particle revealed: Don Lincoln, JHUP author of The Quantum Frontier and Fermilab physicist explains the concepts behind the search for this elusive particle using simple dice. Read more about this discovery on NOVA’s Physics blog: The Nature of Reality.

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Filed under American History, American Studies, Animals, Behind the Scenes, Botany, Conservation, Current Affairs, For Everyone, General Science, Literature, Math, Physics, Politics, Publishing News, Regional-Chesapeake Bay, Reviews

by | May 23, 2012 · 8:00 am

A vibrant tradition: knights of the razor in the 19th and 21st centuries

Guest post by Douglas Walter Bristol, Jr.

When Damian Johnson, the co-owner of the No Grease chain of barber shops in Charlotte, North Carolina, began reading my book, Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom, he was struck by the discussion of the movie Barbershop on its first page. The movie is a comedy set in Chicago’s South Side about a 20-something named Calvin, who has inherited a barber shop from his father and is frustrated with the challenges of operating a small business in the inner city. Confronted with foreclosure after mortgaging the shop to finance several get-rich-quick schemes, Calvin sells the business to a loan shark. Through a series of madcap plot developments, Calvin wins back his business after he learns how important barbers are to the African American community.

Damian related to the movie. He grew up in the business—his mother owned a beauty salon—and he had gone off to college determined to find another career. In the end, though, he embraced barbering and wrote his senior marketing paper on how to open a shop like No Grease. Since Damien thought Barbershop captured something important about his experience, he wondered if the rest of Knights of the Razor might remind him of his own life. He told me later that it did.

I was fortunate enough to learn what Damian and his twin brother Jermaine thought about my book over an excellent dinner they bought me in Charlotte on April 13. After reading Knights of the Razor, Damian contacted me about giving a lecture, so I traveled to the Queen City. Damian and Jermaine were superb hosts. I enjoyed shooting pool at their barber shop in the Time Warner Arena. I was also Damian’s guest at a fundraising gala for Johnson C. Smith University, over which he presided as the master of ceremonies. As you can tell, Damian is a great organizer. He managed the next day’s event, my lecture, with considerable aplomb. Introducing me to the crowd of about 80 people at the Levine Museum of the New South, Damian told the audience how he had accidentally found my book on Amazon and decided, after reading it, that he saw himself as one of the Knights of the Razor.

Damian and Jermaine went on to explain the parallels they found between being black barbers in the 21st century and in the 19th century. Like their predecessors, the twins had to use ingenuity to be successful black businessmen when race posed obstacles. Damian, for example, shared how he and Jermaine convinced their white landlord to finance the purchase of their first shop when no bank would give them a loan. As it happened, their former landlord attended my lecture, and he told the audience what a good investment he had made. Another parallel to their 19th-century counterparts was their first-class shops. In the three No Grease shops, all located in upscale neighborhoods, black barbers wear bow ties while they clip the hair and shave the beards of Charlotte’s black professionals.

Jermaine then explained why he and his brother had chosen the blackface image for the No Grease logo. After learning about minstrel shows while studying drama in college, Jermaine realized that a figure from the minstrel stage could have a double meaning. Blackface invoked negative racial stereotypes, but by taking ownership of the image, Jermaine and his brother could let white businessmen know that they were not playing any games.  What W. E. B. DuBois referred to as “double-consciousness,” an awareness of how he looked in the eyes of white people, was a defining trait of the 19th-century black barber. Since he served white rather than black men, understanding white viewpoints was even more central to achieving success than it has been for the Johnson brothers in the 21st century.

The strongest parallel, however, between the Johnson brothers and the intrepid barbers that I wrote about? In the 19th century, the Knights of the Razor were a fraternity. Black barbers took teenagers under their wings as apprentices, trained them for success, and helped them open their own shops. Damian and Jermaine have continued this tradition. A dozen extremely well-dressed graduates of their barber school attended my lecture. One of them, a memorable young man named Dominique, had been working for the Johnsons since he was 17 and is now the foreman of their shop in the Time Warner Arena. So, while I had traveled to Charlotte to tell Damian’s friends what I had learned about his predecessors in the 19th century, he and his brother Jermaine taught me that the vibrant tradition I studied was alive and well in the 21st century.

Douglas Walter Bristol, Jr., is an associate professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi.

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by | May 9, 2012 · 9:00 am

Observations on My Reading Newspapers at Breakfast, May 9, 2012

Guest post by Douglas Anderson

The third part of Benjamin Franklin’s memoir begins with a little memo that he wrote to himself nearly three-hundred years ago this May 9, giving it a title that I have taken the liberty of modifying for this post. I doubt that he would object, any more than he objected to the plagiarized sermons of a young Irish preacher who created a stir in Philadelphia in 1734 by delivering good sermons written by others instead of bad ones that he wrote himself. The twenty-five-year-old Franklin’s “Observations on My Reading History in Library” concludes that the great “Affairs of the World” amount to a repetitive cycle of order and disorder, union and fragmentation, driven by the divisive clash of human interests. People only briefly succeed in suppressing private goals to pursue the general good, before those private ambitions break us into antagonistic and acrimonious parties. I wonder whether Franklin would be pleased or discouraged at the extent to which our present political and cultural climate confirms the brash conclusions of an obscure printer’s journeyman in 1731?

For the last several years I have been thinking about Franklin’s famous cartoon of a segmented serpent, applying it as an emblem to his own writing and his life. But how might it apply to our present circumstances?

Franklin’s “Join or Die” cartoon, published in The Pennsylvania Gazette May 9, 1754

Like all election years, this one is marked by intense partisan passions and intemperate language, amplified  by media that Franklin could never have envisioned, perhaps, but which he would have understood.  He refused to run abusive articles in his own newspaper, even when potential contributors insisted on the “Liberty of the Press,” reasoning that while the “press” might literally be free to anyone who could pay for a printer’s services and supplies, the Pennsylvania Gazette under his leadership had an obligation not to spread “Detraction” and augment “Animosity” among its readers.  His paper was an instrument of union not mutual recrimination.  The media were not public conveyances but public trusts, in Franklin’s eyes, guardians of the public temper as well as vehicles of information, instruction, and pleasure.

Most of the personal virtues that Franklin is famous (or infamous) for recommending in his memoir have political as well as ethical significance. “Wrong none, by doing Injuries or omitting the Benefits that are your Duty,” he reminded himself when he sought to conform to standards of “Justice.”  In the pursuit of “Sincerity” he tried to “Use no hurtful Deceit,” to “Think innocently and justly” and “speak accordingly.”  Moderation required him to “Avoid Extreams” and “Forbear resenting Injuries so much as you think they deserve.”

Each of us resembles a contentious city or a complex nation in miniature: debating wrongs and benefits with ourselves, balancing between hurtful and innocent forms of deceit, torn between resentment and restraint. Self-government begins with the self, not with the community, Franklin believed, but it was not a matter of adherence to simple formulas or prescriptive rules. The harnessing of character in the interests of doing good was an imperfect process in the most literal sense: ongoing, incomplete, unfinished.

Early in his career Franklin abandoned the religious tradition in which he had been raised when a Presbyterian minister managed to turn a verse from Philippians into a sectarian screed: “Finally, Brethren, Whatsoever Things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, or of good report, if there be any virtue, or any praise, think on these Things,” Franklin remembered the verse to have urged.  No sectarian doctrine, no partisanship, scarcely any marks of ideology or religious tradition characterize these six momentous “things” that we are to think on.  And in thinking on them, Franklin might have suggested, we stand the best chance of breaking the futile cycles of history that his library memorandum described with such prophetic clarity nearly three centuries ago.

Douglas Anderson is the Sterling-Goodman Professor of English at the University of Georgia and the author of several books, including The Unfinished Life of Benjamin Franklin and The Radical Enlightenments of Benjamin Franklin, also published by Johns Hopkins.

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